Neuro-Developmental Disorders, Criminal Justice & An Emerging Global Consensus

​Val's Take/Conjecture

• The Connection between ADHD and greater risk of Criminal Justice involvement has been around at least since the 1990s.
• Sweden led this at one point.
• ​There has been more and more work on this in the UK and with this latest 2025 article in the International Journal of Law & Psychiatry --- Italy.

It does seem that European academic articles and government reports are asking more interesting questions:

• What should the law be?
• What should the range of services be?

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American Academic articles can get bogged down in the finer points of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity and Competency ---

• We can' ignore current law.
• But we need to be thinking about what "ought to be" not just what "is."

On the other hand, the American Legal System by and large would be happy to hand over the oversight of Defendants with various aspects of "ADHD" and "Co-Morbidities" to the Public Health System ----

• Not only are the RESOURCES not there to handle that in PUBLIC HEALTH;
• The UNDERSTANDINGS are getting a lot better but they're not perfect and it's not clear that you can get out of some kind of "CUSTODIAL CARE" in every case.
• It's exceedingly inconvenient to know that there are actual biological mechanisms.
• Further, these "Social Concerns" affect people's biology, too and are often diverse forms of "Chronic Stress."

ADHD in adults and criminal behavior: The role of psychiatric comorbidities and clinical and sociodemographic factors in a clinical sample (2025)
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[Italian Researchers]

​Conclusions: Adult ADHD, particularly in males, with combined presentation and in the presence of comorbidities such as oppositional defiant disorder and alcohol use disorder, is associated with an increased risk of criminal behavior.

The findings highlight the need for personalized and multimodal interventions to mitigate these risks.

​Future studies should adopt longitudinal designs to explore causal dynamics and evaluate the effectiveness of therapeutic strategies in forensic contexts.

Offending and clinical characteristics of adults with autism spectrum disorder: Experience at forensic psychiatry center in Türkiye between 2012 and 2022 (2025)
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​[Turkish Researchers]