God Awful Movies - 577: The Great ADHD Myth?

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

This week, Dr. Alice and Marsh join us to debunk a homicidally misguided Channel 4 "documentary" about ADHD.Check out more from Dr. Alice on Skeptics with a KCheck out more from Marsh on Skeptics with a K and the Know Rogan ExperienceIf you’d like to make a per episode donation and get monthly bonus episodes, please check us out on Patreon: http://patreon.com/godawfulCheck out our other shows, The Scathing Atheist, The Skepticrat, Citation Needed, and D&D Minus.Our theme music is written and performed by Ryan Slotnick of Evil Giraffes on Mars. If you’d like to hear more, check out their Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EvilGiraffesOnMars/Report instances of harassment or abuse connected to this show to the Creator Accountability Network here: https://creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org/

So this is where we get our title card. The Great ADHD Myth, question mark? That question mark at the end. I think the question mark at the end of that title is the not touching can't get mad of documentary title. We didn't say it was a myth. We asked a question whether it was a myth. You technically can't get us. And now we're going to be introduced to the victim, sorry, subject of our documentary.

This is Miles. He is an eight-year-old. I think he's 10. 10-year-olds. He's also called Mason. He's called Mason. What are I called? We called them months.

Some British name. Whatever. There's like four of you. Awful. Movies. Welcome back to the Gamcast. Where each week we sample another selection from Christian cinema because sometimes the greatest religion is the religion of believing true things.

I'm your host, Eli Bosnick, and sitting 3,311 miles or 5,328 kilometers to my immediate left is my good friend Michael Marshall. Marsh, welcome back. Thank you so much. I appreciate your efforts to make me feel welcome by converting the units into a measure of distance. We do not use in this country. We don't really use kilometers. We do not use kilometers. Had I been on mainstream Europe, this would have been a delightfully welcoming introduction to me.

Bathams? Horse hands? Do you guys have hordes? We use hectares, which is a measure of area, but somehow we make it work. Pounds. I should have done pounds. Damn it. Stupid. And that delightful laugh you just heard is 11 inches to Marsh's right. They live really close to each other. Returning guest masochist, who we promise does not have to watch anyone pee in their mouth this week. Dr. Alice Howeth. Hello, thank you very much for having me.

It's very fun to be back. Yes. So, my friends, this, it's rare here on Godawful movies that I get to blame someone else for the movie that we were watching. But I am pleased to say that not one but both of our guest massacus, came up with the movie this week. So I am blameless and new, like a fallen snow, as always. So tell us, Marsh, what will we be breaking down today? We watched the great ADHD myth, question mark.

It is the mainstream British television documentary that was made and broadcast by the highly prestigious Channel 4 that asks, what if every single expert who ever actually studied ADHD was wrong and the people that were right all along were the ones who liked leaving positive comments on Kathleen Stock's substack. Okay, I know that's a deep, deep cut

on people who follow Kathleen Stock, but it's a great one. You should follow Kathleen Stock Substack just so that you can get that joke. And Alice, how bad was this movie? Okay, before I answer that question, Eli, I want to say, I have watched this movie twice now, once for Skeptics with a K, where I use it as the basis for a rant on how disabled people are being attacked, both in the UK and globally, and now again for your show.

And I think for a progressive show, it is quite ironic that apparently you have no qualms whatsoever with torturing me, a disabled person, for your own amusement. It's true. It's true. It's time for us to sit back and listen and not speak. But in answer to your question, how bad was this movie, if you like experimenting on disabled children, you will love this movie. You yeah, there's a lot of, is broccoli good for you? What do you think, little Timmy, in this film? That really is. There really is. But it's true, that's exactly what it is,

if broccoli somehow would have, like, contributed to dictating this child's future and you are still fucking with it. Right. And somehow he was like broccoli vitamin deficient and the post and the fucking breakfast club close at the end is fucking Mason died of lack of broccoli. Speaking of which, is there anything?

You guys want to nominate this for being the best. of being the worst act. Yeah, I absolutely do. And it's not about Mason. I'm going to go with best worst collateral damage. Because as we'll get into it, we do run a torturous experiment on a kid with ADHD, but we also run the same experiment on his little brother for no clear reason.

Sure do. And this kid is just on the receiving end of shit the entire way through this. It's him that I think is really suffering here. Yeah, poor Miley, like justice for Miley. I'm sure at some point we'll talk about it. But every time they are demonstrating that Mason's behavior has gotten bad. It is him punching his little brother in the head. Yeah, absolutely. My best worst is it is the best worst example of a documentary maker who does not have ADHD. Honest, he really definitely

does not have ADHD. He is certain he does not have ADHD. Look, as the parent of a child with autism, I really try not to be that parent who tells people they have autism. This guy has ADHD. Yes, 100% Has ADHD. He might as well, like, it's like he was asleep in a diabetic coma and does the insulin and wakes up and is like, I fucking hate how this feels.

Oh, having a nice nap. Yeah. And I'm going to go with best, best poor people. So whenever we watch a documentary in the United States and we have to look at poor people, it's a bummer. Your poor people are adorable.

It is largely eyebrow-based. I have noticed. I don't... Now, Alice, I'm so glad that you're here to speak on behalf of all women. As a woman's, I assume husband's income goes down, they make you shave off eyebrows in a sort of ceremony so that they know it's like a median income situation. I love how you've inadvertently hit on something that is actually genuinely true.

Yeah. Because, I mean, maybe you've not heard of the scouse brow. Oh, it's the scouse. Oh, I'm aware. of the scouse. Everyone is just turning slowly but surely into Humpty Dumpty the lower the income level and it gets dangerous. The only thing Mason takes less of than medicine

is eyebrows. Well, we've got some child endangerment on the other side of the break that's a lot less fun than it sounds. So we'll take a quick break but we'll be back in a bit for the great ADHD myth. Mertl, thank you so much for coming in. I just want to introduce you to our new American employee, Brian. I want to introduce him to the team. Hi, Brian.

Wonderful to meet you. So I thought we just run Brian through the schedule we've got for our documentaries for the coming year. Oh, I love that. That's a great idea. So first up, we've got Churchill, the tea that changed history. Nice, sure. And then we've got lizards of the jungle. It's really beautiful stuff.

Oh, sure. Nature. Can't wait to see it. it. And then in summer, we've got, surely you can drink a bit of bleach? I really can't wait for that one. Yeah, exactly. Right. And then after that, we're going to... There's a documentary coming out called, Surely You Can Drink a Bit of Bleach? Yes, yeah, but there's a question mark at the end. There's that upwards inflection. We're just asking the question. I see the question. Oh. Um, what's it about? Okay. So you know how everybody says all the time,

you can't drink bleach, like, at all. Right, because it's poison. Well, that's the conventional wisdom, yeah, but what Tim has explored is like, is it, though? Yes. But is it, though? Sorry, what's happening right now? What's in this moment?

What's happening? Oh, sorry, I should have explained. One out of three British documentaries has to be homicidly dangerous or else people won't tune in for the Churchill ones. Yeah, all the Thatcher ones. Right, right. Is that like a law?

We assume so. I mean, I wish it was one in three. Marsh get out of sketch. No. And we're back. And we're going to start on a very spooky looking London. This was a weird way to introduce this movie, right? It's so weird.

It looks like it's coming out of that London in decline disinformation content. It's so great. It's not showing off London to its best at all. Do you think they have like a bullshit B-roll crew? And they were like, are we doing one of the anti-Muslim? Oh, no, we're doing a medicine. Shit. Oh, man.

Cut the werewolf sound effects. Is that why, Alice, you pointed out that they're looking at an open shot of a possibly flammable tower block in London? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because famously, our tower blocks are slightly flammable. They are slightly flammable. On average, they're slightly flammable. Some are super flammable.

Some are super flammable. It's something about poor people living there. Your poor people are very flammable. I don't know what you got. You think eyebrow more flammable, less flammable, less eyebrow. But apparently it works the opposite way. And we're going to introduce something here that I need us spiritually, sexually, to dwell on. Because I will come back to it throughout the movie.

