Russell Brown: Controversial ADHD documentary risks dangerous consequences
The Great ADHD Myth? documentary that screened recently on Britain’s Channel 4 was designed to be controversial. Its presenter, Daily Mail columnist and NHS psychiatrist Dr Max Pemberton, trailered it with a series of newspaper articles including one topped with a headline about the “terrifying effect” a single tablet of an ADHD medication had on him.
In the same column, Pemberton approvingly quotes Katya Rubia, a professor of cognitive neuroscience who has spent 30 years scanning the brains of people with ADHD and appears in the documentary. He seizes on her comment that the brain can change when behaviour changes, as support for his argument that ADHD is not “a fixed, lifelong thing a child is simply born with” – that is, not a neurodevelopmental disorder.
Professor Rubia later said in a statement the “irresponsible” documentary had “cherry-picked, truncated and presented out of context” comments from her interview. The documentary, she said, risked “dangerous” consequences. Several of her peers, including the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, expressed similar concerns in statements to the UK Science Media Centre.
Apart from Rubia, they did not appear in the documentary, which presented uncontested commentary from, among others, a psychiatrist who campaigns against his own profession’s formal consensus about ADHD and autism (he declares ADHD a “social construct”), and a psychologist who has previously called for an end to all psychiatric diagnoses.
The central story is that of Mason, a 10-year-old boy who is taking a psychostimulant for ADHD. He doesn’t like the meds and for six weeks the producers have him stop. He seems happier and funnier unmedicated (it’s not clear how much that can be separated from the increased outdoor activity and other changes that were also part of the “experiment”) but he also returns to being disruptive in class, struggles to focus on his work and fails his exams. His mother agrees he needs to go back on the meds.
The lesson, says Pemberton, is that it’s the education system that needs to change to accommodate the differing needs of children like Mason.
As the parent of two autistic young men, I have dreamed of that for years. I can also confidently guess what the Daily Mail would make of it.
Or even Pemberton himself. A year ago, he wrote a column scorning the idea of workplaces formally taking account of the strengths and weaknesses of neurodivergent employees, because “it’s starting to feel like some people think they shouldn’t have to make an effort to change their behaviour”.
I am a 64-year-old man diagnosed with ADHD three years ago. I’ve come this far, in part, by not having a proper job. Like 10-year-old Mason, I think about the trade-off between the wild mind that earns me a crust and the benefits of my very low dose of methylphenidate. In the adult ADHD group I’m in, many people have a far harder time than me, failing not only at work but in social roles and relationships. There is real suffering.
While I was mulling all this, the Act Party announced a campaign promise: it would repeal the “good employer” sections of the Public Service Act and the Crown Entities Act, which require public entities to take account of the needs of people with disabilities. Those people are really just collateral damage to the policy’s real target, the place of te ao Māori, which is guaranteed in the same sections.
After the documentary aired, Facebook comments swelled with the reckons of people who had taken from it not the need to reform education, but the message neurodivergence is fake; a mere fashion trend, if not a form of benefit fraud. The programme pushed the same button Act is reaching for in its target voters: a deep fear that someone, somewhere is receiving special treatment.
Russell Brown is a freelance writer living in Auckland.
