ADHD as an Arrangement: Between Medicalization and Neurodiversity

Abstract

This article offers an affective reading  of the attentional practices of adults diagnosed with ADHD to diversify available narratives beyond medicalization and utilitarian takes on neurodiversity. Drawing on shadowing of six adults with heterogeneous trajectories—complemented by genealogically inspired documentary analysis—the study treats attention as a collective, pre-individual practice, tracing situated assemblages of objects, bodies, times, and relations. The central finding is an interior and anterior “attentional unease” that reorganizes adult biographies: liminal events and the belatedness of diagnosis activate the search for “arrangements” to inhabit a difference felt as one’s own. These arrangements coalesce across four interconnected dimensions: (i) materialities and techniques that exteriorize attention; (ii) strategic uses of pharmaceuticals and other substances;
(iii) digitally mediated modes of attentional “suspension”; and (iv) the management of movement and energy. We thus propose understanding ADHD as an arrangement for what is experienced as “unfixable”: not merely a deficit to be corrected, but a legitimate mode of expression whose stabilization requires “expenditure”—economic, temporal, affective, and relational—often rendered invisible. This expenditure is shot through with vectors of differentiation (class, gender) and shapes who can assert difference as valuable. The article concludes by shifting the focus from individual correction toward institutional conditions that democratize such expenditure and broaden social justice for living together across diverse attentional modalities.