Two weeks ago, Britain’s Channel 4 ran an hourlong show titled The Great ADHD Myth? that featured National Health Service psychiatrist Max Pemberton, an ADHD skeptic. The show drew 9,656 complaints from the public — people taking the time to find and pull up the channel’s online feedback form and let go with a blast — a massive negative reaction that’s well beyond normal for documentaries.
At the end of the show, Pemberton laid out his hypothesis: ADHD isn’t a disorder of the brain but is, instead, a mere “social construct.” Something we’ve all as a society decided is real, but was just arbitrarily put together by someone for some reason and has now stuck with us.
One ADHD skeptic, Dr. Iona Heath, told him flatly that it’s definitely not a medical condition. Another child psychiatrist predicted that a century from now people will be looking back on today and marveling at how “gullible” we all were.
As “proof” of the hypothesis, the show followed a 10-year-old boy who used diet and lifestyle changes to replace his medication. But then the folks in the ADHD community in the UK got together to dig into the program and discovered that the child had actually gone back on his meds and the result was a measurable improvement in his schoolwork.
Even though their experiment didn’t work, they ran with it as if it had. It provoked one of the contributing researchers, Professor Katya Rubia, to publicly pull her support from the film, as Channel 4 tried to defend itself by saying that there’s “considerable debate” about ADHD. That’s an understatement.
But here’s what’s really bizarre about the entire episode: everybody in the show was looking at ADHD in a binary sense — it’s either a brain disease/disability or it’s a social construct that we’ve all invented — and in my humble opinion they’re both wrong.
Back in the 1970s, Louise and I started and ran a residential treatment facility for severely abused children. Some had files thicker than your forearm and none of those kids were “a social construct.” Virtually every kid we ever worked with had what we’d call ADHD today; in many cases it was their parents trying to punish them out of their Hunter behavior that led to the abuse in the first place.
Most struggled in school, but take them into the woods and they were suddenly alive and entirely aware of everything around them (our program was on 140 wooded acres on a small lake).
This show and most of the mainstream “debate” about ADHD falls into those two categories: illness or social construct. But what if it’s neither but, instead, an adaptive set of skills and behaviors that kept our ancestors alive for 300,000 years before the advent of intensive agriculture?
The traits we call ADHD are, of course, entirely real. And they’re also clearly heritable.
The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement, put together by 80 professionals from 27 countries, examined 208 conclusions drawn from meta-analysis and very large studies and heritability was the main thing that kept popping up. Particularly in twin studies, the gold standard for that type of research.
They concluded that heritability of ADHD ran around 74 percent, which puts it among the most easily inherited conditions in all of psychiatry and medicine, even higher than type 2 diabetes. Social constructs don’t produce those sorts of correlations; genetics do.
But heritability doesn’t mean “brokenness.” Pemberton, et al, acknowledged the heritability of ADHD, but concluded it was like inheriting a disabling condition. It’s certainly a challenge for some, but for others (including myself) it’s also a source of inspiration and can drive great success.
Those genes are still doing their magic after all these generations and despite the best efforts of Farmers among us to stamp them out or crush their presentation. They kept us going for 300,000 years of hunting and gathering: the person who was constantly scanning their environment was the one who caught that movement in the brush that was the tribe’s lunch. They drove him to track that animal across 15 miles of forest or savanna.
Those are Hunter traits, not deficits. They’re an ancient job description, necessary for the survival of our species in that era.
Then, about ten thousand years ago, we invented agriculture and, as Dan Quinn documents in his brilliant novel Ishmael, everything changed. Out of Farmer’s patience, repetition, and sustained attention to single, unchanging tasks and tolerance for delayed rewards we built schools, offices, and factories.
And we made them all on the Farmer’s templates, which is why we’ve been calling the Hunters defective ever since.
So when Pemberton wrapped up his show by saying we should change Hunter kids’ diets, cut access to screens, and adjust their lifestyles he was moving in a reasonable direction: environment is critical for success for Hunter children (and adults). But it’s not TikTok or sugar: it’s the classroom, the cubicle, and the 8-hour stretch of sitting still doing repetitive, boring work.
ADHD UK surveyed people who’d watched that broadcast and found that one-in-five experienced “severe distress” and 38 percent said the show caused them “significant distress.” The Royal College of Psychiatrists warned that invalidating ADHD would discourage people from seeking help and encourage Farmers (my word, not theirs) to further vilify and discriminate against Hunters.
ADHD UK’s chief executive, Henry Shelford, was blunt, saying that we wouldn’t have The Menopause Myth or The Dyslexia Myth, so why this?
Us Hunters are neither a myth nor are we broken. We’re the descendants of the Hunters who kept humanity alive for millennia, and many of us are damn sick and tired of being asked to choose between the argument that we’re broken or our diet or social media are making us crazy.
If this made sense for you, please pass it along to someone who watched that broadcast and felt something crack. And if you’re new here, subscribe so you don’t miss what comes next. Every week I go looking for what the research actually says, and, thankfully, every week it keeps pointing the same direction.
My late first husband and I were walking in our neighborhood with our two sons, ages 2 and 5, one afternoon. As we approached the large park with its swimming pool, my husband suddenly raced across the street, climbed over the 15 foot high chained link fence, dove into the pool, and pulled out a drowning man. It turned out that my husband, who worked as manager of a swimming center and was a former lifeguard, had noticed the man flailing and had instantly also noticed that the lifeguard on duty was not paying attention. In seconds he was activated and saved the swimmer's life. Hunter in action. This was in the early 70s and he had always been treated badly in school for being 'hyperactive'.
"... constantly scanning their environment ...." That's the phrase that absolutely defined my experience of life. I got upset reading some of this reporting. I experienced a kind of revelation encountering the early book "You Mean I'm Not Lazy...etc." Might as well have been my biography! Unfortunately, recognition and coping came late to make the most of the talent.