Cracked by James Davies Read Free Book Online Page A

with ADHD.
    As odd as this may sound, the figures published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal are plain to see. The line that charts the monthly diagnostic rates, rather than resembling a mountain range that peaks and dips from month to month, instead moves steadily and diagonally upward from the beginning of the year in January right up to the end of the year in December. To translate this into numerical terms, we find that 5.7 percent of all boys born in January were diagnosed, compared with 5.9 percent born in February, and 6.0 percent born in March. After that, the monthly rates rise incrementally until boys born at the end of the year are 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed than boys born at the start.
    If this figure seems startling to you, then just consider the female diagnostic rates: Girls born at the year’s end in December are 70 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls born in January. So what is going on here? Why are children born at the end of the year far more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than children born at the beginning?
    The clue to unraveling this puzzle has nothing to do with birth signs or weather patterns or cosmic shifts in the lunar calendar. It rather has to do with the simple fact that children in the same year at school can be almost a full year apart in actual age. This is because children with birthdays just before the cutoff date for entering school will be younger than classmates born at earlier times of the year. So in Canada, for example, children born at the beginning of the year (January) are eleven months older than classmates born at the end of the year (December). This means that January children have a full eleven months of developmental advantage over their December peers. And an eleven-month gap at that age represents an enormous difference in terms of mental and emotional maturity.
    As I was keen to find out more about the implications of this study, I interviewed Dr. Richard Morrow, one if its lead researchers.
    â€œWell, the most important thing we noticed,” Morrow said candidly, “was that the younger kids in the classroom were far more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD because their relative immaturity was being wrongly mistaken for symptoms of ADHD.”
    The relative immaturity of the younger children was, in effect, being wrongly recast as psychiatric pathology. “And this clearly explained for us,” continued Morrow, “why the younger you are in your class the more likely you are to be diagnosed with this condition. And this is happening not just in Canada, because we found that wherever similar studies have been conducted [e.g., the United States and Sweden] they have reached the same results—the younger you are in your class, the more likely you’ll get the diagnosis. It’s a pretty wide phenomenon.”
    The reason why Morrow’s research is so important to us is because it provides a clear example of what is known as medicalization—namely, the process by which more and more of our human characteristics are seen as needing medical explanation and treatment. Now, while in the Canadian study it is clear that the effects of medicalization can be deleterious, this is obviously not the case in all instances. Indeed, medicalization, at best, has often been a force for good. For example, it was right to use medicine to cure biological conditions that were once unhelpfully understood as religious problems (to be healed only by prayer or church attendance).
    And yet, as we have seen, there are forms of medicalization that are clearly unhelpful. These are the forms that invasively spread medical authority where it was never designed to go. For instance, “problems” such as low achievement, certain kinds of truancy, or underperformance have attracted medical diagnoses and intervention in our children, as have many normal reactions to the demands of adult life that are labeled as so-called