Millions of parents and teachers have been enchanted into believing in the existence of a discrete psychiatric illness called “attention deficit disorder” that supposedly afflicts millions of American children…[In fact] these children are not disordered and A.D.D. does not exist. They may have a different style of thinking, attending, and behaving, but it’s the broader social and educational influences that create the disorder, not the children. These children should not be saddled with a medical label requiring specialized treatments. They should be given the kinds of nurturing, stimulating, and encouraging interventions that are good for all kids!
One of the biggest difficulties with the A.D.D. myth is that its holy trinity of symptoms – hyperactivity, distractibility, and impulsivity – are sufficiently global as to to be likely a result of any of a wide number of potential causes.A child can have trouble paying attention or behaving, for example, because his schoolwork is boring, because his family is going through a crisis, because his way of learning doesn’t match the school’s way of teaching, because he is allergic to milk, because his temperament doesn’t match that of his parents, or because he is anxious or depressed.
There is a general level of poverty when it comes to A.D.D. -community-sanctioned interventions…only two treatments are consistently recommended by A.D.D. experts: medications and behavior modification.
Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D.: The Myth of the A.D.D. Child, preface.
In November of 1998, the National Institutes of Health held a Consensus Conference on ADHD. In the statement released as its conclusion, after hearing from a wide-ranging panel of experts (despite almost all of them being pro ADHD and pro drug), they said, “…we do not have an independent, valid test for ADHD, and there is no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction.” These facts have not changed in the time since. (2006). (Fred A. Baughman Jr., M.D. with Craig Hovey: The ADHD Fraud.)