Why Nobody Should Accept Experts’ Halfhearted ADHD Reversal

So it turns out that after over three decades of public health propaganda insisting that Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) was a serious medical condition that warranted the mass prescription of various amphetamines, all of it was essentially bunk. In a recent viral essay in The New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough explains that “experts” in ADHD are finally admitting that diagnoses and treatments for the disorder have been largely misguided.

To be clear, most skeptics and people with common sense have long suspected that ADHD was mostly a catch-all label for more energetic children who didn’t conform to the restrictive behavioral standards set by schools. Nevertheless, they have had to actively resist the overwhelming social pressure to sedate their children in order to help them succeed at school and the world beyond.

Naturally, most parents who were frustrated with their unruly children immediately caved to this pressure. As such, their children subsequently suffered, and they can no longer get these years back. As writer and mother Joy Pullmann recently remarked, boys specifically suffered since their kinetic nature and increased penchant for restlessness and boredom were misattributed to ADHD.

In one sense, this essay seems to suggest that psychiatrists, doctors, and trusting parents are finally moving away from harming their children with unnecessary drugs and false labels. It may not undo the damage done to so many Millennial (my peers) and Zoomer children (my students) who spent their formative years under the toxic influence of Ritalin and Adderall, but perhaps it will offer a way forward for future generations to pass through their childhood and adolescence relatively unscathed.

Unfortunately, a closer analysis of the fuzzy reasoning employed by Tough indicates that there is still reason to worry that the ADHD label and (mis)treatment will end up persisting. Undergirding his interminable argument (around 9,000 words) are three dubious tactics that are commonly used by left-wing sophists: (1) automatically excuse all scientific-sounding conclusions; (2) attribute all phenomena to material causes; and (3) blur the meaning of terms to fix logical contradictions.

Like many other essays and books about popular psychology, Tough’s argument focuses on methodology in the hopes of seeming more authoritative. Tough generously pads his essay with various studies and professional opinions that led doctors and psychologists to believe that ADHD was a valid disease that could be treated with prescription drugs. Even though some of these studies exclusively examined the short-term effects of medication, confused cause and effect, and/or relied on a small sample size, what we’re supposed to understand is that the conclusions reached were understandable.

Except that wasn’t true. Rather than approach ADHD through a rigorous process of induction that reasons from available evidence, the scientists used deductive reasoning, applying an accepted principle to a specific situation to best define and understand it (known in logic as a syllogism). In the case of ADHD, the major premise was that all diseases and disorders are treatable through prescription drugs, the minor premise was that ADHD was a disease, and the conclusion was that drugs could help with ADHD.

At no point did any of these experts actually prove that ADHD was a real disease, let alone one that could be treated with pills. Consequently, well-paid teams of scientists were testing all manner of mind-altering drugs to “treat” a disease that may or may not even exist.

All of this is absurd on its face and deeply unscientific. It’s hardly different from doctors testing which blood-sucking leeches would be best for curing a migraine. And yet people immediately accepted this reasoning because of the credentials of the profiteers who conducted these studies, trusting their claims on faith.

Ironically, this evidence-free faith is based on a hardheaded materialism that has long been inculcated in modern populations. The majority of people today reflexively believe that scientists are trustworthy because they work with objective physical reality rather than subjective nonphysical reality. Even when it concerns the immaterial workings of the mind, scientists continue to enjoy most people’s trust even when they shouldn’t.

There’s far more reason to believe that the symptoms associated with ADHD are the result of some negative influence or psychological need being neglected, not any kind of hormonal imbalance or an undersized brain. Therefore, the best response would involve some mix of therapy, different parenting practices, and changes in the environment (which Tough’s article explicitly mentions). But this isn’t widely accepted because nothing about the problem or solution seems appropriately scientific.

Of course, one way for ADHD boosters to navigate through the contradictions implicit in the bad science and the proposed rectification is to take a clearly defined idea and blur it by turning it into a spectrum.

Just like gender, autism, or sexual orientation, ADHD is yet another spectrum of symptoms: “The alternative model, by contrast, tells a child a very different story: that his A.D.H.D. symptoms exist on a continuum, one on which we all find ourselves; that he may be experiencing those symptoms as much because of where he is as because of who he is; and that next year, if things change in his surroundings, those symptoms might change as well.”

While this definition is certainly more “flexible,” it’s also perfectly useless. ADHD is now the equivalent of a mood that changes from day to day and place to place. This in turn makes it impossible to refute. If one wants to argue against the reality of ADHD, defenders can simply point to an indefinite “continuum” that encompasses multiple definitions of the presumed disorder. The goal of all this is to create a rhetorical loophole that allows ADHD believers to continue prescribing and taking drugs in the belief that the disorder is a real thing, not a cynical fabrication of unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies.

Altogether, Tough’s essay is a purposely convoluted, poorly reasoned, and deceptively worded account of ADHD. It provides cover for bad actors and presents what should be obvious as a complete mystery. It is deliberately mushy thinking meant to downplay a horrible truth: We have been wrongly drugging our children for decades.

Countless lives have been ruined as a result, and justice demands that the people responsible for pushing the ADHD narrative receive a full and public repudiation, if not legal punishment. Anything less risks allowing other similarly specious mental health narratives to take hold and inevitably hurt society’s most vulnerable members.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X and Substack.