Mapping the social studies of ADHD: From medicalization theory to neurodiversity in the digital age,and future directions

Abstract

The past 30 years have seen significant changes in how Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is understood, with public discourse and prevalence rates reaching an all-time high. While its evolution in the U.S. is well documented, recent global and digital shifts prompt a reexamination of ADHD research. The significance of this article is that it maps and analyzes, for the first time, an extensive and heterogeneous body of scholarship, spanning the sociology and anthropology of health and mental health; science, technology, media, and disability studies; and medical humanities, to propose the definition of a new subfield of “social studies of ADHD.” By synthesizing key conceptual developments, social theories, and empirical findings therein, our article fills in a substantive gap in the literature, identifies main analytical frameworks, and outlines future research directions. We first trace the history of ADHD diagnosis and the DSM, rendered as an exemplary case of medicalization—as both theory and process—in the sociological literature since the mid-1970s. Second, we examine debates on the globalization of ADHD diagnosis and treatment to illuminate new areas of study and cross-national comparison. Third, we discuss alternative models and emergent perspectives on demedicalization, decolonial approaches, and the neurodiversity paradigm, which operates both as a social scientific concept and a movement. We then synthesize the latest research on the digital health turn to consider how emergent technologies and online platforms are reconfiguring ADHD knowledge, subjectivity, and sociality. To conclude, we use our critical analysis as a launchpad for setting a future interdisciplinary agenda for ADHD research in three areas that are relevant to the social study of health, illness, and medicine more widely: (1) digital and more-than-human perspectives on attention and care; (2) ethnography and phenomenology of ADHD affect and embodiment; and (3) intersectional, decolonial, and community research approaches.

Introduction

As a condition that has seen significant changes in how it is defined and managed in the last few decades, the history and evolution of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have been well documented (Goodwin, 2010; Lakoff, 2000; Mayes et al., 2008; Smith, 2012) in the U.S., where it is estimated to affect 7 million, or 11.4%, of children as of 2022 (Danielson et al., 2024). Despite this, ADHD remains a multifaceted, widely debated condition that is not always well understood by social scientists and the public. It is also an elusive condition spanning the boundaries of neurobiology and social environment, developmental pediatrics and psychiatric categorization, and different conceptions of disability, mental health, and neurodiversity (Filipe, 2020a; Filipe et al., 2021a; Filipe, 2023). Given the growing prominence of clinical, digital, policy, and public discourse surrounding ADHD—including the UK government’s 2026 review into the surge in diagnoses of mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions (Singh, 2026)—our article intervenes at precisely this moment to map how ADHD has been studied, defined, and problematized over the past three decades.

The multiple complexities of ADHD have led scientists, healthcare professionals and the general public to debate its etiology and validity, with many questioning whether ADHD is biologically “real,” a medicalized social “construct,” or a condition underpinned by a combination of genetic, neurodevelopmental, and environmental factors (Singh, 2008; for a debate on the biological body in medical sociology, see Williams, 2006). Similarly, the shifting patterns in the regulation of psychostimulant drugs for ADHD and global pharmaceutical markets have been critiqued, as have the ethics of stimulant medications, and the inequalities underlying late, mis- and under-diagnosis (Singh et al., 2013). More recent debates surrounding the condition include the underdiagnosis of ADHD in women, girls, and people of color (Bergey et al., 2022; Craddock, 2024); the uptick of later-in-life adult ADHD diagnoses; and self-diagnosis of the disorder through social media content (Alper et al., 2025; Holroyd, 2026). These are only some examples of a growing body of international literature on ADHD (Bergey et al., 2018a). Considering this literature, and the recent globalization and digital (re)shaping of ADHD definitions, a reexamination of social theory of—and research on—ADHD is urgently needed that examines both persistent historical trends and emergent socio-cultural dynamics.

On occasion of the 30th anniversary of Health and its landmark special issue, we answer the journal’s call for articles that map critical and theoretical approaches to the study of health, illness, and medicine, as an opportunity to reflect on its past developments and consider potential new avenues of inquiry. Our article makes a significant and original contribution to the field by mapping and critically analyzing the social histories and studies of ADHD over the past three decades, while also proposing a definition of “the social studies of ADHD” as sub-field of research, and setting an agenda for its future interdisciplinary directions. Filling in a major gap in knowledge, our article has three main aims.

The first is to “take stock” of the field and that which is “of value” (Grant and Booth, 2009) by charting and synthesizing an expansive, yet often fragmented, corpus of social research on ADHD. While this research has been published since the late 1970s, it expanded more significantly after the 1990s and at the turn of the new millennium. ¹ To meet this aim, we conducted a critical review and thematic synthesis of research (Grant and Booth, 2009) covering key theories and topics, as well as relevant analytical models of and approaches to ADHD diagnosis, treatment, and experience, ranging from their socio-cultural representations to global and digital reconfigurations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first thematic overview to cover such a range, which will be relevant to the journal’s diverse readership.

Our second aim is to offer an operating definition of the social studies of ADHD as a sub-field of research, on its right, drawing on our analysis of the existing evidence-based research. We conceptualize the social studies of ADHD as an interdisciplinary sub-field of research on the social and cultural dimensions of ADHD (i.e. beyond primarily clinical and epidemiological studies), building on contributions from sociology, history, anthropology, and medical ethics and humanities, as well as disability, psychosocial, media, and science and technology studies (henceforth, STS). Despite its heterogeneity, this scholarship often draws on social and cultural theory to critically conceptualize ADHD diagnosis, discourse, management, and experience, and on qualitative analysis and/or mixed methods to empirically answer research questions (e.g. archives, interviews, surveys, ethnography, discourse analysis).

