Charles Bradley first observed that amphetamine calmed hyperactive children in 1937 — not because he was investigating a brain disease, but because he was running experiments on institutionalised children at the Emma Pendleton Bradley Home in Rhode Island. The children who responded were better workers in the institutional setting. The first clinical observation of stimulant effect was a labour management observation inside a custodial institution.
C. Keith Conners developed the standardised teacher-rating scale that enabled mass diagnosis from classrooms. His instruments were funded in part by pharmaceutical industry research grants through the 1970s. The mechanism by which diagnosis left the clinic and entered the school — where teachers, not psychiatrists, became the screeners — is traceable through the academic record.
NHS England’s Right to Choose mechanism allowed patients to self-refer to private ADHD providers. NHS spending on private ADHD assessment tripled from roughly £36 million to £128 million in three years. Then NHS England moved to restrict Right to Choose specifically for neurodevelopmental conditions in 2024–25, citing costs. The same year, a wave of “overdiagnosis” press coverage arrived — concentrated in the Daily Mail, The Times, and the Telegraph, most of it sourcing unnamed NHS clinicians.
Shire Pharmaceuticals — now part of Takeda — spent decades lobbying for expanded ADHD diagnosis while simultaneously funding the research that justified it. Their UK and Irish adult ADHD awareness campaigns in the 2000s were produced and funded by Shire. The campaigns increased diagnosis rates. The same companies now produce right-wing narratives about overdiagnosis, which creates scarcity and drives private market prices up. It is profitable in both directions.
Psychiatric classification systems designed by military and colonial institutions to manage populations have been applied to neurodevelopmental difference in ways that consistently serve capital and consistently harm women, colonised people, and the poor. The simultaneous existence of a private diagnosis industry and a “overdiagnosis” media campaign is not coincidental. The outcome — a population that cannot think clearly, cannot organise, internalises failure, and works harder for less — is the same outcome that is intrinsic to the core function of the corporate system.
Interesting post and no doubt all of it is true. Whatever serves the capitalist beast is what gets the $$ and support. As someone who was diagnosed as an adult with audhd, I was already taking the medications I needed to function before I was diagnosed. The diagnosis simply gave me answers for why I am the way I am, wonderful clarity I had lacked and needed my whole life. Always be suspicious of the "it's overdiagnosed" crowd. I can see clearly that my dad has ASD, mom has anxiety and adhd. They've never been diagnosed, but they've been on the same cocktail of meds 30+ years that my kids take now for those diagnoses.
So the system profits from diagnosing us and then from telling us we're overdiagnosed. Great.