My partner and I raised a teenager with multiple diagnoses from ADHD to reactive attachment disorder. He had been classified by child services as severely mentally ill and considered to be all but unplaceable.

When we took him in as a measure of last resort, his social worker told us the system had all but written him off. She said his diagnoses made him easy to dismiss, but she didn't believe he should be dismissed.

When he started living with us, it was easy to see why people thought he was too mentally ill to lead a normal life. His frequent temper tantrums and meltdowns were that severe. They wrecked his social life and his ability to succeed at school, and he was already attending a school for kids with special needs.

It would have been easy to give up, to agree with the professionals that something about his neurology was too messed up for him to overcome his challenges.

We slowly learned he had good reasons to feel and behave the way he did. He was reacting to his environment in a way that felt rational to him. For privacy reasons, I won't get into detail, but he'd suffered a lot of abandonment and abuse. He had internalized that as not just normal but inevitable.

He tested us over and over, almost like he was trying to force us to abandon him to prove a point to himself.

I doubt he was trying that consciously and maybe I'm wrong altogether, but over the course of a couple years he started to realize he was safe. His personality did a complete 180. By the time he was 16 years old, he was to all outward appearances a perfectly happy teenager.

Later, as a young adult, he held down a job and pursued successful romantic and friend relationships, something all the experts had said he would never be able to do.

I know this isn't directly on point to what you're writing, but if we had believed the diagnoses, especially the RAD one, we probably would have presumed his neurology was too damaged to even try to help him.

Fortunately, we listened to his social worker instead of his psychiatrist. (That's in no way meant to disparage psychiatry, of course.)

He was simply reacting to a horrible environment, and when that environment turned nurturing and supportive, he got better.