Teacher Tom: Is ADHD A Fraud?

Teacher Tom: Is ADHD A Fraud?:

Is ADHD A Fraud?

According to the American Psychiatric Association, 11 percent of American kids (over 6 million of them) have ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder). I'm not a psychiatrist, but I know the symptoms (inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity) and I can honestly say that of the hundreds of children that have passed my way over the past couple decades, I've never met one upon whom I would hang that label.

Now, I admit to be completely unqualified to make that diagnosis, but you would think that by now I would have run across at least one child who set off my alarm bells. Or perhaps there is something about our school that attracts non-ADHD kids, or maybe I'm looking right at the symptoms and just see normal behavior, or it could be that the folks performing the diagnoses are wrong more often than they are right.

Well-regarded Harvard psychologist Jerome Kegan tends to think that ADHD is largely a fraud foisted upon us by pharmaceutical companies seeking to move their Teacher Tom: Is ADHD A Fraud?: