If I were to accept the premise of Channel 4’s documentary The Great ADHD Myth?, then I have spent years labouring under a false belief. The diagnosis I received for my so-called ADHD is apparently just an arbitrary concept, invented by popular consensus and promoted by publications like New Scientist. National Health Service doctor Max Pemberton presented this idea in a documentary that aired in the UK last night, and in the less than 24 hours that have passed since, many articles and columnists have commented on why it’s so offensive.
While I have my own thoughts on that – and trust me, I’m offended – the most urgent issue to address is the show’s wilful misrepresentation of the scientific consensus that ADHD is a real condition. Why many women with ADHD feel overwhelmingly controlled by their hormones One claim is that ADHD is a new condition, dreamed up to force square pegs into the round holes of modern life. An early documented medical description of what we now call ADHD dates from 1798 when Alexander Crichton from the Royal College of Physicians described people who had problems paying attention for long enough to complete tasks, saying they had “the fidgets”.
Since then, the condition has been medically described and renamed (who can forget “abnormal defect of moral control in children” in the early 1900s?) many times. While Pemberton is right to note that rates of diagnosis have soared in recent years, diagnoses in the UK are still below estimates of population prevalence from around the world. Studies that screen large groups of people for symptoms consistently put rates of ADHD in the general population at around 5 per cent in children and 2 to 3 per cent in adults.
But the results of an analysis published in The Lancet this month found that just 1 per cent of the population is diagnosed overall in England. Even among boys and young men, the group most likely to be diagnosed, the recorded rates are 2.9 per cent and 3.6 per cent, respectively. If anything, ADHD is underdiagnosed on these shores.
A study of 140,000 people suggests that a broadening of the diagnostic criteria for autism and ADHD explains the sharp rise in diagnoses, but that doesn’t mean too many people are being told they are autistic or have ADHD Then there is the claim that ADHD is a social construct, not a neurodevelopmental condition. This is something Pemberton concludes after talking to neuroscientist Katya Rubia at King’s College London. Rubia says that while there is evidence of differences between the brains of people with ADHD and neurotypical people at the group level, it isn’t possible to diagnose ADHD from a brain scan.
You can’t diagnose ADHD from brain scans. The same can be said for most, if not all, psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions. Most of these, like ADHD, are diagnosed by assessing symptoms and the effect they have on a person’s everyday ability to function.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
