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Financial stress on the parents translates into physiological stress in the children. Poor kids are much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. I'm telling you, if your friend's got ADHD, I can tell you he had a stressed early few years.
One of the really interesting things I wanted to talk to you about is ADHD. I've had a few of my friends in my close friendship circle diagnosed with ADHD recently. I then looked into some of the statistics around ADHD. I found this statistic that said in the 1980s, one in 20 US children were diagnosed with ADHD. Today, the number is roughly one in nine. Just generally, around me, it feels like, and this could just be because of my own little narrow circle, or it could be because of a wider thing happening in society, that there's been an increase in diagnosis of mental illness and things like ADHD.
When I spoke to my friend about what he believed the cause of his ADHD was, and he's posted this on LinkedIn and talks about it very publicly now, it seemed to point to a belief that it was relating to some kind of genetic or heritable factor. The issue I've been contending with myself, and why I spoke to Johann Hari about this and others about this, is that if I accept that, then I feel like I'm accepting that we're being born somewhat broken. This is almost what Johann Hari talked about in the early stages of his teenage years, where he was made to believe there was a chemical imbalance in his brain, and therefore he was born broken, and here is the medication to solve it. I don't personally believe that we're born broken.
Anybody interested in the subject might do what I think Johann actually did, which is to read my book on ADHD. It's called Scattered Minds. I was diagnosed in my 50s, and so were a couple of my kids, but I never bought into the idea that this is a genetic disease, or that it's a disease at all, genetic or otherwise.
As for the rising number of people being diagnosed, there could be two reasons at least. One is that we're better at diagnosis, so before we wouldn't have noticed it, but now we are. Or, genuinely, there are more people who are having trouble in certain ways, such as with attention and impulse control. Either way, the fact is that many more children are being diagnosed and medicated for this condition, particularly in the US, but also increasingly here in the UK, as well as in China and elsewhere.
As I said earlier, here is the actual reality: nobody has ever found a gene for ADHD. Nobody has ever found a gene that says if you have this gene you're going to have ADHD. No such gene has ever been found, no group of genes has ever been found that says if you have these genes you're going to have this condition, nor ever will be. And no such gene or group of genes has ever been found that says if you don't have these genes you will not have the condition.
There are some diseases that are genetic. One runs in my family: muscular dystrophy. If you have the gene, you're going to have the disease. My mother had it, my aunt had it. That's a genetic condition, and if you have the gene, you'll have the disease. Those kinds of diseases are very rare. There are some genes that, the more of them you have, the more likely you are to have any number of mental health diagnoses: ADHD, depression, anxiety, even psychosis and bipolar illness. But there's no group of genes, or set of genes, or gene that themselves determines any one condition. As a matter of fact, you can have those same genes and not have any condition whatsoever.
So something is being passed on, but it's not any kind of condition. What's being passed on is sensitivity. The more sensitive you are, the more you're going to feel whatever is going on in the environment. You take the same sensitive kid with these genes that confer greater sensitivity, and sensitive means to feel, from the Latin word to feel, sentire. The more sensitive you are, the more you're going to feel, the more bad stuff happens, the more pain you're going to be in, and the more compensating you're going to have to do. At the same time, with those same genes, if you were treated well and you grew up in a healthy environment, you'd just be creative and happy and joyful and a leader, an artist, a shaman, or a very creative CEO, or whatever you're going to be. So the genes don't determine; they make you more sensitive to your environment.
If you go back to what I said about tuning out, it's simply a defense. The more sensitive you are and the more stress in the environment, the more you're going to feel the stress, and the more you're going to need to escape from it by tuning out. So he didn't inherit ADHD. You inherited a sensitivity that makes it more likely, under stressful circumstances, that you revert to tuning out. When your brain is developing, which by the way is an organ that develops physiologically under the impact of the emotional environment, if there's a lot of stress in a child's life, and what I'm saying is that in this society more and more parents are stressed, not because they don't love their kids, not because they're not doing their utmost to provide for them, but because they're more stressed for all kinds of social, political, and economic reasons. If you look at inflation in Britain, which is a high risk right now, more people are going to be stressed financially. Financial stress on the parents translates into physiological stress in the children. Those children may want to tune out because it's too much to be in the present. Some of them will be diagnosed with ADHD. They didn't inherit anything in terms of a disease; they're just reacting to the environment. So if we're diagnosing more and more kids these days, I think it's because the parenting environment has become much more stressed.
