For a few years now, blog posts keep popping up in my Facebook feed that claim “French Kids Don’t Have ADHD!” These posts allege that ADHD is a disorder primarily designed by pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs, that the original “founding father” of ADHD claimed that it is a “fictitious disease,” and my personal favorite, that it’s all about how the French rear their children. Yes, according to these “blogs,” apparently all of us American parents with ADHD kids are simply doing it wrong. In essence, we’re bad parents.

You know what? Fuck that.

Yeah, I might be angry. I’m more than a little tired of people posting these blogs without researching the claims. Google is a thing people. Use it. The claims are bullshit.

As a person, as a family, that knows full well the difficulties and debilitation that ADHD can cause, seeing these posts is infuriating and painful. Just because some blogger, even one with Ph.D. at the end of their name, posts something like this, does not make it true. Of course, it doesn’t help that once it’s published (this began in 2012 with a post by Marilyn Wedge on PsychologyToday.com), all kinds of bloggers, including people who are selling “holistic” and “natural” remedies and diets (like David Wolfe), are repeating and recycling these 2012 claims, and touting them as gospel, despite a lack of credible support.

In another piece three years later, by Katherine Ellison, in the same online publication, Ellison noted emphatically that Wedge’s piece was wrong. However, people just keep recycling Wedge’s incorrect data. According to Ellison, a 2011 study found that rates of ADHD among French children are between 3.5 and 5.6 percent, which falls right in the global range of 5.3 to 7.2. Furthermore, in 2015, France’s High Health Authority officially disagreed with the studies Wedge based her position on (which claimed a rate of only .5%). Furthermore, European councils and various psychiatrists are noting that the problem is not that French kids don’t have ADHD, but that it’s not well understood, well treated, or well diagnosed, and that there is insufficient training and inequalities in access to help. Unfortunately, there isn’t a ton of current information out there, because most Americans don’t actually care about French rates of ADHD, they just want to blog over and over and over about debunked statistics from 7 years ago, because it supports the current hysteria over “big pharma.”

None of this is to say that ADHD isn’t over diagnosed. It also isn’t to say that ADHD can’t be over medicated, or that there aren’t valid concerns about the influence and intentions of the pharmaceutical industry. While for many kids medication is a first line treatment, medications don’t always work for all kids. In some cases, other modalities work just as effectively, or even better. However, that is something that should be decided by parents and doctors, and not influenced by the current backlash against “big pharma.”

Additionally, for all the hysteria about over-diagnosis, there are studies that show thousands of kids are under-diagnosed, particularly in Black and Latinx communities and, that even once diagnosed, they are much less likely to receive medication or other treatments.

Is there an issue with overprescription of medications as a whole in this country? Yes. I think we’re all rather done with the ability of pharmaceutical companies to directly market to the general public, and the inevitable way it compromises the medical profession.

Are there problems in the pharmaceutical industry with overpromising, overselling, mistakes or lies in testing, etc., etc.? Yes, there are. It’s the stuff of lawsuits and legislation.

The FDA has requirements for approving drugs, and while we might like them to be more stringent, they exist. The current hysteria over big pharma (which is often hand in hand with the anti-vaccination movement) is effectively using a very broad brush to invalidate decades of psychiatric and medical research.

Nationally, we keep having conversations about the need for more openness regarding mental health, more access to mental health care, and the lessening of stigma around mental health issues. At the same time, however, the incessant stream of blogs attacking psychiatric medications, are vilifying the very doctors and researchers who have developed indices for diagnosing and treating ADHD and other disorders, because *gasp* “big pharma.” The hypocrisy is astounding. 

Given what we saw in the 2016 election cycle about the amount of misinformation out in the world, and the ease with which it is disseminated, I beg you all to stop accepting as truth blog posts that make these claims. Just because it’s on a fancy blog, or because someone has some letters after their name, doesn’t make it true. In fact, if you start to trace these posts, you’ll find that they are all recycling the same bullshit.

Do your own research. Remember the adage: if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If a post promises you that the only thing you have to do to solve ADHD (or OCD, or depression, or anxiety) is change your diet, or move to the mountains, buy their vitamins, or eat goat dung while standing on your head, without discussing the complexities, spectrums, and variety of these disorders, as well as the variety of treatments, it’s too good to be true. If it refuses to acknowledge decades of research, refuses to acknowledge when medication is useful and life saving, as well as when it isn’t a good choice, when it dismisses all of that out of hand, you should probably question their motivations. If you hit Google and can’t find information that is more recent than six or seven years ago, or that isn’t being printed in any major medical journals like JAMA, Pediatrics, NEJM, The Lancet, maybe you should, at the very least, question it.

Our family’s experiences with ADHD are not going to be the same as another family’s experiences, nor would the results of treatments (pharmaceutical or otherwise) necessarily be the same. There isn’t a one size fits all approach to ADHD, and I respect that there are families out there that, for whatever reason, would rather not use medication. However, the flip side needs to be true as well: respect those families that do choose to use medication. Do not assume that because some kids are over-diagnosed, every parent is merely drugging their kids into some kind of submission (pro-tip, it really doesn’t work that way). Do not assume that those parents haven’t investigated multiple modalities of treatment for their kids, or haven’t had them thoroughly tested.

Most of all, however, don’t post articles that effectively claim we’re just shitty parents doing it wrong, lazily drugging our children, especially if you haven’t investigated the claims in the post. It’s inaccurate, it’s unhelpful, and, frankly, it’s just plain mean.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/suffer-the-children/201203/why-french-kids-dont-have-adhd (the original, problem post)

https://www.davidwolfe.com/france-adhd/ (a shill selling his remedies)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pay-attention/201511/french-kids-do-have-adhd (the post correcting the incorrect one)

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-adhd-correcting-myths-about-adhd-20456 (an online resource for ADHD and other issues, which is vetted and reviewed by a panel of doctors)

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/work-of-fiction/ (putting into correct context the quote by “the father of ADHD.”)

https://www.additudemag.com/race-and-adhd-how-people-of-color-get-left-behind/ (information on the color gap in ADHD, from another online resource for individuals and families dealing with ADHD, whose advisory board consists of a wide spectrum doctors and therapists that specialize in ADHD and learning issues, with various modalities of treatment.)