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🇸🇪 Sweden /Health & Science

Questions Remain Over How ADHD Is Described

From Svenska Dagbladet · () Swedish

Translated from Swedish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Opinion Named sources Context piece
  • Psychiatrist Johan Bengtsson argues that ADHD should not be presented as a clearly defined hereditary neuropsychiatric disorder without stronger evidence.
  • He says attention depends on factors such as interest, alertness, noise, notifications and personal worries, making individual measurement difficult.
  • Bengtsson also questions the ethics of medicating children to reduce the risk of crime and calls for greater caution around pharmaceutical-industry research and conflicts of interest.

ADHD is a psychiatric diagnosis, but it is often treated as something more than that. Johan Bengtsson, a psychiatrist and postdoctoral researcher at Uppsala University, argues that the diagnosis has been marketed as a biological and hereditary disorder more clearly defined than the evidence allows.

Diagnoses can serve several purposes, including treatment, research, statistics, communication and the allocation of resources. But Bengtsson says ADHD has not been separated out as the distinct hereditary neuropsychiatric disorder it has been portrayed as. He welcomes Markus Heilig and other professors rejecting diagnoses as “things in themselves” and distinguishing clearly between findings at group level and findings at individual level.

things in themselves

· Markus Heilig and other professorsBengtsson cites their rejection of treating diagnoses as independent entities.

He also says the limitations of twin studies deserve public attention rather than remaining in the cautious wording of scientific papers. The word “hereditary”, he argues, needs more precise use because statements from people in white coats can influence people’s life choices and their understanding of their abilities. “I can’t” is, he writes, a common phrase among students diagnosed with ADHD.

I can’t

· Johan BengtssonHe gives the phrase as a common formulation among students diagnosed with ADHD.

Bengtsson challenges the idea that all human variation can simply be placed on a spectrum. Attention depends on interest, wakefulness, noise, intrusive push notifications and worries about issues such as personal finances or a child’s future. That context-dependent ability, he says, is poorly suited to being placed on a normal-distribution curve and described as having more or less of it.

He argues that this may frustrate neurobiological researchers seeking numerical measures, but it creates room for teachers to see the individual student and say, “You can, if we do it this way.” Bengtsson also questions whether professors should judge that a person’s life will be ruined because their functioning faltered at school. He says the risks described by the opposing debaters are social rather than medical, while evidence for medication largely rests on pharmaceutical companies’ own research. Two of the professors have declared conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry, he adds, making the case for caution stronger.

You can, if we do it this way.

· Johan BengtssonHe presents the kind of individualized response a teacher might offer a student.
About this summary

Originally published by Svenska Dagbladet in Swedish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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