Deficient Attention and Disordered Activity: Child Psychiatry’s Response to ADHD

Because attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) seems to be a simple medical diagnosis with an unusually effective medical treatment, nothing before has attracted so much business for child psychiatry. Like any business that booms when it is not ready, child psychiatry risks going bust. This is an analysis to inform our urgent business planning in a UK context. K E Y WO R D S attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), child psychiatry I N T H E W O R L D of business it is known that the commonest cause of going bust is not getting too little work. Companies collapse when business booms before they are ready. For child psychiatry in the UK, if not elsewhere, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was not part of our business plan, so our own attention has been deficient. Despite our supposed science and acumen, we have failed to pay attention to the very obvious logic of where our child psychiatry and ADHD business was leading. Rightly, we were pushed by Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) countries and the media to take ADHD more seriously than we did. Who needs a better advertising campaign? Now many of us face an avalanche of ADHD cases, at which we are trying to shovel with ADHD clinics and various official guidelines on ADHD (e.g. Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network [SIGN], 2001). But, on their own, these loud announcements invit