Why are people with ADHD even taking any prescribed medication in the first place.

More than 85% of children with ADHD worldwide are in the mild or moderate group.

It is so often in that grey area of diagnosis, where there is a struggle to draw the line between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, that diagnostic inflation happens.

The UK has seen a 400% increase in adults seeking an ADHD diagnosis between 2020 and 2023. Gradual adjustments to the diagnostic criteria in the DSM have made adult diagnosis increasingly possible. ‘Hyperkinetic reaction of children’ that disappeared in adolescence has passed through many iterations to become ADHD, diagnosable at any age, as it is now.

The DSM lists ADHD as a neurodevelopmental disorder. Something interesting happens to a medical problem when it enters the DSM. Although only born out of consensus by committee rather than through scientific advancement, it is suddenly made to seem scientifically concrete.

The frank truth of it is that despite decades of work, no biomedical research project has succeeded in finding any brain abnormality common to people with ADHD.

There are no biomarkers that allow behaviours exhibited by people with ADHD to be distinguished from other disorders or even from normal human experience. Even those researchers intent on finding the biological ‘cause’ for ADHD will admit it is a condition that manifests in many ways in a wide range of people and has lots of different long-term outcomes.

Yet we continue to gather people who have the traits considered consistent with ADHD under one medical category, studying and treating them as if they were a single group, all of whom unequivocally have a brain development disorder.