It’s the new joke, isn’t it? Hands up anyone who doesn’t have ADHD ! Or, am I the only person here who doesn’t have ADHD? And the joke is all the more exquisite in London . It turns out that it’s here that there’s been the highest increase in the rate of prescriptions for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder over the course of four years, from 2020 to last year. Researchers have found that while rates over that time have gone up across the country, in London they’ve really spiked: the annual rate of increase is 28 per cent, followed by South East England, where the annual increase is nearly a fifth.
So, why is it that nationally, 25 people in every thousand were getting an ADHD prescription in 2020 and more than 44 are getting it now? And why is it that London is at the front of this particular trend? Is it that the pace of life has rocketed so dangerously over this time – cost of living, febrile world order, climate crisis, smartphone dependency ...
all that stuff? My own view is that it’s part of the current, worrying trend to medicalise the human condition , whereby habits and dispositions that used to be attributable to character or circumstances are now seen as something to be solved by the pharmaceutical industry. And if we’re talking about dangerous habits that make for attention disorder, look no further than your smartphone, a device which could have been, and almost certainly was, designed to make us incapable of concentrating on one thing fo.