Panorama’s gonzo documentary risks making people think that I’m faking ADHD

A recent BBC Panorama investigation looked at a rise of private clinics diagnosing ADHD in adults. To get diagnosed, the reporter filled out questionnaires about his daily habits and childhood history, and his family also answered questions about him. He also paid a lot of money to a private clinic.

In my training as a journalist, I was always told that you needed a really good justification to embark on undercover stories. In doing so you are, after all, temporarily abandoning the core of journalism – that is to say, the full truth. I don’t think this BBC investigation had that justification. It wasn’t holding power to account or exposing corruption. Anything that gets public money is arguably fair game, but these clinics are paid for out of peoples’ own pockets, many of whom are probably desperate for treatment because of a lack of access to NHS services.

Just like dyslexia is nigh-impossible to spell for dyslexics and lisp is a cruel word for those with it, the process of getting ADHD is especially arduous for those who suffer from it. Forgotten appointments, missed phone calls, long winded diagnoses – it’s a great example of how the bureaucratic world we live in is tailor made for the neurotypical mind. If private clinics make getting a diagnosis easier for struggling people, why wouldn’t we embrace that?

Every single one of my report cards said the same thing: struggles to concentrate. My homework ability was non-existent, and I had behavioural issues. And yet, despite going to a good school and even visiting a special educational therapist, I still wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was an adult in 2008, and only then because I coincidentally lived about 30 miles away from one of the only clinics in the country specialising in adult ADHD.

Do we really think people are attempting to get diagnosed with a relatively stigmatised learning difficulty for fun? Or to get drugs?

Though my teachers always said I was bright, I struggled a lot with concentration. I made it through my GCSEs without too many problems, but when I got to A-levels I couldn’t handle them, and ultimately failed. I only got to university because a kindly Austrian tutor saw my passion during an interview. I graduated with a first-class degree and a fully funded Masters.

In my case going to university, where I had more autonomy and the ability to choose what I was doing with my time, was enough to help me with my concentration. I excelled in areas that I previously struggled, going from the bottom of the class to the top.

But medication and the diagnosis itself definitely played a role here. Just knowing what exactly was wrong with me helped a lot with my self-confidence and understanding.

So for me, the idea that people with ADHD are over-diagnosed is laughable, especially among women and girls who aren’t as likely to be disruptive. There is a famous graph about how the number of left handers has shot up exponentially ever since it stopped being drilled out of kids in school; the number of left-handed people hasn’t changed, but the number of people who accept their inherent left-handedness has.

It’s also entirely plausible that the information-dense digital world we now live in can have adverse effects on peoples’ concentration spans, creating ADHD-like symptoms in people later on in life, or even exacerbating symptoms that may have been easier to control prior to the “attention economy” in which we currently live.

I was initially diagnosed with dyspraxia, a lack of spatial awareness, which is often confused with ADHD during adolescence. That didn’t explain why I just couldn’t focus at-will like most people can, ever since I was a child. Then I purposefully would lock myself away with no stimulus and start daydreaming about my pencil being a spaceship.

I noticed later on that a lot of my friends suffered from similar issues – partly because distractable birds of a feather flock together – but whose parents didn’t have the money or knowledge to send them to a specialist educational institution for a costly diagnosis.

People with ADHD can be wonderfully creative, the life of the party, and extremely empathic. They are also much more likely to be sent to prison, to have difficulties in their family and professional lives, and to die by suicide. Life can be hard for all of us, and even more so for the chronically disorganised and inattentive.

Panorama is one of the UK’s best examples of hard-hitting investigative journalism and has very a proud history. In my view this investigation didn’t live up to that history. It wasn’t just a dud story – we all have those – it’s made things more difficult and stigmatizing for people who are likely already at the end of their tether.

People with learning difficulties and mental health problems frequently hear that they’re making it up far too much. We should listen to – and fund – experts and practitioners in this field, rather than journalism that, in my view, has the effect of further stigmatising stigmatizes vulnerable people.