Our third aim is to use this analysis and our proposed frame as a “launch pad” for further conceptual development (Grant and Booth, 2009), by outlining key thematic areas and future directions, which not only advance knowledge in the social studies of ADHD but also expand its horizons further afield. Our proposed interdisciplinary research agenda will be relevant to the study of similar (and frequently overlapping) neurodevelopmental and mental health conditions, and to future research in the sociology of medicine and diagnosis, medical and psychological anthropology, critical public health, and medical and neurodivergent humanities, more broadly.

To meet these three aims, we begin by tracing the history of ADHD and its evolving diagnostic classification and the medicalization of this condition, especially in relation to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). We then explore the globalization and pharmaceuticalization of ADHD to illuminate the expansion of diagnostic criteria and therapeutic trends across countries. Following this, we introduce an emergent body of literature that moves beyond theories of medicalization to consider ADHD from social, decolonial and disability perspectives (including the neurodiversity/divergence paradigm), before finally synthesizing the latest research on the digitization of ADHD to consider how emergent technologies and online platforms are changing its symptomology and sociality. After mapping out these key social theories and topics within the social studies of ADHD, we conclude by reflecting on the limitations of the current state of the field and propose three underexamined areas of study on ADHD that deserve further attention: (1) digital and more-than-human perspectives; (2) ethnography and phenomenology of ADHD; and (3) critical intersections of ADHD. By tracing the history and contemporary developments of ADHD research, our article provides an up-to-date overview of and a thematic framework for understanding the social studies of ADHD, as a paradigmatic case for understanding the past several decades of developments in medical sociology and in the wider interdisciplinary study of mental health, disability, and neurodevelopmental conditions.

ADHD in history and social theory: Diagnosis, DSM, and medicalization

One of the earliest terminologies used to describe ADHD can be traced back to the 1940s, when Alfred Strauss and Heinz Werner coined “minimal brain damage”—a term that was later used to describe hyperactive children who were believed to have experienced neurological trauma before, during or after birth (Smith, 2012: 21). Confusingly, this term shared the same acronym and similar symptomatology of “minimal brain dysfunction” (or MBD) which was a category commonly used in the 1950s and 1960s, including by health services in the U.S. (Mills, 2022). In the following decade, however, the term Hyperkinetic Impulse disorder was also applied in the U.S. to describe hyperactivity and poor impulse control (Smith, 2012), alongside other expressions, such as “acting out,” which captured those behavioral issues, especially among young white boys. Amid a profusion of terms and etiological explanations, psychiatrist Paul Wender (who was on the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Advisory Committee on Infancy, Childhood and Adolescence Disorders) famously called for the unification of these definitions under the single diagnostic category of minimal brain dysfunction (MBD) in the 1970s and for the recognition of “attention deficit disorder” (ADD) among adults, in the 1990s (Filipe, 2020a; Mills, 2022).

MBD, and later ADD, were gradually reframed as a neurobiological inability to control impulses and to maintain attention, resulting in excessive motor activity and developmentally inappropriate behavior (Lakoff, 2000), providing the basis for the diagnostic criteria listed in the third edition of the DSM. The DSM-III, published in 1980 by APA, foregrounded ADD as the second of nine diagnoses found in infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and included an initial sub-typification of ADD with and without hyperactivity, and persisting beyond childhood and adolescence (Decker, 2013). As a revised diagnostic category, ADD stressed inattention as a primary indicator of the disorder (especially within the classroom setting), rather than symptoms of overactivity. This new label encouraged educators to identify students who were not just “acting out,” but also those who daydream and get easily distracted—meaning more young girls were diagnosed with the disorder (Smith, 2012). Since 1987, with the revised version of the third DSM (DSM-III-R), the nomenclature of ADD evolved to Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD)—a term still in use today. The inclusion of ADD in DSM-III, and ADHD in DSM-III-R, thus marked a turning point in the definition of inattentiveness and hyperactivity as part of a neurodevelopmental disorder, rather than a problem of misbehavior or poor motivation (Filipe, 2016). To this point, some argued that the terms ADD and AD/HD “entered the vernacular to describe a certain type of child or adult whose difficulties adjusting to scholastic, vocational or social situations were no fault of their own or their parents, but rather due to a hidden neurological disability passed along in families” (Smith, 2012: 22).

As the behavioral characteristics of short attention span, restlessness, aggression, and impulsivity were gradually categorized as medical, brain-based conditions, the concepts and diagnosis of hyperkinesis and ADD/ADHD attracted sociological interest. Drawing on the sociological critique of medicine as an institution of social control of deviance (Zola, 1972), the thesis of medicalization was applied to the “case of hyperkinesis” as early as mid-1970s, by U.S.-based sociologist Peter Conrad. Conrad (1975) described this case of medicalization as part of a process through which behaviors and social issues become understood as medical problems (and thus amenable to medical intervention or treatment), moving them from the framing of “badness” to that of “sickness” (Conrad and Schneider, 1992). The post-1980s DSM categorization marked, in that regard, a paradigmatic shift in the field by moving away from previous psychodynamic theories (which centered on mother-child interactions and relational difficulties between self and social environment) toward neurobiological explanations for the etiology of ADHD (Rafalovich, 2001). This shift in ADHD diagnosis and etiology helped redress issues of maternal blame, parental guilt, and stigma associated with ADHD, meaning that parent-led and self-advocacy groups were, in turn, able to draw on a neurobiological explanatory framework for ADHD to raise public awareness about the condition (Singh, 2008; Smith, 2012).