Our narrator will introduce himself as having been a psychiatrist for 25 years. And as this movie goes on, I will return to that sentence and say, what? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. This is Max Pemberton or I think I'm 90% sure it's the guy from I think you should leave. And I think that's the only thing that makes this entire documentary make sense. Like he's been a psychiatrist for 25 years, but only part of that was dressed as a hot dog while he was doing it. You know, his name isn't actually Max Pemberton. No, I know. I know. It's a pseudonym. It's a pseudonym that he has adopted as his legal name.

so that he can practice under it as a doctor. Yeah, he got it from like one of his ancestors was a writer, a poet or a novelist called Max Pemberton. He was like, I shall choose that for my fake name to do my fake documentary. Yeah, it's really bad. This guy who's written like a lot of, he says he's written articles and books about health in the UK. And I looked up some of the articles he's written to, he's a psychiatrist.

He's written a lot of articles. He has. He's written extensively for the Daily Mail. He's written articles like, I'm a psychiatrist. And I've seen what happens when a strange families. end up living near one another again and it's really good. This is the one thing Prince Harry needs to do to make things right with William. So deeply irresponsible here, deeply professional psychiatry.

Mostly literature within the medical field. I get it. It's mostly in-house public. That was in The Lancet? Did you say that one was Lancet or Daily Mail? I think it was quartered in the Daily Mail. It might have been originally published. Or maybe I'm confusing it with his other article.

I know the explanation behind all of Prince Harry's terribly misjudged, misguided actions in recent years. I've seen it so many times in my. clinic, this is what's going on, and the one question he must ask himself, he's weirdly obsessed with Prince Harry. Well, I don't think it's that weird because he has also written an article about Professor Plagiarism, about Jason Ardey, about making outlandish claims. And he claims that he's come up with one condition that could explain everything and then gone through the history books of like some weird condition. But I think he's obsessed with Harry because he's a little bit racist. Yes. No, I think that might be the case. I also, I'm going to point out two other articles,

I've got some others I'll drop in here and there, but one of his articles was, it's selfish and cruel to use your child as a weapon, Madonna, which I thought was a lovely ending. Madonna. That's a real swing out of nowhere. Literally the only way that article title makes sense is if he is in the middle of a divorce proceeding with Madonna. It's interesting that he then goes on to use a child to make a point in a documentary.

Yes, yeah. Is that selfish and cruel? And the other one I'll point out, women do lie about rape as I know to my own. cost. Oh, Max. Max Pemberton. Maybe this is why you have a pseudonym. I don't know. Max Pemberton. Oh, Max Pemberton. Okay. So with the character of our narrator, really fully established, he's going to tell us that, dang, Nabit, this ADHD is just everywhere nowadays. We're going to get a little montage of some TikTokers talking about it. He Googles famous people who say they have ADHD. And that page doesn't result in nothing? Yeah.

All of this is so irritating. Because he's saying that this one diagnosis recently has surprised me. But he first wrote about ADHD in 2015. He wrote about it in The Daily Mail. We will live to regret trying to cure naughty children with drugs. So like he's not recently changed his mind at ADHD. This isn't a recent thing. Yeah.

He's thought this quite a long time. He says it's recently taken him off guard, which as you say, definitely cannot possibly. have. He does show some TikTok videos of particularly women talking about that personal experience with ADHD, but some of the other videos they show are one of them is from an app company, the Tudor app. Okay. It's spelled like the French way of spelling the, which is one of a billion to do apps targeting ADHD who just so happened to be quite desperate for support in managing their executive dysfunction and prone to signing up for subscriptions to things that they then forget to cancel because they struggle with executive dysfunction.

And they're using that as proof that here's an app taking advantage of people with ADHD, but it proves that people believe weird things about ADHD. That is the one where the comment about ADHD is literally rewiring of the brain first is mentioned and it is coming from a company that is selling products to people with ADHD. And that's actually what he's going to tackle right now, right? And this is the fucking, there's no such thing as a chemical imbalance bullshit all over again, right? Which is the common way to express the wiring of the brain, which is an expression, and our narrator is going to spend the next six minutes going, but your brain doesn't literally

have wires in it, does it? Because that will kill you if you got near a magnet, didn't you? Yeah, he's going to aggressively misunderstand a common metaphor to make it seem like, well, this is them pretending to be scientific. And they're not scientific. We've got a load of scientists who do agree with us, because we're going to meet all of their experts now, as they're all coming in. Yeah, their experts aren't great. I don't have much you looked into any of their experts. They start with Dr. Lucy Johnston. She claimed in 2013 that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder aren't real

and that the biomedical model of treating mental distress as something that medication can treat is false. So she doesn't think there are any drugs that can help you with brain stuff, which is not great. Well, that is because she wrote the power threat meaning framework, which is, describes itself as an overarching structure. for identifying patterns in emotional distress, unusual experiences and troubling behavior

as an alternative to psychiatric diagnosis and classification. She doesn't believe that any psychiatric diagnosis exists. Yeah, at all. At all. Which is weird that Max is happy to hang around with her given that he's been a psychiatrist for 25 years. Well, you know, it's the two enemies at the mountaintop thing. She's also a specific brand of British old lady

that is one of my favorites, right? So you have to understand that as an American, all Brits carry a certain gravitas and wisdom. And so when you see a woman who looks like this, right, sort of like an old nan, right, you expect her to deliver like a cup of tea and a cookie that she calls something weird that tastes bad for some reason.

And then she'll just belt you across the face with like, you know, Lithuanians can't actually smell. They're just faking it. It's really, it's really awesome. And she's also, this is a gam favorite. They'll always, in these bullshit, documentaries, there'll be a bunch of liars who aren't ready to lie all the way, right? So we got doctor, who we're going to talk about in a second, who's like, they're infetamines, right? Because

he's hoping that you're going to think that we're just, you know, shooting up meth between the kids' toes, right? But then there's always one who's just willing to go all the way with the lie, and Sue is the one who's willing to, everyone else would be like, I'm not sure about drugs. And she's like, I would kill every psychiatrist in the world and burn their bodies for heat. And like the bunch of people they assemble here as well. So like they've also, they talk to a guy called Professor Matthew Smith, who says he spent 25 years researching the history of ADHD. And he might have done that because he's a historian, which is great. I mean, I respect historians, but he's not a doctor. He doesn't have any medical background. He's the author of a book which is an alternative history

of hyperactivity, food additives and the fine gold diet. He thinks ADHD is caused by food additives and you can cure it with a 1970s elimination diet that's no longer used because we got a fuck a lot of evidence it didn't work. And he's the guy we're going to say like, well, you know, maybe ADHD isn't a thing. Twenty-five years ago, they thought he could just change your diet and it will be fine. So maybe we do that. He's the expert they go to here. Yeah, it's ridiculous. He's also the first person who brings up the idea that to some extent, he says the disorder is a social construction. He's the first person to bring that up. And I think this documentary has got lots of mistakes throughout it in that they just don't know what certain

words mean or they don't know what certain like metaphors mean. Max, Pemberton doesn't understand the metaphor of my brain is wired differently when you have neurodivergence. Matthew Smith doesn't know that social construction doesn't mean that it's a myth and it's invented and completely fake. Like universities are socially constructed. They still fucking exist. Yeah. High fives are social construction and you should still do this. Lots of disorders are social constructions. But unfortunately, most people with those disorders have to function in society. So they really have to manage their way through society. That's the If you just release ADHD people out in the woods, they're fucking great.

It's the fact that they're, you know, with us and the computers and stuff. So this is where we get our title card. The Great ADHD Myth, question mark? That question mark at the end. I think the question mark at the end of that title is the not touching can't get mad of documentary title. It's sure that hell is. We didn't say it was a myth. We asked a question whether it was a myth.

You technically can't get us. And now we're going to be introduced to the victim, sorry, subject of our documentary. This is Miles. He is an eight-year-old, eight? I think he's 10. 10-year-old. He's also called Mason. He's called Mason.

What I call him? He called him Miles. Some British name, whatever. There's like four of you. And he's got, he was diagnosed with ADHD, but his mom doesn't want him on drugs. So they're going to do an experiment. Not, I would be very clear, not like watched by a doctor or an official experiment or a double-blind experiment. They're going to stop taking their meds.

an experiment that I did a bunch in college. I didn't realize I should have been publishing all those results under, I wonder if I'll try to kill myself again weekly. Right. But you know when they say you should like experiment at college, they don't mean with coming off your meds. No. You took them the wrong way.

I wish you would have told me that. Yeah, but like basically it's Mason's mom doesn't want him to have to have the medication anymore. She doesn't want that. And so they have agreed that he'll stop. And I don't know who the they is there, but I don't imagine that Mason had a great. great deal of input into the theying of that bit of decision-making.

