Parents deserve the truth as scientists now admit families were misled into believing their children had a neurobiological disorder that required mind-altering stimulant drugs.
By Jan Eastgate
President, CCHR International
April 18, 2025
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and the prescribing of stimulants to treat it were the subject of a recent game-changing exposé in The New York Times Magazine. The revelations will shake the psychiatric establishment and vindicate decades of warnings from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR): namely, that there is no definitive biological marker for ADHD, yet 3.4 million American children have been labeled with it, most placed on powerful, mind-altering drugs.
The New York Times investigation by Paul Tough exposes a pattern of scientific reversal and public misdirection. Doctors and researchers who once helped define and promote ADHD as a neurobiological disorder are now admitting critical errors, overstated drug benefits, and an absence of supporting science. As federal regulators are currently looking into the explosion of ADHD diagnoses in American children, parents across the country are left questioning how they were led to believe their children had a brain disorder, with no test to prove it.[1]
As Tough writes, The “ever-expanding mountain of pills rests on certain assumptions: that A.D.H.D. is a medical disorder that demands a medical solution; that it is caused by inherent deficits in children’s brains; and that the medications we give them repair those deficits. Scientists who study ADHD are now challenging each one of those assumptions.”
ADHD—A Disorder Without a Medical Test
The most damning truth confirmed by The New York Times is that, despite decades of claims to the contrary, ADHD cannot be medically confirmed. As the article states, “There is no reliable biological test for ADHD,” and the diagnostic criteria “often require subjective judgment.”
Yet that didn’t stop psychiatrists and researchers from telling the public otherwise. ADHD became a widely accepted “neurobiological” condition, medicalizing common childhood behaviors such as restlessness, impulsivity, and distractibility, despite the absence of objective proof.
Parents were routinely told their child had a brain-based disorder and needed medication. But as The New York Times reveals, that narrative is unraveling from within, as key figures now distance themselves from their earlier claims.
Expert Reversals on ADHD
At the center of this dramatic reversal is James Swanson, who in the 1990s was working as a research psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. At the time, CCHR—established 56 years ago by the Church of Scientology and professor of psychiatry, Thomas Szasz—had organized a nationwide protest campaign against children being labeled with ADHD and prescribed powerful amphetamines and stimulants. From 2012 to 2022, the total number of prescriptions for stimulants to treat ADHD increased in the U.S. by 58%, and CCHR held regular protests against the mass drugging of children.
The number of American children diagnosed with ADHD had more than doubled from fewer than a million patients in 1990 to more than two million in 1993, almost two-thirds of whom were prescribed Ritalin. Swanson and others estimated 3% of children had the condition.
However, the figure kept rising, hitting 5.5% of American children in 1997, then 6.6% in 2000. And a more recent estimate soared to 11.4%. In a 2017 follow-up study, Swanson found that ADHD symptoms in those taking the drugs had not improved, and recipients had remained about an inch shorter than their peers. Today, Swanson concedes that there are things about ADHD that are “definitely wrong.” And after three decades of studying stimulants, Swanson stated: “I don’t agree with people who say that stimulant treatment is good. It’s not good.”
Other experts quoted by The New York Times included:
- The traditional notion that there is a natural category of people with ADHD that clinicians can objectively measure and define “just doesn’t seem to be the case.” – Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a researcher in psychiatry and neuroscience at King’s College London.
- “There is no single-gene story. Fifteen years ago, there was incredible optimism, and now we realize how far away we are.” – John Gabrieli, an M.I.T. neuroscientist
- “Although it has been believed for decades that medication effects on academic seatwork productivity and classroom behavior would translate into improved learning of new academic material, we found no such translation.” – William Pelham, Jr., Florida researcher
- “[The drugs have] minimal effects on academic achievement or attainment.” – F. Xavier Castellanos, a neuroscience researcher at New York University
Prior studies claiming evidence that ADHD is a neurobiological disorder are also now being rebuked. Sonuga-Barke argues that the entire decades-long quest for a biomarker has been “a red herring” for the field. “In the field, we’re so frightened that people will say it doesn’t exist,” he says. But the reality is that “there literally is no natural cutting point where you could say, ‘This person has got ADHD, and this person hasn’t got it.’ Those decisions are to some extent arbitrary.”
According to The New York Times, for some teenagers, the negatives of stimulants have led them to lobby their parents to stop taking the medication, or they just quit on their own. To Swanson, the high quit rate is further evidence that, over the long term, ADHD drugs just aren’t that good. “If it’s so effective, why do people stop?” he asked. “The physicians say, ‘They stop because they don’t know what’s good for them.’ So the parents hear the message: ‘If you don’t fill this prescription, you just don’t know what’s good for your kid.’ But if you ask the kids themselves, they say, ‘It makes me feel bad.’ Or, ‘It didn’t help me.’ Or, ‘It stopped working.’”
