I suck at giving writing advice.

Lately, the writer’s block devil has been really staring into my soul, stealing seemingly all the words I’ve learned over the past 20 years, making me try every odd trick in the book to brush him away. This includes writing articles, which I never thought I’d want to do. But the desire to write has lived inside for a while. One of the most embarrassing videos of me out there is when I, at 6-years-old, opened up a makeshift book in my living room and announced, “These are my stories,” before reading aloud ten pages of a book I’d written on a Sunday afternoon.

I hate that. I wish I’d learnt when I was older.

Now I have to wrench every reason for my writing quirks, and my skill, and my ability from my brain with devastating effort. They came about during a period I can’t even remember. To be frank, some of the writing advice I remember the most came from a class in Year 6.

So when I actually do realise what I’m doing when writing, I have to note it down like I’m a student learning from my brain, the lecturer, who’s clicking past the slides with incomprehensible speed. This is what this article is, I suppose.

The thing is, I didn’t receive this advice. I saw it somewhere — maybe on Instagram, maybe on Pinterest, maybe on Tumblr — and realised that’s what I’ve been doing all along without hope of change. I don’t even remember the post, and for the life of me, I can’t seem to find it again. I presume it’s something that appears one day and doesn’t leave, if you’re like me and started writing at a young age. But if there’s anyone out there who’s curious, or learning later on, then I’d love to share.

I give my readers, and sometimes characters, an expectation. Then I douse that in a sour dose of reality. This doesn’t just go for an overall plot point, but for every scene, conversation, even minor thought. It doesn’t have to be a 180 shift from expectation to reality, but something as little as the colour lavender shifting to periwinkle can do the trick.

The best thing about this is that it creates an expectation in itself. The reader begins to expect the shift to reality, so when the expectation, most often set up at the very beginning of the story, is confirmed right at the final moment, when all plot comes to a head, one may receive a standing ovation for something as obvious as… allowing a reader their moment of satisfaction.

What use is Chekhov’s Gun if the reader expects the trope to be used for the millionth time?

Let’s say a character tells a lie at the beginning of a book, a lie that their love interest, or friend, or even antagonist, believes but the reader doesn’t. At once, the reader expects that lie to be revealed and for it to change the entire story. Maybe even have your character expect it, too. But hold your fire.

This is where the reckoning between expectation and reality can begin. Have that party go awry, have a character lose a winning battle, have the very worst thing that could ever happen to them become a fond memory. Expect the night to go wonderfully, then have it crash, then build it back from its pieces into a completely new belief. Let there be moments within the story where the reader knows a character’s expectation will be let down for the twentieth time, and have that create tension. This tension will inevitably be lost somewhere along the way, wherein the expectation of reality becomes the expectation itself.

The lie is revealed here.

(picture from Pinterest)

UK’s popular broadcasting channel, Channel 4, has announced an upcoming documentary called The Great ADHD Myth? This will “seek to determine whether ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental disorder or a social construct” and poses the question: “While traits of ADHD undeniably exist – the question is why they exist. Is ADHD actually a neurodevelopmental disorder? Do people with ADHD have differently wired brains? Or does our world … serve as the catalyst for certain…patterns of behaviour?”

After reading this announcement, I rolled my eyes and kept scrolling — another misconception that I refuse to think hard about lest I spiral into how the group who are secretly and shamefully the most excited about social constructs are, yet again, the ones slapping the label onto things they find uncomfortable. However, it lingered as soon as I closed my laptop, and so did the emails from Substack begging me to make my first article.

Turns out I still hope I can make sense of how the world has evolved in seeing neurodiverse individuals due to social media and a moral panic pin-wheeling through everybody, be it adolescents on X, or your grandad at the pub. And although my psychology lecturers decided ADHD was worth skipping over on their clinical psych curriculum, my personal stake in the subject of neurodivergence lives on, exacerbated by interesting takes such as:

It is certainly not a medical condition as far as I’m concerned.

We’ve replaced corporal punishment with giving [children] a pill.

No, these takes are not taken from niche, uninformed forums on Reddit and Facebook, or from people who spend their lives away from neurodiverse children. The former quote is from Dr Iona Heath, Former President of the Royal College of General Practitioners. The latter is from Dr Sami Timimi, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist. (Both from the Channel 4 article.)

