The re-enchantment of psychiatry in school institutions: an analysis based on the thought of Michel Foucault

Abstract

This article addresses the new forms through which psychiatric knowledge and psychiatric power emerge within school institutions. Its aim is to understand an important phenomenon that took shape in the transition from an anti-psychiatric culture to a neurodiversity culture: diagnostic-report governmentality. Methodologically guided by Foucauldian archaeology and genealogy, and based on
the hypothesis that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) constitute the main components of this diagnostic-report governmentality, we conducted a qualitative bibliographic study with a twofold objective: on the one hand, to demonstrate the existence of a substantial body of literature on these disorders in relation to educational practices and childhood—and, in doing so, to expose their rudimentary forms of characterization—and, on the other hand, to indicate how they operate in the rationalization of governmental practice under the neoliberal principle of installing competition in the inert points of society. In conclusion, we argue that neurodiversity culture, driven largely by the creation of social movements around autism, has significantly contributed to the return of an entire vocabulary, practice, and mode of subjectivation specific to psychiatric power from the ostracism in which, until very recently, they had
remained. These elements have thus come to function in a capillary manner across the most diverse strata of social life— especially within school institutions.