Why Adult ADHD Is Trending

What Pharma Doesn’t Want You To Know

A year or two ago, I started seeing posts from friends and acquaintances on social media declaring they were considering being tested or had been “diagnosed” with ADHD. Like many things on the socials, I chalked it up to strange occurrence and kept living my life.

Until I started to notice it more. And more.

Many of these people were also seemingly awake to the reality of the pharmaceutical industry, yet were now actively seeking advice, diagnosis, and solutions from the same enterprise. I started getting curious, asking myself, why now? What’s driving this?

In this article, I dive into the surge of adult ADHD diagnoses, questioning the cultural, social, medical, and environmental forces driving this trend. Together, we’ll uncover the history and origins of psychiatric diagnoses, peeling back the layers of how these “disorders” came to be defined. We’ll also examine current movements, like the neurodiversity paradigm, and how they’re reshaping our culture and self-perceptions. Along the way, I’ll share my personal reflections and propose alternative approaches to navigating life’s challenges without rushing to label or medicate ourselves—because that’s always where our power lies.

What Happens When Psychiatry Fails to Ask "Why?"

I was in my early twenties when I learned how the psychiatric industry works. My boyfriend’s father had been considered “bipolar” for a long time, and was supposed to take a daily medication from the benzodiazepine family called Clonazepam.

Except, he hated taking this medication due to how it made him feel, so he’d often secretly stop taking it, resulting in what his family considered to be “episodes” in which he wanted to leave the planet—but which were, in fact, withdrawal symptoms.

Clonazepam may cause a physical dependence (a condition in which unpleasant physical symptoms occur if a medication is suddenly stopped or taken in smaller doses), especially if you take it for several days to several weeks. Do not stop taking this medication or take fewer doses without talking to your doctor. Stopping clonazepam suddenly can worsen your condition and cause withdrawal symptoms that may last for several weeks to more than 12 months.¹

After one of these “episodes”, he’d be sent to a rehabilitation centre where he’d stay for a few weeks with other mental patients to have therapy and be forced to take his medication. Then, he’d be welcomed back into the family where the cycle of hell would continue.

Witnessing the same harrowing cycle repeat for years, I started to wonder if there was another solution. This led me to take a deep dive of the psychiatric and psychotropic drug industry in my spare time.

I was curious what it was that resulted in the initial diagnosis of “bipolar disorder” but his family had been on the hamster wheel for so long it was a distant memory. Most of what they remembered was the vicious cycle of coming off and going onto the drugs and the resulting suicidal episodes, not the circumstances which prompted the initial diagnosis.

Not satisfied with surface level answers, I wanted to know, how do psychiatrists come up with these “disorders” and get people to believe they have them so they take their drugs for life?

The Business of Labels: How Disorders Are Voted Into Existence

In my research, I learned psychiatric diagnosis is based on a book called the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (or DSM for short).

This bible of psychiatry contains symptoms and descriptions for diagnosing a rapidly increasing number of mental health disorders. The original edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1952, listed “102 categories of diagnoses, increasing to 182 in the DSM-II, 265 in the DSM-III, and 297 in the DSM-IV.”² Each edition casts a wider net encompassing larger segments of the population.

As it turns out, psychiatry and the DSM aren’t based on any form of scientific testing. The average person is completely oblivious to this. We make appeals to the white coats of authority who satisfy us with vague assumptions, as in the case of depression, for example, where the cause is said to be a “chemical imbalance”. But there’s no proof of this.

Psychiatric diagnoses are not medical but merely voted‑on behaviours. Yes, that’s right. “Disorders” are based on votes sent in by psychiatrists. And, “more than half the experts who compile the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have ties to the pharmaceutical industry.”³

A 2006 study⁴ showed that “Fifty-six percent of its contributors have received research funding, speaking or consulting fees, or other forms of financial compensation from drug companies.”⁵ It also found that, “One hundred percent of the members of the panels on ‘Mood Disorders’ and ‘Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders’ had financial ties to drug companies.”⁶

Sobering stuff. Could it get worse? Well, yes.

