Doctor: ADHD, as currently defined, does not exist

It sells.

Do you have an alternative? Do we regulate what the news is allowed to say? How do we prevent such poor quality journalism?

News is entertainment (sadly, and mostly worthless), expecting it to be anything else these days is foolish.

Pretty funny. Just yesterday I was at Barnes and Noble checking out some Malcolm Gladwell books in the psychology section and right next to them was a book with the title ADHD Does Not Exist. I didn't get a chance to take a peek at it because I was too occupied reading the first couple of pages from Gladwell's Blink which was pretty captivating.

This article is so potentially harmful, even if it's more nuanced than the hyperbolic "ADHD Doesn't Exist" title would suggest.

The reality is that -- whatever the underlying cause -- a lot of people struggle with attention span issues, and that these issues cause a lot of pain and unfulfilled potential.

Even if ADHD medications are overprescribed Band-Aids, people benefit from them. We should try and find better diagnoses and treatments, but it makes no sense to blast people by telling them their condition "doesn't exist."

If I have one complaint about the way we treat ADHD it's a lack of education for patients. The medication is only one part of the solution and in my personal experience it's nowhere near the biggest piece. Diet, environment, sleep, and exercise are just as crucial... but these are things I figured out on my own, not anything my doctors mentioned.

  Firstly, addiction to stimulant medication is not 
  rare; it is common. The drugs’ addictive qualities 
  are obvious. We only need to observe the many patients
  who are forced to periodically increase their dosage if   
  they want to concentrate. 

This true but disingenuous at best because it omits perspective in a way that borders on maliciousness. Adderall causes only a very mild dependence according to all studies I've ever read. The FDA and my personal experiences agree. I've discontinued my Adderall on a number of occasions (by responsibly tapering it down to 0mg over several days) and it was no problem.

To compare it to something most of us are familiar with: I found Adderall much easier to discontinue than caffeine, a thing I've never been able to quit. (I've never smoked, so I can't compare with nicotine)

And to all those who say ADHD is a matter of "willpower..."

Maybe. For some.

I always told myself that too. I was born in 1976 so I went through school here in the USA right before they started diagnosing ADHD left and right and I was labeled a procrastinator instead. I never even really heard of ADHD until I was out of school.

After four years in college, which were a mix of promise and opportunities torpedoed by procrastination, I worked 10, 12, 14-hour days to finish work that I was more than talented enough to finish in 5 or 6 hours. My happiness suffered, health suffered, and relationships died.

Then I finally admitted that maybe it was a little more than a willpower issue. If it a matter of lacking willpower, why was I at the damn office trying to work long after everybody else had left? Whatever the hell my problem was, it wasn't work ethic.

So I sought treatment... at the age of 32. And while medication was only an imperfect yet valuable part of the solution, my life has been on track again for a number of years.

> Unless you have a better idea how to treat it

Actually, if you read the article until the end, it proposes a better idea to treat it: Do not lump together all the conditions that lead to the symptoms together. Treat them as individual conditions with different causes and administer appropriate treatment - don't just hand them pills because it's simple.

I sincerely doubt that stimulants are the best treatment we can give those people. They may help in the short term, but they're highly addictive and your body develops a tolerance. What are you going to do once those people are tolerant to medication? Wave your hand in the air, tell them "bad luck, you developed a tolerance, now have a nice day". Medication may be required in some cases, but it's often only the beginning of a treatment. You need to solve or at least tackle the complex problem to really help them - and assigning a simple label doesn't always help.

This man is peddling a book. I'm not saying that precludes his correctness but it does mean that the more analytical of us should apply a little more salt to our appraisal of his motivations than a journalist might.