This is the whole issue here. This is a 10-year-old kid. He cannot consent to being on national TV, being experimented on, like stopping his medication, and then being shown, being emotional or distressed on film without actually having consented to that. Well, you say that, Alice, but are you bearing in mind the fact that he's in the very capable and professional hands of Dr. Max Pemberton, the man who once wrote, Do you believe in angels? I do. A homeless man and the goodness of one woman means that I believe in angels. So this is a very professional psychiatrist. This is a good. He is being taken care of. Yeah. Mom says here that she wants Mason to develop

coping strategies. And I wrote in my notes, medicine is a coping mechanism. That's what it is. It's a really fucking awesome mechanism that we came up with. And a bunch of nerds made it in pill form and fucking rocks. She also says like she wants him. to use it as a coping strategy so that he, rather than coping on his own, like she wants him to cope on his own rather than take medication, as if taking medication isn't something you do for yourself? Yeah. Like, you're in charge of like ordering the meds, taking the meds, dealing with side effects.

Like, you're in control of that. That is coping on your own. You've made that choice. And the thing, the choosing of Mason in particular, I think is a bit deceptive by the documentary makers. Because, first of all, Mason is saying, when they ask him, he really struggles to do anything without medication. He finds it really distressing.

He finds like concentration art. We see footage of him beating his brother up as part of his, like the evidence for like, oh, it's fine, this kid doesn't really need medication or anything like that. That is kind of him screaming and punching, screaming about punching his brother in the throat specifically is part of their montage of like, ah, this is a kid who doesn't need men. Kids will be kids. What can I say?

But the thing is they've already, like, the way they've set this up is to say there are spiraling rates of ADHD diagnosis. and now there's so many more kids being diagnosed as ADHD. But when he says spiraling rates, he's not talking about this kid who you could diagnose from space 50 years ago. And his life is very clearly severely impacted by his ADHD. Like this is a bait and switch. That's exactly what this is here. Yeah.

And speaking of bait and switch, now our experts are going to tell us about ADHD drugs in scare quotes so hard, their hands are going to fall off. Yeah. We learned that ADHD drugs are infatamines. Yes. And I wrote in my notes. Yeah.

And aspirin is just fucking willow bark. Can you believe that, guys? They're just chucking it off trees, tossing it in the bottle. There's one lady says it's like a slow release cocaine. And then she says, which is quite shocking when you use that language. But like, you use that language. She's lying. Yeah.

I could explain to you how chemotherapy works in ways that sound totally fucked if I get to choose what language I'm using. I mean, I can't. I could get Alice to explain how. chemotherapy works in ways that sound totally fucked. You don't need to ask me, it's straight out of the Woo playbook. It's that it is, chemotherapy is just mustard gas. It is exactly what the Woo says. So we learned that Mason was having a really hard time in school,

and then he started taking medication, and it helped his grades. And then there's sort of a pause, which I empathized with, because sometimes I've accidentally pointed out that I'm an idiot. Not in documentary form, but I bet if someone gave me too much money and pointed a camera at me, I would eventually. I've certainly managed to do it with a microphone. So then they cut to Mason and Mason's just like, I don't want to.

And they're like, okay, well, you know. Yeah, but he didn't just say, I don't want to. He says, I don't want to, but it works. He does. And they're only follow-up, he says, I don't want to take it. Sometimes I don't want to take it, but it works. And their only follow-up question is, tell me more about the don't want to take it bit and nothing about the,

so you say that it works bit, which very clearly shows the fucking bias of this entire project of a documentary. Yeah. So now we're going to learn about the conditions of our experiment. So to be clear, Mason is going to stop his medicine for six weeks for this experiment, which is a fucking insanely short time to measure anything except how long six weeks is. I will also say. Which is a really long time when you're not on your ADHD medication. And a child. And the entire length of the summer holidays. The summer vacation is famously six weeks long. You'll be off meds for your entire summer. a holiday is worth of time. That's so long. I will also say that he might be on a short-acting medication that you don't need to like slowly let down from or get back on. But if he's on something like an SSRI or SSNI, taking a child off of a medication cold turkey for six weeks is a homicidal dangerous idea, right? It's really dangerous. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and pray that this was a methylate, right? Yeah. But even then, not great, right? It's not

Awesome. It's not great. Kids should not be brought off those medications cold turkey. And it's also, I mean, I don't want to go into this too much, but it's not an experiment because you've got one kid and no other kid that you're not taking off the medicine to compare. You've got, you're just, you're fucking with a kid is what you're doing. Well, that's the younger. The younger brother's the control. Yeah, exactly. He gets punched. So now we're going to misunderstand the brain some more. We're going from, I don't understand how the brain is wired to brains don't work different. I genuinely don't understand what lie he was trying to sell us here.

This is bonkers where he's like, oh, you know, the brain isn't functioning properly. The brain isn't functioning properly. And therefore it means that the brain is wired differently. And that can't be true because the brain isn't wired differently. It's like, but function is just doing stuff. Like function is organizational planning or executive function. It is just all physical function can be stimming or fidgeting. We can see all of that.

It's all stuff that people experience. Well, you say that, Alice. but can you point to a picture of an MRI? Can you point to a brain and say, that bit there, that's the ADHD? Because if you can't do that, then Dr. Lucy in particular is very certain there's no such thing as ADHD. Well, they seem to think that there's absolutely no evidence of ADHD, even though there's loads of behavioral evidence of ADHD. Yeah, he talks to an MRI tech for a second, right?

And she actually gives a pretty decent answer, right? Where he's like, show me on the mat where the ADHD touched you. And she's like, well, you're like, well, you're. know it is a complex series of diagnoses and we use a variety of factors. And he looks at the camera like, got a bit of an accent, doesn't she? Just saying a bit of an accent, probably not born here. Not sure if I trust that. The thing is he and Dr. Lisa were denying that ADHD as a developmental disorder because you can't see it on a brain on MRI scan. But like dyslexia is also a developmental disorder. Do they need to see an MRI scan to prove that dyslexia exists? Or can I just show

like some of my dad's incomprehensible Facebook posts. And that will be like irrefutable proof. That's what's going to finally convince her. She tears up. Okay. Dyslexia is a thing. Okay. That's fine.

And you say he was 60 before he figured that. And he was a postman. So like he looked at letters all day. Actually read all day and still didn't. Okay. Battle two. Sure enough. Come on.

We all know each other here. If you get someone else's post, you can just switch. You know where they live. You should see him at the pub. See him at the pub. The MRI expert they talked to, by the way, she was livid about how she was presented in this. She is an expert about imaging ADHD.

They're going to make it look like she's finding evidence that it's not there. But she said after this, this is a call from her, my interview is hours long. They cherry-picked the bits that suited their push for presenting ADHD as a myth. Byest programs like this one that push their review of ADHD as a mythical entity are irresponsible and will have detrimental effects. That is one of the experts they misrepresent in this documentary. And that's fair. But what I will say is, if you are a world leading expert on the thing, maybe don't, at any point in an interview, say the whole thing is based on doctors making things up, which she did do when she was on camera. Now, I think she did.

But she meant there's not an evidence that doctors have discovered it. But at one point, she says doctors are just making things up and say, ah, you could see Max Pemberton's eyes light up. It's a wrap. It's a rap. We've got it. We got it. We got it. He literally laughs gleefully. when she says that.

It's like when the real housewives start throwing drinks at each other. The shot is made. We've got it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or when the flat earthers saw that TikTok where you said

that the earth was flat, it just works out for everybody. Yes, yeah, all six million of the fuckers. God. So now we're going to cut back to Dr. Lucy and she's going to explain to us that basically, I'm only exaggerating a little

when she says that people with ADHD ADHD are just a bit of a flibbertid gibbet. She genuinely says that just some people find it harder than other people, but there's no evidence that it comes from a neurodevelopmental condition. So, like, it sucks to be them, I guess. Yeah, it's almost like she's saying, well, the thing about those people is, they just need to suck it up and get on with it.

That's really what they need. They don't eat drugs. They just need a spine, get on with it. That's basically what she's putting in here. I wrote my notes at this point, are there people with less white blood cells? Yes, but is there evidence that AIDS exists? Oh, shit, I realized you already did that movie. Fuck, I'm in a different movie, aren't I?