Ignoring that corporal punishment was effectively banned in schools in 1987, making it at least 3 decades before the supposed outbreak of ADHD diagnosis in children, it astounds me that people who have dedicated years of their lives to the study of psychology compare physical abuse of children to prescribed medication aimed at helping them function in a society that fails to accommodate them.

My instant thought was that, no matter how objective they claim to be, there is only one answer they’re interested in hearing. An answer that can be discovered by reading the title alone. Even if the conclusion is nuanced, prefaced by a disclaimer of “we don’t wish to alienate people with ADHD”, you and I know full well that the it’s not real crowd will have their fill anyway. A narrative of fear may further infect the neurodiverse medical field.

Furthermore, it is interesting that the Channel 4 article conveniently leaves out a fact about the chief documentarian and NHS psychiatrist, Max Pemberton. He is also a columnist for the Daily Mail. He’s the editor of Spectator Health magazine, and previously wrote for the Daily Telegraph.

His column frequently aims at ADHD and the individuals with it. For example:

It’s easy to see the appeal in seeking a diagnosis if it means you don’t have to put in the same effort and commitment as your colleagues.

Wow, sounds like an objective psychiatrist.

Naturally, there is another side to this argument which I can’t help but acknowledge. Part of being a psychologist is looking at an explanation — in this case, an ADHD diagnosis — through a question of what other possible factors there could be for a certain behaviour. Perhaps this is what Pemberton innocently seeks, without denying the struggles people with an ADHD diagnosis have. In his words:

There's no doubt that the people seeking these diagnoses are genuinely struggling; that isn't in question. What the film asks is whether ADHD is really the best explanation for that struggle and my hope is that we come away with permission to ask better questions about what modern life is doing to all of us.

However, as I’ve argued before, Pemberton’s claims simply aren’t what the world needs. What I find most worrying is whether the blatant misinformation in his other articles will make another appearance, this time in a documentary viewed by even more people with their cherry-picking, selectively biased minds at the ready. In particular, I am referring to the idea that ADHD is over-diagnosed in the UK:

Research suggests that far from being under-diagnosed in children, ADHD is now being wildly over-diagnosed — and that is actually dangerous.

Powerful, definitive words. Also words that a quick Google search can disprove.

With all fear-mongering wiped away, ADHD is widely considered by experts and health data to be under-diagnosed in children and adults in the UK. I’m interested to see what type of “research” Pemberton is referring to here, when standard studies show that 3-5% of individuals have ADHD but GP and NHS tracking figures identify only a fraction of that. While misdiagnoses can occur within the private and public sector (as with any condition, might I add), studies suggest that under-diagnosis and a poor knowledge of treatment remain the primary issues to address. Interestingly, time-trends studies have shown no increase in the population rate of ADHD over time, although identification has increased.

I can’t speak for what this documentary will contain, but I expect it will conveniently gloss over the fact that ADHD is disproportionately under-recognised in young girls compared to young boys, and that families face severe waiting lists for assessments in the NHS pathway.

As with much clinical psychological research, a conclusion that there is a singular, definite cause for a mental illness or a neurodevelopmental disorder doesn’t exist unless you take a purely biological approach. Even then, things are cloudy 99.9999% of the time (not a real statistic). It frequently runs in families, genetics accounting for roughly 70-80% of the risk. Neuroimaging reveals differences in brain regions managing attention, impulse control, and motion. Imbalances involving dopamine — a hormone regulating motivation and reward — have also been strongly suggested to play a central role. Other environmental factors can contribute to the phenotype of ADHD, such as early childhood adversity, maternal smoking/drug use, and low birth weight, but these are recognised to interact with the biological prerequisite, rather than cause traits entirely.

So my question is why? If the consensus on ADHD from professional research is that it is under-diagnosed, and primarily caused by biological factors, why do we need a documentary widening the divide between neurodivergent and neurotypical people? Not just that, but why is this kind of thing so goddamn compelling? What are the real reasons for such a virile debate? What can we do about it? Instead of creating moral panic and lending the “concerned” a perpetual supply of people to other, how can we prioritise making things better so we can function better as a society as a whole?

What ADHD is and why people doubt it:

A common stereotype of ADHD is that those with it are constantly distracted and procrastinate getting tasks done. This view is in part due to the name of the disorder, which highlights the attention-deficit aspect rather than the characteristic that Russell Barkley, PhD, argues should have more emphasis in the field: self-regulation.

