A Biocultural Theory of ADHD

Explaining Canaries in the Coal Mine by Thomas Armstrong

One of my fave papers, Canaries in the Coal Mine (which you can find in Chapter 2 of Critical New Perspectives on ADHD) is an argument that children labelled ADHD are more sensitive to the increasingly frenetic pace of life and are showing signs of distress first — Armstrong thinks we should see this as a sort of “biocultural feedback”, a warning that s…