And then we hear from a guy, we hear from Professor Matthew, again. What I've got for him is him saying, like, essentially, please don't notice that I'm making a continuum fallacy about where we draw the line on what counters having ADHD and not, and how the fact that we don't know exactly where we draw the line doesn't mean that all ADHD is fake. Black and white can exist, even if you can't point the point at which gray stops being mostly white and start being mostly black. You can't find that line. It doesn't negate the idea that black is a color. Right. And even if you like, then you have to pretend that there aren't color scientists who have spent a tremendous amount of time being like, well, actually, this is where we call it gray.

And it's like, yeah, but I don't know that. So, you know, looks blue to me. Well, and then we hear from this guy, Dr. Sammy, who we've seen in a couple of places here and there. And what he says about the ADHD medications, the stimulants that they give, he says, we've no idea what these drugs might do long term. And that is such a denialist line, because whatever you think the long term evidence is showing, he can always mean longer than that. Yeah. Meanwhile, we've got a lot of short-term evidence, but he's dismissing all of that

because the evidence doesn't go long-term enough. Like, Stubilance, they were first used as an ADHD treatment. I looked at the top. In 1937, so we can't really know the long-term effects until we see what happens to those patients after their 100th birthday. Maybe something happens when you turn into a, when you hit the century mark.

Yeah, the centennial is really where the side effects kick in. Yeah. I was taking these bills and then just a hundred years later, like that. And then we get this weird ad break. Now, I wasn't sure, is this just a British thing? Because the movie, I want to be very clear to the audience at home, the movie pauses to go like, what you say? Some ads?

Adds, commercial day. Yeah, yeah. And this is because it was an hour-long documentary broadcast on Channel 4, which is a channel with ads. So, yeah, this would them stop me to be like, like, look, ADHD, and then they show some ads about the great ADHD myth. We're back again. So we'll do this periodically. Okay, good. I was bad for.

It sort of feels like they felt they've made their argument now. Like, are we done? Oh, shit, you want more. Hang on, we'll carry on. We'll carry it. My experience was just like I was watching a movie and then Vin Diesel went, Fast and the Furious Five and stared at me for two silent seconds. All right.

Well, if this documentary gets to pause for an ad break, then God damn it, so do we. But we'll be back in a bit with even more. The Great ADHD Myth? Just one nice Scorpio Marsh, I have told you. you? Look, you know you're setting an impossible standard. You know that. I am. It's true. Hey, you guys ready to finish the show? Yeah, sure, Alice. We are. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What's with all the Alice all of the sudden? What do you mean? I don't know. Just seems like a little fast, right? Like, did you know that there's 100% more Alice in the conversation than there was like five minutes ago?

Right, but that's only like, because... I don't know. I don't know. Like, maybe Alice Alice is here, right? I am. But, like, maybe it's also just big Alice that wants us to think she's here, you know? Okay. What's big Alice? I don't know. I'm just saying, like, makes you think.

Does anything make you think? No. And we're back. When we left off, we couldn't paint with all the colors of the wind. So oxygen doesn't exist. And we're back with Mason, who likes not being. on his meds for the experiment. Oh, and this is so bad, like what Max Pemberton says at the start of this,

at the start of this, like, as we're back here, he says, essentially now we've taken Mason off the meds. We want to find out if there's anything else, Mace can use instead of the meds. But like, maybe you find that out before you take him off the meds and start this experiment to let him know if there's anything he can do instead, rather than just take him off the fucking medication like that. So this is a really interesting point because, Marsh, you listed through some of the

experts that we had earlier. but one of the experts that you didn't mention was Sarah Wally, who is on this documentary. She is not a medical professional. She is not medically qualified. She has never worked for the NHS, despite the fact that earlier in the program, the show heavily implies that she is an NHS clinician.

But she runs a clinic, a private clinic, that specialises in drug-free interventions for people with ADHD. This show has spent a lot of time criticizing private, practice and private companies making money out of ADHD. And yet their main expert, one of their main experts, specializing in drug-free interventions at her private clinic that she founded. Yeah, she's there basically doing advert for the key clinic. And when you look through the website, it is such bollocks.

It is such obvious bollocks. Yeah. And she's there to take away the iPads and the candy? The gaming devices. Yeah. She demonizes screens. she takes out processed food. She gives them, she gives Mason nutritional supplements.

She says that sugar makes you hyper. Yeah, she thinks sugar makes you hyper, which is like ridiculous. Obviously, she says it's all about the sugar. The fast food and the sugar in there and the ultra-processed foods because you get a hyperactive sugar spike and then you get a sugar crash. Two things that don't exist. Your biological, the expert you're relying on here believes that sugar high is a thing and it fucking well isn't.

So this is the person they're relying on here. Yeah, we cut to one of their experts here and he goes, it looks like your kid is still when they're on the iPad, but their heart is beating much faster, they're sweating. And I wrote, dude, what are your kids watching? Because mine is watching the making of Frozen 2 over and over again. He's pretty chill. Yeah, this is the expert Sam Wass.

And he says, when the kids are in front of a screen, it activates their fight or flight system. And I think if you swipe down from the top of the screen, you can turn off fight a flight mode. Yeah, it's one of the settings. They changed it in 27. They did. It's crazy.

Yeah. We also learned that Mason's going to do yoga, play in the fresh air. And I wrote in my notes, Marce, you should have tried this with your sister. Just toss her down a hill, see if she walks back up. Yeah, look, all I've ever said is Dr. Ellis maybe wouldn't be disabled if she just did a few more nature walks from time to time. Yes.

We always say this to you. And does she listen to us? No. Never, because she's got the doctorate and we're just dickheads. That's what she's saying. Yeah, exactly. And we have this montage of, like, Mason being sad that they're taking his candy and his iPads away and stuff. And, like, I know that.

what this is going for is like, kids are addicted to this stuff, but it's, it's just like an actually sad little boy. Yeah. It's like a weird moment. Him and the brother. Yeah.

You're taking it all the sweets and the screens away from the brother as well. And it's ridiculous that they blame this all on screens because they sell out, Mason's had these behaviors for his whole life. They're talking about he's always felt, he said, I've always felt I've had too many thoughts.

So he says that at one point, like his head squiggly. So was that all screen-based? Has it all been the amount of screen? that he's had literally the entire 10 years on screens, or is this just something like he has ADHD and that's a totally legitimate thing? And then they're talking about this being an experiment. And so we're going to remove your medication and your screens and all the sugar and ultra-processed food. And we're going to get you to do yoga and we're changing

and nutritional supplements. Yeah, and giving them nutritional supplements that she doesn't tell us what they are, but she's done biol-this quack has done biological tests to diagnose them with needing these supplements. So I guess it's okay for him to take her pills, but not the pills given to him by someone with a medical degree, someone with actual medical practice. Yeah, it's ridiculous. But you're changing every variable of this kid's life and then saying, well, I wonder if anything will change if we change everything radically about this kid's entire experience of the universe all at once. This isn't an experiment. And then Max pops back up to be like, let's see if these changes alone as if it's like an insignificant number of changes. Yeah, like if it's not

that, Max, what else are you going to do to this kid? Like, well, All we've got left is to take one of his arms. I don't know what else we've got. We've taken everything else from him. So we're running out of variables to alter. Sarah Wally literally says just that one simple thing, which is cutting sugar, processed food, increasing natural foods and increasing proteins.

But just that one simple thing. Yeah, it's the one easy trick to changing literally everything about a child's life without his permission. And then this section ends with a call from mom being like, oh yeah, his behavior's gotten a lot worse since he's not. on his medication. Yeah, it's not good. It's not ideal. This is where Sarah Wally says that coming off the drugs is going to be really difficult and then describes that it's going to be really difficult because she's taking him off his drugs, cold turkey. It's like, you don't have to do that. You have

just chosen to take him off his drugs, cold turkey. And then taken away all of his distractions and comforts. And then they're like, oh, this is going to be really hard from it. It's like, yeah, because you're being actively cruel to this poor child. This poor child and his brother. And I don't want to keep coming back to the collateral damage that. is this poor brother who would like the only other time we've seen him is either being punched in the throat by his brother or shouted out really aggressively by his mum and that's the all we've seen but now he's like upset because he's losing access to everything but the thing is with this kid right they're banning the younger brother from having any sweets or screens or

screens or devices but his younger brother doesn't apparently have ADHD which in itself refutes the entire premise that it's the screens and the devices and the sugar that's causing ADHD because they've both getting the same experience and only one of them has ADHD. Maybe this isn't those things you're taken away. But we'll just gloss over that and then make this other kids life miserable as well. They're literally taking candy,

if not from a baby, but then from quite a small child. From certainly closer to a baby than an adult. Yeah. And look, I want to be clear, they don't say what medication is on, but the audience might assume that they can do this with their kids. And we should point out that it is like,

literally homicidaly dangerous to just cold turkey some medications that kids are on, especially psych meds. And things we will actually find out sort of through the backdoor which medication he's on, because later Max is going to start taking medication. And he says, this is the same stuff that Mason's on. So that's true. So we will know the medication. Right.

