This article by Peter Hitchens has been published by the Daily Mail. It begins:
“Does ADHD in fact exist? This week the BBC’s Panorama programme quite rightly exposed some very worrying private clinics.
In online consultations, staff had diagnosed a BBC reporter with ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — despite an in-person, and far longer, assessment by an NHS psychiatrist concluding that he didn’t have the condition.
The clinics, while charging rather plump fees, seemed to have an extremely relaxed attitude towards diagnosing this increasingly common complaint.
It is a huge issue. ADHD was once mainly confined to children but is now spreading rapidly into the adult populations of the Western world.
The clinics, one of them working on behalf of the overloaded NHS, were also willing to prescribe powerful stimulant drugs on the basis of this.
Mainstream doctors drew up their skirts in horror. Very alarming stuff. But the whole programme was based on two assumptions.
The first was that ADHD exists at all, and the second was that there is some gold standard objective, testable diagnosis, against which these clinics can be judged …”
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