This neurobiological framework gained traction after the 1970s and from the 1990s onward, through the consolidation of biological psychiatry and cognitive psychology, and the advancement of neuroscience. A widely known example of this is the neuroimaging study of cognitive psychologist Russell Barkley, who found dysfunctions in inhibitory responses in the prefrontal cortex to be connected to the neuropsychological inability to control impulses (Mayes et al., 2008), and who then led on the international consensus statement on ADHD published in 2002 (for an updated overview, see Faraone et al., 2021). Simultaneously, the 1999 Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with AD/HD (MTA)—a landmark 14-month clinical trial comparing treatment approaches that was sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Mental Health—found psychostimulant medications (such as methylphenidate) to be an effective standalone treatment when compared to behavioral therapy and community care (Posner et al., 2020). In addition to establishing the safety and efficacy of psychostimulant medications, the MTA study sought to settle decades of public controversies and legal actions surrounding psychostimulant medications, as these were specifically prescribed to school-age children, and adolescents and subject to special labeling restrictions (Mayes et al., 2008). As such, the post-DSM III architecture and its subsequent editions and revisions (e.g. DSM-IV in 1994) devised an empirical diagnostic system whose criteria could be consistently and internationally applied, providing a common infrastructure for naming, coding, and explaining ADHD, further linking up diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.

At present, the DSM-5 and its revised edition (DSM-5-TR), published in 2013 and 2022, respectively, defines people with ADHD as showing a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity in developmentally inappropriate levels that negatively impacts academic, social, and/or occupational functioning (American Psychiatric Association (APA), 2022: 68). Within this framework, the symptoms of inattention include often: failing to pay close attention to details; struggling to sustain attention; having difficulty organizing tasks/activities; and being easily distracted and forgetful. The hyperactivity-impulsivity symptoms include frequent fidgeting, running or climbing in inappropriate situations, being unable to play quietly, often “on the go,” talking excessively, interrupting or intruding on others, and blurting out answers before the end of a sentence. Children must exhibit at least six of these symptoms (five for adults) for longer than 6 months, in two or more settings, and before the age of 12, which cannot be better accounted for by a different diagnosis. Yet the application of DSM categorical criteria (yes/no criteria for presence/absence of symptoms) is neither fixed nor always seamless: behavioral checklists, neuropsychological scales, and teacher, parent/partner, and self-reporting questionnaires have been adapted and are widely used in the assessment of ADHD, highlighting dimensional aspects of intensity and frequency of symptoms (Filipe, 2016, 2018). Over the years, moreover, clinical and epidemiological studies have found that ADHD co-occurrence with dyslexia, anxiety, and autism is the rule rather than the exception (Faraone et al., 2021)—a distinctive aspect that is poorly captured in existing models of disease “comorbidity.” As such, vernacular for co-occurring conditions has emerged (e.g. AuDHD), with experts calling for alternative, dimensional models to increase their nosological validity and clinical utility of diagnosis in the upcoming DSM-6 (Poletti et al., 2026).

Moreover, the evolving DSM criteria is not the only way in which the medicalization of ADHD has been shown to occur. Conrad and Schneider (1992) posited that medicalization not only operates through medical discourses (such as those found in the DSM) whereby problematic behaviors are defined in terms of “disorder,” but also in doctor-patient encounters and via institutional actors that help shape the meaning and management of ADHD in medical terms. For instance, sociologists have identified how educators and parents have played such a role, with Malacrida (2004) documenting how schools have been crucial in identifying and referring children for ADHD assessment and Rafalovich (2013) exploring parental roles in the medicalization of childhood. Early empirical studies in the U.S. by Bussing et al. (1998) explored variations in how ADHD is represented, finding racialized differences in how parents interpret and report ADHD in their children (with African-American parents referring to behavioral problems, while Caucasian parents referred to medical syndromes). Blum’s (2015) ethnographic study of mothers of children with ADHD in the U.S. also reiterates the advocacy role that parents play in seeking diagnosis and treatment, demonstrating how ADHD care continues to be impacted by social and racial disparities nearly two decades later.

As is evidenced by the range of actors, discourses, and practices involved (albeit asymmetrically) in shaping the meaning and management of ADHD, the medicalization of this condition is salient in the development and validation of scientific, diagnostic, and clinical approaches, and furthermore as a response to the pervasive question of what makes a condition more or less biologically “real” or more or less socially “constructed” (Singh et al., 2013). The social and medical history of ADHD is marked, as such, by shifts in three domains as proposed by Rojas-Navarro and Filipe (2023). First, we observe a move from an original diversity of categories in the mid-20th century, to the unification of ADHD diagnosis, which is reflected in the historical evolution of the DSM (especially since the 1980s and DSM-III). Second, cognitive psychology, neuroscientific, and biomedical research have sought to identify the neurobiological pathways underlying ADHD, at first pushing back against psychodynamic theories and, later on, moving from primarily psychiatric descriptors to incorporate neurobehavioral and developmental dimensions (Rafalovich, 2001, 2013). Third, alongside this definitional reframing, efforts have gone into establishing the efficacy of psychostimulant drug treatments (Mayes et al., 2008) and into building a diagnostic-therapeutic consensus on ADHD that could be widely applied, as we explore next.

