Funding Disparities Rebrands American Gifted Children as Mentally Ill & Paris Hilton Doesn’t Help

Funding Disparities Rebrands American Gifted Children as Mentally Ill & Paris Hilton Doesn’t Help

Republished with permission from AbleChild. 

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.

Hilton may bring her high-profile advocacy as attention to treatment facilities, but the more pressing concern is the pre-facility transformation of children—from gifted educational profiles morphed into mental health identities and, ultimately, medication regimens.

The United States must confront a difficult question: where are the gifted and talented children? Many have never been formally identified, as labeling for behavioral conditions is both easier and more profitable. Subsequently, children are medicated, managed, and too often written off. In tragic cases, the consequences extend into adulthood, manifesting as addiction or suicide after years of exposure to psychiatric medications marketed as mental health assistance.

A more balanced and evidence-based approach is needed to ensure that gifted children are accurately identified and supported, rather than mislabeled and managed according to financial incentive. School psychologists must be removed from the education system and replaced by qualified educators capable of identifying the gifted, not “disordered,” child.

AbleChild has strongly argued school-based mental health diagnosing and screening should be removed from public schools entirely, as psychiatric labeling is questionnaire-driven, not objective medicine, robbing generations of children of educational tools by converting learning profiles into “patients.”  The nation’s children should not be a captive audience for big pharma and the behavioral health industry.

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AbleChild is a 501(3) C nonprofit organization that has recently co-written landmark legislation in Tennessee, setting a national precedent for transparency and accountability in the intersection of mental health, pharmaceutical practices, and public safety.

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