Making sense of children’s mental illness and behaviours in school settings : Unravelling the cultural repertoires of school staff in Swedish compulsory education

Abstract: Increasing numbers of children are being diagnosed with some kind of mental illness and especially the diagnosis ADHD and Autism are often discussed in popular media and academic articles. Several studies have underlined the relation between educational systems and the processes of diagnosing the children. How can we gain a deeper understanding of this connection in the context of Sweden? Between 2013-2017, the proportion of children who received care for some form of psychiatric diagnosis generally increased in Sweden. In terms of education, in the last three decades, reforms with a market tendency in the Swedish educational system changed the expectations towards the performance of the children in the school settings. This scenario makes Sweden an important country to investigate how the psychiatric discourse is being adopted by the school staff. This thesis aims to investigate to what extent the school staff in compulsory schools in Sweden draw on psychiatric discourses to the understanding of children’s mental health and behaviours, focusing on the behaviours classified as mental illness. Furthermore, this work also investigates how the school staff makes use of the psychiatric discourse in their practices. Through theoretical and empirical research, this thesis analyses how psychiatric discourses about children’s mental illness and behaviours are present in the Swedish educational system. The theoretical investigation mainly draws on the works of Foucault, Bourdieu, Hacking, Rose and Conrad. The discussions about the Swedish context is based on readings of school policies and statistical data about the number of children being diagnosed with some form of mental disorder. The empirical part of this research is constructed on interviews conducted with teachers, special pedagogues and counsellors currently working in Swedish compulsory schools. The findings suggest that the school staff in compulsory schools in Sweden support their understanding of children’s mental health and behaviours heavily on psychiatric discourses. However, it is also possible to locate moments in which the school staff questions the broader processes of the medicalization of the children. Finally, the results also point out the importance of investigating the medicalization of children in relation to the educational system.