ADHD is the disorder du jour. It’s the most coveted diagnosis of our time. The middle classes in particular crave the ADHD label, because who wants to go to a dinner party these days without having some vogue ailment to boast about? There is now concern – finally! – that ADHD is being overdiagnosed. The Times reports that 278,000 people in England are on ‘central nervous system stimulants’ – yikes – to treat their ADHD. There was an 18 per cent hike in prescriptions for ADHD drugs between April 2023 and March 2024, and now nearly five in every thousand people in England are being treated for the condition. Man that’s a lot of annoying people.

The Economist is worried, too. Last year it got the fashionably disordered middle classes choking on their pills when it said ‘ADHD should not be treated as a disorder’. Its reasoning was solid: much of the stuff we bundle up as ‘ADHD’ is just ‘ordinary human traits’, it said. It’s so true. Who among us has not at some point felt impulsive, disorganised, agitated? We’re not sick, we’re having a bad week. No one benefits from the pathologisation of life’s ups and downs. Aside from Big Pharma, that is. As a writer for Scientific American said back in 2016, ADHD feels like a ‘manufactured epidemic’. Drug companies have ‘massive financial incentives’, he said, to convince people they’re unhinged and need drugs. One wonders if Scientific American would publish a piece like that today.

The ADHD epidemic, like all faux disorders, started in the US. They’ve been drugging kids there for years. Seven million American kids – that’s 11.4 per cent of them – are said to have ADHD. Many are being pumped with Ritalin and other calming drugs. The sedation of a generation – it’s crazy. As one sceptical psychiatrist wrote in the New York Times a few years back, this ‘drugging of children’ is the really scary ‘epidemic’. We are using stimulants to ‘[suppress] all spontaneous behavior in normal children’, he said. Aldous Huxley called – he wants his storyline back.

How striking that this explosion in the drugging of children coincided with the crisis of discipline in family and school life. It seems to me that medication was brought in to do what adults were increasingly reluctant to do: make kids sit still and shut up. And now these ill-disciplined brats have become ill-disciplined adults. As someone from Gen X (the last sane generation), I remember fidgeting and overtalking being severely reprimanded. At school, at the dinner table, at Mass, you twitched and chatted at your peril. Even random old men on the bus would tell us to shut the fuck up. No doubt millennials and Gen Z think this sounds tyrannical, but at least we don’t need drugs to get through a 20-minute work meeting. The West’s millions of ‘ADHD adults’ don’t need medication – they need a time machine so they can go back and beg their bourgeois parents to discipline them better.

Just make sure that time machine has got a digital, not analog clock: Schools are removing analogue clocks from exam halls as teenagers ‘cannot tell the time.’