But now that Mason's behavior is worse without his meds, Max is going to wonder if maybe ADHD is just kids being kids. Okay. The line that Max gives here is, although his behavior is clearly difficult, I can't help but wonder if this is nothing unusual for many children. And I wrote, what, being subjected to pointless experiments on television. No, that is pretty unusual for children, mate. We don't typically do that. Yeah. And this struck me very last chapter of the bell curve, right, where I've spent an entire book about how much lower IQs are for black people than white people. But I'd like to spend a little time talking about universal basic income, right? He's sort of, oh, sure, I've denied all of medical science for most of this documentary, but big pharma funded by hedge funds pretty bad.

I think we can all agree, right? Yeah. And now it's time for Dr. Max, not a rapist, to get assessed himself. And, okay, first of all, I would like to say I have a lot more context to why he doesn't want the camera crew to watch the entire session. Now that I know the kind of articles he writes, I imagine he mentioned Harry and Harry's marriage a few times in the session. Yeah, he probably struggled to stay on the topic, find himself distracted in conversation,

like opening tangents in conversation. For reasons he will never accept, yeah. Right. And look, this is a classic thing in the anti-psych bullshit world, right? Which is that you go to a psychiatrist, you say they have the symptoms of a psychiatric condition, and they go, okay, you have a psychiatric condition. And then you go, aha, you didn't count on me lying because how the fuck would you measure it if it wasn't about what I actually thought and felt.

But he does it wrong, right? The way this con is supposed to work is you take a person who doesn't have schizophrenia and they go, oh, I'm hearing voices. And they go, oh, okay, let's get you the help you want. And he goes, aha, I got you. Except Max very fucking clearly has ADHD. He does. So in his little diagnosis montage, he's just going,

now come on, we all lose our keys now and then, don't we? I like the moment where he says that if he's out, he only ever keeps his phone in his pocket so he doesn't lose it because otherwise I get through about 20 phones, which if that is the number he goes to as an exaggeration, that means the actual number is still a really fucking big number. Yeah, it is. Because he's ADHD.

They obviously manipulate this little montage of showing just little bits of his test, not the full test, but even the bits that they show us are really diagnostic. He talks about how you can just hear him saying, oh, yeah, no, I'll typically, when I start to work, I'll work and then I'll suddenly realize it's like 2.30 in the morning. And it's like, yeah, because you get into hyperforkers. And he says about, well, who doesn't really hate waiting in a queue ever? And it's like, people who are like really struggle with waiting for things because of a medical condition that they have. Like, you are so ADHD made. Yeah. And then he finishes it. He gets his diagnosis, right? The thing. And he's like. He's diagnosed with combined type ADHD.

Yeah. Because he clearly has ADHD. And he's like, but here's the funny thing. no part of me is, and you see, I swear you see him starting to say the R slur. And then he's like, disabled, disabled. No part of me is disabled. Like, he might as well pat his legs and be like, see, they're fine. They're fine. I can walk her back just however I want to. And he's gone to now, he's got this ADHD diagnosis. And as you say, he's saying, but I don't need is valid because no part of me is disabled and that my lifestyle isn't affected by how my brain works, which is distinctly different

from ADHD is a myth. Because you can't say it to myth. You just got diagnosed. And I think you could see in his face. He's like, yep, okay, yeah. Didn't see this happening. This is a real bummer for the edit. Well, and he goes on to say that the issue here is the way that psychiatry

and medicine in general, like actually describe what meets the diagnostic criteria of a condition. But the diagnostic criteria for ADHD requires that it affects your daily functioning. But it does affect his daily functioning. he has to keep his phone in his pocket, otherwise he loses his phone. Like, that is a decision that he has to make and change how he goes about his day-to-day life. We don't know the other examples he's given, but, like, that is changing your day-to-day life in order to accommodate the condition that you have.

Yeah, and it's great because he says, like, well, if I'd had an ADHD diagnosis 30 years ago, I'd never have developed coping strategies. But, Max, do you know who doesn't need ADHD coping strategies? People who don't have ADHD because if ADHD was a myth, like the fact that you've got coping strategies is in itself probably diagnostic to some degree. But here's the thing, guys. If ADHD was real, why would the diagnostic criteria for children and adults be the same? That's the start of his next section. I wrote in my notes, yeah, that's also true of broken legs, man. I don't know. Yeah, there's a fuck a lot of things.

We also cut back to Lucy here. Lucy has the DSM-5, and she's telling us that when she was a kid, it was, you could carry it in one pocket, the DSM-5. And now it's full of, full of things. And this is one of my favorite things that they do with the DSM-5. And we've seen this in so many psychiatric bullshit movies, which is they read a few things

that are like, kind of universal for the DSM-5, but only when you don't understand how diagnosis or diagnostic criteria works, right? She might as well pull out and be like, and that's a word that's pretty common. Anyways. Yeah, yeah, it's ridiculous.

So this isn't Lucy. This is Dr. Ioni Heath. Iona Heath. And I think was she the one, Alice, was the former head of the College of GPs or the College of Psychiatrist. And it's very clearly former because they, as Alice mentioned to me off air, like they are not behind what she says in this at all. So it's like...

So both the Royal College for GPs, who she was the previous head of, and the Royal College for Psychiatrists, who another of their experts was formerly the head of, have come out and made statements about this documentary saying, we think ADHD is real. We think it's really harmful to, like, talk about it in this way. Yeah.

They're one step short of saying, there's a reason these guys are former and not current. It's all feels about this. But yeah, her point is that the DSM has got bigger, the more mental health diagnosis they've found. But that's true of any list of medical conditions. Yeah. Like, at one point,

the complete list of human ailments was maybe a pamphlet long and consisted mainly of, have you tried leeches on it? Like, the more you learn about how the body works, the bigger that list gets. And that's a good thing, because you're catching people who've got stuff. There used to be five kinds of bile, and that was it.

We liked it. We liked it. You could measure someone's red hair by how Jewish they were. It was great. Back when women had hysteria and wandering wombs, yeah. Yeah. And we also hear from Dr. Sammy again here, and he's looking through the criteria as well. And he's doing the same thing of like, you can see how fuzzy the words.

And he says, often squirms in their seat. How often is often? What is a unit of squirm? How do you measure a unit of squirm? And I wrote, yeah, great point. Let's apply that same rationale to pain. What is a unit of pain? How are you measuring pain? You can't. Therefore, pain isn't real. Are we on the same page here now, Dr. Samin? This is a really fucking damaging perspective because patients should be able to tell their doctor that something is happening and having a sufficiently negative impact on their life and not have to justify with numbers to prove that they're struggling. It's absolutely ridiculous to be pulling this. position. On a scale of one to ten, love, how awful are you really? And the thing is, well, there's a bit that Max does in the voiceover as well when he's talking about like these diagnoses applying to children. He says, but adults can decide for themselves whether to be assessed and

medicated. But you're saying that while you are now currently making a child go cold turkey without any way of giving you meaningful informed consent, like you are the one making the decision for this child. Also, why wouldn't you give a, his argument is just against giving children medical care? Like, all right, you know what? We'll see how you feel about the leukemia when you turn 18. All right, Timmy. That's when you'll make a decision about yourselves, my son.

That's when you'll make that decision on your own. Fingers crossed. I mean, if you get there, you can make that decision. If not, well, it wasn't meant to be. It's fine, Timmy. We've got another one. It's fine. So, Marsh, I don't want you to have to confess to anything.

But at this point in the documentary, this is where I assume Marsh Army crawled into the room and wrote a sentence into the script for Max to say. Because this is where he says, Because, yeah, obviously these behaviors deeply affect people and the medicine is life-saving. But. But. But, yeah, it's great. Yeah, he said the meds can provide a lifeline.

