Experience of being a child with ADHD: Hermeneutic-Heideggerian understanding.
ADHD; childhood; attention; phenomenology.
The theme of inattentive children has emerged since the 20th century, and, although a biological cause has not
been discovered, they are still diagnosed as a deficit because they do not correspond to a certain model of
school performance, and the care provided aims to cure or improve ADHD. However, supporting this
understanding, phenomenology emerges as another possibility to understand what attention would be. This
concept would be, in the Heideggerian perspective, a way for Dasein to be in the truth, an existential temporality
of being-there, as possibilities of inhabiting its historical horizon. Thus, he would linger in a proper or improper
way, attentive or dispersed from himself. How is the experience of living as a child from a place that was
determined by the diagnosis? If attention is a global aspect of ADHD, how do they perceive themselves as
being charged for something that “lacks” them? To approach the lived experience, we structured our research in
four meetings: two meetings with the participants and two with their parents. We used the phenomenological
method, inspired by the Heideggerian hermeneutics, and we approached the participants through the playful
game hour with the expressive resource of the sandbox. Playing is a prerogative of Dasein as a child, and as an
invitation to play time, we use the sandbox from a phenomenological perspective. This path fostered dialogues
about her diagnosis, with the creation of scenarios and expression of her being a child with ADHD. As for the
interpretation, it was made by the transcript in the affectation diary, and to interpret it we were inspired by the
Heideggerian circle, which reveals the way we are understanding, and which, for the research, was adapted by
Azevedo (2013), Maux ( 2014). Thus, two children aged 7 and 9 years diagnosed and undergoing treatment for
ADHD participated in this study, whose worlds appear through interdiction and games with excessive rules by
their caregivers. Their life projects are crossed by the understanding of their caregivers in a substitutive and
impersonal way. It was understood that their existences were revealed from a being-child-with-ADHD-in-
treatment. We think that, as long as the sense of being is merely given, the madness of psychic suffering in
these children will be biologizing representations, forgetting the original phenomenon of the sense of Dasein's
being-there in these children.