ADHD Is Over Diagnosed | Proof For Your Liberal Friend

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Speaker 2 A shortage of ADHD medication is leaving some parents in limbo, and they're wondering if they're going to have enough pills to help their children.

Speaker 6 Shortage of ADHD medications is in a category of its More than once over the past several months, I have predicted that we would see a reported skyrocket.

Speaker 6 We would see a skyrocketing rise of ADHD diagnoses as millions of children are forced to sit and stare at screens all day in lieu of receiving a real education. That's what I predicted.

Speaker 6 I think I said it on the show multiple times. I tweeted it.

Speaker 6 Now, usually I enjoy saying I told you so. I don't hate saying I told you so.
I love saying it. This is not one of the times where I enjoy saying it.

Speaker 6 This is one of the times where I really do hate saying it, but

Speaker 6 I told told you so. This week,

Speaker 6 NBC News reported right on schedule that ADHD diagnoses have skyrocketed during the pandemic. The article by Olivia Solon offers more details, starting with an anecdote.

Speaker 6 This is what she reports. It says, Susan McLaughlin's 12-year-old daughter, Isabella, was a straight A student before the pandemic.
Isabella, who lives in

Speaker 6 a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, excelled at science and math and was already getting high school credit for algebra. But when her school shut down in March and classes shifted to Zoom,

Speaker 6 Isabella's grades took a nosedive.

Speaker 6 She signed on for her virtual class from a desk piled high with books, papers, and stuffed animals, and then spent hours trying to clean her room instead of focusing on schoolwork.

Speaker 6 She found herself paralyzed by assignments, McLaughlin said, but she wouldn't tell her teacher over email that she was struggling as she would have done in person.

Speaker 6 McLaughlin, 53, a mother of three from Delaware, Ohio, says it was a meltdown after meltdown after meltdown.

Speaker 6 McLaughlin spent months trying to bring more structure to Isabella's day by writing lists, schedules, timelines, checkboxes.

Speaker 6 But as someone who was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder herself a decade ago, McLaughlin realized that she was seeing the same behaviors in Isabella.

Speaker 6 She thought, quote, I've got to nip this in the bud.

Speaker 6 Isabella is being evaluated by a psychiatrist, a process that takes several hours and requires her teachers to fill out questionnaires about her behavior.

Speaker 6 McLaughlin hopes that with an ADHD diagnosis, Isabella will be able to get a prescription for a stimulant medication such as Ritalin, Adderall,

Speaker 6 or something like that to alleviate her symptoms. Okay.

Speaker 6 Pausing here for a second.

Speaker 6 Strange. Strange, isn't it? The child was a straight A student.
Everything was fine. Then she was confined to a house for a year, put in front of a screen, and suddenly she has trouble learning.

Speaker 6 She must have a mental disorder. Yes, that must be it.

Speaker 6 No other explanation comes to mind.

Speaker 6 More from NBC News.

Speaker 6 It says two dozen parents, pediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists, and researchers all described a crisis among children suffering from inattention and tanking school performance.

Speaker 6 Data from specialists involved with

Speaker 6 diagnosing and treating ADHD show just how much parents are struggling to get help.

Speaker 6 They're flooding an ADHD support line with questions and ADHD diagnoses and prescriptions for related medications have soared. The number of parents calling a helpline

Speaker 6 set up by children and adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, that's an organization, a nonprofit that supports people with ADHD, rose by 62% since the pandemic started.

Speaker 6 Traffic to its website last year grew by 77% compared to 2019. Aetna Health, a technology company that

Speaker 6 creates practice management software for healthcare providers, published research in May drawing on data from its customers that showed an increase in patients aged 13 to 17 who received new

Speaker 6 diagnoses of ADHD. From the week of March 9th to the week of March 30th, the proportion of visits by teenagers that involved first-time ADHD diagnoses rose by 67%.

Speaker 6 That was a similar spike among teenagers, especially boys.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 6 It should be, I hope, clear to most people that it's not a coincidence to find so many children having trouble with inattention and hyperactivity when they're cooped up, deprived of their normal outlets like sports and other physical activities, and forced to learn through Zoom classes.

Speaker 6 You know, I suffer quite a bit from inattention when I am forced to sit through even a 15-minute Zoom meeting. I can't imagine doing it every day for hours and being 12 years old on top of it.

