ADHD

About ADHD and other diagnoses in childhood. There is a conditioned reflex that activates every time the news hits us with the senseless violence of a minor: the frantic search for an acronym, a disorder, a medical box in which to confine the inexplicable. Today that acronym is increasingly ADHD. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder has become, in public debate, the great container to fill with everything that is “deviant,” meaning anything that falls outside the boundaries of law and social conformity.

If I may summarize the movements and related theories of modern psychology, I believe two main approaches can be distinguished. The first concerns trauma and how it affects the abnormal or deviant development of personality and its behaviors. The other is based on the importance of considering events only partially as factors of determination and construction of existence.

In this second scenario, biology and family history intertwine with the rules, conformities, and pressures of a society that imposes its models and standards of conformity, blurring emotional states, lawful and unlawful behaviors, illnesses, and norms of coexistence. The fate of a boy is shaped in this friction between the “inside” and the “outside”.

But this is precisely where easy diagnosis becomes dangerous. The individual encompasses biology, biography, family history, and relationships, both past and present. The environment includes society, with its developments, rules, and conformities: everything we live and are forced to share, even when we do not want to. Traumatic experiences and the social system shape the person and their destiny in the world.

Today we are talking about ADHD again whenever dramatic stories of violence among kids of any age emerge. The diagnosis thus becomes an easy explanation for violent and deviant behaviors in children and adolescents: those who rebel, who appear rude, mischievous, indifferent to rules and punishments.

Explaining these situations with a diagnosis is simplistic and, I firmly believe, also wrong. Wrong because, in principle, there is no illness that justifies behaviors. Wrong because ADHD is a complex condition, whose diagnosis cannot be reduced to a few symptoms. Wrong because attributing such a demanding label requires extreme caution, also to avoid processes of marginalization and stigma.

If we use medicine to justify educational failure or the pressure of a social system that fails to understand and manage what is happening, we are not activating true processes of care or rehabilitation. Perhaps we are just trying to soothe our anxiety as adults, who need to quickly find blame and culprits.

Diagnostic caution is not a bureaucratic option, but an ethical duty. Because behind a hasty diagnosis, there is not a solution, but often the beginning of an exclusion process that can mark an entire life.