In the USA and other Western countries who have adopted this method of diagnosis, “many state and federal statutes include definitions of mental illnesses based specifically on the diagnostic guidelines found in the DSM for use in both civil and criminal proceedings. Additionally, private insurance companies and several federal and state government funded programs, such as disability and benefits programs, rely on the DSM in determining a person’s potential eligibility.”⁷

“In the modern world, virtually every mental health professional must refer to the DSM's codes to bill treatment to insurance companies.”⁸

Put simply, psychiatry is a monopoly based on unsubstantiated ideas that has made its way into every corner of modern lives.

Consider that “80% or more of the general public now believe it is established that depression is caused by a ‘chemical imbalance’”⁹. And this legacy theory is still put forward by professionals who prescribe Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to the tune of $8.9 billion per year¹⁰ despite there being no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity.”¹¹

Let’s tie all of that up in a disturbing little bow before we move on.

1. The whole edifice of psychiatry is propped up by a selection of psychiatrists voting to include “disorders”—which are simply a list of symptoms—into a book.

2. The majority of these psychiatrists have ties to a pharmaceutical company with a vested interest in what disorders are included in the book.

3. Many of these disorders use drugs as the first line of treatment.

4. Shifts in terminology and diagnostic criteria in each edition have been shown to coincide with radical upturns in drug prescriptions.¹²

5. All psychiatrists must use this book as their bible to diagnose patients with an increasing number of disorders, prescribing psychotropic drugs as the solution, so that psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies get paid and patients are financially reimbursed.

6. The more disorders are included in the book, the more opportunity there is to prescribe psychotropic drugs for their treatment, and the more the pharmaceutical companies and shareholders laugh their way to the bank.

This entire house of cards resulted in my boyfriend’s father—during one of the times where he stopped taking Clonazepam, had been diagnosed with lung cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy (another rabbit hole I won’t get into right now)—sculling some bleach from under the sink, and dying alone in hospital a few days later because this wasn’t his first suicide attempt and his family were sure he was the boy crying wolf.

At the time, I was the only human in the family who saw this for what it was; a death caused by Big Pharma and the psychiatric industry, and a travesty that he never got the holistic help he needed because doctors were too busy trying to force pills down his throat and chastising him for not wanting to.

I also seemed to be the only one who looked at whether cancer was connected to Clonazepam. As it turns out, it is. This study “found that clonazepam users have had 15% higher risk to develop cancer among all other BZD drugs.”¹³

To me, this death was not a suicide at all. And this made me wonder how many deaths are hidden under the carpet and blamed on this cause, when there are clearly other forces at play.

Fast forward to today and the psychiatric industry continues to boom, yet has no true solution other than psychotropic drugs, hence my interest in the inner workings of the current adult ADHD epidemic.

Antipsychotic drugs—powerful chemicals designed originally for only the most seriously mentally troubled—are now a $22.8 billion industry.¹⁴ They’re handed out like lollies. You only need take one look at the graph below to see how “more effectively diagnosing” just one category of disorder, like ADHD lines the pharmaceutical coffers.

Source

So let’s bring this back to the explosion of adult ADHD diagnosis and explore why I see the current trendiness of being diagnosed as an “ADHDer” strangely problematic.

Many friends and acquaintances have expressed a sense of relief after being diagnosed—perhaps due to feeling seen, heard, and recognised for their idiosyncrasies—even though their intention is not to go the pharmaceutical route.

So how does one get diagnosed?

The ADHD Quiz: How Easy Is It to Get a Label?