Speaker 6 The trouble here is with the final D in ADHD. That's where I've got an issue, or really both Ds, deficit and disorder.

Speaker 6 Okay,

Speaker 6 it's not only wrong, but arrogant and cruel to call a child disordered because he's struggling to learn in an environment like that.

Speaker 6 The deficit, the disorder is with the environment, not the child.

Speaker 6 It is disordered to lock kids inside, to try to teach them through a screen. That's disordered.

Speaker 6 Kids who struggle with that are healthy. It's natural.
It's healthy to struggle under those circumstances. Your kids should struggle, actually.

Speaker 6 Yes, it may help.

Speaker 6 It may help them sit still to put them on drugs and tranquilize them.

Speaker 6 But if you're going to do that, and I don't think you should, but if you do it, Don't pretend you're treating an illness or a disorder.

Speaker 6 Don't fool yourself.

Speaker 6 You know, you need your kid to sit still and look at Zoom for six hours. And so you put him on drugs.
All right.

Speaker 6 I really wish you wouldn't. I think it's terrible to do it.
But if you do, at least be honest and do not claim that you're treating a disorder because you know you're not.

Speaker 6 You know that's not what you're doing. You're trying to get your kid a competitive advantage in this certain environment or context.
Okay, like a guy who isn't good at baseball is not disordered.

Speaker 6 Not thriving in baseball is not a sign of a disorder. So if he takes steroids, he's not treating an illness.
He can't say that he suffers from a baseball deficiency.

Speaker 6 No, he's just, he wants to succeed in this specific specialized environment known as baseball. And so he's taking the drug to help him do that.

Speaker 6 It's the same thing here. A child who doesn't thrive while staring at a screen for five hours is also not disordered.
That is not a symptom of a disease.

Speaker 6 So putting them on drugs, it's like doping.

Speaker 6 It's just to give them that advantage.

Speaker 6 Who is to say that children should thrive in that environment? We've decided that we want them to,

Speaker 6 but that doesn't mean they should.

Speaker 6 Giving him a drug to help is not a medical decision then, even if a doctor prescribes it. You're also not doing it to help him exactly.

Speaker 6 The kids are being drugged while they're stuck at home in order to make things easier on the teachers and on the the parents and on the system generally.

Speaker 6 That's who this is for. It's hard to think of any industry that's enjoyed more success over the past 20 years or so than big pharma.

Speaker 6 More than 131 million people, that's two-thirds of all adults in the United States, report that they're taking at least one prescription drug currently.

Speaker 6 That's a significant increase from the year 2000 when around half of American adults said they were doing so.

Speaker 6 The percentage of people taking five or more prescription drugs has nearly doubled since the turn of the century. Spending on prescription drugs in that period has more than tripled.

Speaker 6 Drugs that supposedly treat psychological issues like unhappiness or lack of self-control have done especially well. From 1991 to 2018, SSRI prescriptions increased by over 3,000%.

Speaker 6 Roughly half the country either takes the potentially mind-altering drug Ozempic to lose weight or knows someone taking it.

Speaker 6 Now, given big pharmaceutical tremendous success, you'd think that by now, They would have solved a lot of the health problems facing Americans, or at least made progress in resolving these problems.

Speaker 6 But the opposite is true. Average life expectancy is declining.
Suicide rates are going up. So are the rates of obesity, drug addiction, cancer among young adults.
How is that possible?

Speaker 6 How is the pharmaceutical industry succeeding financially while failing in every other area that matters?

Speaker 6 How can they have so many people on so many medicines, and yet at the same time, everyone is only getting sicker and less healthy?

Speaker 6 Part of the answer is that many drugs created by Big Pharma aren't even intended to alleviate health problems anymore. They're designed instead to cause more death and suffering.

Speaker 6 Big Pharma is churning out record amounts of sterilization drugs, abortion drugs, suicide drugs, especially in Canada, where the government has begun putting down the undesirables who don't even have a terminal illness.

Speaker 6 They are euthanizing human beings like stray dogs and hardly anyone is objecting to it. More than half of all abortions are now performed using drugs from pharmaceutical companies.

Speaker 6 So-called puberty blockers, which can cause lifelong complications, are now prescribed to children under the age of 18 more than twice as often as they were just a few years ago.

Speaker 6 The rest of Big Pharma's catalog, the drugs that are at least allegedly beneficial to patients' health, have had a lot of marketing behind them.

