Understanding attention deficit hyperactivity disorder from social-ecological and evolutionary perspectives: Implications for an alternative psychosocial intervention for Chinese families of adolescents with ADHD

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is predominantly construed as an internal biological dysfunction and is treated by biomedical interventions in Chinese societies such as Hong Kong. This paper aims to review two alternative models for conceptualizing ADHD in Chinese contexts, namely Bronfenbrenner’s social-ecological model and the evolutionary model of Jensen and colleagues. Understanding ADHD from the social-ecological and evolutionary perspectives has important implications for developing an alternative psychosocial intervention for Chinese families of adolescents with ADHD that takes the interplay between ADHD characteristics and the social as well as the physical environments into account. Copyright © 2019 University of Regensburg.