Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that people are born with.
Well, at least that’s long been the narrative in the medical field.
But the fact that ADHD diagnoses and Adderall prescriptions have skyrocketed in recent decades, especially in young male populations, has many — even the left’s “experts” — questioning if ADHD is actually congenital. It seems they can’t help but ask: If ADHD is something you’re born with, why the enormous surge in diagnoses?
In a recent New York Times article titled “Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?” writer Paul Tough challenged the idea that ADHD is solely a fixed, biologically driven condition and suggested that it might also be driven by various environmental factors, including increased academic pressure, pervasive screen time, sleep deprivation, and post-pandemic stress.
In response, the Daily Wire published an article titled “The ‘Experts’ Are Finally Admitting That ADHD Is A Scam,” in which the writer acknowledged that mainstream sources are finally beginning to question what many of us have known all along: ADHD is a misdiagnosis of normal behavior.
The writer alleges that the feminization of education, pharmaceutical greed, and the mislabeling of normal male behavior are what’s really driving ADHD diagnoses and prescriptions.
On a recent episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn dove into these new conversations revolving around ADHD.
“The truth is we’ve been told not that a feminized education system has increasingly punished normal male behavior it doesn’t understand; 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 teachers have been unable to control. Instead, we’re led to believe that boys have suddenly become afflicted with a severe psychological disorder,” Glenn reads from the Daily Wire piece.
He agrees that what’s being done to boys in education is a travesty.
“Everything is just push the girls, push the girls, push the girls — ‘you can be anything.’ ‘Shut up, sit down, have some Ritalin’ to the boys,” he condemns.
The boys who are being written off as distractible and out of control are really just being typical boys. The Daily Wire article mocked one experiment conducted at the University of Central Florida, in which children were placed in front of a computer and shown two videos: a math lecture involving basic addition, subtraction, and multiplication, and a pod-racing scene from “Star Wars.”
Surprise, surprise — the kids were more likely to fidget and spin around in their chairs during the math lecture than they were when watching the “Star Wars” scene.
Using these “groundbreaking” findings, the UCF published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology titled “ADHD Kids Can Be Still — If They’re Not Straining Their Brains.”
The Daily Wire ridiculed this, arguing that the study merely “discovered the concept of boredom.”
Glenn agrees and humorously compares the UCF study to discovering that your children “like sugary cereal over bran flakes” and then trying to “get them on LSD” to correct the problem.
While it’s true that some children struggle to focus in school more than others, it doesn’t mean they have a psychological disorder, Glenn says. It means that “all kids are wired differently; boys and girls are wired differently.”
Our differences are not the problem. The problem is that “public schools are made for everybody to be the same.”
To hear more of the conversation, watch the clip above.
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