Meanings and causes in ADHD

Abstract

Comments on an article by S. Timimi and Eric Taylor. Eric Taylor dismisses Sami Timimi's critique of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as an oversimplified polemic. He admits he may have been biased because he viewed it as an antipsychiatry tract. I find it unfortunate that the threat of 'antipsychiatry' means that a serious attempt does not appear to have been made to resolve the controversy surrounding ADHD. Is there a dispute about the facts as well as their interpretation? For example, it is not clear whether brain differences have been shown in unmedicated children, with the protagonists stating opposite views. Professor Taylor makes various statements, again with the authority of this textbook chapter, which seem to need further clarification. There is surely an onus on Professor Taylor to justify his response to Dr Timimi's challenge that the medical model of ADHD 'offers a decontextualised and simplistic idea that leads to all of us - parents, teachers and doctors - disengaging from our social responsibility to raise well-behaved children'. One way of viewing the ADHD controversy is that Dr Timimi is more concerned about the meaning rather than the physical cause of the disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)