Best Of 2025: The ‘Experts’ Are Finally Admitting That ADHD Is A Scam

Editor’s note: This week, we’re reprinting some of our best stories from the past year. In this piece, originally published in April, Matt Walsh dismantles the ADHD scam. *** At the risk of angering all the people who will scream from the rooftops that “correlation doesn’t equal causation,” like it’s some kind of Scriptural edict, here’s some data that’s worth considering. From 1980 to 2020, the share of male teachers, in both elementary and middle schools, declined from 40% to less than 20%. Men have mostly stopped teaching young children in school. And during this same period, as men have abandoned elementary schools, there’s coincidentally been another major change in childhood education: Everyone’s being diagnosed with ADHD. More than 21% of 14-year-old boys in this country now supposedly suffer from this condition. The number goes up to 23% for 17-year-old boys. As a result, prescriptions for drugs like Ritalin and Adderall have skyrocketed. From 2012 to 2022, the total number of prescriptions for stimulants to treat ADHD increased dramatically by nearly 60%. Boys between the ages of 10 to 14 were the demographic that saw the highest increase in these prescriptions. For decades, you’ve been instructed to believe there’s no significance to this correlation whatsoever. As women increasingly enter the workforce and replace men in teaching jobs, we’re not supposed to draw any conclusions about how the behavior of male children is now being addressed. The truth, we’ve been told, is not that a feminized education system has increasingly punished normal male behavior it doesn’t understand. It’s not that schools have lost their capacity to educate male students. It’s not that smartphone use and electronics in general have become distractions teachers have been unable to control. Instead, we’ve been led to believe that, in truth, boys have suddenly become afflicted with a severe psychological disorder. There’s no objective, biologically-based test for this disorder, nor can anyone point to a specific gene or pathogen that might cause it. But the scientific consensus, for many years now, has nevertheless been clear: ADHD, they’ve said again and again, is real. And the way to treat it is to give children “speed,” in the form of drugs like Ritalin. As I’ve said repeatedly, for over a decade, the science behind the theory of ADHD isn’t simply underbaked or inadequate. It’s comically useless, to the point that it’s obviously fraudulent. To give just one of many examples, a few years ago, researchers at the University of Central Florida conducted a grand experiment where they put a child in front of a computer. Here’s what it looked like: The researchers showed a child two separate videos. One of the videos was about mathematics, and it involved a teacher talking about basic addition, subtraction, and multiplication. The other video was the pod-racing scene from “Star Wars.” And, as you can see from the videos, the child became bored during the math lecture. He starts spinning in his chair and fidgeting. On the other hand, when the child...

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