Currently, no single medical test can determine if you have ADHD. No brain scan, blood test, or genetic test is available to show you that you have ADHD. Neurologists can scan your brain and make assumptions about why parts of it look the way they do, but they can’t “see” ADHD.¹⁵

And although ADHD is listed in the DSM-5-TR under Neurodevelopmental Disorders, “no biological marker is diagnostic for ADHD”. “Meta-analysis of all neuroimaging studies do not show differences between individuals with ADHD and control subjects”, thus “no form of neuroimaging can be used for diagnosis of ADHD.”¹⁶

Basically, diagnosis is entirely up to your doctor’s discretion. They’ll examine your symptoms (ticking them off from a list of 18) and how they affect different areas of your daily life and let you know if you make the grade.¹⁷

Source

You can also self-screen. This won’t give you a “formal diagnosis”, but you’ll be answering the same questions a psychiatrist will ask you. The self-screening tool¹⁸ consists of 6 initial questions, deemed the ones “found to be the most predictive of symptoms consistent with ADHD.”¹⁹

Out of curiosity, I took the test and my results said I had “symptoms highly consistent with ADHD in adults and further investigation is warranted”. I have zero desire to have myself labelled with any disorder, but this experiment showed me it would be simple enough for me to do so.

In one of their episodes, James and Jules Galloway, hosts of the Late Diagnosis ADHD podcast—who were both diagnosed with ADHD (combined type) after being married for over 20 years—have both found a new identity after receiving their diagnoses.

From Symptom to Selfhood: The Identity of ADHD

ADHD seems to have become a core part of the Galloway's’ personalities, a new lens they see the world through. And at the ages of 50 and 46, they’ve found a sense of belonging in a special global family of people with similar personality quirks.

When I listened to James sharing how insulted he feels “when people hit you with the ‘Oh, but everyone’s got ADHD!’ comment,” it felt like he was saying, “No, I’m special. There are only a certain amount of people allowed in our special club.” It reminded me of the time I spent in a divisive feminist community where many of the women clung to victimhood.

The use of neologisms and buzzwords in the ADHD world has definite parallels to social justice, feminism, gender studies, identity politics, and what I and others consider to be “woke programming”.

In one episode, Jules mentioned the word “neurotype”, which I’d never heard of, but after looking it up, I found a sentence which hits the nail on the head for why people in the “ADHD movement” cling to their diagnoses.

Dr Joel Schwartz, a Neurodivergent Psychological Consultant from the Neurodivergent Collective, says, “Unlike the medical model that sees these conditions in terms of symptoms, often with a wholly negative spin as something to get rid of, the Neurodiversity paradigm sees these syndromes as more of an identity.” [emphasis added in bold]

Dr Schwartz works within the “Neurodiversity Affirming Paradigm/Model,”²⁰ which “is an anti-oppressive methodology that is informed by social justice education, such as disability justice, disability studies, neurodiversity studies, Mad studies, critical autism studies and fat studies. It was developed to intervene against the current oppressive models that center individualism and are inherently fatphobic, ableist and sanist. It challenges the medical model of disability, neuronormativity and pathological paradigm that currently pervades and anchors education and practice in dietetics and the mental health field.”²¹ [emphasis added in bold]

How beautifully that paragraph outlines my point about the introduction of neologisms. I had to read it multiple times to get a vague sense of what it was attempting to say. I still feel confused.

Neuroaffirming care is a new model that “takes a person-centered, strengths-based approach. It aims to empower and support unique needs and strengths…rather than trying to ‘fix’ or change neurodivergent people to fit into a narrow idea of what’s considered “normal” or ‘better’.”²²

It’s important to understand here that the “neurodiversity movement” is a social movement, not a medical one. The neurodiversity theory has not been formally adapted for psychotherapeutic frameworks.²³

Unbeknownst to them, the neurodiversity community’s ideology is underpinned by Critical Theory, which teaches neurodiverse people they’re discriminated against at every turn, which then becomes the lens in which they experience the world. This is evident in the way James and Jules speak.

It’s based on the idea that we want everyone to feel included. But if we start “affirming” everything and removing all relationship to “normal”, could we be robbing many people of the ability to experience life in a richer, more regulated, and less challenging way?

The teachings reject “normalcy”, the idea that neurodivergent people need “fixing”, and positions neurodivergent people as the experts in neurodiversity.

