Does ADHD actually exist? This week the BBC’s Panorama program rightly exposed some very worrying private clinics.
During online consultations, staff had diagnosed a BBC reporter with ADHD – attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – despite a personal and much longer assessment by an NHS psychiatrist who concluded he did not have the condition.
Although the clinics charged rather hefty fees, they seemed to have an extremely relaxed attitude about diagnosing this increasingly common complaint.
It’s a huge problem. ADHD was once mainly confined to children, but is now rapidly spreading to the adult population of the Western world.
The clinics, one of which was commissioned by the overburdened NHS, were also prepared to prescribe powerful stimulants on this basis.
Ritalin, a brand name for methylphenidate, for the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Regular doctors pulled up their skirts in disgust. Very alarming things. But the whole program was based on two assumptions.
The first was that ADHD exists at all, and the second was that there is some gold standard objective, testable diagnosis, against which to judge these clinics.
I know this will get me in all sorts of trouble. The ADHD lobby is huge and powerful, furiously turning on its critics. It drives legions of people into lifelong prescriptions as it officially cannot be cured, only ‘treated’.
And I suppose it’s fair to guess that the makers of these drugs are happy about that. They have excellent PR and spin machines and are brilliant at recruiting doctors to their side, with charm and lavish perks.
Here’s an example: In 2012, the pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) was fined nearly £2bn after admitting to bribing doctors and encouraging the prescription of inappropriate antidepressants to children (there has been – so far – no been such a case involving ADHD drugs).
GSK lavished hospitality and kickbacks, including travel to resorts in Bermuda, Jamaica and California, on doctors who agreed to write additional prescriptions.
But more ferocious than all this power and wealth are the parents (and often the teachers) of the diagnosed children. They want the child’s problems to have a medical cause, rather than being linked to modern parenting techniques or schooling.
And, of course, the patients are happy to be relieved of any personal responsibility for their behavior.
And what is this behavior? The NHS website provides a list. Part of this is: having a short attention span and being easily distracted; making careless mistakes, for example in schoolwork; seem forgetful or lose things; being unable to stick to tasks that are tedious or time consuming; seem unable to listen to or follow instructions; being unable to sit still, especially in a calm or quiet environment; constant fidgeting; excessive talking; not being able to wait their turn; act without thinking; interrupt call.
First, who hasn’t behaved like this? Then notice how many of these supposed symptoms are not actually experienced by the alleged sufferer, but by the adults who are in charge of them.
One of the problems with being diagnosed with ADHD is that it encompasses such an extraordinarily wide range of behaviors, including children who may be suffering from birth trauma or brain damage, and children who are just wayward and stubborn or driven to distraction. boring schools and bad teachers.
Even worse, it closes the topic. If all these millions really do suffer from a treatable physical ailment, then we need not worry about our degenerate family lives, dominated by screens and junk food, and lack of sleep and outdoor activities and our uninspiring schools.
A pill – nowadays often prescribed for life – solves the problem. Meanwhile, the small minority of children who are physically ailing are administered drugs that calm them down, and their real problems are ignored and not investigated.
This means, firstly, that they are not treated and, secondly, that medical knowledge no longer advances. It is doubtful whether the “diagnosis” of “ADHD” objectively helps any of those to whom it is applied. But it shrugs off responsibility for many adults and shuts down scientific research.
Even if some of these children do indeed have a physical defect that can be cured with medicine, it is not conceivable that they would all be in the same condition – six or seven million children now in the US, hundreds of thousands in Britain.
And then there’s the problem of the pills they get. In the US, many children are prescribed a real amphetamine, a class B drug that is normally illegal, with many known bad long-term side effects. Yet this is given to boys and girls from the age of four.
In this country, methylphenidate is the drug usually prescribed to children over the age of five, similar to but not identical to amphetamines.
Like them, it is used illegally without a prescription as a stimulant and aphrodisiac.
Among the adverse effects are tachycardia (a rapid heartbeat), palpitations, headache, nausea, insomnia and anxiety. Not to mention weight loss and abdominal pain. If this doesn’t worry you, then don’t worry. But it worries me a lot.
Adderall, a trade name for a combination drug also used in the treatment of ADHD
And here comes the other amazing thing. On November 18, 1998, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) held a so-called ‘Consensus Conference’ on ‘ADHD’. This sought to reach agreement on what ‘ADHD’ is and how it should be treated. I suspect there has been quite a bit of fighting.
The conference eventually issued a statement stating clearly that there is no independent, valid test for ADHD and no data showing it is due to brain malfunction. This, of course, undermines the case for giving potent drugs, which physically act on the brain, to presumed patients.
Now if you look for this information on the internet, you probably won’t be able to find it. It has inexplicably disappeared from the NIH’s own website and I’ve tried to get an explanation from them as to how or why this happened, but I’ve gotten no explanation.
Little by little, I found bits of evidence that the statement was really made. Then I found a lawyer in the pleasant lakeside town of Madison, the capital of Wisconsin, who happened to keep a copy of the original statement. And there are the original words.
“We don’t have an independent, valid test for ADHD, and there’s no data to suggest that ADHD is due to brain dysfunction. Further research to determine the validity of the disorder remains a problem.’
Somehow this has changed to the much vaguer wording that ‘there is no independent valid test for ADHD as of yet’. Although research has suggested that ADHD is central to the central nervous system, further research is needed to definitively establish ADHD as a brain disorder.”
I find this censorship of the truth disturbing and disturbing, just as I find the whole issue of children’s medicine disturbing. But someone has since realized that adults too can be tricked into believing that a pill will make them a better fit in the modern world.
Long ago, Aldous Huxley predicted a society in which a drug called Soma (miraculously harmless) would solve all society’s woes.
As he put it, ‘All the benefits of Christianity and alcohol; none of their flaws… the warm, richly colored, infinitely friendly world of Soma vacation. There is always Soma, delicious Soma, half an ounce for half a holiday, one ounce for a weekend, two ounces for a trip to the beautiful East, three for a dark eternity on the moon.’
He meant it as a warning. We took it as a guide.