ADHD: The riddle of the missing facts
THE troubled celebrity Ant McPartlin announced last week that he has been ‘diagnosed’ with ‘ADHD’. Why the inverted commas? Well, these things may not be quite as hard and fast as you might believe.
You’d think from the way ‘ADHD’ supporters go on about it that it was an actual disease, though they’re careful not to use the word. But the fact they want to hide is that it isn’t. It’s just a collection of tick-box opinions, quite unsupported by hard, objective science.
Yet children, often very young, are dosed with powerful amphetamines (normally a Class A illegal drug) or very similar pills, on this cloudy basis. But here’s an astonishing fact you’d struggle to know if you weren’t very alert. Some doctors, especially in the USA where the ‘ADHD’ industry is far older and bigger than here, fiercely challenge the very existence of the complaint. Perhaps in the hope of getting them to shut up, the US government’s mighty National Institutes of Health (NIH) held a special conference in 1998 to try to reach a consensus between the enthusiasts and the doubters. It failed.
Instead, a statement was issued with a lot of soothing, optimistic waffle about ADHD, but containing the cold, hard verdict, forced into the wording by the doubters: ‘We do not have an independent, valid test for ADHD and there are no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction.’
You can see how devastating these few words are. How can you give children powerful drugs if you have no physical diagnosis? The words are still true, by the way, 20 years later. Despite endless efforts to find an objective test, ‘ADHD’ is still ‘diagnosed’ only by subjective opinion.
A copy of the original document survives by accident in an obscure corner of the internet. It is also quoted in a number of scientific journals and newspapers from the time. There is no doubt of its authenticity.
But in the NIH’s official website version of the 1998 document, the vital words are not there any more. Was the removal official? If so, who decided and why? I can’t get a clear explanation.
This is the sort of thing you might expect in Orwell’s 1984 where the past was constantly being rewritten to suit those in power. But in a major Western country, it seems to me to be more than a little worrying.