Some of my favourite quotes from Barkley give me hope that there are psychologists out there who deeply understand ADHD as a whole, rather than focus on the headline-catchy parts:

ADHD is not about knowing what to do, but about doing what one knows.

ADHD is not an attention disorder. It is a blindness to the future.

The children who need love the most will always ask for it in the most unloving ways.

In his model, behavioural inhibition is the foundational control tower that disrupts the “now” and affects our core executive mental abilities: non-verbal working memory, verbal working memory, self-regulation of emotion, self-motivation, and reconstitution (planning/problem solving). Key concepts in his theory include time blindness (struggling to use past experiences or future concepts to influence current actions), deficient emotional self-regulation (omitted from the current DSM-5), and developmental delay (lag in maturity/self-control).

I can hardly blame the uninformed public for believing that ADHD is just “laziness” when narratives from popular media outlets are okaying narratives pushing the idea that ADHD isn’t a neural difference beyond attention-deficits.

ADHD is not just poor behaviour and attention problems in class. It is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects how the brain regulates our motivation, working memory, and self-management. In practical terms, that can mean starting tasks feels almost impossible, and sustaining one’s attention requires far more effort than it seems to for other people. The difference between a behavioural issue and ADHD is consistency between situations, whether it causes the individual significant distress, and whether it persists over time.

People without ADHD will inevitably have a limited worldview about what it feels like, though, as self-conscious humans, we would rather not admit this is the case, especially us with a background in psychology. Many individuals with it try extremely hard, often harder than others realise, to function while dealing with a brain that hates initiating tasks. Viewers of this Channel 4 documentary likely have already decided the problem with ADHD is a lack of effort, when in reality, it’s the cost of effort. Which is why more misinformation to fuel this mindset is completely unnecessary.

I therefore believe that a big part of the confusion starts with how ADHD looks from the outside. People imagine that if something is “real”, then it should come with a clean, obvious test: a simple yes-or-no answer.

ADHD doesn’t work like that. Thorough knowledge of the individual’s symptoms and their developmental history is needed for a diagnosis, making it easier for sceptics to dismiss it as subjective and speculate about whether diagnosing it at all is valid.

Plenty of real medical conditions are identified through thorough observation and individualistic conversations rather than one perfect laboratory marker. The absence of a single magic test does not mean the absence of a genuine disorder. Medicine can be messy because human beings are messy.

One thing I’ve observed in these “ADHD isn’t real” arguments is the point that its symptoms overlap with everyday human experience too often. “Everyone forgets things! Everyone gets distracted! Everyone procrastinates! Everyone has days where focus feels hard, you silly Gen Z!”

Aside from the fact that these people probably just hate the idea of relating to people with neurodevelopmental disorders, a sense of familiarity with the symptoms makes them easier to trivialise. Again, individuals without ADHD — especially ones who don’t spend regular time with someone who has it — can easily fall into the trap of believing it’s a common experience, that someone is using ADHD as an excuse. I do find it interesting that, often, it is the parents of children with undiagnosed ADHD who tell them they also experienced these issues when they were at school (during the 80s or 90s, when diagnosis focused solely on hyperactive boys), and somehow that means their child… doesn’t have it? Read: a 70-80% heritability factor, hello?

ADHD is not about these occasional lapses in behaviour, however. The difference between everyday human experiences and ADHD is not whether the behaviour exists at all, but how often it happens, how intense it is, and how much damage it can cause to daily life. I’m curious whether Pemberton, as a psychiatrist and journalist, has sought to delve deeper into why a case might be explained by ADHD rather than focusing on why it might not. If someone did the latter for my Autistic traits, then who knows, I might be masking it into oblivion to this very day.

If you’re reading this with ADHD, then you probably recognise how much you struggle with deadlines, your routines and organisation, emotional regulation and self-control in ways that affect school, work, relationships, and your self-esteem. And people telling you that it’s something everyone else struggles with sometimes, and shouldn’t be treated or even medicated, can feel like a punch to the gut.

Why are these people telling you that you’re like everyone else, when all your life you’ve been taught to fit into their boxes? How can it be that everyone else struggles with these things when all you see are people begging you to stop “being lazy”?