The globalization and pharmaceuticalization of ADHD: Trends and critiques

Much of the scholarship discussed so far has a distinct North American perspective yet, in the past 30 years, ADHD has expanded on a global scale, as indicated by epidemiological and prevalence meta-analyses, and in the international sales and consumption rates of psychostimulant medications. In the widely cited meta-analyses conducted by Polanczyk and colleagues in 2007 and 2014, ADHD has been estimated to affect about 5% of school-aged children and adolescents worldwide and approximately half that rate in adults, with a study from 2015 indicating a global benchmark prevalence of around 7% (Bergey and Filipe, 2018; see also Posner et al., 2020). As Singh et al. (2013) indicate, a study conducted around that time by the US Centers for Disease Control suggested that the lifetime prevalence of ADHD in the US is around 11%, while nearly twice these rates were reported in Colombia, growing at unexpectedly faster paces in Latin American countries than in the U.S. Parallel to this rise in ADHD prevalence, there has been a sharp increase in rates of prescription and consumption of psychostimulants worldwide. Recent reports from the International Narcotics Control Board indicate that the “world record level of psychostimulant drug consumption was reached in 2013” (Filipe, 2023: 336).

These global trends raise important sociological questions (Singh et al., 2013), especially pertaining to the disparity between the expected global prevalence of ADHD and data gathered in different locations around the globe, which has raised concerns about the validity of such estimation. Namely, debates remain on whether higher rates of, and variations in, prevalence estimates across countries reflect socio-cultural factors, problems related to measurement and research methodologies used in those studies, or changes in how diagnostic criteria are applied (Bergey et al., 2018; Posner et al., 2020). However, these global trends nevertheless indicate the “universalization” of ADHD, which Lusardi (2019) has suggested is caused by both the redefinition and expansion of ADHD to include school-age children, youth, and the adult demographic, as well as the geographical migration and circulation of ADHD diagnosis and treatment beyond the U.S. Similarly, some sociologists have argued that the migration of APA’s DSM criteria to other countries represents “an exemplary case of [an] impending globalized medicalization” of ADHD (Conrad and Bergey, 2014: 31). This process is deemed to alter medical and public understandings of the condition, associated with a shift away from other diagnostic frameworks (e.g. the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)) in European countries, whose criteria for hyperkinetic syndromes and ADHD are comparatively more stringent.

Furthermore, medical sociologists have described how those classificatory frameworks, concomitant with non-diagnostic child mental healthcare in countries like France, act as countervailing forces to the pharmaceuticalization of ADHD (Vallée, 2019). Pharmaceuticalization is a sociological term used to describe “the process by which social, behavioral or bodily conditions are treated, or deemed to be in need of treatment with medical drugs by doctors or patients” (Abraham, 2010: 604). While mutually enabling, processes of medicalization and pharmaceuticalization are not mutually dependent (i.e. medicalization can happen without pharmaceuticalization, and vice versa) and the latter term should not be subsumed under the former. However, in the context of ADHD, the two processes often appear conflated in the literature, and historically too, when the neuroimaging studies, international consensus statements, and therapeutic clinical trials, that took place at the turn of the millenium, jointly produced the ADHD diagnostic-therapeutic nexus as we recognize it today. Indeed, when compared to other neurodevelopmental conditions, “the marketization and use of psychostimulant drugs in the management and treatment of ADHD have [been] one of the most distinctive—and perhaps also divisive—aspects of its social and medical history” (Filipe, 2023: 338).

This particularity has been expressed in extensive debates on the ethics of stimulant medication use, its off-label prescription for cognitive enhancement, and implications for how we make sense of questions of agency, identity, and intersubjectivity in childhood and youth, to name a few examples (Singh et al., 2013). These questions, together with cross-national variations and peaks in both prevalence and prescription rates, have sparked an interest in international and comparative studies. As documented in this journal’s archive, social and qualitative research has investigated how parents, teachers, and professionals make sense of epistemic authority and ADHD subjectivity in Italy (Frigerio et al., 2013), with others exploring how ADHD and psychostimulant treatments have been portrayed and critiqued in the news and social media in countries such as the UK (Horton-Salway, 2011), France (Ponnou et al., 2020), and Sweden (Qaderi and Lindblom, 2024). There have also been cross-national comparative studies, ranging from the role of ADHD parent advocacy groups in France and Ireland (Edwards et al., 2014), and how parents and teachers perceive variations in prevalence and prescription rates in Canada and Belgium (Brault et al., 2023), to children’s own voices on ADHD and their perspectives on authenticity and agency in the UK and U.S. (Singh, 2013).

