The great ADHD myth?

‘The great ADHD myth?’ will screen on channel 4 next Tuesday 18th August. This is despite a threat from ADHD UK (see mention in previous post) to report the programme to Ofcom if the programme repeats what it sees as the failures in its promotional announcement (see correspondence). The Global ADHD Advocacy Network also issued a similar response to the announcement.

The concern is that to imply ADHD may be a myth denies its reality. I don’t think anyone is saying that people cannot have problems with attention and being overactive and impulsive. Indeed, in a sense we all can do so at times (see previous post). The complainants do not want to recognise that ADHD is a social construct, but if ADHD has any meaning, it may be as an abstract rather than concrete concept. There is no clear evidence of brain dysfunction. What the complainants are objecting to is the challenge to their identity which has been created through taking on the label of ADHD. In this sense it must be a social construct, at least to some extent, because the social fact of ADHD diagnosis changes the way some people understand themselves. In fact, this is what a lot of people value about the diagnosis, because it seems to provide an explanation for what they have seen as deficiencies in their personality.

The complainants make much of the World Federation of ADHD international consensus statement (see article). I was an endorser of a critique of a previous so-called international consensus statement (see article). The literature is biased and it is reasonable for a television programme to try to correct that bias, including about the evidence for stimulant medication (see previous post). Splitting off of an unwanted part of oneself by blaming personal difficulties on an hypothesised neurodevelopmental ADHD concept, however real it may be believed to be the case, may not necessarily be the best way to understand such difficulties. Of course genes set the limits to our development but environments determine the actualities (see recent post). My concern is that people are being misled by advocates such as ADHD UK and the Global ADHD Advocacy Network about the nature of ADHD.