The BBC’s flagship current affairs show Panorama is often, though not always, a decent watch. On Monday 15th May, the episode is titled False Diagnosis: The ADHD scandal. Here’s the corporation’s heads-up:
The author and comedian Nick Pettigrew picked the story up on twitter and gave his feelings thus: “Fuck, and I can’t emphasise this enough, you.” He goes on, first in the voice of a reporter: “I lied to a doctor who was acting in good faith and they came to a diagnosis based on my lies”. Well done, you fucking hump. You just made loads of people’s lives more difficult. And he’s right. Everything about the trailer is wrong on so many levels. Allow me to explain.
“There has been a sharp increase in the number of adults who think they have ADHD.” I hope Panorama has some kind of evidence to back this up because, speaking personally, this was not my experience. I realise what follows is recycled material, but there you go. My entire life has been racked by mental health issues, mainly clinical depression. I’m sorry if this sounds self-pitying but my depression is a life destroyer. But there was, I hadn’t realised, something else going on, an underlying condition that had never been picked up, never mind assessed. Sometime in the last decade, GPs, therapists and a forensic psychiatrist suggested to me there might be something else going on. They all suggested ADHD, some suggested Asperger’s and one, the forensic psychiatrist, felt I had elements of PTSD lasting from a troubled childhood. I did not “think (I had) ADHD“, I was referred to the local NHS ADHD assessors. The waiting list for an assessment was at first four years but it gradually increased to six or seven. I made the reluctant and difficult decision to seek a private assessment. On 24th January 2023, my assessment took place and the diagnosis was I had moderate to severe ADHD. I had always had it.
Reporter Rory Carson clearly lied through his teeth to get an assessment, to obtain powerful drugs and uncovering “evidence suggesting that diagnoses are being handed out to almost everyone who books an appointment.” Well, I didn’t lie through my teeth and was scrupulously honest, sometimes asking my assessor to be more specific about certain questions so I could be sure I was giving the correct answer. I had done some basic research on my possible condition and numerous on-line tests which all suggested I had ADHD, but I approached the actual assessment with an open mind. Why on Earth would I want to obtain a diagnosis that wasn’t true? What possible benefit would there be to that?
I’ll need to watch Panorama to see where this all ends, but there are some things that strike me straight away. They are:
- The suggestion that people – like me? – think they have ADHD and we have overwhelmed the NHS. We’re almost be regarded as if it’s some kind of fad. It isn’t.
- Because the NHS has been overwhelmed, we’re all going private. It’s been overwhelmed only because the NHS service is inadequate (to say the least).
- All you need to do is pay for an assessment and you will get a diagnosis. “Handed out” is the crude term Panorama uses
- These private providers are handing out powerful drugs with no real thought of the possible effects. I concede there may be something in this. I was recommended certain drugs to deal with my ADHD and my GP threw his hands up in horror, metaphorically speaking.
I have no doubt that there are plenty more private ADHD assessors than there used to be. Hopefully, Panorama will provide actual facts and figures and, just as importantly, put them in some kind of context. Has there really been an explosion of people “who think they have ADHD“, which implies that this is some kind of fad, but why you want to pretend to have a neurological cognitive disability? Given the choice, I’d rather not have it, in the same way that I’d rather not have clinical depression. No one ever says, “Oh, I so wish I had cancer” yet apparently it’s perfectly okay to suggest someone with a mental illness or a cognitive disability would say they’d like to be mentally challenged. In my best Christopher Hitchens voice, I call “NON-SENSE” to that.
I leave the almost final words to Nick Pettigrew who concludes: “There’s a documentary to be made about the chronic lack of funding for ADHD treatment and how that’s forced people to seek private care. This is not that.” There is a chronic lack of funding for the entire NHS after 13 years of Conservative misrule with over seven million people now waiting for treatment. In 2010, despite the effects of the worldwide financial crash, NHS waiting lists after 13 years of a Labour government were virtually non existent. This is literally a problem created by Rishi Sunak and his predecessors David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Trust, a crisis made in 10 Downing Street. And mental health services have been ravaged to the extent that nothing exists beyond six weeks of initial counselling and being sectioned. If your GP suspects you may have a neurological cognitive disability, bad luck with that one.
I’ll watch Panorama in the hope that the journalism is more objective than the preview suggests because if it isn’t this will be a massive kick in the teeth, or should I say head, for those of us who lives have been ravaged by a whole range of conditions. And it will do far more harm than good.
