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Resumo

Using an interview‐based analysis of the accounts of interactions between educators, parents, and clinicians, this study explores educators' roles in interpreting childhood troubles as the medical phenomenon of attention deficit‐hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The analysis of interviews shows how children's 'personal' troubles become understood as 'relational' ones, prompting increasingly sophisticated social responses. I argue that the institution of education, operating in a clinical capacity but lacking the legitimate authority to assign ADHD diagnoses, plays a hybridized, semiofficial role in the medicalization process. This assertion informs a critique of the 'informal/official' dichotomy found in the sociology of deviance lexicon, and furthers previous positions in the sociology of mental health that have implicated school representatives in the social construction of behavior disorders.

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