Implicaciones jurídicas, psicológicas y criminológicas del trastorno por déficit de atención e hiperactividad(TDAH)

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: The Attention-Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is considered as the most predominant mental psychopathology in childhood worldwide. Its main symptoms are lack of attention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness. The possibility of its appearance during adolescence and adulthood influenced by a group of clinically significant facts and other wide variety of determined risky factors would define it as a chronic psychopathology with severe consequences which can lead to the development of antisocial and illicit behaviour. Therefore, the first approach is supported by the analysis of such factors covered from the more psychobiological aspects of the disorder until other aspects related to the risk of criminality and its treatment at a penal and prison level, which comes from a legal analysis. METHODOLOGY: In order to discover the link of the ADHD in the development of violent conducts and its legal analysis in the Spanish Legal System, mainly the Thesis analyses: 1) the neurobiological and genetic new explanations and the comorbidity with other pathologies (ODD, TC or APD), 2) the origin and explanation of delinquency in this population and 3) the penal sanction and legal analysis according to chargeability and criminal liability to who, in presence of ADHD, makes a crime. CONCLUSIONS: The link between ADHD-criminality is limited to the presence of comorbid pathology, which determines the trajectory of adulthood offenders. However, having noted that a minority of people with ADHD are criminals, in case they are, the explanation is attributed to the external symptomatology, specifically impulsivity. According with all of that, could be accepted ADHD symptomatology as exemption cause of criminal responsibility?