That's backed up in your book, where you mention that study of 65,000 parents and their children with ADHD. You say there's more trauma in their lives. I found that to be really supportive of what you just said. I'm saying this from memory, but the study of 65,000 children and their parents found that those parents who had more adverse, traumatic events in their lives ended up having a higher chance of having a child with ADHD.
Well, look, in the United States at least, poor kids and kids of so-called color are much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. Why would that be the case? Because they're living with so much more stress. Men as well, right? More men and boys are diagnosed, partly because in boys the symptom of hyperactivity seems to be more conspicuous. When a boy is sitting in school and can't be still, that's obvious, and the teacher will notice it. The girl who's dreamy and tunes out, who fades away at the back of the class, doesn't create any problems, so they don't get noticed. That's one of the reasons. But also, funny to say, young boys, infant boys, are more sensitive to environmental pressure than girls are, for some strange reason, so they're more likely to be affected by these factors.
Seeing a boy like that in the class, one that's fidgety, has a poor attention span, and responds badly to stress, we medicate.
What is the impact of that approach to treatment, medicating super early? When I worked as a physician, I would certainly prescribe medication sometimes. It's a question of who's prescribing it and with what intention. If I understand that the real problem in this child is not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with the child, but that they were developed in a stressed environment and those stresses are still acting on them, and one of the stresses is that the parents don't understand the child's behaviors and tend to react rather harshly, then if I can help the parent understand the sensitive nature of their child, that also means that when positive changes occur in the environment, the kid will be very responsive to that as well. If the parents can create a positive, accepting, understanding atmosphere in the home and work on their own stresses so they don't unconsciously pass them on to their kids, that kid will change very quickly.
If in the short term the child wants the medication to function better, and no child should be forced to take medication, medication is never the final answer. At the very most, it stops a cap. There's no proof whatsoever that medications help anybody heal from ADHD. They simply suppress symptoms, which may be helpful in the short term, but for God's sakes, go to work on the long-term development of that child. What does that mean? Create the conditions in which healthy development takes place. That child will do very, very well. If you think the problem is a disease, they're just going to medicate away the symptoms.
What about adults? I'm thinking of my friend. He's in his 30s, and he got the diagnosis of ADHD in his 30s. He's been given this medication, which he presumably has to take for life. He's told me the medication has helped him focus. It's been a game changer.
Yeah, I've taken medication myself for ADHD, and it helped me focus. It helped me write my first book. I didn't take it for this one. As a matter of fact, more recently, when I was beginning to write this one, I thought maybe I would take a bit of Adderall like I used to, just to see if it helps me write the book better. All it did was give me side effects. My brain has changed. I don't need it anymore.
So I would say to your friend: if the medication is helping you right now and it's not causing you side effects, I've got nothing against that. You might want to give it a break every weekend, or you might want to use it for when you have to work or really concentrate. But it's up to you. If it helps you function, take it. But go to work on the traumas and stresses that are driving your ADHD, going back to your childhood. My book on ADHD, Scattered Minds, does outline some ways to do that. You might find that you don't need the medication so much anymore, or not at all.
Number one. Number two: even if you do still need it, your life will be so much fuller and so much less stressed if you deal with the underlying causes than if you simply medicate the symptom. I'm telling you, if your friend has ADHD, he had a stressed early few years, and his parents were stressed. So deal with that. Deal with what conditions you're creating now in your life that generate more stress for you. Are you taking care of your body? Are you exercising? Are you eating well? Do you get out into nature? Nature has a certain kind of harmony to it, which actually calms the mind. Are you doing all these things? If you're not, all you're doing is medicating a symptom. If you are taking the medication specifically to help you focus but you're working on these other issues, you have a much fuller life, and you may find you don't need the medication after all.
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