April 16, 2025Since its publication last Sunday, The New York Times Magazine article “Have We Been Thinking About ADHD All Wrong?” has been called provocative and controversial.
We would like to add a few adjectives: misrepresentative, biased, and dangerous. In his 8,800-word article, writer Paul Tough used cherry-picked bits of decades-old data, very small studies, and interviews with three patients (all men) to exhume long-debunked ideas about ADHD and its treatment with prescription stimulant medication.
Tough dismissed the lifelong work of esteemed ADHD researcher Russell Barkley, Ph.D., and suggested that the diagnosis of ADHD was “arbitrary” because it relies not on a biomarkers or genetic tests, but on a trained clinician’s careful review of patients’ self-reported and observed symptoms in several settings.
To be clear, identifiable biomarkers do not yet exist for many psychiatric, neurodevelopmental, and neurodegenerative disorders.