What a coincidence that it’s always the most irritating people who get diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Sue Perkins, Jamie Oliver, Owen Jones – the list of celebs who have this trendy malady reads like a roll-call of people you’d flee a pub to avoid. No offence to ‘the ADHD community’, but everyone I’ve met who claims to have this disorder has been a royal pain in the arse. Like the fuming student who accosted me at the Oxford Union to harangue me about something I’d written on mental health. ‘Look!’, he said, pulling a box of pills from his pocket. ‘These are for my ADHD!’ His face was flushed red and frozen into a seething grimace. ‘Well, they’re not fucking working’, I thought.
Hear me out: is it possible you don’t have ADHD and you’re just a bit of a twat? No judgement. We all have twat tendencies, me included. It’s just that most of us don’t doll up our maddening foibles as a neurodevelopmental disorder requiring medical treatment. Consider the ‘symptoms’ of ADHD: overtalking, interrupting others, fidgeting, mood swings, extreme impatience, being ‘unable to wait your turn’. I’m old enough to remember when we called such people rude. Or another four-letter word. Now we have to pretend they’re mentally disordered. I might try this next time I’m late for something, which is my most grating trait: chalk it up to my ‘Time Perception Disorder’.
Guess what? That disorder already exists. I Googled it after writing that sentence. It’s called Time Blindness, it’s a ‘time perception-related’ disorder, and the symptoms include ‘chronic lateness’, ‘procrastination’ and ‘missed deadlines’. Yay! I’m not a dawdling son-of-a-bitch who keeps his friends waiting because he just has to finish the latest episode of Severance – I’m ill! What a relief to know it’s not my fault I’m always 20 minutes late to the pub, just as it’s not Jamie Oliver’s fault that he’s the most irksome, vexing mockney in the land. We are unwell, people. We can’t help it. Give us the drugs and go away.
Whatever your bad habits are, whatever your worst personality traits, I guarantee you there will be a ‘disorder’ you can swaddle them in so that you come off as ill rather than irritating. You’re ‘spiteful and vindictive’ and you ‘deliberately annoy people’? Maybe you have Oppositional Defiant Disorder. You’re deceitful, impulsive and aggressive? You might have Antisocial Personality Disorder. Your kid’s a bully who plays truant from school and sometimes even starts fires? Maybe he has a Conduct Disorder and would benefit from ‘multisystemic therapy’. Or, I don’t know, maybe he’s a little wanker who would benefit from a slap.
We are living through a great pathologising of human behaviour. Everything from exam stress to being a nasty piece of work who is always ‘seeking revenge’ has been reimagined as a disorder. ‘One in four people will experience a mental-health problem of some kind each year in England’, says one charity, such as ‘low mood, anxiety or stress’ to an extent that it ‘impacts… daily life’. Only one in four?! Everyone I know feels ‘low’ at times, because they’re human beings, and that’s what happens to human beings. It’s not a ‘mental-health problem’ – it’s life. Just as talking over people and pushing to the front of the queue is not ADHD – it’s bad manners.
ADHD is the disorder du jour. It’s the most coveted diagnosis of our time. The middle classes in particular crave the ADHD label, because who wants to go to a dinner party these days without having some vogue ailment to boast about? There is now concern – finally! – that ADHD is being overdiagnosed. The Times reports that 278,000 people in England are on ‘central nervous system stimulants’ – yikes – to treat their ADHD. There was an 18 per cent hike in prescriptions for ADHD drugs between April 2023 and March 2024, and now nearly five in every thousand people in England are being treated for the condition. Man that’s a lot of annoying people.
The Economist is worried, too. Last year it got the fashionably disordered middle classes choking on their pills when it said ‘ADHD should not be treated as a disorder’. Its reasoning was solid: much of the stuff we bundle up as ‘ADHD’ is just ‘ordinary human traits’, it said. It’s so true. Who among us has not at some point felt impulsive, disorganised, agitated? We’re not sick, we’re having a bad week. No one benefits from the pathologisation of life’s ups and downs. Aside from Big Pharma, that is. As a writer for Scientific American said back in 2016, ADHD feels like a ‘manufactured epidemic’. Drug companies have ‘massive financial incentives’, he said, to convince people they’re unhinged and need drugs. One wonders if Scientific American would publish a piece like that today.
The ADHD epidemic, like all faux disorders, started in the US. They’ve been drugging kids there for years. Seven million American kids – that’s 11.4 per cent of them – are said to have ADHD. Many are being pumped with Ritalin and other calming drugs. The sedation of a generation – it’s crazy. As one sceptical psychiatrist wrote in the New York Times a few years back, this ‘drugging of children’ is the really scary ‘epidemic’. We are using stimulants to ‘[suppress] all spontaneous behavior in normal children’, he said. Aldous Huxley called – he wants his storyline back.
How striking that this explosion in the drugging of children coincided with the crisis of discipline in family and school life. It seems to me that medication was brought in to do what adults were increasingly reluctant to do: make kids sit still and shut up. And now these ill-disciplined brats have become ill-disciplined adults. As someone from Gen X (the last sane generation), I remember fidgeting and overtalking being severely reprimanded. At school, at the dinner table, at Mass, you twitched and chatted at your peril. Even random old men on the bus would tell us to shut the fuck up. No doubt millennials and Gen Z think this sounds tyrannical, but at least we don’t need drugs to get through a 20-minute work meeting. The West’s millions of ‘ADHD adults’ don’t need medication – they need a time machine so they can go back and beg their bourgeois parents to discipline them better.
Or – and I’m really putting my neck on the line here – maybe they just need to exercise some self-control. Here’s my advice for grown-ups who interrupt people and have temper tantrums – don’t. Stop using the luxury malady of ADHD to dress up your bad habits as a ‘disorder’. Stop seeking a diagnosis to avoid taking responsibility for your shitty behaviour. Stop being a stooge of Big Pharma and give adulthood a shot instead. How about it? In 2025 I’ll be on time for the pub and you’ll stop being a tosser – deal?
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/17/you-dont-have-adhd-youre-just-annoying/
English (United States) ·