3.4 Million Children and a System Under Scrutiny
The consequences of this false consensus are now the subject of federal investigation. With more than 3.4 million children diagnosed and prescribed stimulants—some younger than 5 years old—the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has launched a review into the potential misuse of ADHD diagnoses and treatments.[2]
CCHR has, since the 1980s, warned that psychiatric diagnoses such as ADHD are not founded in medical science but are voted into existence, lacking the rigorous biological confirmation required in other fields of medicine. The ADHD debacle, as documented by The New York Times, proves the consequences of this pseudoscientific system and the need to move away from a biomedical model.
In 2017, a UN Health Rights expert, Dr. Dainius Pūras, issued a report calling for mental health care to move away from that biomedical (drug) model. Dr. Pūras had served as a member of the UNCRC, which held hearings on the increasing rate of children being labeled with ADHD and drugged with psychostimulants.[3]
CCHR presented submissions to the UN Committee for the Rights of Children (UNCRC) warning about the massive prescribing of psychotropic drugs to children in 14 countries. In response to the report submitted to one country, the U.N. body strongly recommended the establishment of a system for the “monitoring of the excessive use of psychostimulants on children.” The UNCRC was critical of the “medicating” of children, without expressly examining root causes or providing parents and children with alternative support and therapy.”[4]
CCHR supports the recent World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) guidance on Mental Health, Human Rights, and Legislation, “Legislation on mental health must therefore take a new direction away from the narrow traditional ‘biomedical paradigm’ that has contributed to coercive and confined environments in mental health services.”[5]
CCHR calls into question the ethics of prescribing amphetamine-based stimulants—controlled substances—to millions of children with no biological test or lab confirmation that a disorder exists.
The federal investigation now underway should be the beginning of broader accountability. It is time to:
- Reevaluate the science behind ADHD and its treatment coverage under government insurance.
- Ensure full informed consent for parents, including disclosure that ADHD has no known biological marker and there are no lab or medical tests to confirm the diagnosis.
- Redirect funding to non-drug alternatives
Conclusion: From Reckoning to Reform
The New York Times has ignited a long-overdue reckoning in the psychiatric and pediatric fields. Its revelations make clear that ADHD’s biological legitimacy was exaggerated, its treatments oversold, and its researchers are now, in many cases, retreating from their original claims.
This is not just a moment of vindication—it is a rallying call to reform a broken system. Millions of children were and continue to be labeled and drugged based on a condition that neither psychiatry nor science has ever proved to exist. The damage done to those children—and the trust of
their families—demands not an apology, reparation, and lasting reform.
The federal investigation must go beyond the surface. It must ask how pseudoscience was allowed to shape national pediatric policy—and why it took the voices of regretful researchers, not decades of watchdog warnings, to finally force a change.
References:
[1] Paul Tough, “Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?” The New York Times Magazine, 13 Apr. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/magazine/adhd-medication-treatment-research.html?smid=em-share
[2] “The ADHD Epidemic: How Profit, Not Science, Drives the Surge in Diagnoses,” CCHR International, 21 Feb. 2025, https://www.cchrint.org/2025/02/21/the-adhd-epidemic-how-profit-not-science-drives-the-surge-in-diagnoses/; “Number of U.S. Children Taking Psychiatric Drugs,” CCHR international, https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/children-on-psychiatric-drugs/; “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Establishes the Make America Healthy Again Commission,” The White House, 13 Feb. 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-establishes-the-make-america-healthy-again-commission/
[3] “World Needs ‘Revolution’ in Mental Health Care, U.N. Health Rights Expert Reports,” CCHR International, 14 June 2017, https://www.cchrint.org/2017/06/14/world-needs-revolution-in-mental-health-care/; “World needs ‘revolution’ in mental health care – UN rights expert,” United Nations, 6 June 2017, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2017/06/world-needs-revolution-mental-health-care-un-rights-expert; https://web.archive.org/web/20170118053505/http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Health/Pages/SRBio.aspx
[4] “World Needs ‘Revolution’ in Mental Health Care, U.N. Health Rights Expert Reports,” CCHR International, 14 June 2017, https://www.cchrint.org/2017/06/14/world-needs-revolution-in-mental-health-care/; “Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 44 of the Convention,” UNCRC, 17 Sept. – 5 Oct. 2012, p. 15, https://web.archive.org/web/20130729192330/http://rightsofchildren.ca/wp-content/uploads/Canada_CRC-Concluding-Observations_61.2012.pdf
[5] “New WHO Mental Health Guideline Condemns Coercive Psychiatric Practices,” CCHR International, 18 Sept. 2023, https://www.cchrint.org/2023/09/18/who-guideline-condemns-coercive-psychiatric-practices/; “Guidance on Mental Health, Human Rights and Legislation,” World Health Organization, OHCHR, 9 Oct. 2023, p. xvii, https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/373126/9789240080737-eng.pdf
SHARE YOUR STORY/COMMENT