Increasing identification of ADHD
Why are record numbers of people receiving ADHD diagnoses occurring around Earth?
In the prestigious international journal Nature for 26 November 2025, Helen Pearson published an analysis of identification rates for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In “ADHD diagnoses are growing. What’s going on?: More children and adults are being diagnosed with ADHD in some countries. Science is helping to understand why — and how best to provide support,” Ms. Pearson assembled facts and figures from scientific sources to describe the state of human knowledge about debates regarding identification and understanding of ADHD.
In the lede for her article, Ms. Pearson explained the questions she addressed:
In some parts of the world, record numbers of people are being diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In the United States, for example, government researchers last year reported that more than 11% of children had received an ADHD diagnosis at some point in their lives1 — a sharp increase from 2003, when around 8% of children had (see ‘ADHD among US boys and girls’).
But now, top US health officials argue that diagnoses have spiralled out of control. In May, the Make America Healthy Again Commission — led by US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr — said ADHD was part of a “crisis of overdiagnosis and overtreatment” and suggested that ADHD medications did not help children in the long term.
So what, exactly, is going on?
She went on to discuss contemporary concerns such as gender differences, variations in level or impairment, social media influences, and more. She presented not only the research but also the opinions of leaders in the study of ADHD. Some readers will find the discussions challenging, not because the facts are hard to understand but because Ms. Pearson did not shy away from examining controversial perspectives from a scientific perspective.
This is not a paper about interventions. It is not choc-a-block with recommendations for living with ADHD. It is about contemporary concerns in ADHD (e.g., what is driving the upsurge in adult diagnoses?) and it is chocked full of observations predicated on scientific evidence.
Ms. Pearson, who has a Ph.D. in medical science, has been contributing too Nature since the early 2001. She has editorial responsibility for the journalism efforts for the journal. She studied genetic influences on brain development, wrote a prize-winning book entitled The Life Project: The Extraordinary Story of Our Ordinary Lives (2016) about human development,1 and has covered related topics.
Footnotes
Ms. Pearson delivered a TED talk about her book. It’s called “Lessons from the longest study on human development.”