This puts anyone who attempts to bring forth any solutions that may help regulate people experiencing symptoms of “neurodiversity” in a position where they’re not allowed to—they’re not the “expert” AND there’s nothing to fix.

But—dare I say it—what if there was?

Attention Crisis: ADHD and Our Culture of “Too Much”

I recently read Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne. An incredible read, he shares how to simplify parenting and outlines small, doable steps to a simpler, more connected home life.

Payne laments that modern children are exposed to a constant flood of information which they can’t process or rationalise. When I read this, I realised that’s exactly how I feel too.

At the time of reading the book, I was in the midst of an extensively challenging week. I felt overwhelmed, overloaded, under-skilled, exhausted, and like I was drowning in the midst of all that lay in front of me. I felt useless; lambasted by all of the different social media channels, messaging apps, and communication channels I’m “supposed” to keep on top of as an online business owner, daughter, mother, and wife. Not to mention all of the other “adulting” that’s required of me.

It got to the point where I’d had a post-kid’s-bedtime sofa breakdown with my husband sharing how I just don’t know how I’m supposed to keep up with it all.

As I reflected on Payne’s words and combined them with my own emotions, plus what I was noticing regarding the increase in trendiness of ADHD in my social world, it dawned on me.

What if the rise in what we label “adult ADHD” has the same cause as “childhood ADHD”, as outlined in Simplicity Parenting?

I started to join some dots.

Challenging the “Fixed Brain” Myth

The mainstream view that psychiatrists and people like James and Jules, or celebrity ADHDer, Em Rusciano hold true is that “The brain you were born with is the brain you were born with…ADHD is a neurotype, a brain type, you can’t get rid of it.”

They therefore perceive ADHD as “a lifelong condition”. Yet, this model is outdated, proven false, and ignores many important factors, like hormones and our environment.

Payne says of these popularised, yet outdated ideas:

“It seems, though, partly an outgrowth of popular views of the brain as our ‘control tower’, hardwired and fixed. With this conceptual model, the way to change behaviour must be a way of rewiring. Such drugs as Ritalin and Adderall are promoted as rewiring in pill form.

Another accepted analogy for the brain is a specific chemical formula, a kind of personal hormonal cocktail. If there is a deficit of serotonin in your brain’s mix, then, unfortunately, you may have ADD. And if you see ADD as entirely a function of brain chemistry, and you see that chemical ratio as fixed, then only chemical intervention makes sense.” [emphasis added in bold]

Like me, Payne isn’t a fan of the use of terms like “ADHD” or “ADD”. He says,

“There is an excess of attention, really. These kids can be very attentive, but they have difficulties prioritising that attention. Their level of attentiveness is not always in accordance with the situation at hand. The acronym I think more appropriately describes the syndrome is API: attention priority issue.”²⁴

I’ll be the first to put my hand up and say I definitely find it hard to prioritise my attention. Don’t you?

The ADHD Study That Changed Everything

Kim John Payne and research partner, Bonnie River, conducted a five year study²⁵ on fifty-five children from thirty two Waldorf schools in the USA and Canada who clearly had attention difficulties or API. All of the children surveyed fell within either the clinically or school related parameters for a positive diagnosis for ADD/ADHD.

Payne and River’s study “counters the view that the brain’s ‘hormonal cocktail’ is entirely predetermined and fixed”. Their results suggest “a child is more than just the chemical levels in their brain and the tendencies those levels influence.”

My feeling is that adults are too.

In Simplicity Parenting, Payne shares that the “anxious child has an abundance of cortisone that the body can’t fully assimilate; the very active child has tendencies derived from adrenaline.”

Their study shows that these “chemical landscapes and drivers (hormones and tendencies) can be affected by changes in a child’s environment and their life. Behavioural tendencies can be soothed or relaxed by creating calm.”

Within four short months, they found that “68 percent of the children whose parents and teachers adhered to the protocol went from clinically dysfunctional²⁶ to clinically functional...”²⁷

“The children in our study also experienced a 36.8 percent increase in academic and cognitive ability. Such indicators are flat with the psychotropic drugs.”²⁸

After repeating the study, they got the exact same results.

