ADHD, Crime, and the Family Tree: The Inheritance of Impulse
Saturday, November 1, 2025. This is for Kevin, my 10 am on Saturdays at the clinic who just survived a fatal car crash which killed his friend.
A new study in Biological Psychology has confirmed what many of us suspected but were too polite to say aloud: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder doesn’t just make you distracted. It makes you statistically interesting.
Specifically, people with ADHD are more likely to be convicted of a crime — and so are their relatives. The link, scientists say, is partly genetic.
It’s not destiny, exactly. It’s heredity with a bad sense of timing.
The Predictable Surprise
Researchers from Sweden’s Örebro University analyzed more than 1.5 million people born between 1987 and 2002 and found that the risk of criminal conviction increases with genetic closeness to someone with ADHD. Identical twins share the most DNA and, apparently, the most bad decisions. Cousins share less of both.
It’s the kind of pattern that makes behavioral geneticists giddy and everyone else vaguely uneasy.
Just so you know, ADHD’s heritability sits around 70 to 80%; criminal behavior, about 50%. Mix them and you get a family tendency toward acting first and regretting later — a sort of familial co-aggregation of ADHD and crime risk that sounds clinical until you picture their Thanksgiving.
When Sweden Measures What America Moralizes
Sweden’s incredible national registers make this kind of granular analysis possible. Every citizen’s medical and legal history sits neatly in a database, ready for statistical enlightenment. In America, by contrast, we have privacy, opinion, and chaos.
In Sweden, impulsivity is data.
In America, it’s character development.
Why do we tend to moralize what the Swedes simply measure?
Genes Behaving Badly
This next part is interesting. The genetic gradient is precise: identical twins show the highest overlap; full siblings, somewhat less; half-siblings and cousins, weaker still. As DNA thins, so does the resemblance — like a family recipe repeated without the salt.
But genes aren’t a verdict. Most people with ADHD never commit crimes, and most criminals don’t have ADHD. They merely share certain tendencies — impulsivity, novelty-seeking, poor inhibition — that can build interesting lives or destroy them.
Left unmedicated, impulsivity can lead to chaos. Managed, it can produce incredible innovation. Sometimes the difference between a visionary and a fugitive is facility with paperwork.
The Gender Plot Twist
The study found women with ADHD had a greater relative increase in conviction risk than men. Not because women are more criminally inclined, but because they’re underdiagnosed.
When a man acts impulsively, we call it aggression.
When a woman does, we call it emotion.
By the time she’s diagnosed as having ADHD, she’s already exhausted every coping mechanism — including, occasionally, minor arson.
The Family Business of Impulse
The familial pattern is unmistakable. The closer the genetic tie, the stronger the risk.
Yet the point isn’t inevitability; it’s inheritance. ADHD is not a moral failure but a neurological imbalance — a dopamine system that misfires between craving and consequence.
It’s a trait that can make someone brilliant at improvisation and terrible at taxes.
The same circuitry that creates entrepreneurs can, under pressure, create defendants.
In clinical terms, the study maps the genetic link between ADHD and criminal behavior; in human terms, it maps the thin line between brilliance and trouble.
Context, Again, Is Everything
Genes whisper, but environments shout.
Family stress, poverty, trauma — all amplify risk. Many with ADHD live in chronic friction: punished for impulsivity, then pathologized for the response to punishment. The real struggle isn’t attention; it’s regulation — emotional, behavioral, and moral.
As any good clinician knows, ADHD rarely travels alone. Rejection sensitivity, anxiety, and shame trail it like younger siblings. The same pattern fuels the intimacy and impulse collisions I explored in ADHD and hypersexuality.
The antidote isn’t discipline; it’s awareness — the cultivated pause that turns reactivity into choice.
Diagnosis as Commerce
In the United States, ADHD has become both under- and over-diagnosed — depending on who’s selling the cure. We’ve medicalized boredom and privatized focus. We don’t fund attention; we lease it out monthly.
Sweden quietly studies 1.5 million people, using meticulous documentation. America launches an app.
Final Thoughts
The paper’s title — The Familial Co-Aggregation of ADHD and Criminal Convictions — reads like something few would click on purpose.
But its conclusion is oddly humane. It suggests that impulsivity, risk-taking, and emotional volatility — traits that can lead to creativity or chaos — are not pathologies but predispositions awaiting an appropriate context.
Genes are the last respectable form of destiny, and like all fate, they invite both resignation and rebellion.
Most families pass down heirlooms. Others pass down dopamine dysregulation. Both can be managed, if you can better grasp what you’re holding.
The rest is just impulse, waiting for opportunity.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Oskarsson, S., Kuja-Halkola, R., Andersson, A., Tuvblad, C., Brikell, I., D’Onofrio, B., Chang, Z., & Larsson, H. (2025). The Familial Co-Aggregation of ADHD and Criminal Convictions: A Register-Based Cohort Study. Biological Psychology.