The Great ADHD Myth? A Response

All about the “The Great ADHD Myth” as aired on Channel 4. Has anyone ever told you that depression is a social construct? Or cancer, for that matter?

Read on, because by the end we’ll have discovered that both are social constructs, both are myths, and both are real. Stay with me.

Is mental health a myth?

Channel 4’s documentary The Great ADHD Myth? put the question on a lot of living-room sofas: is ADHD a genuine neurodevelopmental disorder, or a social construct? By the end of the programme, its presenter, the NHS psychiatrist Dr Max Pemberton, had reached his answer. As reported by LBC (2026), he concluded that ADHD is a social construct rather than a disorder of the brain. (In fairness, Channel 4 has said the programme does not deny the lived experience of people diagnosed with ADHD (LBC, 2026), and concerns about prescribing deserve a proper hearing.)

Notice how the title and that conclusion fit together. “Myth” and “social construct” are placed on one side, and “real” is placed on the other, as though you must pick a team.

That quiet little leap in logic is the thing worth examining. It’s a false dichotomy: the assumption that if something is socially constructed, it can’t be real. It’s also what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle would have called a category mistake, where a claim about how a concept was built is treated as a claim about whether the thing exists.

What do we actually mean by “social construct”?

Social constructionism asks how we come to know and categorise the world. Berger and Luckmann (1966) argued that much of what we take for granted as reality is built and maintained through shared human understanding. Our categories for understanding people, in other words, are shaped by history and culture rather than simply read off nature.

Crucially, “constructed” doesn’t mean “imaginary”. Searle (1995) showed that money, marriage and property are socially constructed institutional facts, yet nobody doubts that a mortgage is real. Hacking (1999) made the same point from another angle: calling something socially constructed is the beginning of an inquiry, not a verdict that it doesn’t exist.

Every diagnosis is a social construct

Here is the part that tends to raise eyebrows. Every diagnosis is constructed in this sense. Depression is defined by criteria agreed by committees and published in manuals such as the DSM and the ICD. Those criteria have been revised over the decades and will be revised again.

Cancer is no different in structure. Humans decided which cellular changes to group together, what to name them and where the thresholds lie. That doesn’t make tumours imaginary, and it doesn’t make the suffering any less real.

So the honest question isn’t, “is ADHD a social construct?” The answer is yes, in the same way that everything in diagnostic medicine is. The more interesting question is: why is that label used to discredit ADHD, but not depression, diabetes or cancer?

None of this means the evidence is irrelevant. An international consensus statement endorsed by the World Federation of ADHD summarised a large body of research supporting ADHD as a valid disorder (Faraone et al., 2021). There are legitimate, ongoing debates about diagnostic thresholds, over- and under-diagnosis, and treatment, and critics such as Thomas Szasz have long challenged the very notion of mental illness. Those are debates worth having openly. They are different from the move that says “constructed, therefore fake”.

What is a myth, really?

Part of the problem is that, in everyday speech, “myth” has come to mean “falsehood”. (“Five myths about breakfast.”) That isn’t what the word means in the traditions that have studied it most closely.

In depth psychology, in the study of religion and in the arts, a myth is a story a culture tells to carry something true that plain description can’t hold. The historian of religion Mircea Eliade saw myth as a narrative of how a reality came into being, one that gives meaning to those who live by it. Jung saw myths and symbols as expressions of deep patterns in the psyche, which is why similar images recur across cultures that never met.

You don’t need any particular belief to recognise this. A poem can say something true about grief that a medical definition of grief never will. A painting can hold an experience of fear or longing without a single fact in it. A story told around a fire, or a spiritual practice, can orient a person in the world whether or not they take it literally. Imagination is not the opposite of truth. It is one of the ways we reach it.

In my own practice, I welcome conversations about spirituality, art and meaning, and I respect whatever place they hold in a client’s life. That isn’t about endorsing any one belief. It’s because the stories people live by are part of how they make sense of their experience, and ignoring that would leave out something real.

