I learned this while spending 12 weeks in Forensic psychiatry during my psychotherapy training.

I noticed that a few of the patients were acting out the behaviours of other patients. Namely, setting fire to paper waste bins. excuse the pun, but it spread like wild fire through the ward. The fire brigade were called weekly.

I remember sitting in group supervision in 2000 and the supervisor was warning us about the recent increases in referrals from parents asking for assessments for ADHD.

Mothers speaking outside of the school gates came to realise that children had better support if they had an ADHD diagnoses and they would have an increase in child benefits. So they were asking for an assessment for ADHD.

back to the ADHD article and looping behaviour:

To understand the complexity of the issue, it is helpful to consider the work of the philosopher of science Ian Hacking, who spent much of his life trying to untangle this sort of thing.

One of the most important lessons that Hacking taught us is that when it comes to medical diagnoses with behavioural aspects, humans are “moving targets”. This is because of what he termed “looping effects”: that when people receive a label, they respond to it by changing their behaviour accordingly. But because their behaviour has now changed, the label itself must evolve to capture the very thing purportedly being labelled. This then sets off new kinds of behaviour in those receiving the label and thus the looping continues.