Furthermore, a growing body of literature has sought to map and understand the discourses, actors, and social factors shaping differential rates of access to care, which may impact the adoption of short-term or long-term therapies (Bergey et al., 2018). Research on ADHD in Southern Europe (Filipe, 2014, 2023) for instance, has shown how the preexistence of structural inequalities and historical and institutional legacies of dictatorship, compounded by economic austerity and cuts in public healthcare spending, help explain the uptake of psychostimulant medications as a “first line” treatment for ADHD in the last decade. In line with this research, scholarship hailing from South America and beyond has sought to think beyond the dominant “Anglophone” literature on the medicalization and pharmaceuticalization of ADHD (Bianchi et al., 2016; Rojas-Navarro and Vrecko, 2017). Some studies have explored, for instance, temporal aspects of ADHD and how the “specter” of diagnosis impacts the experiences of Chilean school-aged children over time (Rojas-Navarro et al., 2024), while others have ethnographically documented Danish ADHD adult experiences of feeling out of synchrony with their social worlds (Nielsen, 2017). Taken together, this body of work illustrates not only how ADHD has become a globally circulating, unevenly institutionalized diagnostic category whose meanings, measurements and treatments are shaped by global and local approaches to pharmaceutical treatment, but also how the social studies of ADHD have expanded into a comparative, socio-culturally attuned body of research.

Beyond medicalization: Demedicalization, neurodiversity and decolonial paradigms

As is evidenced by the wealth of literature laid out thus far on the actors and institutions involved in the medicalization, globalization, and pharmaceuticalization of ADHD, these theories have largely dominated the field and shaped the paradigmatic approaches to the social studies of ADHD over the past several decades. However, it is important to enter a word of caution against using these broad-brush concepts as the prime or sole framing for ADHD, as the configuration of ADHD’s diagnosis, prevalence, treatment, and experience cannot be reduced to a top-down process of medicalization on a grand scale, or to socio-cultural idiosyncrasies that are inherently demedicalizing (Filipe, 2016: 393). To this point, scholars have pointed out the challenges and limits of medicalization as an overarching explanatory theory. Bioethicists, for instance, have suggested that we need to empirically distinguish “bad” forms of medicalization (such as over-medicalization and over-prescription) from “good” forms of medicalization (Parens, 2013) which could redress, for instance, late-, mis-, and under-diagnosis experienced by women and girls with ADHD (Holden and Kobayashi-Wood, 2025). In other contexts, such as Ghana, children and youth have also been identified as agents of medicalization themselves by using psychiatric labels for agency, support, and identity, and assigning new social meanings and roles to those labels to circumvent the risk of stigma and over-medicalization (Beeker et al., 2020).

Other scholars have also argued for the need for further research into de-medicalization. Halfmann (2012), for example, argued that there has not been sufficient analysis of how de-medicalization processes can also occur across discourses, practices, and identities, and on micro, meso and macro scales that can be both top-down and bottom-up. Similarly, Bergey’s (2024) research specifically documents instances of de-medicalization, when ADHD coaching clients frame their experiences within nonmedical discourses (e.g. coaching as “self-actualization” practice rather than “treatment”), while simultaneously participating in the medicalization of their behaviors as symptoms to secure diagnostic validation. As historian Rosenberg (2002) argued, the history of psychiatric diagnosis is about more than medical hegemony; it tells a story about how seemingly reductionist medical means (e.g. diagnostic categories and psychiatric labels) can be used to achieve de-stigmatizing, socially inclusive, and culturally holistic aims (Rosenberg, 2002), in ways more complex than what sociological theses of “top-down” medicalization may purport.

What is more, there has also been a significant movement from cultural theorists that critiques the medical model of ADHD. Instead, ADHD has come to be understood within this field as exemplary of the “social model of disability,” which positions disability, not as a biological flaw in need of medical intervention, but as a cultural interpretation of human variation that excludes and stigmatizes difference and leads to discriminatory practices (Garland-Thomson, 2005). Within the logics of this social model, the lived difficulties of disability arise from societal and environmental barriers to access, mobility, and participation (rather than impairments located solely in the individual). Disability studies scholars have thus played a pivotal role in critical advocacy work and helping to culturally reframe ADHD, introducing and popularizing terms like neurodivergence and neurodiversity that are now commonly used as umbrella categories for medicalized conditions of neuro-differentiation in everyday discourse, in the news media, and in clinical practice alike. This term, first attributed to the autistic Australian sociologist Judy Singer’s doctoral research in the 1990s (Greco, 2022), has been significantly developed through the sub-field of critical neurodiversity studies, understood at once as a conceptual paradigm and social advocacy movement.

Within this neurodiversity framework, neurodivergence is a deviation from neurotypicality or neuronormativity—terms that are used to describe “the normal human being” as someone who lives, acts, and experiences the world in accordance with how the prevailing culture imagines a person with a “normal” mind would (Walker, 2021: 51; see also Garland-Thomson, 1997 for a foundational text on disability studies). In other words, more than diverging from an “objective” state of normalcy, neurodivergence is seen as a deviation “from whatever constructed image and performance of normality the prevailing culture currently seeks to impose” (Walker, 2021: 59). This approach thus acknowledges that there are “many forms of innate but value-free neurological differences within normal human variation” (Meinen, 2023: 3), and that these variations are molded by multiple factors such as “genetics, the influence of developmental environments on genetic expression, and the infinite variety of ways in which each individual mind is shaped by culture, activity, environment, and experience” (Walker, 2021: 38). Neurodiversity studies have thus contributed to an alternative framing and understanding of autism (and to a lesser extent ADHD) which have neurobiological and neurodevelopmental underpinnings, yet are further compounded by environmental barriers, social demands, and cultural norms, as well as unjust experiences of deprivation and adversity (Filipe et al., 2021a, 2021b; Singh, 2026). Cultural and neurodiversity studies perspectives have carved a path for research that examines how socio-cultural and political contexts impact neurodevelopment, whilst highlighting how certain behaviors are deemed normative or disordered within society (Chapman, 2023).

