There at least three answers:

1. It is a ‘medical condition, first described in symptom terms in 1798 by the Scottish physician Sir Alexander Crichton as “the incapacity of attending with a necessary degree of constancy to any one object.” In 1902, the British pediatrician Sir George Frederic Still described it as “an abnormal defect of moral control in children.” He found that some affected children could not control their behavior the way a typical child would, but they were still intelligent.

   There are two point to note: the first the ‘symptoms’ were identified by people with a limited range of interactions with children in a variety of contexts. Their view contrasts with that of  … who stated that  “childeren were never designed to be still”! The second iis th irony of someone with the name Still being the one to describe those who were not still!

2. For those who watched Chanel 5’s Does your child have ADHD? the other evening, you’d be foregiven for thinking it was little more than a money generating enterprise.Apart from multimillion pounds made by Big Pharma for selling medication for those so labelled, it cited the figure of £1000 being paid for a 2 hour ADHD assessment!. The message that parents are not to blame is reminiscent of Uta Frith’s ‘parents are not to blame for their child/’s autism! Such ’emotion’ laden ‘explanation underplays the role of interaction and the hegemony of the right. Just one instance from the broadcast: a mother of a 6 year old daughter blowing bubbles in their garden. No comment is made on the fact that the mother holds the bubble  tub with  her left hand and blows bubbles through right hand held ring, while her daughter does it in mirror image form.
3. For those intersted in saving time, effort and money, and want to know what’s really happening in the brain, the third explanation is that the root cause is believing and being treated as though one were right (or left handed) when in fact one’s ‘basic operating system is the opposite. The issue is not whether one is right or left handed but whether one writes with one’s adept hand. It was distressing watching the Chanel 5 Does your child have ADHD to see plenty of evidence of unacknowledged adept left handedness. Indeed, the implicit hegemony of the right was more than adequately to be witnessed. It was distressing to see so many floundering around when the cause and the remedy are within reach. Given the role that writing plays in literacy and education in general, it was surprising that this was completely neglected in this programme.