I watched Channel 4’s The Great ADHD Myth? and I have things to day beyond hello, clickbait central.

We know there are a lot of attacks at the moment on the neurodivergent community, and using that title in itself was pure clickbait, and unfortunately it is going to work.

As a documentary, the main thing I can say about it is that I found it very confused, and ultimately it felt like the work of someone who was not looking very far and who was mostly trying to confirm his own hypothesis, which is not very scientific, is it?

Taking the experience of a young boy, taking him off medication and then showing that things like nature, yoga, movement and other accommodations could do wonders for him does not prove that medication is not valuable. Of course those things helped him. I completely believe they did. What it shows is that environment matters enormously, which is something many of us have been saying for years.

The fact that he needs medication to cope with school is a different question, and actually one where I agree that there is a serious issue. The way our school system works is deeply detrimental to many neurodivergent children, and in my view it is not even one size fits all, it is one size fits no one. It is a system that needs a serious overhaul, and I have been banging on about that for years.

Of course a child should not need medication simply in order to cope with an educational environment that is badly designed for them. There is something wrong with the system if that is what is happening, but that is not evidence that ADHD does not exist, and it is certainly not evidence that medication is some kind of easy way out of doing the work.

Medication is one of the tools. We all know it is not a silver bullet, it works for some people and not for everyone, some people find it unpleasant or unhelpful, and for some people it is absolutely extraordinary and genuinely life-changing. It has its place, just as accommodations have their place, coaching has its place, nature has its place, movement has its place, understanding your nervous system has its place. These things do not need to be placed in opposition to each other.

I also found the presenter’s own experiment highly disturbing from an ethical perspective. Going through an assessment, getting access to medication, trying one drug and then making broad conclusions on the basis of one dose is not serious evidence. Interestingly, the whole thing actually feels very ADHD to me, because we are very good at trying to circumvent systems when the system does not make sense to us. Not because we want to break the system, but because when a system does not work, we want to understand it, improve it and make sense of it.

I do not doubt that his intentions are good, but I think he has simply not done enough work, and I think part of the problem is that he is still operating from a very Western medical model of pathology, where we are always looking for what is wrong with the person rather than looking at the whole picture.

To me, that is also one of the massive problems with the way we talk about ADHD.

Ultimately, what we are diagnosed on is very often distress and impairment. We talk about organisation difficulties, impulsivity, executive dysfunction, emotional dysregulation and all the things that become visible when somebody is struggling, but we do not talk nearly enough about what happens when that person is regulated, supported, interested, safe, autonomous and working in an environment that actually fits them.

When we are dysregulated, our traits can become profoundly impairing, but when we are not dysregulated, when we have the right support and the right environment, many of us can absolutely fly like nobody’s business.

So I think the much more interesting question is not whether ADHD exists. ADHD does exist, and there is plenty of research supporting that.

The question I would much rather we were asking is why ADHD is still named primarily as a deficiency and a disorder, when actually it is also a neurological difference, and why we still describe neurodivergent people mainly through the difficulties they experience in systems that were not designed for them.

In the context of neurodiversity, we should be talking about neurotypes, different neurotypes, all with their own strengths and their own challenges.

Being neurotypical does not mean that you are normal and everybody else is abnormal. It means that your profile fits more easily within the social structures we currently have, because the accommodations needed for a neurotypical profile are basically already folded into society.

Having support for ADHD is not about functioning to normal standards.

Fuck normal.

The point of getting support, for ADHD or for any disability, is to allow that individual to reach their own personal potential. That is what matters.

Someone who is disabled may be able to outperform someone who is not disabled once the right support is in place. Look at the Paralympics. Is it cheating because those athletes are receiving adaptations and support that allow them to perform at their best? Of course it is not.

ADHD is the same in that sense. We are very capable people, and with the right support, the right understanding and the right self-awareness, we are able to fly.

Everyone should be entitled to the accommodations that allow them to be their best self, and I think this is one of the really big things the documentary missed.

And since watching it, I have been having a little fantasy about what education could look like if we really started again.

What would an ideal environment look like if we stopped thinking in terms of school and started thinking about a place for growing, literally a garden of childhood, a real kindergarten?

For me, it would be nature first, not buildings first.

It would be a mini world, a mini park, a forest, a place with a lot of nature where children move around, engage with the world and learn through being part of it. There would be animals to tend to, there would be husbandry, there would be bikes that need fixing, meals that need cooking, places that need cleaning, things that need building, and learning would be integrated around all of those things.

You would learn maths because something needs measuring, you would learn to read because you need to find something out, you would learn biology because there is something alive in front of you, and you would learn to write because you have something you want to communicate.

Because the model we are using now does not really teach us about life. It teaches us to conform.

And in the world of AI, conforming is the job of machines. It is not ours.

We have spent generations building an educational system around standardisation, compliance, repetition, information retention and producing the right answer, and now we have machines that can do those things extraordinarily well.

So surely the future of education has to be about becoming more human, not less.

It has to be about curiosity, creativity, relationships, judgement, experimentation, imagination, adaptability, problem-solving and all the different ways human beings think.

The future belongs to neurodivergence, and by that I do not mean that everybody needs to be neurodivergent. I mean that the qualities we have spent so long trying to suppress, the divergent thinking, the questioning, the refusal to comply with systems that make no sense, the drive to find another way, are exactly the qualities we are going to need and we should cherish and support them.

So yes, I think The Great ADHD Myth? raised some questions worth asking, but I think it was asking them through such a narrow hypothesis that it never really got anywhere near the bigger picture.

The question is not whether ADHD is real.

The question is what happens when we stop trying to make people normal, and start building a world in which different kinds of human beings are actually allowed to thrive.