Once a mental heath construct captures public consciousness it is extremely difficult to shift. Organisations develop to promote and extend the narrative. Dissenters are like King Canute trying to hold back the waters.
Into the path of the ADHD juggernaut has stepped the Channel 4 documentary ‘The Great ADHD Myth’. With a positive balanced critique of the documentary by clinical psychologist, Yaakov Ophir (2026). Unsurprisingly it has brought down the wrath of ADHD UK,but with no credible rebuttal.
The British Association of Cognitive and Behavioural Psychotherapy (BABCP) is the self-proclaimed lead organisation for CBT in the UK. But it has maintained a deafening silence, about the CBT treatment of ADHD. Embarrassingly there is no evidence- based protocol for this ‘disorder’. Yet ADHD figures prominently in GP records with young and old being placed on the ADHD pathway. Parents are led to believe that there is a ‘pot of gold’ at the end of these rainbows.
Back in the 1980’s I ran groups for parents stressed out managing their kids [Scott (1989) and (2015)] but without any need to pathologise the children’s behaviour. Simple strategies applied systematically often worked wonders. But since there has been an absence of the application of simple 1st line strategies. Instead CBT therapists are invited to workshops that highlight the ‘complexity’ of problems, and that stress the miraculous properties of ‘formulation’. The more that problems can be reified, the more they can be held to fall within the orbit of academic clinicians – the predominant workshop providers.
Workshops on PTSD are commonly based on the postulate that
Sometimes the data don’t allow us to be definitive. Many supporters of Critical Psychiatry would put ADHD and Autism in the same category. Having just read Jason Arday’s autobiography (up to 2023), it is difficult to escape the sense that something at a fundamental biological level has been going on with him. There seems to have been an overlap between autism and learning difficulties, which is mind-blowing as he rose to become the youngest black professor at Cambridge University. His death is a tragedy at every level, he clearly struggled valiantly (RIP).
Dr Mike Scott
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