"What is strange is that we don't have more children coming to us": A habitography of child psychiatrists and scholastic pressure in Kolkata, India

Negotiating ADHD: Pragmatic medicalization and creolization in urban India

Although a growing number of studies have demonstrated differences in responses to ADHD-like behaviours, very few studies have focused on theorizing diversity in the way ADHD is framed and approached globally. To contribute to the study of medicalization in a global context, this study examines the discursive field in which care professionals explain and treat ADHD among children in metropolitan India and addresses the need for an analytic framework to grasp the variations in the way ADHD is understood and approached. Building on the concepts of pragmatic medicalization and creolization, we study ADHD discourses in India asking 'What is at stake' and 'What matters most'? In this mixed methods study, 64 care professionals regularly involved in assessing ADHD-like behaviour completed an online Q-sort, and 21 professionals participated in face-to-face interviews. The Q-data were subjected to factor analysis. The interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analyses. Our study identified six distinct ADHD discourses, which showed that care professionals combine explanatory and treatment models. Professionals adapt their explanations and treatments of ADHD to parents' worries regarding academic performance, family prestige, stigma and side effects of allopathic medicine. Our findings indicate that an awareness of local concerns and adjustments to structural opportunities can diversify how ADHD-like behaviour is framed and responded to. This study demonstrates that medicalization operates between the emerging institutions of care and the everyday concerns of families and care professionals and reveals the need to examine conflicting stakes as drivers of diverse responses to ADHD diagnosis and treatment in India and the rest of the world.

Disentangling Family Life and Hair Pulling: Trichotillomania and Relatedness

Trichotillomania (hair pulling) remains a relatively unknown form of body-focused repetitive behavior (BFRB). Sufferers tend to conceal both the action and its effects from others because of stigmatization, which is strong in both public and domestic spheres. Negative responses from close family members can add significantly to the suffering. Based on fieldwork in the United Kingdom and United States, we explore how hair pulling troubles ties even among close family members. We show why ethnographic methods reveal impacts of hair pulling that structured assessments do not yet capture and argue for a more nuanced study of BFRBs through anthropologies of relatedness.

'It just opens up their world': autism, empathy, and the therapeutic effects of equine interactions

Experiences of autism-spectrum disorder are now increasingly studied by social scientists. Human–animal relations have also become a major focus of social inquiry in recent years. Examining horse-assisted therapy for autistic spectrum disorders, this is the first paper that brings these fields together. Drawing on participant observation and interviews at a UK horse therapy Centre, this article examines how staff and the parents of riders account for the successes and limitations of equine therapy. To the respondents, horses ‘open up’ autistic children and make possible interactions that seemed impossible before. Horses were regarded as facilitating the emergence of apparently social behaviours, which included eye contact, pointing, and speech. Three key explanations emerged for therapeutic success: the sensorial, embodied experience of riding the horse; the specific movements and rhythms of the horse; and, the ‘personality’ of the horse. Equine therapy can be regarded as enabling a form of multispecies intersubjectivity, with the resonance between rider and horse seeming to make possible a new attunement between humans. Practices of equine therapy, and perceptions of its efficacy, serve in turn to attune social scientists to a version of empathy constituted through lively and sensorial interactions, as opposed to one that is restricted to particular kinds of humans.