Last week, the Channel 4 documentary, The Great ADHD Myth, took a long overdue look at attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The program has since faced a significant backlash online and a tidal wave of complaints to Ofcom. Perhaps this says more about ADHD than it does about Channel 4. Because as the program revealed, many scientists now see the condition as more of a “social construct” or “identity marker” than a real illness.
At the center of this row, and one of the star witnesses of the documentary, is Dr Sami Timimi, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist in the NHS. Timimi has been a critic of ADHD for many years stating that it is “a fact of culture rather than a fact of nature”. He has noted that there is no convincing scientific argument for its clinical usefulness, nor indeed any evidence for its existence. To date, no blood test, scan, or biomarker can reveal the presence of ADHD anywhere in the human body.
Further, the ADHD symptom list – which includes inattention, disorganization, restlessness, and most devastatingly of all, an inability to complete uninteresting tasks – are well represented in almost everyone, and most especially the young and ill-disciplined. Surely these are normal human traits, not a cognitive malfunction driven by a broken brain? Is this yet another example of the psychology industry’s attempt to pathologize normal human behavior?
Other medical experts quoted in the documentary, such as Dr Iona Heath, former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, were equally skeptical. Heath has plainly stated, “It is certainly not a medical condition as far as I’m concerned”.
The evidence for ADHD just doesn’t stack up. For a convincing diagnosis you need distinct symptoms and very clear impairment. Schizophrenia has hallucinations, delusions, and thought disorder. Addiction has tolerance, withdrawal, and craving. ADHD has only restlessness, inattention, and boredom, along with other vague and subjective feelings which are observable in anyone to a greater or lesser degree.
To truly identify ADHD, some cross-cultural recognition would be helpful. But it turns out there isn’t much ADHD to be found in Botswana. At least, not until researchers went looking for it in 2020. Armed with questionnaires, they promptly discovered it in12.3 per cent of children. Which kind of proves my point. ADHD is a social construct and not a naturally occurring phenomena. Its existence requires the presence of human psychologists to identify the behaviors that constitute it, in a way that addiction, schizophrenia, and other disorders don’t. They are observable to anyone with eyes.
To be fair, ADHD is not unique in lacking a biological marker (addiction doesn’t have one either). But the difference lies in the fact that smoking a crackpipe for 23 hours a day is very obviously dysfunctional and terribly dangerous. But where exactly is the pathology in ADHD? Not following the script of the movie very well? Not wanting to make your bed?
What has undoubtedly led to this heightened scrutiny around ADHD is the wild over-diagnosing that has allegedly been taking place for much of the last two decades. Medical professionals interviewed for the program say that the bar for diagnosis is set too low. For adults, diagnosis is reliant largely on self-reporting and is predominantly questionnaire led. Tick enough boxes and you can walk away with a disorder that seemingly explains every weird feeling you ever had, and at the same time get your hands on a prescription of medical-grade amphetamines.
Which leads us to the next point. As many an exasperated professional has noted, the efficacy of stimulant medications in treating the rather pedestrian symptoms of ADHD, is often taken as proof of the existence of ADHD. But this circular reasoning is the clinical equivalent of putting a witch on a ducking stool. It should be obvious to anyone that stimulants increase your focus just as ducking stools increase your chances of drowning. Neither though are evidence of having ADHD or being a witch.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves why we are giving children, teenagers, and young adults stimulant medications like methylphenidate (Ritalin) in the first place. These complaints have been voiced for years by advocacy groups like The Council for Evidence Based Psychiatry. According to Professor John Read at the University of East London, the number of children in the UK who are under 16 and using stimulants to treat ADHD “increased 34-fold between 1992 and 2013.” That’s an increase from 1.5 per 10,000 children, to 51.1 per 10,000. It’s frankly a scandal that it’s taken this long for a national broadcaster to platform the issue.
Only now the situation is much, much worse. In 2025, the data suggested that 1.19 percent of the population have an ADHD diagnosis. An estimated 325,000 people are receiving central nervous system stimulant medication for their ADHD, 135,000 of whom are children or young adults.
So why is this potential non-illness so popular? Dr Max Pemberton, the consultant psychiatrist who presented the documentary, had this to say:
“As a psychiatrist, I’ve watched ADHD go from a diagnosis that was only occasionally made and after careful assessment, to one that is increasingly demanded and dispensed, and I wanted to understand why.”
It seems to me there are two possible answers to this question. The first is ideological and the second is material.
In the clinical literature, ADHD is seen a neurodevelopmental condition like autism and other learning disabilities. These categories have been defined by the global psychiatric classification systems DSM-5 and ICD-11 for years. But over the last five years or so this clinical terminology and classification system has been hijacked by the “neurodiversity” movement. Neurodivergence is not a medical diagnosis. It is an online subculture, and perhaps a form of identity politics which seeks to differentiate its adherents from the general population whom it sees as “neurotypical”. The nearest analogue might be the gender fluid spectrum within the trans movement.
ADHD is just one in a long line of disabilities you can have, or more accurately “be” under the neurodiversity umbrella. And the trend is not limited to ADHD. Autism is the latest illness (and in this case a legitimate well-established one) to be hijacked.
A 2021 study in the journal of child psychology and psychiatry saw a 787 percent rise in recorded autism diagnosis between 1998 and 2018. Unusually, the biggest growth in new diagnoses has been amongst adult females, who are often university or academic adjacent. Downstream of them is an ever-growing army of working-class moms struggling to cope with emotionally dysregulated teens, who no doubt find an official diagnosis somewhat comforting. It has been noted by several studies that ADHD in particular is more likely to be present in single parent households.
The second “benefit” you can potentially get from an ADHD diagnosis (or any other neurodevelopmental condition) is literal, financial benefits.
Around one million young people in the UK are identified as Neet (not in employment, education, or training). That’s around 13.4 percent of all 16-24-year-olds. Around half of these are economically inactive due to sickness. According to the Department for Education 20 percent have a mental health condition. That’s up from 7.7 percent in 2012. ADHD was not included in those mental health conditions, but autism was. And alarmingly, 12.3 percent of Neets reported “learning difficulties including autism” as their primary health condition.
Some government sources, most notably the Scottish Parliament, have suggested that rising levels of economic inactivity might be linked to “unmet neurodevelopmental and mental health needs”, suggesting we plow even more time and money into propping up this spectral disorder (perhaps by dishing out more meds). I have a slightly different take.
From my area of expertise, which is addiction treatment, it has been my life’s work to get people off drugs, not encourage them to take more. I have seen addiction treatment center admissions go from approximately 2 per cent of people having ADHD to about 98 per cent. Most addicted people struggle to control their use of substances, including legally prescribed stimulants. I have personally witnessed the abuse of these medications. In my view, they should only be used in the most extreme cases. So, here’s what I think really happens.
Both ADHD and frivolous autism diagnoses are likely leading to young people developing an identity based on being sick. This leads to accommodations being made for them, which in turn leads to reduced expectations for the young people concerned. This in turn leads to reduced participation in economic activity which becomes long term. This creation of a sickness identity is particularly dangerous in 18- to 25-year-olds. Withdrawal from responsibility at this crucial developmental stage establishes economic inactivity as the normal factory setting. It simply has to stop. De-diagnosing people from these kinds of overused disorders would be a great start. In fact, they are considering doing this in Sweden as we speak.
Comments