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Editor’s note: This week, we’re reprinting some of our best stories from the past year. In this piece, originally published in April, Matt Walsh dismantles the ADHD scam.
***
At the risk of angering all the people who will scream from the rooftops that “correlation doesn’t equal causation,” like it’s some kind of Scriptural edict, here’s some data that’s worth considering. From 1980 to 2020, the share of male teachers, in both elementary and middle schools, declined from 40% to less than 20%. Men have mostly stopped teaching young children in school. And during this same period, as men have abandoned elementary schools, there’s coincidentally been another major change in childhood education: Everyone’s being diagnosed with ADHD.
More than 21% of 14-year-old boys in this country now supposedly suffer from this condition. The number goes up to 23% for 17-year-old boys. As a result, prescriptions for drugs like Ritalin and Adderall have skyrocketed. From 2012 to 2022, the total number of prescriptions for stimulants to treat ADHD increased dramatically by nearly 60%. Boys between the ages of 10 to 14 were the demographic that saw the highest increase in these prescriptions.
For decades, you’ve been instructed to believe there’s no significance to this correlation whatsoever. As women increasingly enter the workforce and replace men in teaching jobs, we’re not supposed to draw any conclusions about how the behavior of male children is now being addressed. The truth, we’ve been told, is 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’ve been led to believe that, in truth, boys have suddenly become afflicted with a severe psychological disorder. There’s no objective, biologically-based test for this disorder, nor can anyone point to a specific gene or pathogen that might cause it. But the scientific consensus, for many years now, has nevertheless been clear: ADHD, they’ve said again and again, is real. And the way to treat it is to give children “speed,” in the form of drugs like Ritalin.
As I’ve said repeatedly, for over a decade, the science behind the theory of ADHD isn’t simply underbaked or inadequate. It’s comically useless, to the point that it’s obviously fraudulent. To give just one of many examples, a few years ago, researchers at the University of Central Florida conducted a grand experiment where they put a child in front of a computer. Here’s what it looked like:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="ADHD Study" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/167se17RNHw?feature=oembed" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" data-mce-fragment="1"></iframe>
The researchers showed a child two separate videos. One of the videos was about mathematics, and it involved a teacher talking about basic addition, subtraction, and multiplication. The other video was the pod-racing scene from “Star Wars.” And, as you can see from the videos, the child became bored during the math lecture. He starts spinning in his chair and fidgeting. On the other hand, when the child is shown something more engaging, he suddenly stops fidgeting. He’s actually paying attention to “Star Wars.”
Unless you’re an alien who’s never interacted with a child, and was never a child yourself, there is nothing remotely interesting or surprising about this footage. It’s exactly what you’d expect a normal, healthy child to do. But in the academic world, which exists to sell pharmaceuticals to children, this was a groundbreaking experiment. The footage was the basis for a peer-reviewed article in the“Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology.”
The University of Central Florida bragged about their findings with this headline: “ADHD Kids Can Be Still – If They’re Not Straining Their Brains.” Their conclusion was that ADHD is a nefarious disorder that’s only triggered by “cognitively demanding tasks,” and that we need to be vigilant of ADHD whenever children have to use their brains in specific ways.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mws-ep-1576-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
In reality, of course, the University of Central Florida had simply discovered the concept of “boredom.” That’s all they accomplished. It’d be like discovering that children prefer ice cream to broccoli, and then announcing you’ve identified a major new psychiatric disorder. It’s exactly like doing a study to discover that children are more excited about opening presents on Christmas than they are about doing their chores, and then concluding that there must be some previously undetected mental illness infecting every child on Earth.
Multiply this garbage study by about ten million, and you get the sum and substance of “ADHD research” over the past few decades. None of it is legitimate. As a result, we’ve all been waiting for the moment when, at long last, the medical establishment and mainstream media will finally acknowledge that none of this science is legitimate — because when that happens, millions of children will be spared these damaging and grossly unnecessary ADHD drugs.
This week that moment has belatedly arrived.
The New York Times Magazine has just published a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/magazine/adhd-medication-treatment-research.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lengthy article</a> entitled: “Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?”
It’s important to note, at the outset, that this article is not the result of some new discovery in the field of ADHD. There hasn’t been any new, groundbreaking research. Instead, the piece is a collection of existing studies about ADHD — some of them dating back more than a decade — along with testimony from researchers who, in the past, were some of the leading voices promoting ADHD medications. Now these researchers would like you to know that they’ve changed their minds because, after thinking about things for a while, they realize they were completely wrong.
