ADHD column drew opposing responses
Published 1:30 am Monday, May 15, 2017
I fully expected my recent column on ADHD — in which I expanded upon noted Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan’s contention that it is an “invention” — to stir the pot. Kagan said what I’ve been saying in this column and everywhere the opportunity has provided for more than 25 years. During that time, psychologists and psychiatrists have responded with vitriol and even threat, but when I have invited them to debate me, on their turf, at my expense, they have — to a person — become silent.
Said column drew opposing responses from mental health professionals, parents of children diagnosed with ADHD, and a few folks diagnosed with adult-ADHD. I’ve heard all the talking points before. The ADHD establishment has been beating the same drums for as long as there’s been the diagnosis.
One individual, for example, claimed that ADHD is a “real thing” because it is “documented in the nonfiction book Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition.” That argument presumes that the psychiatric diagnoses contained in the DSM-5 are valid in some objective sense of the term — as in the common explanation that many are caused by “biochemical imbalances.”
And yet (a) no biological anomaly has been found to be reliably associated with any psychiatric diagnosis, (b) no one has ever quantified the fictional “biochemical imbalance,” and (c) no psychiatric drug has ever consistently outperformed a placebo in clinical trials. Concerning the latter, it can therefore be reasonably argued that said drugs rely to one degree or another upon the placebo effect. Indeed, in study after study, placebos have often reduced the symptoms of conditions contained in the DSM-5. Placebos do not, however, ameliorate the symptoms of valid diseases such as pneumonia and cancer.
Caveat: The diagnosis may be bogus, but no observant person would deny that significant numbers of school-age children have pronounced difficulties with paying attention, impulsivity, completing tasks, and the other diagnostic signs of ADHD. Interestingly, according to every individual to whom I’ve ever spoken who taught elementary school in the 1950s (well into the hundreds of such former teachers), this behavior pattern was not a significant issue in their classrooms.
In our book “The Diseasing of America’s Children,” my co-author (behavioral pediatrician Bose Ravenel) and I point out that the behaviors diagnostic of ADHD are typical to toddlers. In other words, since the 1960s, significant numbers of children have brought toddler behavioral characteristics with them to school. Our explanation is that 50 years of bogus professional parenting advice based on bogus psychological theory (in combination with early exposure to screen-based media and increasingly non-nutritional diets) has created a slew of new behavior and developmental problems.
