Examining The Disease And The Diagnosis

What is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)? Does ADHD exist (PBS)?

National Institute of Mental Health:
NIH Publication No. 08-3572 Revised 2008 – (Link)

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common childhood disorders and can continue through adolescence and adulthood. Symptoms include difficulty staying focused and paying attention, difficulty controlling behavior, and hyperactivity (over-activity).

Symptoms of Inattention
1. Be easily distracted, miss details, forget things, and frequently switch from one activity to another.
2. Have difficulty focusing on one thing. Become bored with a task after only a few minutes, unless they are doing something enjoyable.
3. Have difficulty focusing attention on organizing and completing a task or learning something new.
4. Have trouble completing or turning in homework assignments, often losing things (e.g., pencils, toys, assignments) needed to complete tasks or activities.
5. Not seem to listen when spoken to.
6. Daydream, become easily confused, and move slowly.
7. Have difficulty processing information as quickly and accurately as others.
8. Struggle to follow instructions.

Symptoms of Hyperactivity
1. Fidget and squirm in their seats.
2. Talk nonstop.
3. Dash around, touching or playing with anything and everything in sight.
4. Have trouble sitting still during dinner, school, and story time.
5. Be constantly in motion.
6. Have difficulty doing quiet tasks or activities.

Symptoms of Impulsivity
1. Be very impatient.
2. Blurt out inappropriate comments, show their emotions without restraint, and act without regard for consequences.
3. Have difficulty waiting for things they want or waiting their turns in games.
4. Often interrupt conversations or others’ activities.

The British Journal of Psychiatry (Jan. 1, 2004), 184: 8-9 (Link):
ADHD is best understood as a cultural construct - Dr. Sami Timimi / Professor Eric Taylor

There are no specific cognitive, metabolic or neurological markers and no medical tests for ADHD. Because of uncertainty about definition, epidemiological studies produce hugely differing prevalence rates: from 0.5% to 26% of children.

More than 30 neuroimaging studies have been published. Researchers have yet to compare unmedicated children diagnosed with ADHD with an age-matched control group.

There is no established prognosis, and association and cause frequently are confused in the literature. ADHD has generated huge profits for the pharmaceutical industry against a background of poor-quality research, publication bias and payments to some of the top academics in this field. Thus, the mainstream dogma on ADHD is contaminated and misleading (Timimi, 2002).

In modern Western culture, many factors affect mental health which include: loss of extended family support, mother blame (mothers are usually the ones who shoulder responsibility for their children), pressure on schools, a breakdown in the moral authority of adults, parents being put in a double bind on the question of discipline,  family life being busy and ‘hyperactive’, and a market economy value system that emphasises individuality, competitiveness and independence (Prout & James, 1997).

Throw in the profit-dependent pharmaceutical industry and a high-status
profession looking for new roles and we have the ideal cultural preconditions
for the birth and propagation of the ADHD construct.

Is a medical model of ADHD therapeutically helpful? Quite the opposite; it offers a decontextualised and simplistic idea that leads to all of us – parents, teachers and doctors – disengaging from our social responsibility to raise well-behaved children.

We thus become a symptom of the cultural disease we purport to cure. It supports the profit motive of the pharmaceutical industry, which has been accused of helping to create and propagate the notion of ADHD in order to expand its own markets.

By acting as agents of social control and stifling diversity in children, we are victimising millions of children and their families by putting children on highly addictive drugs that have no proven long-term benefit (Timimi, 2002) and have been shown in animal studies to have brain-disabling effects (Moll et al, 2001; Sproson et al, 2001; Breggin, 2002).

By conceptualising problems as medically caused we end up offering interventions (drug and behavioural) that teach ADHD-type behaviour to the child.

ADHD scripts a potentially life-long story of disability and deficit, resulting in an attitude of a ‘pill for life’s problems’.

We create unnecessary dependence on doctors, discouraging children and their families from engaging their own abilities to solve problems. ADHD is de-skilling for us as a profession as there is minimal skill involved in ticking off a checklist of symptoms and reaching for the prescription pad.