America is starving for gifted education while financially rewarding psychiatric labeling. While bringing attention to the ADHD issue is appreciated, Paris Hilton’s recent Business Insider interview admitting “ADHD is my superpower” is a message wrongly pushing the alleged mental disorder as some kind of empowerment.
It is of interest that Hilton would raise the ADHD mental disorder to superpower status while, at the same time, the United States is significantly underfunding gifted education and financially incentivizing psychiatric labeling practices. High-profile figures, like Hilton, who frames ADHD as her “superpower,” contribute visibility to a growing trend in how behavioral conditions are marketed as sources of empowerment.
Hilton describes ADHD as fueling her “drive, curiosity, and creativity,” along with “a million ideas all the time.” She also mentions “rejection-sensitive dysphoria” (intense unbearable emotional pain caused by perceived rejection) as linked to ADHD, calling it “exhausting” and “painful.”
The financial disparities between ADHD funding and gifted programs are telling. The U.S. Department of Education’s appropriation for the Javits Gifted and Talented program is just $16.5 million, compared to estimates that ADHD services cost the U.S. education system $13.4 billion annually. The current system prioritizes mental health funding for diagnosis over the identification of superior educational ability.
Crucially, the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis lacks an objective biological marker… no blood test, brain scan, or X-ray. Put simply, there is no known abnormality that is the alleged ADHD. Instead, diagnoses rely on behavioral checklists and school-based screenings, broadening the label and creating pathways for the behavioral health industry and pharmaceutical market within educational settings.
This system warrants scrutiny beyond treatment facilities; it must also include how labeling pipelines shape outcomes. When behaviors are categorized as disorders, questionable mind-altering medication becomes the default intervention, steering children away from educational opportunities and toward clinical drug management.
Many gifted children, who often display heightened sensitivity and intensity, are instead mislabeled as having behavioral disorders. Characteristics such as defiance, oppositional behavior, hyperactivity, mood fluctuations, and attention difficulties—traits frequently seen in gifted individuals—are too often misinterpreted as pathology. Once labeled, these children are managed clinically rather than nurtured academically, a process perpetuated by the financial incentives inherent in current mental health policy, where the disparity between funding for education opportunities for the gifted receives a little more than $16 million, while ADHD-related programs enjoy nearly $14 billion in funding.
The widespread misdiagnosis of the nation’s gifted is consequential. When institutions classify gifted students as psychiatrically disordered, subject them to medication, and lower academic expectations, the result is lasting harm to individual lives and societal potential.
Historically, under President Eisenhower with the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the U.S. prioritized identifying high-ability students, supporting guidance and testing within schools. However, legislative priorities shifted under pressure from behavioral-health and pharmaceutical interests, moving schools away from talent identification toward managing behavior through diagnostic labeling and medication.
The funding imbalance suggests that gifted students are not overlooked by happenstance and, rather, are systematically converted into patients within a lucrative behavioral management industry.
Hellbound and Down 