Why Are So Many Women Suddenly Being Diagnosed With ADHD? (refinery29.com)

There are reasons some people need ADHD drugs. They are usually identified at a young age. How many young (teen to  twenties) people have been propelled into “mental breakdowns”, often forever altering their lives, by inappropriately taking these drugs. This is the same trajectory as opiate addiction  and the medical community again, is not using their common sense nor medical knowledge re: understanding of what constitutes a healthy environment that young humans need to thrive in.  Do no harm.

Everyone should read Dr. Ahsan's essay. Its perspective on the cultural, societal, and political causes of mental distress is eye-opening, insightful and very pertinent. She echoes the iconoclastic views of R.D. Liang 50 years ago, another open-minded Brit. As she says "The diagnosis of individual 'mental disorder' can make us believe there’s something wrong with us rather than the world around us, and that healing happens in isolation." This is true in many but by no means  all cases. Like Gabor Mate, Ahsan emphasizes the confusion and obfuscation about the causes and lived experience of disordered mental life by looking at the social and political context of personal development. These factors, no doubt, are very important and universally neglected. Hyper-capitalism has been able to accumulate massive personal and corporate wealth by unfettered exploitation (and mental oppression) of 80% of the rest of the world's people, while at the same time sucking away the resources ($$$$) necessary to provide the social capital to an ordered society.

In addition, the exploitation of mental illness is made worse by the influential, archaic, distorting bible of American psychiatry - its DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Understanding this professional blindness throws additional light on the increasing diagnosis of ADHD. The DSM is a catalog of symptomatic states historically evolved from the fantastical creative ideas of Freud and others. American psychiatry, stuck on a roster of symptom complexes, refuses to be discerning or to look at mental illness labels through an etiologic (causal) lens.

To take the issue of ADHD in particular, on the one hand, the scientific evidence for a genetic biologic basis, is very strong. On the other hand, Ahsan does not go far enough when she insightfully observes, are"those of us experiencing difficulties with attention really mentally 'disordered' or are we experiencing understandable responses to a distracting and overwhelming world?"   In fact, the situation is MUCH WORSE. It is quite clear that many cases of "ADHD" have disordered attention directly as a symptomatic response to their experience of the trauma of child abuse and neglect. American psychiatry refuses to recognize this experience at all, as a diagnosis or etiology, and thus continues to inappropriately treat this disruptive experience with Ritalin and other pharmaceuticals. No one knows how many "ADHD patients" are really suffering post abuse trauma and thus unable to have effective cognitive attention.

These reflections, both as expressed by Ahsan and as extended by me, highlight a significant cultural and medical failure which churns out and exploits impaired human beings and then avoids effective treatment. Only collective awareness and action by all of us is crucial to and capable of rectifying this important problem.