These perspectives reiterate the relevance of sociological accounts of “disorder” that consider their normative aspects, without necessarily opposing biological and medical explanations for ADHD (Bowden, 2014). In this sense, a new wave of social studies has situated neurodivergent conditions in the wider socio-cultural contexts and alternative ontologies of difference, to challenge the predominance of both “Western scientific paradigms” and “biomedical, deficit-based understandings” of neurodivergence (Bruno et al., 2025: 2637). Manase’s (2024) localized and decolonial study of neurodiversity within Southern Africa exemplifies this by problematizing the Western epistemological dominance of medicalized terminology and seeking to resituate neurodivergence within African humanism perspectives. Another concrete illustration of how these links between neurodiversity and decoloniality cast a new light on ADHD is the Māori term “Aroreretini” meaning “attention goes to many things” which reframes “deficit-disorder” in neuro-affirmative terms. Recent studies related to these decolonial perspectives have explored intersections between this phenomenon and the impacts of digital connectivity/disconnection in Aotearoa, New Zealand (Beattie, 2025). These insights resonate with wider debates about attention and ADHD in technologically saturated environments and open a pathway to consider how ADHD is increasingly framed within broader digital transformations, as we discuss in the next section.

ADHD in the digital age: Platforms, subjectivity and lay knowledge

Alongside the socio-cultural critique and reframing of ADHD outlined above, public and scholarly debates have linked rising ADHD prevalence to the role of digital technologies in shaping diagnosis and the ubiquitous influence of social media platforms (Thorell et al., 2024) on everyday life. Tropes of screen-addicted children have become a symbol of a digital attention crisis (see Campo, 2022), which epitomizes social and ethical concerns that the persuasive design of digital technologies combined with information overload, is conducive to shorter attention spans. These concerns include questions surrounding the commodification of users’ attention by digital platforms and subsequent surveillance (Gaeta, 2023), as well as critiques that “contemporary digital technologies are, in essence, attention seeking mechanisms” (Horst and Miller, 2012). From this techno-deterministic perspective, social media, digital technologies, and the internet could be seen, simultaneously, as key components of a new attention economy and as drivers of inattentiveness and ADHD-related symptoms (for a debate, see Pedersen et al., 2021). Indeed, as medical anthropologists and STS scholars have argued, health experiences and symptomology are never purely biological or socially determined, but instead co-constructed through interactions among technologies, social institutions, embodied and intersubjective experiences, and wider cultural meanings (Filipe, 2020b).

However, research has also emerged that pushes back against techno-deterministic perspectives to explore the role of digital technologies, not simply as causal factors in the increasing prevalence of reduced attentive capabilities and other ADHD-related symptoms, but also in shaping the interpretive structures surrounding mental health and health-related behaviors. Conrad et al. (2016) argued, for instance, that the development of the internet, online bulletin boards, chatrooms, listservs, and social media platforms has led to increased sharing of health information, and the creation of online health communities, transforming illness from a largely private experience to an increasingly public one. Social media has garnered particular interest as a source of public, non-credentialized, information on ADHD (Holroyd, 2026; Yeung et al., 2022) and algorithmically targeted health and diagnostic advertisements that commodify attention (Gaeta, 2023). Since online content covers anything from symptoms, behaviors, and lived experiences of ADHD, to resources for navigating life with the condition, it has become an accessible source of tacit and experiential knowledge, which has been shown to reframe certain feelings and behaviors as putative indicators of ADHD and thus shape public understandings of its symptomatology (Holroyd, 2024, 2026; Versteeg et al., 2018). At the same time, cross-national circulation of ADHD-related content on social media may be a contributing factor in the globalization of ADHD (Holroyd and Li, forthcoming), with influencer-driven narratives and celebrity stories of ADHD experiences shaping how ADHD behaviors and cognate psy-diagnoses are identified, discussed, and portrayed in the public imaginary and across cultural contexts (Jutel and Russell, 2023).

Within this context, wellness and healthcare influencers have been theorized as increasingly powerful actors in the circulation of health information. Content creators use audio-visual techniques that are borrowed and adapted from more traditional forms of media to make their ADHD content believable and authoritative (Holroyd, 2024) as well as engaging and viewable (via humor, relatability, hashtags, and memes) to wider online and ADHD communities (Leveille, 2024). Against the cultural backdrop of a misinformation and “post-truth era” (Sismondo, 2017), however, the authority of this lay expertise has become a matter of concern (Verma and Sinha, 2025). Studies into the levels of misinformation about ADHD on TikTok, for example, have found that more than half of top viewed ADHD videos are misleading (Yeung et al., 2022) and most claims about symptomatology do not align with clinical criteria (Karasavva et al., 2025). Addressing these concerns, research has begun to explore how internalized ADHD misinformation might affect clinical and self-diagnosis (Armstrong et al., 2025; Hartnett and Cummings, 2024).