The social construct argument

In the article’s title, ADHD is compared to a social construct.

What actually is a social construct?

The things you may think of first when given this phrase are probably gender, race, countries, etc. Social constructs are agreed upon by society as ways to describe and make sense of the world, and differ between cultures. Most importantly, these can change and develop over time as we humans evolve our understanding of ourselves. But you may be surprised to hear that I think the label “ADHD” is a social construct. Labels such as Autism, Non-binary, and Bisexuality are social constructs because they help us to describe and make sense of the world in a way society can understand.

Before you all click off, I want to add that just because these labels are social constructs doesn’t mean the concepts beneath aren’t real. For example, Autism is a real neurodevelopmental difference, but the label “Autism” comes with stereotypes, diagnosis criteria, history, etc.

Yes, diagnosis is influenced by society. Of course it is. Every medical category is shaped by how we decide what counts as illness, what counts as impairment, and what kinds of distress need different forms of help. No diagnosis exists entirely outside culture, because diagnosis is a system created by human psychologists, each with their own subjective biases and opinions shaped by society.

But something being shaped by society is not the same as it being imaginary. And evidence has suggested that ADHD rates are almost identical across different cultures, something that wouldn’t be seen if the condition itself was a social construct.

Medication Scary?

This distinction between a label and the real underlying issue is why I think fear around ADHD medication, in particular, so often goes off the rails. If someone believes the diagnosis is just a mislabel given to a certain type of behaviour, then medication inevitably starts to look like an unnecessary correction for normal childhood behaviour, and from there, it is easy to start panicking about giving out therapy or diagnosing at all. I argue that this fear is built on a fundamental misunderstanding about the following: a label doesn’t mean the impairment isn’t real and treatment should aim to improve functioning, not ask people to conform.

What makes this especially divisive is the fact that children are involved. “Protect the children!” is a phrase too often used — returning from the archaic anti-gay legislation from the 80s in the form of new discriminatory policies — to excuse and mask underlying agendas that I’d argue end up endangering children.

However, people are understandably protective when they hear the words “children” and “medication” in the same sentence. That protection can be useful when it leads to cautious prescribing and considering the child’s needs before and after medication. Where it becomes harmful is this kind of blanket suspicion, generalised by those already sceptical towards the idea of neurodivergence in the first place, as if any ADHD medication automatically means a child is being drugged for the convenience of an adult, rather than their own functioning.

In reality, medication is considered when it’s clear the child is already struggling with their impulsivity, frustration, emotional regulation, or daily routines. Those difficulties can compound over time if they are ignored. Therapy doesn’t work in the same way for individuals with ADHD as they do with those suffering from anxiety or depression. While it can certainly help, and this is in no way an anti-therapy article, extreme cases could need support like medication, or it can lead to worse outcomes for children with ADHD.

Yes, medication has risks, and yes, it should be monitored carefully. Isn’t that true, though, of nearly every effective medical treatment? The existence of side effects is not an argument against treatment; instead, it is an argument for its proper assessment and informed consent. Refusing treatment out of a vague cultural fear and a hope that it “might improve on its own” does not protect the child. It could leave them unsupported for years until they get a diagnosis as an adult anyway.

While the Channel 4 article suggests the documentary focuses on how we can shift a social construct, I’d argue that it may end up doing the opposite. A quicker fix than shifting all of society would be to ignore children with ADHD altogether, hoping it will ease things up for the neurotypical people around them instead.

Creating fear around medication for children quickly becomes its own form of harm. Maybe it’ll reduce some overreach, but in reality, what it’ll do is shame families with children who have ADHD. It’ll discourage parents from seeking assessment at all, and make children feel as though their struggles are embarrassing or illegitimate. Pushing the conversation towards someone’s ideology instead of what the evidence strongly suggests can’t happen when children’s self-esteem is already at stake.

The stronger argument is that support for ADHD, including medication and labelling the disorder, is not a scary overreaction. People should be cautious and informed. When caution takes a dip into fear, this rarely ever helps.

What is a diagnosis for?

A misunderstanding of what diagnosis can mean will garner fear around getting one for ADHD. Not everyone experiences a diagnosis the same way, nor will they feel the same about gaining one. But the narrative Channel 4 pushes is that a diagnosis is a label that permanently traps someone, or a declaration that a person is “other” and will be held back in life.

