Big Pharma Fear of Lost Income Underlies Their Scare Tactics

     This week on Mad in America Dr. Yaakov Ophir, a clinical psychologist and a research associate at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, published a thoughtful overview of ADHD controversies in response to an ADHD UK rebuttal to a recently aired BBC program, The Great ADHD Myth.

     The ADHD UK attack made three major assertions:
      1. “ADHD is not scientifically controversial.”
      2. “ADHD is not a parlour debate. People die.”
      3. ADHD is not a myth. It is not a social construct.”

     Dr. Ophir’s article provides a conscientious overview of relevant ADHD studies that support or contradict these three absolutes. An equally conscientious reader would be hard put after reading the article to see much validity at all in these three ADHD UK claims. Ophir is, of course, the author of the book ADHD Is Not a Disease and Ritalin Is Not a Cure.

     ADHD UK also voiced a public warning about the BBC program even before it was broadcast that claimed the program’s title and framing would cause harm. They said that “the broadcast would intensify stigma, deter people from seeking assessment and treatment, and put lives at risk,” per Ophir.

     Although Ophir does mention the spectacular rise in ADHD diagnoses over the years – from a nonexistent diagnosis in 1946 to one labeling up to 20 percent of children with ADHD – he does not note the equally spectacular rise in Big Pharma profit for ADHD  medications. Big Pharma giants like Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Novartis AG, and Eli Lilly generated around $15 billion in revenue last year alone from their ADHD products.

     That ADHD market is projected to grow to more that $23 billion over the next ten years. No wonder such scare tactics are being used against anyone threatening to reveal that the ADHD diagnosis emperor does not have any clothes on.

     No wonder, too, that they’ve gone on an aggressive attack — and not just a cautious defensive – to anyone questioning ADHD. They now put their public focus on all those poor souls who will be deprived of taking medication on the low end of the speed spectrum for an ADHD diagnosis that may or may not be the least bit valid, as Ophir’s article so nicely shows.

     It’s an attack Big Pharma has already honed while they have sought as much government funding as possible to educate the public about how many undiscovered citizens there still are out there who are in dire need of being prescribed medication to treat their undiagnosed depression and anxiety.

     They’re marketing experts, but medical impostors.