I was like, all right. So is that discrediting your entire documentary or just the experiment you're running on this poor child? Like, which part of this is discredited in your eyes now? Yeah. We check back in with Mason. He's having a hard time not having his screens or his sugar. But he is enjoying yoga and playing Legos at this point, I think. Yeah, and I love all of this because they say, like, his routine of yoga is helping keep his outbursts in check.

And I wrote, how do you know that? How do we know that? You're not even showing us that this is happening. And then they also say, Mason, he's three weeks off of his medication and he seems better at managing his behavior. And I wrote, seems. What does seems mean? What is a unit of behavior? Oh, are we not asking those questions now? No, no, we're all done with those. Yeah. And they're like playing outside. And this is where mom and her lack of eyebrows comes out. And she's like, it's so nice to get outside, you know, supposed to eat inside. It's nice at here. Hasse isn't on fire. And I'm like, okay, I guess all of psychiatry is wrong, then.

So now we're going to dwell on the fact that ADHD medication is on the rise again. Yeah, they say that boys age 10 to 14. They're the most medicated group. But the thing is someone is all, like one cohort is always going to be the most medicated group. That is how statistics work. cut the data up, one of them is going to be clumpier than the other parts of it. Yeah.

And also, like, boys in that age range are the age range that we'd spot and diagnose ADHD in boys, like girls are missed. And adults, we're only just getting around to diagnosing adults. It is boys in that age range that are first clocked as ADHD because that's when they have difficulty with school. Yeah. But we get a first here. We get a god-awful movies first because this is where Max, our bullshitter, has decided,

you know what? he's going to try some of these ADHD meds for fun. Yeah, I want to know how it feels is a great reason to take medication. To take literal stimulants that he has said on the show, that they have said on the show is like slow release cocaine, but he's going to do it on TV for fun because he's got a diagnosis. He doesn't agree he actually has. I demand that our bullshitters start doing this.

The next time we do an anti-AIDS documentary, I want someone being like, I wonder what there's AZT bullshit's like. Like, glurp. Okay, but in fairness, Max was both a junior doctor and a journalist at the Daily Mail. So I think his issue with the slow release corkin might be the slow release part. That would be a problem. Yeah, no, that would be a problem. We also, again, another bullshit fact, he opens the medication, he pulls out the side effects list and he's like, whoa. And this thing, whenever this happens in one of these bullshit documentaries, I wonder, what would they want?

would they want them to just not tell us about possible side? Like, what's the ideal that you open up a medication and it goes, this one doesn't do shit, love, it's fucking fabulous. You're nothing, I promise you. Yeah, just cross your fingers, pinch your nose and take it. It's fine. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, he's like, he is a doctor.

He knows it's a dick move to read out all the side effects as if everybody is going to get all those side effects. He's not RFK Jr. on Rogan. You're meant to have like a medical degree here. And as he's going down the side effects, he says, he gets to one. says repeated sounds and words. He says, that's something we call ticks. It's like, no, it isn't. That's echolalia. Tix is something else. Can I just see your psychiatry diploma real quick? Just like really quickly, Max. No, I wanted it at the arcade fair and square.

I put several pounds into Piccadilly Circus for this, sir. But he, like, the amount of time, this documentary is only 46 minutes long. I know we've done a lot longer than that. That's how bad it is. But it's 46 minutes long. They spend more than 2% of its runtime reading the side effects list from this list here. Just lists of things. So he takes the pills and now we watch him wait for them to kick in. Yes. And while we hear from Dr. Sammy saying, yo, people take this medication recreationist. So we shouldn't just give it to people willy-nilly, at which point we

immediately cut to Max taking it as a self-declared stunt, which feels pretty willy-nilly to me. Yeah. At least when I was doing it in college, I was trying to keep my dick hard, okay? I can I can legitimately say the times I snorted Adderall were better and more moral than what MEC does in this documentary. And Alice says that

as a medical professional. That's what she's that's on behalf of the Royal Academy of Wizards. I forget which one you're a part of. All right. Well, I'm watching an asshole who doesn't believe in science wait for drugs to kick in which means I need to check that I didn't

accidentally time travel back to college, But before I do, let me give Act 3 the hard sell. Can you show me on the brain where the ADHD touched you? Has Mason uncovered the negative side effects of Brussels sprouts as well? What's the point of having government-sponsored television if you're just going to turn into TLC anyways? Find out the answers to these questions and more when we return for the just asking not enough questions conclusion of the great ADHD move? So how old are you, little Timmy? Seven.

And do you like how the chemotherapy makes you feel? No. It makes my tummy hurt. That's right. It does. But mommy says it helps with the cancer. But if it helps with the cancer, why would it make your tummy hurt? Um, yeah.

So would you rather do the big scary chemotherapy that makes your tummy hurt, or would you rather have an ice cream? I think you might be homicidely stupid. Damn it, that's the third one. Let's go to the next room. We are running out of kids right now. Yeah, well, they've all got Google now, haven't they? Yeah. And we're back for more of this shit. And when we left off, our narrator had taken drugs, he admitted to not needing.

And now he's going to tell us that he feels weird. I mean, that is basically what he says. He feels really chilled on stimulants because he's got ADHD. And that's what happens when you've got ADHD. Yeah, that's that he's saying like he thinks. It feels slowed. And the thing is, he's on a stimulant. He should feel stimulant.

He should feel stimulate. He's not. It's because he's got ADHD. It did make me think. There is the famous kind of thing that people find out they've got ADHD because they take some, like, stimulants. And then they just feel really calm and want to go away and read on it or something. There is a massive backlog for getting an ADHD diagnosis in the UK. And as we found out in this, it's also really expensive to get a professional therapist to tell you you've got ADHD to do the assessment.

cocaine is comparatively cheap. Is it not just a method of short-cutting the diagnostic method by just seeing how weird you feel if you take a stimulant. If you take a stimulant, you feel super calm. Yeah, you might have a idiotic. Perfect. Let me pitch you. Let me pitch you.

Here we go. Hi, I'm Dr. Alice. How well. And I'm here to tell you, do a little bit of cocaine and see how it makes you feel. That's the best way to get diagnosed for ADHD. That's what they're. Dr. Alice says, Bing!

Morgan, did you put the cartoon that we made with the white under her nose? Is that what's making the Bing noise? It's just, don't worry, Alice. It's just the word no. He's just put the word no there. I can feel, I know we're recording this in the before times, but I can see it's right here is the word no. It's just the word no.

But the thing is, like, while Max is out, so he's taking these drugs, he feels very slow. He's gone to do something totally normal, like go to, where he goes to like a shop or something like that. And he's genuinely shocked. And he said he's shocked because he went into a shop and wasn't massively chatty to everyone in there like he normally would be.

And no one else would ever be. This is already a sign that you are, that you've got ADHD because you're chatting to everyone all the time. And I wondered, what would he normally be chatting about? Maybe he talked about something like his Daily Mail article. I'm a socialist, but as an NHS doctor, I know Benefits Street is telling the truth about lazy welfare cheats. Maybe that's the kind of thing he just bring up

Apra or nothing in a shop when he definitely doesn't have ADHD. What are you think of Prince Harry's marriage? So now we're going to check back in on Mason. Mason is still drugless. They're outside in nature. This is where we meet Mason's, I assume, stepdad for the first time.

And this is where Mason's stepdad tells us that old Mason was fucking lame. But new Mason? New Mason's pretty fucking cool. Oh, it's so sad. And it's like their argument is, look, he's enjoying being outside. So we can't possibly have ADHD. Would an ADHD person be able to do that swinging on a tree?

But yeah, like, it might well be that he's better because he's burning a little bit of energy while he's outside. And that's fine as long as he and his family can always spend this same amount of time outside, even when they're not involved in a weird experiment for television. Maybe this will be working out for him. But if it's, if it like, changes and goes back to any kind of routine, that a family would need to have, this isn't a long-term solution. And I feel so sorry for this kid.

He is being basically repeatedly told that he's only fun to be around when he's unmedicated. Even while we're finding that he can't concentrate at school. So it's like his stepdad thinks he's a right laugh now. And that's just as valuable as a functional education when you think about it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's always money in podcasting. I love how they're just assuming that this is something that you can do. they say natural settings cause our bodies to relax as if you can just go outside every time you get distracted.

