Editorial: Evolving Understanding of Conduct Disorder

Abstract

Conduct disorder affects up to 10% of youths.1 It is heritable, stable, and highly associated with important psychiatric comorbidities and has significant predictive value for life course with respect to education, employment, intimate relationships, and legal problems. In 25% of youths diagnosed with conduct disorder, the diagnosis serves as a prelude to adult antisocial personality. In nearly all adults with antisocial behavior, conduct disorder was a harbinger of behaviors and attitudes to come. Despite all this, conduct disorder remains an underdiagnosed, understudied, underemphasized phenomenon at both societal and neuropsychiatric levels. Most attention to the disorder lies in the imagination of Hollywood, where rebellious youth, liberated of societal norms, combine wanton aggression with unlikely cleverness to the delight of audiences, without depiction of the suffering and impairment far more common to individuals with the phenotype.