06/04/2026
My interview with Dr. Sami Timimi was all about why ADHD and autism diagnoses have exploded, and whether the science actually backs any of it up.
People assume ADHD and autism are things you can find inside the brain. Something hardwired. Something a scan or a blood test reveals.
It isn't.
At no point did any of this follow a scientific discovery about what's happening in people's brains. What actually happened is what I call a mutation of constructs. An idea starts narrow, then widens. From hyperactivity, to attention, to adults, to "masking," to women. Not because we discovered anything new, but because we kept changing how we define it.
Today the fastest growing group being diagnosed is adult women. The suffering is real. But the label tells you almost nothing about the cause.
We've built a whole mental health industrial complex around these ideas. Pharmaceuticals, apps, books, assessments, institutes. Mostly built by well meaning people. But it profits from how distressed and alienated we've come to feel.
My worry is simple. We've never had a generation of young people as pathologized as this one. And I worry about what it means when so many of them grow up believing there's something broken inside their brain.
Stories of suffering are also stories of survival. Please don't take that away from the next generation.