The article opens by discussing a researcher named James Swanson, who conducted a famous experiment in the 1990s that tracked three groups of students over a long period of time. One group of students received drugs for their alleged ADHD. Another group received “behavioral training.” And a third group didn’t receive any kind of treatment. After a little over a year, the study supposedly showed that the kids who received Ritalin were doing a lot better than any other group. This study immediately became a major national news story. It was sold as proof that Ritalin works and that ADHD is real. And researchers like Swanson became highly-paid consultants for the pharmaceutical industry, shilling ADHD drugs. So everyone was happy. This is in spite of the fact that, even if the drugs really did improve a child’s behavior or academic performance, that in and of itself doesn’t prove that he has a disorder. Steroids improve athletic performance, but that doesn’t mean that a child who lacks athletic skill is disordered. Just because a drug enhances performance doesn’t make it a legitimate medication. But, it turns out, these drugs don’t even do that much.
As the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/magazine/adhd-medication-treatment-research.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">now admits</a>, the researchers understood very quickly that their narrative was false:
<blockquote>As time passed, Swanson began to grow uneasy. He and his colleagues were continuing to follow the almost 600 children in the M.T.A. study, and by the mid-2000s, they realized that the new data they were collecting was telling a different — and less hopeful — story than the one they initially reported. It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in the other groups. But by 36 months, that advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms. Swanson is now 80 and close to the end of his career, and when he talks about his life’s work, he sounds troubled — not just about the M.T.A. results but about the state of the A.D.H.D. field in general. ‘There are things about the way we do this work,” he told me, ‘that just are definitely wrong.’</blockquote>
In other words, now that he’s 80, this researcher — who played a vital role in the mass-prescribing of ADHD drugs — has no problem going on the record and explaining that the so-called “science” on ADHD is essentially meaningless.
In the end, we’re not correcting any kind of disorder in the brain. We’re not providing a long-term solution to a medical problem. We’re just giving children amphetamines, which have the predictable effect of artificially stimulating their brains so that they seem less bored — while introducing a whole host of catastrophic side effects that we’ll discuss in a moment. And like all drug highs, eventually it stops working, and reality sets in.
The “top scientists” are all admitting this now. It’s not just James Swanson who’s recanting his old research on ADHD. For example, in 2017, a Dutch neuroscientist named Martine Hoogman announced that she had discovered evidence confirming that ADHD is a real, observable disorder that’s reflected in human biology.
She stated at the time:
<blockquote>We confirm, with high-powered analysis, that patients with A.D.H.D. have altered brains; therefore A.D.H.D. is a disorder of the brain.</blockquote>
That’s what this researcher found with her “high-powered analysis” less than a decade ago. That was her statement. But now, this same neuroscientist is admitting that her data showed something completely different. This is again from the reporter who wrote this week’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/magazine/adhd-medication-treatment-research.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Times article</a>:
<blockquote>When I interviewed Hoogman by email recently, I was surprised to learn that she now wishes she could have revised that statement. ‘Back then, we emphasized the differences that we found (although small), but you can also conclude that the sub-cortical and cortical volumes of people with A.D.H.D. and those without A.D.H.D. are almost identical,’ she wrote. In retrospect, she added, it wasn’t fitting to conclude from her findings that A.D.H.D. is a brain disorder. ‘The A.D.H.D. neurobiology is so much more complex than that.’</blockquote>
So here we have a leading “expert” who claimed, in 2017, that her research proved that ADHD alters the brains. And now, via email with a New York Times reporter, she casually admits that her research showed that the brains of people who are diagnosed with ADHD are “almost identical” to everyone else. To call this a walkback would be a massive understatement. These people are completely abandoning everything they’ve been saying with absolute certainty. And yet their research is still used by believers in ADHD to support their theory — even though the actual researchers themselves no longer stand by it.
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To be clear, it wasn’t just this one scientist. Dozens of leading “experts” pushed the idea that ADHD is a symptom of observable, physical issues in the brain. They even published a consensus statement claiming that a single gene caused ADHD, and that ADHD patients had less brain matter and less electrical activity in their brain. None of this was actually true. When they ran experiments to prove this was true, they got the opposite result — but they pretended otherwise at the time. That’s what this Dutch scientist is now admitting to.
It’s impossible to measure the full extent of the damage that’s been done to millions of young children as a result of this fraud.
Here’s just <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/magazine/adhd-medication-treatment-research.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">one metric</a>, citing the MTA Study:
<blockquote>Children who took Ritalin for an extended period grew less quickly than the non-medicated children did. By the end of those 36 months, subjects who had consistently taken stimulant medication were, on average, more than an inch shorter than the ones who had never received medication. Many of the scientists in the M.T.A. group assumed that this height suppression in childhood would be temporary — that the shorter children would catch up during adolescence — but when data was collected again nine years after the initial experiment, the height gap remained. … Amphetamines can be powerfully addictive, and last year, a study in The American Journal of Psychiatry found that even a medium-strength daily dose of Adderall more than tripled a patient’s likelihood of developing psychosis or mania.</blockquote>
Yes, we have drastically increased the risk of permanently destroying children’s brains and bodies based entirely on junk science. And that’s just what The New York Times is willing to admit now. Give them another 20 years, and they’ll tell you all about the effects that amphetamines have on the heart, as well. All of this data already exists, of course. They’re just refusing to tell you about it.