As a reminder, no drugs were involved and the kids included in the study were those “who might just as likely be hanging from the rafters as seated at desks…the kids who can hijack a class by monopolising the teacher’s attention.”²⁹

So how did they get these results?

In our study of children, with severe symptoms of ADHD, we found that when we simplified their lives they returned to a reachable and teachable state. They emerged from “amygdala hijack”, a term Daniel Goleman coined in his book Emotional Intelligence.

Kim John Payne

Less is More: The Life-Changing Impact of Living Simply

Rather than medicalising their symptoms, they devised a “simplification regime” with “particular emphasis on simplifying environment (including dietary changes), screen media, and schedules.”

Parents and teachers completed out a detailed monthly log of the changes they made at home and school and the frequency with which they applied these strategies. These were mailed back to the research centre for four months.

As one task, they asked “parents to look at the amount of information their child was absorbing and to cut it in half.”

Now I’d like you to think aboout the amount of information you, as an adult, are absorbing. What might happen if you were to cut that in half?

These results weren’t created in a laboratory setting with fancy tools or the need for therapists. They were lifestyle changes available to anyone.

The “protocol” was simplification: a building up of their vitality, or etheric forces, and a quieting down of their stimulation.

And this is what had me make the connection between what I was experiencing and wondering if I—and every adult and child in the Western World—would benefit from simplification too.

The answer? Absolutely.

The results suggest that by paying attention to our children’s environments, we can improve their ability to pay attention to themselves.

The average adult spends approx. 7 hours looking at a screen every day.³⁰

The “typical social media user actively uses or visits an average of 6.8 different social platforms each month, and spends an average of 2 hours 19 minutes per day using social media.”³¹

On average, professionals check their email 15 times per day, or every 37 minutes.³²

We have mounting work, parental, and household responsibilities.

We need to feed, clothe, and take care of ourselves, which means shopping, cooking, working out, and getting adequate sleep.

Our home is a reminder of all the things we haven’t done yet.

We’re bombarded by advertising, shiny objects, and feel paralysed by the millions of daily bids for our attention.

We weren’t designed to process so many things at once.

And we’re constantly measuring ourselves against the “experts” and “everyday people” we follow on social media who seem to have it together, always.

It’s a lot. Too much.

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Scrolling Away Self-Worth

“Normal personality quirks combined with the stress of “too much” can propel children into the realm of disorder.”

Tracy Gillett

That the popularity of the idea of abandoning civilisation to live in a cabin in the forest, reading by candlelight in front of the wood fire, after eating a dinner prepared from food we grew ourselves is so appealing to the majority of adults is no accident.

En masse, we are craving simple, slow lives, whilst hustling and pursuing madness.

We don’t want to climb the corporate ladder, check all our social media apps on autopilot, and outsource parenting to people we don’t know.

But we do it because we feel like we have to.

We want to feel calm, at ease, and live peaceful, rhythmic lives that support us.

What might happen if we opted for the “Simplicity-Affirming Paradigm” instead of the “Neurodiversity Affirming Paradigm” which goes to insane lengths to pretend that overwhelm and dysregulation are normal—when most of us would say, they clearly aren’t?

From Routine to Chaos: How Life Shifts Trigger ADHD Diagnoses

In 2022, Kelli María Korducki wrote an article in which she says there’s a striking overlap between ADHD symptoms and “pandemic brain”. She says:

“ADHD symptoms can look and sound a whole lot like the struggles that define many people’s everyday workflows, which are so often fragmented by push notifications and digital dopamine hits. Who doesn’t have trouble multitasking or following through with tasks? And who isn’t fighting the urge to impulse-scroll social media during the particularly dull moments of any given afternoon?”³³

Em Rusciano, an Australian “celebrity” who was diagnosed with ADHD in 2021 during the plandemic, describes in a National Press Club address how she was feeling when she was diagnosed:

During the great Melbourne lockdown of 2020…after the novelty of being at home with my family 24/7 wore off, quite quickly I found the absence of my usual routine and structure led to my mental health completely unraveling.