So when a documentary titles itself with “myth” and a question mark, it’s worth asking which meaning is doing the work. If it’s the everyday one, “fabricated”, the title quietly settles the question before the argument begins. If it’s the older one, a story through which a culture makes sense of experience, then calling ADHD a myth isn’t an accusation. It’s a starting point for asking what the story is telling us.

The modernist assumption behind the documentary

Underneath the title sits an older assumption about knowledge. Modernism, as a way of thinking, holds that there are absolute truths about the world that exist independently of us, and that careful enough investigation will uncover them. Applied to diagnosis, this produces a very particular test: a condition is only “real” if it can be matched cleanly to something objective and observer-independent, like a broken bone on an X-ray. If it can’t, then it must be an invention.

Notice what that test does. It treats the only legitimate kind of reality as the kind that exists with no human framing at all. Anything shaped by language, culture or agreement gets filed under “not really there”. By that standard, ADHD fails, but so would depression, anxiety, and in the end most of medicine, since every diagnosis involves human decisions about where to draw the lines.

Postmodern thought, including social constructionism, questions the test itself. The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard described the postmodern condition as an incredulity towards grand metanarratives: the overarching stories that claim to explain everything from a single, authoritative standpoint. Social constructionism isn’t saying that nothing is real. It’s saying our access to reality is always mediated by language, culture and shared agreements, so we can’t step outside them to check a diagnosis against “pure” reality.

That’s what I mean by saying the question presupposes the modernist framework. “Is ADHD real or a construct?” only makes sense if you already accept that real and constructed are opposites, and that only the first deserves to be taken seriously. Once you question that assumption, the question dissolves, and a better one takes its place.

So, is ADHD a myth?

Yes, in the richest sense of the word: a way a culture tells the story of a pattern of human experience. Yes, it’s a social construct, like depression and like cancer. And it’s real, in that people live with it, are shaped by it, and are helped or harmed by how we respond to it.

Which brings us to the better question for any documentary to ask. Not as “The Great ADHD Myth” would ask, “is it real?” but “what do we do with a reality we have had to name for ourselves?”

This is where the real work lies, and it’s also where the concerns behind a programme like this one are worth taking seriously. Many people are uneasy about how readily medication is reached for. They worry about prescribing rates, about people being offered a prescription before anyone has taken the time to understand their story, and about the effects of long-term use that someone never fully weighed up. Others have lived with the consequences first-hand. Those concerns are legitimate, and they deserve a proper hearing, not a dismissal.

But notice the move that often follows: if over-medication is the problem, then the diagnosis must be the culprit, and if the diagnosis is a construct, it can be waved away. That logic doesn’t hold. A real, constructed category can be applied too quickly, treated too narrowly, or handed a solution that doesn’t fit the person. The remedy for that is better practice, not the denial that the experience exists.

There’s a cost on the other side as well. Telling people that their lifelong struggles with attention, organisation and emotional regulation are “a myth” can leave them feeling dismissed, and can stop them from seeking help that might genuinely make a difference. And for many people the right support isn’t a single thing: understanding, practical strategies, relationships and, for some, medication, all decided with a prescriber who knows them. Those decisions belong between a person and their doctor, not in a documentary.

So what do we do with a reality we have had to name for ourselves? We hold the name lightly and the person firmly. We ask what the label is for, whom it helps and whom it might harm, and we stay curious about the person behind it. That is a harder conversation than “myth or not”, but it’s a far more honest one.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you wonder about ADHD in your life.

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References

Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Faraone, S.V. et al. (2021) ‘The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 evidence-based conclusions about the disorder’, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 128, pp. 789–818.

Hacking, I. (1999) The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

LBC (2026) British ADHD charity hits back at Channel 4 documentary, saying condition ‘is not a myth’. Available at: https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/british-adhd-charity-hits-back-at-channel-4-documentary-condition-not-myth-5HjdgKn_2/(Accessed: 8 October 2026).

Searle, J.R. (1995) The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press.