To be fair, there is one study that the Times cites that’s actually recent. Here’s the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/magazine/adhd-medication-treatment-research.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">groundbreaking insight</a> that the new “MTA” study has uncovered:
<blockquote>Last October, the M.T.A. group published a new study that explored how A.D.H.D. symptoms in M.T.A. participants changed over the course of their childhood and young adulthood. In contrast to the categorical model of A.D.H.D. — you either have it or you don’t — the researchers showed that for most subjects, their symptoms and level of impairment in fact fluctuated over the years, often quite substantially. Only about 11 percent of the children who entered the study with an A.D.H.D. diagnosis experienced the symptoms consistently year after year.</blockquote>
This is something you don’t need an “MTA group” or a controlled, high-budget study to realize. Any parent could have told you this. Anyone with common sense could have told you this.
Everyone — whether they have children or not — intuitively understands that children go through phases. We don’t need to administer psychoactive drugs every time they go through a phase we don’t like. And we all know that it didn’t really take decades for leading scientific experts to come to this conclusion. They knew it all along. But they had a financial incentive to say otherwise. Only now that the situation has devolved into total absurdity — now that we’re supposed to pretend that 25% of teenagers suffer from this diagnosis — are some of these experts finally telling the truth.
They’re also finally admitting that, in reality, the cure for ADHD is simply doing things that are interesting. That’s it. It turns out that, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/magazine/adhd-medication-treatment-research.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according to the Times</a>, ADHD patients suddenly lost their symptoms when they started doing things that actually interested them:
<blockquote>A hairstylist told the researchers that her inability to concentrate in school vanished when she began studying hair.. … A young man who was training to be an auto technician said that in his new career, his A.D.H.D. was no longer an issue. … Patients’ symptoms tended to improve, rather than worsen, during times of higher ‘environmental demands’ — periods of more responsibility and busier schedules. … Jobs or college courses that were demanding and interesting helped alleviate their symptoms. And as their symptoms lifted, they changed the way they thought about themselves.</blockquote>
Imagine that. It turns out that people become bored when you talk to them about something they’re not interested in. And they become more engaged when you talk about things they find interesting. This is the cutting edge of the science on ADHD medication. They’re figuring out things that anyone with ten brain cells could have told you a long time ago. I have gone through this myself. I was a terrible student in school. I could have easily been diagnosed with ADHD if my parents wanted to go that route, which, thankfully, they didn’t. But even though I couldn’t complete a school assignment to save my life, now, as an adult, I write the word count equivalent of two or three chapters of a book every single week while preparing for my show. I also read all the time and enjoy learning new things. What accounts for the change? Did my “ADHD” wear off? No, for one thing, I grew older and became more mature and more disciplined. For another thing, I enjoy what I do now and I’m interested in it. It’s not that complicated. But the medical field has treated it that way for decades.
This whole thing has obviously become something of a pattern in the field of modern medicine. In the last few years we’ve learned — or at least, the people who hadn’t been paying close attention learned — that the chemical imbalance theory of depression was a lie, gender affirming care was a lie, the claim about how lockdowns wouldn’t hurt children was a lie, and now ADHD is a lie. At this point, you have to ask: Why would anyone trust the psychiatric industry ever again? These are not lies of little consequence. Millions of people, especially children, have been hurt.
The only winner in this process, as always, has been the pharmaceutical industry, which has convinced millions of parents to buy their drugs and medicalize a completely normal part of the human condition. These are all points that some of us have been making for years, even decades. We were shouted down as science deniers. Now we get the inevitable missive in some corporate media outlet unceremoniously announcing that the people they defamed and insulted were actually right all along.
That’s what this New York Times article amounts to. I get no pleasure out of reporting on it. I find it infuriating. All you can do, going forward, is to treat the self-described experts in the field of psychiatry with maximum contempt and skepticism, especially when they’re trying to convince you to drug yourself or your child. Just be prepared for the inevitable backlash that will follow when you don’t go along with the next wonder drug they’re pushing for you or your child. First, they’ll call you a science denier. Then, they’ll try to censor you on social media. And then, many years later, without giving away a dime of the money they’ve made from their fraud or suffering any consequences whatsoever, they’ll tell The New York Times that you were right all along.

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