Yet, as Foster and Ellis (2024) argue, research in this area tends to ascribe self-diagnosis among social media users to either users’ intentional misuse of diagnostic labels for personal gain, or to the manipulative effects of digital content. This tendency overlooks the important work that “platformed diagnosis”—a term used to describe self- or peer-diagnosis that is mediated by social media content and platform affordances (Alper et al., 2025)—does for individuals. For example, some have argued that access to ADHD content on social media may help users feel more knowledgeable about the condition, reduce social stigma, and benefit how users seek treatment or support for symptom management (Schiros et al., 2025). Moreover, ADHD social media content has become a mediating factor in how people share personal experiences (Leveille, 2024) and make sense of their own psychosocial identities and ADHD subjectivities (Alper et al., 2025; Holroyd, 2025b, 2026). This role has been conceptualized as a form of “caring existential media,” insofar as it helps users to better understand their behaviors, while also offering explanatory frameworks and identity categories that go beyond medicalization discourse (Holroyd and Lagerkvist, forthcoming). Furthermore, digital platforms create new spaces for sociality and webs of informal care that enable users to forge community and access peer-support from others identifying as ADHDers (Holroyd and Lagerkvist, forthcoming).

Anthropologists and media studies scholars have argued, further, that the endless scroll capabilities of social media platforms, the algorithmically-mediated flow of videos, and the platform culture of mimesis and memes create, altogether, an immersive digital infrastructure and platform habitus that replicates and exacerbates ADHD-like symptoms (Holroyd, 2026; Locke, 2023), while also “enlist[ing] user affect” (Avella, 2024: 6052). In other words, content creators and digital platforms can jointly shape the meanings and symptoms of ADHD, contributing to a lay medicalization of affects, emotions, and embodied experiences (Holroyd, 2026). Yet this process is not exclusive to ADHD and may be more broadly understood as part of a widespread uptake of digital health apps, health-related self-trackers, and personal health technologies, as well as of the datafication and technologization of healthcare, as some would argue (Lupton, 2016). Some researchers see this shift toward digital health technologies as potentially beneficial, examining their functionality in the context of diagnostic processes (Vaidyam et al., 2019) and of real-time assistance to those living with ADHD (Franceli et al., 2022). Others, namely critical digital sociologists, have critiqued the gamification and self-tracking logics embedded in these platforms (Holroyd, 2025b; Lupton, 2016), demonstrating how they encourage neoliberal, self-care behaviors of restoring, managing, maintaining, and self-optimizing health and wellbeing, while also reifying particular symptoms of ADHD that differ from DSM symptomology (Holroyd, 2025b ).

These dynamics and examples illustrate how ADHD-related digital content, as well as the emergent body of research on these topics, both extend and unsettle practices and theories of medicalization in the digital age. On the one hand, the social media presentation of ADHD as an identity category (rather than simply a medical diagnosis) means that this content should not only be understood as contributing to the co-construction of health information, but also as a form of identity construction and meaningful identity performance (Leveille, 2024). The digital framing of ADHD in this way can destabilize biomedical authority by foregrounding lived experience, and complicate medicalization by transforming a clinical label into a cultural resource. On the other hand, the diffusion of diagnostic language into everyday self-description reinforces the centrality of diagnostic categories in the making of the self and constitutes a form of lay medicalization, insofar as these diagnostic categories are taken up, reworked and circulated by users. The algorithmic and memetic amplification of ADHD content and its affective resonance, alongside the coopting and commodification of this discourse within privatized digital health technologies, thus indicates the involvement of new (human and non-human) actors in the socio-environmental impacts, barriers and drivers that are shaping contemporary ADHD diagnosis, experiences and research.

The future of social studies of ADHD: For a critical interdisciplinary agenda

Having now mapped out the past three decades of social research on ADHD, it becomes clear that the condition and configuration of ADHD are shaped by a “dynamic and socially situated process” (Filipe, 2018: 199), combining “cultural, social, political, technological and scientific constituents” (Smith, 2012: 19–20) as well as embodied, affective, and relational experiences. More crucially, it is also evident that ADHD offers a unique case study on the merits and limitations of conceptual developments and theories in the field. Among these, the sociological thesis of medicalization has played a pivotal role in the social study of ADHD, diagnosis, and medicine, and in their popular critique. Parallel to this, studies focusing on pharmaceuticalization and globalization have had an important impact on understanding other aspects of the condition’s definition and evolution across cultural and institutional contexts. Studies spanning sociological, anthropological, and humanities research point to the contingencies and paradoxes surrounding perceptions of the diagnosis and treatment preferences as these are etched in local and social histories of ADHD advocacy, validation, and demedicalizing efforts. In turn, the emergence of the neurodiversity/divergence paradigm, decolonial perspectives, and critiques of medicalization complicate these dynamics, as does the reconfiguration of ADHD discourse on social media platforms, in tandem with the uptake of digital health technology in diagnosis and/or management. These more recent, and understudied, developments in the field further indicate how cultural discourses and technological infrastructures contribute to the reframing of ADHD (within research and popular discourses) which beget a rethinking of medicalization as both social process and a conceptual-theoretical analytic.

