Alastair Mordey

Last week, the Channel 4 documentary, The Great ADHD Myth, took a long overdue look at attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The programme 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 programme revealed, many scientists now see the condition as more of a ‘social construct’ or ‘identity marker’ than a real illness. At the centre 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’.

You may have noticed over the last decade a steady increase in the promiscuous use of the word ‘trauma’. A word that once referred exclusively to grievous injuries of body and mind (gun-shot wounds, PTSD, that sort of thing) can now describe virtually anything. Psychotherapists and clinical psychologists are the main super-spreaders of this hyperbolic virus, though educators, politicians and of course celebrities are now getting in on the act.   But trauma is more than just an annoying buzz word. Its inexorable creep into common parlance is the culmination of aa sustained campaign to politicise healthcare that has been going on for 30 years.