It's like, no, we have jobs and like school and you can't just like swan off and go and be outside to get your brain back. Yeah, if Mason is going to be anything other than a park ranger, this is not a solution for him. Yeah. Yeah. He says a 10-minute walk in the woods reduces the symptoms of ADHD. And I wrote in my notes, imagine a universe in which that sentence had any relevance to the topic in hand. And even that they say temporarily, it's 10%. temporarily reduces it, like, for how long, if it's the duration of your walk that is fucking useless?

If only we knew the unit of squirm that it was reduced by. Maybe we would have the hard answers we seek. So now it's time to talk about how lame Mason used to be again. We're talking about how the old medication was suppressing his personality. To be clear, nobody said that. He's just saying it in the narration. Yeah. And they're saying about how like all behavior is on a bell curve. They're talking about the behavior. He's actually, he's talking to a, uh, a, uh, another expert here, Dr. Courtney Raskin, who he said is an ADHD diagnostic expert. Interestingly, he wrote a book with Courtney Raskin about weight loss. So they are very broad in their... This psychiatrist and this apparently ADHD diagnostic expert felt they could write an entire

book about weight loss. That's the kind of broad amount of expertise that they have. And they're talking about how like all behaviours on a bell curve, so who's to say, what's really ADHD? But the thing is, at the extreme ends of that bell curve, there is distress. And the medication is really important there. They even say that. But the thing is, we don't know whether they assessed where on the belk of Mason actually was before they experimented on taking off the drugs.

What if Mason was on the distress end of that bell curve? You didn't decide that before you decided to, like, do these experiments on the kid. Right. And her example of like unnecessary accommodation. Think of all the crazy things she could have used an example. But her example is that her daughter's friend was given a jump of the cube pass. at a theme park. I cannot think of a lower stakes thing

to make your example of over a common. Like, who is out there going, you know who's got it too easy, fucking disabled people at theme parks? I think we can all agree that theme parks are just a menagerie of pleasures when you're disabled and they've had it too good for too long.

And the thing is as well, right, Mason is struggling at school. We get to the point where he's struggling at school here So that might genuinely hold him back. Fingers crossed it, worn, fingers crossed, he can catch up and things like that. But it might genuinely hold him back. And at some point in his future, someone's going to say, oh, so you had a hard time schooling. Why was that?

And he's going to have to say, okay, so this lady had a daughter whose friend's mom asked for an accommodation while you're at Disney World. And as a result, I stopped taking medication. Like, that is the genesis of this kid's progression through his life. Why did I? I dropped out of school. So Max Pemberton offered my mom a pack of menthol. infillated cigarettes. Yeah, you know, Space Mountain will sometimes

a cue for that does get quite long. So that's why I don't have any g-siesies. That's why I don't have any accommodations. Yeah, that's a real thing. We also, this is where we get an interview with Mason's teacher. Yeah? And this is such a lovely, humane moment.

Right now, now, Max is going to try and turn this into a weird trap argument, right? He's trying to turn this conversation into, like, isn't it education failing Mason? but this teacher actually navigates this conversation so beautifully because what she talks about is Mason the person and she certainly acknowledges his struggles

she acknowledges to the extent because let me tell you, as someone who is the parent of an autistic kid with an IEP who has not always been the first to say my son has autism and we know it. I have seen a lot of teachers say so here's the thing

before I've been like he has autism and they're like, oh, okay, cool. All right, so the autism, right? And she's doing that, right? And she's doing it really well, and she's doing it really beautifully. But, like, I just wanted to take a moment in this really horrible moment of, like, putting this child through something terrible for no reason at all. This woman handles herself so beautifully.

Like, it's such a lovely moment of kindness. Maybe I was just reaching because of this 40 horrible minutes, but she's so lovely. Yeah, I completely agree. And she handles it so delicately because she's also talking about how, well, it might be better for Mason in terms of. of personality. It is making the rest of the class more difficult to manage. And she's like balancing that out. And it's very clear that she doesn't want to say anything bad about this kid, because she is a professional who would know you don't do something like that, especially on

television, something that Max Pemberton, the psychiatrist who writes about people's mental health states in newspapers of people he's never met, has no idea about that level of professionalism. So she is handing it so delicately. But they describe me him being really disengaged and distracted at school. And that's going to be a problem. And distressed up. about it. He's generally distressed about it. Yeah. Yeah, they're saying like he can tell that he can no longer do the kinds of things at school that he used to be capable of and he's very distressed about that. And his mum says, she's just not sure what to do. And it's either medicate him so he can do his sats or don't medic him so he can very happily fail at his important exams. What a really

tough choice that is. But also, like Mason says he really doesn't want to go back on the medication, which is what happens when you, like, he's been told over and over again for this documentary. that he's more interesting, fun and likable when he's off his meds. Of course he wants to stay off his meds. Yeah. There's even a bit that we, earlier in the shore, where it cuts to a clip from their video diary that they're keeping of how his journey's going. And the mum says, so if I say to you right now, you can go back on your meds, what would

you say? And I thought, yeah, I'd say, how did that sentence start and what was the conversation that preceded it? Because that is not the end of that sentence. It's just the only bit you're showing us. Because you cut out all the bits where you're coaching this kid to want to, want to reject his meds so he can get your approval and get you to like him. It's so fucking sad. So then we're going to cut to one of our experts who's going to begin, it's a bad sentence,

but he's going to begin it worse than the sentence ends. He goes, I'm no advocate of physical discipline, but now in this expert's defense, he's going to end it with, I think medicating children is the new form of corporal punishment, which is incredibly stupid. To be there, I did think he was going to end it with, you just got to beat the shit out of Mason, that's what you've got to do. A slap around the ears. I'm no advocate, but sometimes a kid needs to get smacked. Yeah, absolutely. And this is where we're in the point where they're talking about, well, actually, it's the school system that's fault.

It's not a neurodevelopmental problem. It's just that the school system isn't based around being able to support everybody with every one of their individual needs. So, yeah, as long as we can completely and easily entirely upend and personalize the entire schooling system of the UK slash the world, Mason won't need meds. But that isn't something that's going to happen. And could you imagine, like, if one of us wrote an article saying that what we really need is to revolutionise school to make sure that kids can be treated like individuals and have

like individual adjustments for what they need for them to best focus at school, to be able to go outside as and when they want to and to be as distracted or as enthusiastic or as kind of disruptive as they want to be. Like, we'd be told that we were woke snowflakes who just want to treat kids like their little precious angels who can do no wrong. Yeah. Yeah, like Max is talking. Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Max is talking about how this is in the best interest of children. If Mason fails at school, will this right-wing columnist for the Daily Mail be advocating for anything that is going to help Mason in the future? Absolutely not because that would be woke snowflick. Yeah, you're absolutely right, Alice. But we may have found a key into convincing the right, right? we just deny different medical conditions, right? We're like, we've got to overfund the NHS

because that way we can cut everybody off of their liver medication and then they're like, fuck, sign it into law. All of a sudden we got Boris's signature on the bottom of the bell. We don't need to nationalize the rail and that way people won't need statins anymore. Exactly. It's like mysterious correlation. Exactly.

Yeah, whatever we're going to do. You mentioned it earlier, Eli, but like taking people off medication when they need it for ADHD, like genuinely could affect someone's life so detrimentally that they could end up in gambling debt or could end up taking their lives. Like this is, people with ADHD have increased difficulties with so many different things.

They're more likely to be in prison. They're more likely to have difficulties with finances, with gambling, with violence, with all sorts of issues. Like the medication is more important than just concentrating in school. It is actually genuinely life-changing and getting, taking kids off their medications, cold turkey, is genuinely dangerous. Right, yeah. So now we're at the end of our experiments, and we're going to see whether or not we're going

to keep Mason off his meds. And look, we've seen a lot of this in bullshit documentaries before, but usually they don't announce throughout the 40-minute program what their conclusion is going to be. So it's very anticlimactic, right? It's just like, so, are you going to keep him on his meds? She's like, suppose not. And we're like, yeah, of course not. And it's, it's so bad as well because, like, even in this,

she's talking about, like, how school been, and it's bad. He's been doing very, very badly at school. And I was thinking, this is strange that he's doing so bad, but it's not strange. He's off the meds that he needs in order to be able to concentrate at school. Like you said before he was medicated, he was finding it really difficult to concentrate at school. Then he got on the meds.