For me, however, a diagnosis is a tool for making sense of persistent difficulties so that I can understand them and respond to them properly. Without my own diagnosis, I felt I would be stuck in the unknown, wondering forever why I can’t function the way everyone else does. This, of course, isn’t the case for everybody. But neither is the case that a diagnosis is a trap-card:

I've watched ADHD go from a diagnosis that was only occasionally made and after careful assessment, to one that is increasingly demanded and dispensed…

I can readily say that a diagnosis of ADHD in recent times looks to Pemberton as something being “demanded” rather than something deemed necessary. Does he see people with ADHD as struggling individuals seeking help? Or does he see them as overly imposing, entitled, not fully justified in asking for support?

Again, we return to the truth: the target audience of this documentary thinks ADHD is just an excuse or a convenience issue, and believes diagnosis is something people want for validation rather than because they are struggling. Beneath all of that is a desire for people with ADHD to cope silently and not ask them, their doctors, or their families to adapt.

There seems to be a cruel double-bind here, unavoidable if this rhetoric continues to prevail in popular media: If a person seeks help, they are accused of being demanding. If they struggle at school or work, they are told to pull their socks up and get on with it. If they get assessed and receive a diagnosis, people imply they were influenced by trends. In other words, whatever they do, someone is ready to discredit it.

Fear-mongering against diagnoses also tends to ignore the long-term cost of refusing to make mistakes. Without any confidence in psychology’s ability to diagnose ADHD whatsoever, how can we ever make it better? Isn’t a better diagnosis system what we desire?

I believe the real issue is not whether one’s diagnosis is absolutely perfect. It is whether an individual deserves clarity about their own lives, and the answer to that has to be yes. A diagnosis isn’t for everyone, but it is often the first honest description of what has been difficult all along.

Why does this matter?

People who say ADHD is a social construct usually mean one of three things:

1. Our culture shapes diagnoses, but the underlying condition exists beyond culture.

2. ADHD is over-diagnosed in some contexts.

3. If I can’t see a disability, then it is illegitimate.

The first is a serious and defensible academic point, the second is a question of systems and policies that requires further evidence, and the third is not an argument at all. This is why the conversation gets so frustrating. People often collapse these very different claims into one vague suspicion that “ADHD is fake,” when what they actually mean is far less precise, though they’d prefer an option that makes the world easier to handle.

The most useful position to take in this situation is not “ADHD is a myth”, and it isn’t “a definition of ADHD doesn’t need reworking at all”, either. ADHD is a real neurodevelopmental disorder, but its expression is shaped by many factors. What the sceptics fail to realise is that this is not a weakness in the argument.

Real conditions do not exist in a vacuum. ADHD is a lived experience, something frustrating, exhausting, invisible, and deeply distressing at times. It can be mocked, reduced to a punchline. But people with it can also be creative, tenacious, and empathetic.

When ADHD is treated like a trend, people who need help will get dismissed, even if they are the most “ideal” patients with ADHD you’ve ever seen. People who are drawn to a documentary calling ADHD a myth will selectively pick out what backs up their views. People who have spent years wrestling with symptoms will be told, in effect, that their experience is suspicious, even if they know it isn’t. People with ADHD with internalised prejudice towards their own disorder will spiral further into self-hatred and denial.

Calling ADHD a “myth” is not bold; it is not truth-telling. In our current climate — where neurodivergent people are being told they’re faking or deserve to be eradicated — we do not need another tactless take to add to the onslaught we are already facing.

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Welcome to a space for the things in my brain I keep coming back to:

• Psychology

• Creative writing

• Fandom

• Internet culture

• Whatever else has grabbed my attention enough to motivate me

I’m just starting on here, but for your information, I tend to be interested in how people think and connect, whether that shows up in a psychological idea, a story I’m working on, or a fandom rabbit hole that reveals more about human behaviour than it first seems to. Some posts here will be reflective, some will be more analytical, and some will just be me thinking out loud about something that caught my eye.

I’m also hoping, eventually, to make my way into the publishing industry somehow, so this space is part writing practice, part portfolio, and part attempt to figure out what kind of writer I want to be. That probably means a mix of essays, observations, and pieces that don’t fit neatly into one box.

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