I was exhausted all of the time and it wasn't a physical exhaustion, it was a tiredness that crept into my bones and settled there. No amount of sleep or rest could rid me of it.

And suddenly completing the simplest tasks became nearly impossible it felt like my brain had been bleached of all its magic and I felt completely overwhelmed by life.³⁴

Yes, Em. But how were your sleep, stress and anxiety levels at that time? Your movement and nutrition? Were you watching the news? How did your environment, self-care, and alone time look? Were your hormones balanced? Did you experience loneliness or isolation? Were you missing your regular routine, rituals, and rhythm?

Have you ever had any?

Em’s address resulted in her becoming Australia’s adult ADHD poster girl. But she admits at the time of her diagnosis she was an “anxiety-ridden adult woman” who was “chronically exhausted all of the time”.

In Payne’s book, he mentions the role of cortisol as a neural hijacker, that bullies out learning and other functions to make room for its floods.³⁵ I think it’s safe to say most people’s cortisol levels rose more than a little over the last few years. Em’s no exception.

In her podcast, Anomalous, which she began recording in 2024, Em says:

“Life changes are a huge trigger for late diagnosis. For me, it was the lack of routine and massive life shift that came with the Melbourne lockdown. I also now know it was probably due to hormonal changes from entering perimenopause at this time.”

Notice how in the first sentence above she mentions life changes and “late” diagnosis—and then fails to fully connect the dots?

She assumes (without proof) there is an underlying insidious neurological aberration that has gone unnoticed her whole life and which “conveniently” just happened to be highlighted during the fascist lockdowns—instead of the issue really boiling down to lifestyle and environment factors in her immediate area.

Em admits herself that her skyrocketing stress and fatigue just happened to emerge after undergoing six lockdowns totalling 262 days shattered her normal living circumstances and forced her to adopt decidedly abnormal ones instead.

The solution? Take drugs and normalise dysfunction, apparently.

Let’s just ignore the evidence that shows that without high levels of cortisol circling our bodies, free of the stress–regress cycle, we can regulate our emotions and we’re better able to function.

Let’s ignore the dysregulation that digital screen exposure causes us.

Let’s pretend that an inability to modulate our mood, attention, or level of arousal in a manner appropriate to our environment is not connected in any way to the change in our lifestyles.

Let’s pretend that having a disorganised nervous system that’s constantly in fight-or-flight mode is fine and dandy.

Healing Through Awareness, Not Avoidance

Remember how Payne prefers to use the term API (attention priority issue) rather than ADHD?

Em says, “I don’t have a deficit of attention. I have the opposite. I have an obsessive, out of control, addictive sort of attention. But I usually have no control over where it goes.”³⁶

She just described an “attention priority issue” perfectly.

I want to give Em a big hug and I also wonder what might have happened if she’d paused for a moment and opted for life simplification rather than seeking medical “support”?

The truth is, “symptoms” are signposts. They’re designed to bring our attention to our lives. To have us stop. Take stock. Rest and re-evaluate. We don’t need a label, diagnosis, or medication from the cult of Big Pharma to do that.

Your symptoms are not inconveniences; they’re love notes from your body trying to get your attention. Listen to them. They’re a road map to deeper connection.

Ruby Shine

There is an abundance of evidence to suggest that simplifying our lives—rather than ploughing ahead with medication and slapping on a trendy new identity—is the answer.

As I see it, the Adult ADHD Epidemic is an extension of the mindset that pervades the Western culture, which says:

“If you feel something, label it and do everything you can to make it go away. Surely there’s a pill to numb you and help you keep going?”

Headaches.

Period pain.

Stomach aches.

Constipation.

Back pain.

Coughs and runny noses.

Having a short attention span.

Being easily distracted.

Appearing forgetful or losing things.

Being unable to stick to tasks that are tedious or time-consuming.

Constantly changing activity or task.

Having difficulty organising tasks.

