{"id":798537,"date":"2026-10-10T22:52:44","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T22:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/798537\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T22:52:44","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T22:52:44","slug":"a-reckoning-with-the-adhd-industry-is-long-overdue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/798537\/","title":{"rendered":"A reckoning with the ADHD industry is long overdue"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every now and then, you watch a television programme that has you shouting at the screen. This happened to me when I saw The Great ADHD Myth?<\/a> on Channel 4 recently. I spent years training to work with children with special educational needs (SENs) like ADHD and, for over 10 years, I worked in the SEN departments at various schools. And now I was watching a programme telling me that ADHD does not exist. I was shocked. <\/p>\n

Why? Because I don\u2019t believe ADHD exists either. And finally, doctors are speaking out.<\/p>\n

I am not a doctor. Nor am I a scientist nor a psychiatrist. But I have been on many ADHD training courses. During one of them, the \u2018expert\u2019 running the course told us, laughing: \u2018I often get distracted and fidgety\u2026 I wouldn\u2019t mind betting I\u2019ve got a touch of ADHD myself!\u2019 On another course, one said: \u2018The medication is quite strong, so sometimes it\u2019s nice for the kids who are on it to have a \u201cdrug holiday\u201d during the six weeks. That way they can be themselves for a while.\u2019<\/p>\n

It was a concerning comment. Are we really giving children powerful stimulants like amphetamines and methylphenidate to stop them from being themselves? <\/p>\n

I have spent thousands of hours sitting with both primary and secondary school children diagnosed with ADHD. I have seen many children exhibiting ADHD\u2019s symptoms: inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. But does this prove that they have a disorder?<\/p>\n

Humans are primates. So are chimpanzees. Can you imagine putting a chimpanzee on a plastic chair for six hours a day and expecting it to sit still? Of course not. So why do we expect it from five- or six-year-old humans? Surely it\u2019s only natural to expect young children to fidget and get bored. It\u2019s an immemorial characteristic of childhood. <\/p>\n

Now, it does seem true that kids are less focussed than they used to be \u2013 and there is an obvious reason for this. Almost all primary schools reject the \u2018traditional\u2019 teaching method and now teach \u2018progressively\u2019. This is when children learn through investigation, exploration and play. It sounds great in theory. In reality, it doesn\u2019t work. <\/p>\n

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Here is an example. Copying and memorising are now considered boring and old-fashioned. So, in primary school, children will be told things like, \u2018Investigate what it means to count in eights\u2019 or \u2018Discuss with your talk-partner whether three-times-six is the same as six-times-three\u2019. This way of teaching is deeply confusing and it doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

This was highlighted in a 2019 YouGov survey<\/a>. Only 38 per cent of respondents aged between 25 and 34 said they could recall their times tables perfectly. In the group aged 55 and over, however, this rose to over 60 per cent.<\/p>\n

This way of teaching not only fails to teach. It almost encourages children to become inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive. In other words, displaying exactly the behaviour that gets diagnosed as ADHD. <\/p>\n

We are creating an ADHD generation. According to Out of Control<\/a>, a 2025 report published by think-tank Policy Exchange, one in five children in the UK is now identified as having an SEN. That equates to six pupils in a typical classroom of 30. <\/p>\n

ADHD advocates like to argue that we are now a more empathetic society \u2013 that we are noticing and acting on disorders that would have previously been ignored. But this is not just about good intentions. Medicalisation is encouraged by an ADHD industry that is growing on a vast scale. Estimates put the global market for ADHD medications at around $15 billion. <\/p>\n

For parents, an online assessment for their child\u2019s ADHD starts from around \u00a3400. But it can be money well spent. In the UK, your child\u2019s diagnosis of ADHD can bring in Disability Living Allowance (DLA) payments of up to \u00a3114.60 a week. And DLA opens the door to other payments, such as Universal Credit and Carer\u2019s Allowance. Added up, depending on circumstances and the specific details of the diagnosis, a parent with a child with ADHD can claim over \u00a310,000 per year from the state. <\/p>\n

I am certainly not saying all parents are in it for the money. I also understand that some children may have behavioural issues that go beyond boredom and poor teaching methods. But after 10 years witnessing agonisingly long lessons, taught in painfully bad ways, I ended up believing it wasn\u2019t the children who grew inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive who had something wrong with them. It was those who didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Too many claims about ADHD have been taken at face value, for far too long. A reckoning with the industry is long overdue. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every now and then, you watch a television programme that has you shouting at the screen. This happened…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":798538,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[1398,59,102,1906,1904,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-798537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-education","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-schools","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/798538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}