By tracing these historical and contemporary developments in the field, it becomes possible to outline what perspectives are lacking within existing social research on health, illness, medicine, and diagnosis. Considering these gaps, we ask: what is the future of ADHD studies? What are the potential research directions for social scientists and humanities scholars interested in the history and experience of ADHD, and in their medical, global, and digital reconfigurations? Building on our overview and framing of the social studies of ADHD, we posit that there are three avenues of inquiry that require further critical and reflective attention as the field moves forward: (1) the more-than-human and digital dimensions of ADHD; (2) lived experience and the phenomenology of ADHD; and (3) critical intersections of ADHD, building on disability studies, and feminist and decolonial perspectives. These three areas offer a new framework for the future social studies of ADHD, as well as interdisciplinary research on health and medicine, more broadly.

First, building from the emergent body of research on digital technologies and ADHD that we synthesized above, the more-than-human entanglements that surge from socio-technological advancements require further study. As has been argued within the pages of this journal, digital technologies “promise radical positive disruption,” but are also accompanied by many uncertainties, especially in the context of digital colonization, predictive technologies, data breaches, and unequal access to the internet (Petersen et al., 2019). Despite the fast-expanding body of research on digitization and algorithmic living (Amoore, 2020; Pedersen et al., 2021), digital culture and regulations are rapidly evolving. We thus identify a need for future interdisciplinary work that brings these emergent developments into conversation with cultural, literary, and media studies, STS, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy to consider digital accounts of ADHD “in the wild” and outside the clinic. These should include further critical examination of self-help apps, chatbots, and other e-health interventions, social media discourses, the utilization of Generative AI, and emerging digital coaching (see Bergey, 2024). This wave of studies must extend beyond the U.S. context, and should consider the impacts of global flows of data and the political economies of media markets, as well as how these technologies intersect with felt experience and the logics of techno-capitalistic extraction of value and provision of care (Martin et al., 2015).

Second, despite the recent uptick in digital ADHD-related content that highlights the embodied and lived experiences of the condition (Holroyd, 2026), existing research on the medicalization of ADHD often neglects to consider these elements (Jackson-Perry et al., 2025). This is a crucial avenue of feminist, phenomenological inquiry that has been explored in relation to other health concerns but that remains relatively uncharted in ADHD research (with some notable exceptions: Craddock, 2026; Goodwin, 2010; Nielsen, 2017; Rojas-Navarro et al., 2024). We call for further inquiry into debates on the phenomenology of ADHD in both the online sphere, and beyond, as well as a greater engagement with auto-ethnographic, narrative, and creative methods (e.g. visual documentary, self-reported diaries, creative arts, and movement-based methods; see Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2025) that can uncover how this and other neurodivergent conditions are lived, felt, embodied, and emplaced. We also support recent calls for new theories and interdisciplinary frameworks that account for how the complex interplay between biology, development, and environment influences our wellbeing—and, conversely, how disparities driving the unequal distribution of social adversity and social security heighten disability and vulnerability (Filipe et al., 2021b; Salvino et al., 2022). Continuing this thread would allow social scientists to further explore questions surrounding affective attachment to, and embodiment of, diagnostic labels and medication. It would also respond to the recent call for “a field of critical ADHD studies, which is ADHD-affirmative, intersectional, and produced by ADHDers themselves” (Huijh, 2021).

Third, following directly from this suggestion, we propose future research that centers intersectional and critical (including feminist and decolonial) approaches to the study of ADHD that draws from existing critical disability studies perspectives to consider redefinitions of ADHD springing from self-advocacy efforts, disability movements, and the neurodiversity paradigm. As discussed previously, there already exists a substantial body of literature on the social models of disability, the production of knowledge and normativity (Chapman, 2023) as well as the material, symbolic and social consequences of naming, labeling and classifying neural and bodily difference (Dolmage, 2014) in terms of deficit and disorder. However, these perspectives remain relatively sidelined within sociological research. As such, there remains a need for investigation into how ADHD is also impacted by systemic health inequities, social and political economic structures, and cultural practices and expectations (Jackson-Perry et al., 2025). Here, we especially support recent calls for further research on how intersectional and socio-demographic factors such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, age, geography, and disability shape ADHD experiences (Bergey et al., 2022; Simoni, 2018). This work would also benefit from the incorporation of community-led research, including marginalized perspectives from Indigenous Peoples and their “ways of knowing, being and doing” (Bruno et al., 2025: 2637), and careful examination of the political economies and eco-social determinants of mental health, disability, and wellbeing (Burgess et al., 2025; Filipe et al., 2021a).

Expanding research in these three research directions and applying diverse theories and creative methodologies would give voice and visibility to lived experiences of ADHD. These perspectives, we suggest, could bring novel perspectives and reflexivity to the field, beyond the classic register of critical social theory, by considering how social research has shaped or might play a role in shaping public understandings of ADHD. The interdisciplinary research agenda proposed herein will be relevant for the social studies of ADHD, as we termed it here, and a wider range of akin—and often co-occurring—neurodevelopmental and mental health conditions, including both expert and non-expert, academic and non-academic readers who are seeking to develop their scholarship, practice, and/or policy in the field. As such, our thematization and analysis may be relevant to those exploring social and cultural dimensions of medicine, diagnosis, and knowledge; experiences of health, illness, and embodiment; and the reconfiguration of subjectivity, sociality, and disability, as mediated by digital technology and living environments, through a social scientific and humanities lens.