Being unable to sit still.

Being unable to concentrate on tasks.

(Those last 8 on are all ADHD symptoms, by the way…)³⁷

They all exist to gain our attention and bring us back to ourselves. And the more we ignore or repress them, the more disconnected we become, and the more they’ll come back to bite us later.

Strength is in addressing the root cause, not silencing the symptoms to push through.³⁸

As Rudolf Steiner wrote, “Life as a whole is a unity, and we must not only consider the child but the whole of life; we must look at the whole human being.”

Modern life has us addicted to materialism and reductionism.

On one level, we want to believe we can keep living our hectic lives while a doctor slaps a diagnosis—and new identity—on us. We’ll take any kind of bandaid; as long as we don’t have to stop.

On another level, we crave simplicity and would burn it all down in a second.

Which path we choose depends on our willingness and ability to stop and listen to ourselves.

To drown out culture, trends, and external sources and listen to our inner knowing.

In today’s world, the answer is never needing more.

We always need less.

Simplification is the balm for our deeply frantic lives. Not only for our children, but for ourselves too.

Will we listen?

If we could stick our head up from our phones, perhaps we might.

With love,

Aimee

x

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16 | Bringing Peace To Parenting: Reclaiming Ritual and Rhythm with Meagan Rose Wilson

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References

1. https://medlineplus.gov/druginfo/meds/a682279.html

2. https://www.verywellmind.com/the-diagnostic-and-statistical-manual-dsm-2795758

3. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/05/how-do-new-disorders-get-into-the-dsm.html

4. https://karger.com/pps/article-abstract/75/3/154/282469/Financial-Ties-between-DSM-IV-Panel-Members-and

5. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/05/how-do-new-disorders-get-into-the-dsm.html

6. https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1159/000091772

7. https://www.law.uh.edu/hjhlp/volumes/Vol_13_1/Bearden.pdf

8. https://www.verywellmind.com/dsm-friend-or-foe-2671930

9. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0

10. SSRI’s accounted for 47% of the antidepressant drug market share in 2024. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/antidepressants-per-capita?time=2021

11. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0

12. https://www.law.uh.edu/hjhlp/volumes/Vol_13_1/Bearden.pdf

13. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4602739/

14. https://www.cchr.org/documentaries/marketing-of-madness/all-in-favor-say-aye.htm

15. https://creyos.com/blog/adhd-brain-scan

16. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9871920/

17. https://add.org/adhd-dsm-5-criteria/

18. https://add.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/adhd-questionnaire-ASRS111.pdf

19. https://adhduk.co.uk/adult-adhd-screening-survey/

20. https://www.rdsforneurodiversity.com/neurodiversity-affirming-model

21. Ibid.

22. https://theconversation.com/neuroaffirming-care-values-the-strengths-and-differences-of-autistic-people-those-with-adhd-or-other-profiles-heres-how-227449

23. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dmcn.15384

24. Simplicity Parenting

25. The Anthroposophical Society of America and the Medical Section sponsor the project. It is kindly funded by the Anthroposophical Society, the Research Institute for Waldorf Education, The Rudolf Steiner Foundation, the Fetzer Foundation, Weleda AG, The Hawthorn Foundation, Dr Hauschka Products and donations from individuals.

26. Clinically dysfunctional is defined here as clinically above the 92nd percentile on the Barkley scale (the commonly accepted psychological testing scale for hyperactivity and inattentiveness). Clinically functional is defined as below the 72nd percentile on the same scale.

27. Simplicity Parenting

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. https://www.allconnect.com/blog/screen-time-stats

31. https://datareportal.com/social-media-users

32. https://hbr.org/2019/01/how-to-spend-way-less-time-on-email-every-day

33. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/02/tiktok-trends-or-the-pandemic-whats-behind-the-rise-in-adhd-diagnoses

34. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v88Wd20GiU

35. Simplicity Parenting (page 240)

36. 16 mins in on this episode:

37. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd/symptoms/

38. Why So Many Women Lack Body Wisdom

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