And you said early in the documentary, for the first time in his academic life, he's now on par with his piece. and then you took him off those meds and he's no longer on par with his peers. None of this is strange. This is, that itself is enough of an experiment with data. And then the end of that is like, but all that matters is that he's happy. Yeah, because happiness is just as good as an education and the ability to function your way around society without being in huge amounts of distress all the time. Like being, that level of happiness sometimes is just as good as all of that. Yeah. And Max sort of shotgun blasts us here with like the moral of the,

the story, which really puts into context how insane all of his claims are, right? Like, he's doing sort of a wrap-up speech, right? And he says, what have we learned today? It's a myth that it's a neurodevelopmental disorder. And I wrote in my notes, think about what you would do if you actually thought that, right? If you were a real responsible medical professional and you thought you had discovered that an entire neurodevelopmental disorder was a myth, would you go, I should call Channel 4? No, no, no, no, no, no, BBC.

Let's call Channel 4. Well, yeah, either that, or would you go to your daily mail column where you write articles like The Terrifying Truth? Most of us could be talked into murder. That's the time that he genuinely believed that Darren Brown, the magician, actually persuaded someone to become an assassin, and he wrote an entire Daily Mail article about it, this doctor and psychiatrist who thinks he's got access to reality for people. Yeah.

Then we get some more about how education is important. They need more arts and sports. This movie constantly says that they need more arts and sports. I wrote my notes, my son has more autism during sports. Can he have more reading time? Does it depend on the special interest subject that they prefer, or is it just arts and sports that cures the neurodevelopmental stuff? Yeah, they just keep repeating that the problem is it's not a medical problem.

It's the social problem of inadequate schooling. But neither Max Pemberton nor anybody else involved in this documentary is promoting any kind of solution to realistically changing that. And even if they did, they can't then say that their like reworked version of schooling would be any better for Mason. They've got no evidence for that. They're just like, ah, I reckon, I reckon, I reckon he'd be better if, uh, if something changed, but it won't.

Yeah. And then, as if you weren't already bummed out enough and you should be, we're going to get perhaps one of the most bummer breakfast club closes we've ever gotten, including the movie about cancer where the guy died of cancer. Yeah, yeah. So like, again, we've just done a conclusion. He has just done a what have we learned today? It's all fake.

And then just in text on the screen, because you know they couldn't convince Max to do this as voiceover. They're like, so Mason started to fail out of school and they put him back on his meds again. Yep. Yep. He fucked up his exams and he had to go back in the medication. Just in time to have still failed those exams.

Nice one, Max. Thanks very much, Dr. Pemberton. Yeah. And that's the end of the movie. So I guess now that we know that most of medicaid, science really depends on having a unit of squirm. Alice, what have we learned today? So I think one of the things, well, if anyone has learned anything from this,

I think Dr. Max has come away with a personal journey learning that he may will have to reflect on for large parts of his life. Because I think he's learned that if it's a myth, it's not a myth for him because the drugs do seem to really work for him. So I think he's learned something. I don't know if you learned anything, Alice. I mean, I've learned that people who make documentaries, including professionals, do not understand like some really basic concepts like metaphors.

Yeah. Yeah. Like and as if. Yeah, those are very important ones. Maybe an English lesson for Max instead of a psychiatry one. The problem is Max, he just had too much like sports at school. He had too many classes of sports and art and not enough on the science side of things. That's what it is.

That's what it is. All right. Well, Marsh, Alice, thank you both so much for joining us. If people want to hear more from you, where can they go? So you can hear us both on The Skeptics with a K podcast, where every week. One of the three of us host will actually do a bit of original skeptical investigative journalism on something that you should find interesting. So that's every single week. And Alice, you can also, your deputy editor of the Skeptic Magazine as well. Yeah, you can find us at Skeptic Mag. And you can

also find us if you want to move fast and buy tickets for the ESE Congress that we're running in October this year. We've got some streaming tickets left at ESE, Liverpool. Yes, absolutely. That is the event. That is definitely not QED. But it will still be. lot of the feel of a QED for those who either attended or never got to attend. You can stream everything on YouTube for the low, low price of like a tenor, which is what, $12 or $13. Excellent. Well, I cannot wait. Again, we will have all of that linked in the show notes. Definitely check that out. And while that does it for our review of the great ADHD myth, that's not going to do it for the episode just yet, because we still need to get you hot and bothered for next week.

So, Eli, tell us what's on deck. Me. Me. well me it's the start knowing eth aren't here to stop me so it's the start of our Halloween spookacular that's right we're going to start where the bullshit all began

we've covered a lot of the Lorraine psychic lady movies throughout the years but we're going to start it at its origins with the pretty badly panned insidious all right so with that to look forward to

We're going to bring episode 577 to a merciful close. Thanks again to Marsh and Alice. And a huge thanks to all our Patreon donors that help make the show go. If you'd like to count yourself among their ranks, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com forward slash god-awful and thereby earn early access to an ad-free version of every single episode. You can also help us out a ton by giving us a five-star review and sharing the show on all your various social media platforms.

And if you enjoyed this show, be sure to check out our sibling shows. This Gathing The Atheist, Citation Needed, and D&D, D-minus and the skeptocrat, available wherever a podcast live. If you have questions, comments, or cinematic suggestions, you can email god-awful movies at gmail.com. Tim Robertson takes care of our social media. So does my sister.

Our theme song was written and performed by Ryan Slotnik of Evil Giraffes on Mars. All other music was written and performed by our audio engineer, Morgan Clark, and was used with his permission. Thanks again for giving us a chunk of your life this week. For Heath, Enright, Marsh and Alice. I'm Eli Bosnick. And also no illusions. He's not here this week, but it's on behalf of him, too.

I almost did it without fucking it up. I'm so sorry, Noah. Promising to work hard to Argonarchan architect next week. Until then, we'll leave you with the Breakfast Club close. Mason, having failed his sats, fucked up his entire educational career in a way that every one of his school friends could see. But Channel 4 got a solid 46-minute material out of ruining his life, so it was fine.

Max Pemberton wrote an article for the Daily Mail saying that all children deserve the opportunity to go for a walk in nature every time they get a little bit distracted and fidgety, was lambasted as a lefty-woke snowflake and never wrote for the mail again. Things continued to exist, even when Max Pemberton didn't understand them. All right, and then have you guys been on since the clap? Marcia, I know you surprised you with the clap. I haven't been on since the mail. All right, so I have chlamydia now.

I'm a survivor. Please respect me. And also, I'm going to show you some stuff when Marsha's off camera. I want you to know if it's a rush. So we're going to do one. One, two, three, clap. Yeah. Okay.

One, two, three. Nice. Okay, I've never led that clap before. It feels insane because you guys are like nine hours later. Like, I was like, oh, I gave the instructions wrong. I hated it. It's that much of a delay. See, I didn't feel a delay at my end, but I suppose it's got to come back.

Yeah, no, I've been on the other side. It fucking rocks. Yeah, you're like, ooh. I nailed it. God. Well, jazz band at the end here. Such a sense of rhythm. Mm-hmm.

The Brits and the Jew. We just started a band. Hey, you guys were very involved in music, just not in making the music, just mostly in looking at it off people who did make the music. I'm sorry, do you not like all that black people's music? We've got you. They couldn't do it.

They were too busy. Other stuff. Well, they probably, and they didn't want the money anyways. Yeah, it was about the music. Exactly. You don't even want to speculate or what they spend the money. I saw Ray.

I know how they spend their money. I saw that documentary. Actually, I'll be A quarter of a second. Oh, I knew I shouldn't have gone for Ray. He hates it when you talk about Ray like that. Didn't want the top light on. Sorry, no, that's unprofessional.

I'm meant to catch it. There we go. Meant to have the top light off. Good. That's fine. All right. I'm so sorry, Morgan. That was a terrible count.

Were you watching a clock there? I was. Okay. Because from what I could tell, it just seemed like you were staring off like solemnly into the middle distance. I only let myself be depressed during the five count.

Now that I've got a six-year-old, that's the only time that I take for me. I become violently suicidal for five seconds, three times a week. I wasn't expecting this. That's okay. We can cut it. No, no. I'm not he.

I won't keep this in the edit. This content is scanned credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse or other harm to their hotline at 617-24945 or on their website at creator accountability network.org. This podcast is a production of Puzzle and a Thunderstorm LLC and was created. without the use of generative AI. Its contents may not be used for AI training. Copyright 2026, all rights reserved.