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How Did Incentives Raise Kids' Attention Deficit Diagnoses?

A shift in incentives combined with changes in diagnostic definitions drives ADHD diagnoses to about three percent of kids. Many claimed factors like parental age fail to explain the shift.

Factors claimed as culprits get ruled out. Parental age actually is not that much of a factor. A bunch of stuff claimed to be the driver of the change is not. The punchline is really a shift in incentives. Incentives would be things like extra two hours on the test or whatever in school for kids with ADHD. A teacher gets rewarded for helping neurodiverse populations. The shift also includes how diagnosis is defined and who can provide the diagnosis. In the state of New Jersey it is something like sixty percent of ADHD diagnoses in kids where the kids have never taken any form of test. A teacher just says a kid has ADHD and then the kid is classified that way. Societal level drivers lead to the diagnoses unrelated to the actual spectrum.

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