Is ADHD a Fictional Disease?

Some psychiatrists argue that ADHD is little more than a marketing gimmick.

Some 5.4 million children in the United States have been diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, with two-thirds of them taking psychiatric drugs. Sales of ADHD drugs reached $1.2 billion in 2010, a demand level so high that the U.S. is experiencing an ADHD drug shortage. But an increasingly vocal contingent of psychiatric experts is speaking up against diagnosing children with ADHD, arguing it is a non-existent condition drummed up by pharmaceutical companies to increase sales.

Is ADHD a fictional disease? Cast your vote here.

What makes you convinced that ADHD is not a real disease?

During my time in practice, I’ve authored papers and discovered real diseases and so on. Psychiatry in 1948 was distinguished from neurology. Neurology is the specialty dealing with physical and organic diseases of the brain and nervous system. Psychiatry is the specialty dealing with emotional and behavioural things which are not actual, physical diseases – things like depression, anxiety, panic, and so on.

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Insofar as ADHD is concerned, it seems clear that in the ’50s, as the first psychiatric drugs came to market, that psychiatry – in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry – came upon the market strategy of, “Well, we’ll call these things ‘diseases.’” And the prototypical invented disease was called ADHD.

It was initially in a 1970 congressional hearing in the U.S. that psychiatrists appeared and testified that, what was then called hyper kinetic disorder or minimal brain dysfunction, was a disease that needed diagnosing by a physician, and as a disease it justified the use of drugs to treat it. So that was the official beginning of ADHD in particular and of psychiatric diagnoses in general as being due to a disease of the brain. In every case, they say there’s a subtle chemical imbalance in the brain, which of course they never have a means of diagnosing in life and have never in scientific literature authored proof that there is in fact a disease. And yet they are allowed by [the U.S.] Food and Drug Administration to say that there is a chemical imbalance and that the drugs balance the imbalance.

So it’s been a market strategy. This lie has been allowed to be published by the drug industry and by psychiatry, by our regulatory agencies, specifically the Food and Drug Administration. So that’s where we are today.

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