March 20, 2025 - 4:10pm
In 2017, Simon Wessely, the former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “Every time we have a mental health awareness week my spirits sink. We don’t need people to be more aware: we can’t deal with the ones who are already aware.”
The same is true for ADHD awareness, and the situation has only deteriorated since then. In 2023, Dr Tony Lloyd, the chief executive of the ADHD Foundation, said there had been a 400% increase in the number of adults seeking a diagnosis since 2020, while in the US one in seven boys under 17 have now been diagnosed with the condition. In the UK, the average waiting time for an ADHD referral is three years.
Social media has a lot to answer for here. A new study has analysed the 100 most popular ADHD videos on TikTok (where #ADHD has over 4 million videos and over 11 billion views), and found that fewer than half the claims about symptoms accurately reflected clinical guidelines. The study also found that young adults who spent lots of time watching this content were more likely to have self-diagnosed the condition and overestimate the prevalence of its symptoms.
This is hardly surprising. Content creators, cosplaying as medical experts, constantly pathologise normal behaviours such as “having a messy bedroom” or “struggling to concentrate”. They use anecdotes and experience to reframe ADHD as a quirky personality trait — or, to use the new buzzword, “superpower” — rather than a life-limiting disability. They encourage users to seek out a diagnosis because doing so supposedly “transformed” their own lives. As ADHD is not a clear-cut binary, but instead a spectrum of impairment, it’s incredibly easy to spot similar behaviours in yourself, particularly in an overstimulating world where everyone is distracted by push notifications and digital dopamine hits.
This phenomenon of suggestibility is nothing new, but this desire for a diagnosis is. For decades, parents resisted labels for fear of stigmatising their child; now, they actively seek them.
Teenagers are also particularly vulnerable to these messages because adolescence is a phase of self-discovery and identity-development, and they want validation and reassurance as well as independence. It’s the impossible lure of the promise of a “quick fix”, an explanation for perceived shortcomings, a measure of grace for falling sort of social, school or personal expectations.
Diagnoses can be helpful, yet they can also very quickly engulf our whole sense of self. A social media soundbite lacks the nuance to show young people that having a label can help them navigate their sense of the world, but this safe and comfortable framework can also justify behaviours and take away a desire for change or accountability. It’s incredibly complicated, as all human behaviour is, and cannot be summarised in a 30-second “explainer”.
ADHD is a very real condition: as a teacher I have seen first-hand how difficult it can be for some students to manage their symptoms without targeted support and medication. Yet the sudden explosion of diagnoses, driven by social media, risks undermining the seriousness of the disorder and the likelihood that those who really need help receive it.
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SubscribeKellogg is an idiot suggesting this. It won’t fly with anyone … he must know this.
This is Putin’s 3rd war. (Chechny, Georgia, & now Ukraine. If he doesn’t have a casus belli, he invents one. Putin is the aggressor. Ironically he has driven NATO closer to Russia, with Sweden & Finland eschewing neutrality.
Putin is the aggressor, everything else is noise.
And, in that time, how many wars has America fought?
If we date the Chechnya one to say 1999/2000, then on the US side in that time we’ve got Iraq Ver.2, Afghanistan (you could possibly argue that’s the same one), there’s the war with ISIS in Syria (and general involvement with the Free Syrian Army). I’m leaving out Libya since it’s not really a war they’re fighting, more of a destabilise-and-abandon, and also the Orange Revolution et. al.
Going a bit further back, to the 1990’s we have the US actually bombing a European capital (Belgrade)
Which isn’t to say Putin is or isn’t the aggressor in a given situation, or in many of the wars you cite, but he’s not someone who’s uniquely rogue or aggressive on the world stage. He uses his military aggressively in defence of what he perceives to be Russia’s interests. Rather as the US does, in its interests.
Chechnia was a civil war.
The EU appointed a commission to investigate the 2008 war in Georgia and concluded that Georgia started the war. The Russians gave Georgia a bloody nose, then voluntarily retreated back to the positions they held before Georgia attacked.
You’ll find that western intelligence were all over all three conflicts. Like the Libyan/Egyptian/Syrian ‘uprisings’.
We started all three if you dare to look at the histories of each. We wanted it, we got it (you never know it might have just destabilised Russia and ousted Putin) we mismanaged it and finally we’ve lost.
This is the last western military adventure, proxy or non proxy for a long time. Well, except for Iran it’s beginning to look like.
Would it not be simpler to offer both Ukraine and Russia membership of the EU and get them both bogged down in the politics of the EU. Russia would feel entirely at home with increasing levels of red tape and restrictions on free speech. The EU might have to soft-pedal fines for anti-gay policies in Russia but sacrifices for the grater good have to be made and Russia could easily absorb the EU’s surplus immigrants into the vastness of Russia. With Russia’s oil and mineral resources and indifference to net zero Europe would surely be on a par with the US and China.
The partitions of Cyprus, Korea and Germany may not have been lasting solutions to their problems but all brought peace.
The partitioning of Ireland led to civil wars and decades of murderous “troubles”. The partitioning of British India led to massive ethnic cleansing and bloodshed, and repeated wars. The partitioning of Vietnam led to two decades of bloody war. The partitioning of Palestine has led to ethnic cleansing, unremitting bloodshed and a brutal occupation.
I don’t think partitions as a means to achieve peace have been that successful.
Unfortunate that Mr. Kellogg doesn’t entice Russia by offering it a better “zone of responsibility”. Why not give it, for example, the Atlantic coast of Florida? Balmier climate than Ukraine’s southeast coast, and it might assuage the Russian paranoia about being “surrounded” by the evll West.
Gotta better idea?
Because unless that country is divided up with some international supervision, the Europeans will continue to bankroll their military-industrial partners surrounding it. And once the Russians look again to be steamrolling through the front towards Kiev, then the US will start pouring significant dollars into the war machine once again.
How about letting people vote where they want to be?
I realise the West no longer believes in listening to voters, but it used to be an idea that worked quite well.
US Special Envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg, though not a central figure in American efforts to end the war with Russia, has nonetheless made a new proposal with the intention of jumpstarting stalled peace negotiations: partitioning Ukraine “almost like Berlin after World War Two”.
I’m assuming he misspoke and that what he really meant was “almost like Czechoslovakia before World War Two.
Kudos for saying what few in the Western media will admit: That there are, in the Russian parlance, “root causes” to the war which must be addressed to achieve a peace.
The article linked confines itself to a limited menu of what the Russians have repeatedly stated as the casus belli, but at least acknowledges that Russia had a perfectly rational reason to invade when it did.
Any effort that refuses to engage with the war’s underlying drivers is, as the author states, doomed to failure. The West has talked out of both sides of its mouth for too long for any promises to be effective. That is what ultimately led to the war, and the West will have to accept that this time, only performance will count.