Speaker 6 Other than New Zealand, we are the only country that allows drug companies to market directly to consumers.

Speaker 6 This means that the pharmaceutical industry can sell not just the medication, but also the illness that the medication is supposed to cure. Do you have such and such symptoms?

Speaker 6 Then you might have this disease. Here's a drug that can help.

Speaker 6 Diagnosis and prescription in one 30-second advertisement. How convenient.
Fortunately for Big Pharma, the U.S.

Speaker 6 government has also granted them immunity from lawsuits, even when their products injure people, which they quite often do.

Speaker 6 Maybe the most important single reason for Big Pharma's success, though, is media coverage. And in particular, media coverage that the drug companies have paid for.

Speaker 6 Pharmaceutical companies recently began spending more on advertising than they do on research and development.

Speaker 6 In 2020, the year of the great pandemic, Pfizer spent $12 billion on marketing compared to just $9 billion on R ⁇ D.

Speaker 6 Companies like AbVee and Johnson ⁇ Johnson and Bayer and many other pharma companies posted similar numbers. Now, what does all this money buy you?

Speaker 6 If you turn on any cable or network news channel, you know the answer to that question. It buys incessant advertisements that air during every commercial break.

Speaker 6 And although the net, although the networks, of course, will never admit it, it also buys positive coverage.

Speaker 6 After all, if the networks criticize Big Pharma, they stand to lose millions in advertising dollars. Every single news report you see on TV is sponsored by Big Pharma.

Speaker 6 Now, you might have noticed that the entire national news media,

Speaker 6 kind of staying on this point here, is currently freaking out over the shortage of the drug Adderall.

Speaker 6 Adderall is manufactured by Teva Pharmaceuticals, although they're competitors that make other versions of the drug. All of a sudden, Adderall is really hard to find.

Speaker 6 And here's one recent report from ABC Action News on the shortage. And I want you to see and watch how they frame this issue.
Listen.

Speaker 2 A shortage of ADHD medication is leaving some parents in limbo, and they're wondering if they're going to have enough pills to help their children.

Speaker 6 Yeah, experts say shortages of medications are not rare, but the shortage of ADHD medications is in a category of its own.

Speaker 2 Arvanessa Ariza Ariza spoke with one mother who says it's a game of roulette when it comes to her daughter's medicine.

Speaker 2 She also spoke to an expert who may have a better idea of when the problem will slow down.

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Speaker 2 Meet six-year-old Ayana, a beam of light with a love for lyrics.

Speaker 2 Her mom, Jessica McBride, says this is her lovable daughter on a good day. When she's on her ADHD medication, they finally found one that works well for Ayana last fall.

Speaker 7 Within about a week of being on it, she was finally able to memorize her sight words that she'd been working on for months.

Speaker 7 You know, she was finally able, her brain was able to slow down enough for her to focus.

Speaker 6 What will that six-year-old do without her stimulants? This is a medical crisis.

Speaker 6 After all, the six-year-old has trouble sitting still to memorize sight words when she's not drugged, which makes her very similar to almost every other six-year-old that has ever lived on the planet.

Speaker 6 But this mother mother wants her six-year-old to be less like a six-year-old because it's very inconvenient to have a six-year-old acting like a six-year-old in the home.

Speaker 6 And that's why she desperately needs the drug. And by she, I mean the mother, not the child.
The mother needs the child to be drugged so that the child is not such a burden on her, the mother.

Speaker 6 The anchor says that the shortage of ADHD medication is leaving parents wondering, quote, if they're going to have enough pills to help their children.

Speaker 6 But of course, ADHD drugs for kids are really meant to help the parents.

Speaker 6 Think about what a revealing line that is, though, for a moment. Well, there's two lines there.
The first is about the sight words.

Speaker 6 By the way, if your six-year-old has not memorized all of her sight words in a few months, that's normal. That is a normal six-year-old thing.

Speaker 6 I've had three six-year-olds. I know what I'm talking about.

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Speaker 6 You might notice a pattern here that

Speaker 6 as we have more and more distractions in life that's one of the it's one of the changes from the 90s into the uh you know 2010s and into 2020 is that there are more and more distractions okay we've got you introduce smartphones and social media and people are on their screens constantly 10 hours a day of screen time okay so as as there are more distractions in life people become more distracted is that because we all have a mental disorder or are we just responding to our environments in ways that are actually pretty normal?

