ATTENTION IN THE WAITING ROOM

Oct. 2026

How many children must be assessed before their environment comes under scrutiny too?

In England, around 270,000 young people awaited an ADHD assessment in December 2025, up from 21,000 in April 2019—nearly thirteenfold. The interim report distinguishes this surge from an equivalent rise in ADHD, without settling the contributions of diagnostic catch-up, service backlogs, and worsening difficulties. It acknowledges rising reported symptoms and no recent prevalence data since 2017. In the US, parent-reported ADHD diagnoses among 3–17-year-olds rose from 8.6% in 2016 to 10.5% in 2023.

The question of causes is poorly framed if we look only at the child. At a desk, a child must sustain a train of thought even when it takes effort. On a phone, another video arrives before boredom has to be endured. This contrast is engineered: every prompt to scroll or return has been selected from millions of variants continuously tested on users because it statistically outperforms others at interrupting demanding tasks. Schools are then expected to teach children to resist a system refined, version after version, to make resistance harder.

A 2026 study of 11,286 young people found that increases in problematic social media use preceded small increases in parent-reported ADHD symptoms, particularly among boys—a modest association that does not establish causality. Yet what are we measuring when we measure “problematic use”? Less a stable trait of the child than a provisional outcome of an optimization process that keeps changing.

ADHD can be real, better recognized, and aggravated by this environment: these possibilities can coexist. But without access to platforms’ experiment logs, research will continue to treat as an individual fact what is also a product of engineering.

If the inquiry stops at diagnosis, schools and health services will become repair shops for attention strained elsewhere by an adversary that keeps improving. Consultations will multiply while the demands on attention remain. Policies that ask children to exercise greater self-control leave the companies competing to retain them free to change nothing.

Liviu Poenaru

References

Department of Health and Social Care. 2026. Independent Review into Mental Health Conditions, ADHD and Autism: Interim Report. March 31.

Katz, Samuel M., et al. 2026. “Trends in Parent-Reported ADHD Diagnosis and Treatment Among U.S. Children, 2016–2023.” Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology 55 (4): 688–703.

Nagata, Jason M., et al. 2026. “Problematic Social Media Use and ADHD Symptoms in Adolescents.” JAMA Network Open 9 (7): e2623748.

Kramer, Adam D. I., Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. 2014. “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (24): 8788–8790.