Browsing by Author "Dromberg, Hanna"

This study examines how psychoculture which means the psychologization of everyday life, is constructed in news coverage concerning adult ADHD. It is interesting to look at psychoculture in the context of adult ADHD, because adult`s problems with attention and hyperactivity only began to be categorized as psychiatric disorder in 1994. This despite the fact that the real underlying causes of the phenomenon have not yet been proved by clinical methods. The topicality of this study is also reflected in the fact that ADHD has gained a lot of media attention in recent decades, which has been seen to be associated with a significant increase in ADHD diagnoses. In this study, adults ADHD and psychoculture are seen as socially constructed phenomena. Since the research material is constructed by news and attached to media, it is natural to approach the phenomenon with discourse analytical view. This means, that the use of language is considered to play a key role in constructing social reality. In this study, rhetoric analysis was chosen as the method of analysis. The aim of this analysis method is to study the construction of reality through the use and argumentation of linguistic rhetorical means. The study showed that news coverage related to adult ADHD manifested psychoculture by reproducing the mechanic of therapeutic authority through rhetoric argumentation and excluding certain aspects of the phenomenon of ADHD from the coverage. In line with the idea of therapeutic authority, individual`s problems in various areas of life, such as everyday life and working life were problematized. Based on analysis mainly neuro-psychological explanations, and medical or therapeutic solution, such as psychiatric drugs or peer support for ADHD was provided. The analysis showed that the challenges and problems of people’s everyday lives were seen as individual-driven, and solving these problems was seen as the responsibility of the individual. A process reflecting the psychologization in which problems of everyday life are transformed into psychological problems, which eventually become medical-scientific problems for example through the use of psychiatric language, was found in the news.