Speaker 6 It's not like some new objective ADHD test was developed that explains these numbers. They're just making up criteria that mean nothing and diagnosing every patient who walks in the door.

Speaker 6 Take a look at how the CDC defines ADHD if you're skeptical. The CDC says that children have ADHD if they do the following.
make careless mistakes or take unnecessary risks, daydream a lot,

Speaker 6 forget or lose things a lot, squirm or fidget, and have a hard time resisting temptation.

Speaker 6 My God, the epidemic is worse than I thought. I mean, apparently literally every child who has ever lived on earth is infected.

Speaker 6 At the risk of angering all the people who will scream from the rooftops that correlation doesn't equal causation, like it's some kind of scriptural edict, here's some data that's worth considering.

Speaker 6 From 1980 to 2020, the share of male teachers in both elementary and middle schools declined from 40% to less than 20%.

Speaker 6 Men have mostly stopped teaching young children in school.

Speaker 6 And during this same period, as men have abandoned elementary schools, there's coincidentally been another major change in childhood education. Everyone's being diagnosed with ADHD.

Speaker 6 More than 21% of 14-year-old boys in this country now supposedly suffer from this condition. The number goes up to 23% for 17-year-old boys.

Speaker 6 And as a result, prescriptions for drugs like Ritalin and Adderall have skyrocketed.

Speaker 6 From 2012 to 2022, the total number of prescriptions for stimulants to treat ADHD increased dramatically by nearly 60%.

Speaker 6 And boys between the ages of 10 to 14 were the demographic that saw the highest increase in these prescriptions.

Speaker 6 Now, for decades, you've been instructed to believe that there's no significance to this correlation whatsoever.

Speaker 6 You know, as women increasingly entered the workforce and replaced men in teaching jobs, we're not supposed to draw any conclusions about how the behavior of male children is now being addressed.

Speaker 6 The truth, we've been told, is not that a feminized education system has increasingly punished normal male behavior that it doesn't understand.

Speaker 6 It's not that schools have lost their capacity to educate male students. It's not that smartphone use and electronics in general have become distractions, which teachers have been unable to control.

Speaker 6 Instead, we've been led to believe that in truth, boys have suddenly become afflicted with a severe and mysterious psychological disorder.

Speaker 6 There's no objective biologically based test for this disorder, nor can anyone point to a specific gene or pathogen that might cause it.

Speaker 6 But the scientific consensus for many years now has nevertheless been clear. ADHD, they've said again and again, is real.

Speaker 6 And the way to treat it is to give children speed in the form of drugs like Ritalin.

Speaker 6 Now, as I've said repeatedly all this time for well over a decade, the science behind the theory of ADHD isn't simply underbaked or inadequate.

Speaker 6 It is comically useless to the point that it is obviously fraudulent. The whole thing is a fraud.

Speaker 6 And to give just one of many examples, a few years ago, researchers at the University of Central Florida conducted a grand experiment where they put a child in front of a computer.

Speaker 6 And here's what it looked like.

Speaker 6 You could see it there. The researchers showed a child two separate videos.
One of the videos was about mathematics.

Speaker 6 And it involved the teacher talking about basic addition, subtraction, and multiplication. The other video was the pod racing scene from Star Wars.

Speaker 6 And as you can see from the videos, the child became bored during the math lecture. He starts spinning in his chair and fidgeting.

Speaker 6 On the other hand, when the child is shown something more engaging, he suddenly stops fidgeting. He's actually paying attention to Star Wars.
He was not paying attention to the math video.

Speaker 6 Now, unless you're an alien who's never interacted with a child and was never a child yourself, there is nothing remotely interesting or surprising about this footage.

Speaker 6 It's exactly what you would expect a normal, healthy child to do.

Speaker 6 But in the academic world, which exists to sell pharmaceuticals to children, this was a groundbreaking experiment.

Speaker 6 The footage was the basis for a peer-reviewed article in something called the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Abnormal Child Psychology, and the University of Central Florida bragged about their findings with this headline.

Speaker 6 ADHD kids can be still if they're not straining their brains.

Speaker 6 Their conclusion was that ADHD is a nefarious disorder that's only triggered by cognitively demanding tasks, and that we need to be vigilant of ADHD whenever children have to use their brains in specific ways.