A medical approach towards behavioural problems could make professionals without a medical background, like teachers and other educational professionals feel inapt. In this article, we raise six scientifically grounded considerations regarding ADHD, currently the most prevalent childhood psychiatric diagnosis. These “need to knows” show just how misguided and potentially stigmatizing current conceptualizations of unruly behaviour have become. Some examples are given of how teachers are misinformed, and alternative ways of reporting about neuropsychological research are suggested. A reinvigorated conceptual understanding of ADHD could help educational institutions to avoid the expensive outsourcing of behavioural problems that could also—and justifiably better—be framed as part of education’s primary mission of professionalized socialization.

Purpose: Worldwide, there have been consistently high or even rising incidences of diagnosed mental disorders and increasing mental healthcare service utilization over the last decades, causing a growing burden for healthcare systems and societies. While more individuals than ever are being diagnosed and treated as mentally ill, psychiatric knowledge, and practices affect the lives of a rising number of people, gain importance in society as a whole and shape more and more areas of life. This process can be described as the progressing psychiatrization of society.Methods: This article is a conceptual paper, focusing on theoretical considerations and theory development. As a starting point for further research, we suggest a basic model of psychiatrization, taking into account its main sub-processes as well as its major top-down and bottom-up drivers.Results: Psychiatrization is highly complex, diverse, and global. It involves various protagonists and its effects are potentially harmful to individuals, to societies and to public healthcare. To better understand, prevent or manage its negative aspects, there is a need for transdisciplinary research, that empirically assesses causes, mechanisms, and effects of psychiatrization.Conclusion: Although psychiatrization has highly ambivalent effects, its relevance mainly derives from its risks: While individuals with minor disturbances of well-being might be subjected to overdiagnosis and overtreatment, psychiatrization could also result in undermining mental healthcare provision for the most severely ill by promoting the adaption of services to the needs and desires of the rather mild cases. On a societal level, psychiatrization might boost medical interventions which incite individual coping with social problems, instead of encouraging long-term political solutions.

Academic study books are essential assets for disseminating knowledge about ADHD to future healthcare professionals. This study examined if they are balanced with regard to genetics. We selected and analyzed study books (N=43) used in (pre) master’s programmes at 10 universities in the Netherlands. Because the mere behaviourally informed quantitative genetics give a much higher effect size of the genetic involvement in ADHD, it is important that study books contrast these findings with molecular genetics’ outcomes. The latter studies use real genetic data, and their low effect sizes expose the potential weaknesses of quantitative genetics, like underestimating the involvement of the environment. Only a quarter of books mention both effect sizes and contrast these findings, while another quarter does not discuss any effect size. Most importantly, however, roughly half of the books in our sample mention only the effect sizes from quantitative genetic studies without addressing the low explained variance of molecular genetic studies. This may confuse readers by suggesting that the weakly associated genes support the quite spectacular, but potentially flawed estimates of twin, family and adoption studies, while they actually contradict them.

When discussed in the context of diagnosing or medicating children, psychiatrization is usually portrayed as a more or less monolithic top-down process, which, according to some, enables a child's right to health, while for others is a form of child abuse. This article challenges these conceptualizations in two steps: First, it draws on available literature on psychiatrization (including its top-down and bottom-up operations, and its ideological and material aspects), and its relationship to various psy-practices, and wider processes of (bio) medicalization, psychologization and reification. Second, using two detailed vignettes from ethnographic research with children and youth in Poland, the article demonstrates that children and youth are not necessarily passive recipients of psychiatrization as they themselves navigate, appropriate, resist, and transform top-down influences. While one vignette details a child's more or less open resistance to psychiatrization through their attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder label, the other vignette shows young people embracing and positively identifying with bio and psy-knowledge in relation to depression. However, both vignettes show how children and youth make psychiatrization meaningful as it shapes their lifeworlds, with them sometimes becoming agents of psychiatrization themselves. Our data illustrate the nuances of psychiatrization of, with and by children, and we draw on this to complexify existing literature and framings of psychiatrization.

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Studies of brain size of children classified with ADHD appear to reveal smaller brains when compared to 'normal' children. Yet, what does this mean? Even with the use of rigorously screened case and control groups, these studies show only small, average group differences between children with and without an ADHD classification. However, academic textbooks used in the Netherlands often portray individual children with an ADHD classification as having a different, malfunctioning brain that necessitates medical intervention. This conceptualisation of ADHD might serve professional interests, but not necessarily the interests of children.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is not a singular concept. For the purposes of this study, understandings of ADHD are assumed also to spread along a conceptual dimension that includes some combination of biomedical and psychosocial knowledge. Biomedically, ADHD may be considered a somatic affliction causing inattention and hyperactivity, amenable to pharmaceutical treatment. Psychosocially, ADHD ranks among adverse behaviour patterns that are amenable to psychosocial and pedagogical intervention. Considering both biomedical and psychosocial factors are associated with the ADHD construct, it seems self-evident that young people should be offered information that gives equal consideration to both ways of addressing ADHD, but the question is just how balanced the information available to young people is. This study investigated nine information books on ADHD available in the Netherlands in Dutch, aimed at children and young people up to age 17. Thirteen perspective-dependent text elements were identified in qualitative content analysis. Eight attributes associate with a biomedical view: ADHD as cause, biological factors, clinical diagnosis, brain abnormality, medication, neurofeedback, heritability and persistence. Five text elements associate with a psychosocial view: ADHD as perceived behaviour, environmental factors, descriptive diagnosis, behavioural intervention and normalisation. The most frequent text passages encountered describe ADHD as a brain abnormality, along with medical and behavioural treatment. Providing the main focus for information in eight out of nine books, biomedical information about ADHD predominates in the available youth information books, while psychosocial information about ADHD is far less well covered.

IntroductionThe descriptive classification Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is often mistaken for a disease entity that explains the causes of inattentive and hyperactive behaviors, rather than merely describing the existence of such behaviors. The present study examines discourse on ADHD to analyze how authors passively and actively contribute to reification—a fallacy in which a concept is represented as a thing existing on its own.MethodsCritical Discourse Analysis and Qualitative Content Analysis of academic textbooks, scientific articles, websites and videos were used to analyze how ADHD is reified.ResultsThe analyses reveal four ways in which inattentive and restless behaviors are presented as an entity by means of the ADHD classification: language choice, logical fallacies, genetic reductionism, and textual silence. First, language choice, such as medical jargon and metaphors aid in representing ADHD as a disease entity. Second, several logical fallacies do the same, including the relatively unknown “ecological fallacy” that refers to the erroneous belief that average group findings, such as average brain size of groups of those with an ADHD classification, can be applied on an individual level. Third, genetic reductionism is often achieved by overstating the results of twin studies and being silent about the disappointing molecular genetic research. Such textual silence is the last identified mechanism of reification and includes instances in which societal factors that affect the ADHD construct are often omitted from texts, thereby obscuring the extent to which ADHD is a limited heuristic.DiscussionIt is essential that discourse communities do not repeat these four ways of reifying behavior and social relations into an alleged entity with the acronym ADHD. The errors and habits of writing may be epistemologically violent by influencing how laypeople and professionals see children and ultimately how children may come to see themselves in a negative way. Beyond that, if the institutional world shaped to help children is based on misguided assumptions, it may cause them harm and help perpetuate the misguided narrative. To counter the dominant, reifying and medicalizing view, guidelines such as the recently published “Dutch ADHD Psychoeducation Guidelines” might be helpful.