The Daily Wire shouts “Best of 2025” and then promptly republishes Matt Walsh’s insipid diatribe on a subject he has no grounding in. Predictably, he leans on the laziest trope in the contrarian playbook: Big Pharma invents diagnoses to pad profits — an argument delivered without irony by a platform that itself thrives on outrage-as-revenue and clickbait certainty dressed up as dissent.
In a final flourish of accidental self-parody, Walsh cites his sources as “experts” — quotation marks doing more work than the evidence — drawing from the same shallow, conspiratorial pool that has kept figures like RFK Jr. gainfully employed in the business of confident misinformation. The pattern is familiar: perform skepticism, dismiss lived reality, gesture vaguely at corruption, and declare yourself courageous for saying what serious inquiry has already moved past.
This is not critique. It’s content.
Every few years, a familiar genre resurfaces:
“I’ve finally cracked it. ADHD isn’t real.”
The latest attempt doesn’t bring new evidence. It brings recycled doubts, selective citations, and the confident swagger of someone mistaking contrarianism for insight.
The structure is predictable: identify real uncertainties, strip them of context, and declare victory over a straw version of psychiatry that serious researchers abandoned years ago. If the goal was to advance understanding, it failed. If the goal was to provoke clicks, it succeeded.
Let’s look at how.
The Core Trick: Mistaking Complexity for Fraud
The author’s central move is not subtle. It repeats throughout the piece:
If a condition is complex, heterogeneous, probabilistic, and imperfectly measured — it must not exist.
That standard would eliminate half of medicine.
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental construct, not a laboratory assay. It is identified through patterns of impairment, development, heredity, and response to context — not a single gene, scan, or blood test. This is not a weakness. It is the nature of complex human systems.
The author treats this as a scandal. Researchers treat it as Tuesday.
“There’s No Biological Test” — And That’s Supposed to Be Shocking?
Yes, there is no single objective diagnostic test for ADHD.
There is also no single test for:
chronic pain syndromes
migraines
autism
depression
many autoimmune conditions
early Parkinsonian syndromes
In ADHD, biology shows up probabilistically:
high heritability across twin studies
polygenic risk rather than single-gene causation
small but consistent group-level brain and network differences
altered reward and executive control dynamics
None of these were ever meant to produce a yes/no scanner result. The author quietly swaps “not individually diagnostic” for “not biological” — a sleight of hand, not a conclusion.
“They Can Focus on Star Wars, So It’s Just Boredom”
This is where the piece tips from weak to unserious.
The fact that people with ADHD can hyperfocus on interest is not a revelation. It is one of the most replicated findings in ADHD research and lived experience.
The impairment is not “can’t focus.” It is can’t reliably regulate focus in line with long-term goals, external demands, or delayed rewards.
Reducing ADHD to “kids like fun more than homework” is not insight. It is a parody of insight — and one that diagnostic criteria were explicitly designed to prevent.
The MTA Study: Complex Data, Cartoon Conclusion
The article leans heavily on the MTA study, especially the finding that early medication advantages diminished over time.
This is presented as a smoking gun.
In reality, the MTA showed:
carefully managed medication improves symptoms in the short to medium term
long-term outcomes depend on far more than medication alone
real-world treatment drift, adherence, environment, and development matter
That does not invalidate ADHD. It invalidates the fantasy that pills alone were ever meant to.
Declaring a condition fake because its treatment isn’t a permanent cure is an oddly selective standard — one that would also invalidate diabetes, hypertension, and asthma.
Brain Imaging: From Overpromise to Overcorrection
The author delights in pointing out that early brain-imaging headlines were overstated.
They were.
But correcting exaggeration is not the same as erasing evidence.
Group-level brain differences in ADHD are small, heterogeneous, and non-diagnostic — which is exactly what serious researchers now say, and have said for years. The mistake was in public messaging, not in the existence of biological signal.
Using scientific humility as proof of deception is a curious argument. By that logic, any field that updates its claims should be abolished.
Medication Risks: Real, Important — and Misused Here
The article’s most emotionally charged sections focus on medication risks: growth effects, cardiovascular issues, psychosis risk.
These risks are real. They should be discussed plainly. They should inform prescribing.
What they do not prove is that ADHD itself is a fraud.
Risk does not negate diagnosis. It demands better clinical judgment, not denialism dressed as concern.
Ironically, sensationalist writing like this makes thoughtful risk–benefit discussions harder, not easier.
Variability Over Time Is Not a “Gotcha”
Symptoms change. Environments change. Demands change.
Some people grow into scaffolding. Others lose it. Some appear to “outgrow” ADHD — often because expectations soften or supports improve.
This is how neurodevelopment works.
Treating variability as proof of nonexistence misunderstands development at a foundational level.
What This Article Actually Is
This is not a serious critique of ADHD science.
It is:
selective citation
collapsing nuanced findings into binary claims
conflating bad practice with nonexistent conditions
and mistaking rhetorical confidence for rigor
It thrives on public mistrust of psychiatry while quietly ignoring the field’s own internal debates and corrections.
That’s not skepticism. That’s content.
The Uncomfortable Truth the Article Avoids
The real conversation isn’t “Does ADHD exist?”
It’s:
Why diagnostic quality varies so widely
Why lived experience is still dismissed when it contradicts neat theories
Why we demand people with executive dysfunction adhere perfectly to demanding interventions
Why uncertainty is treated as scandal rather than signal
Those are harder questions. They don’t fit neatly into viral outrage. And they don’t allow the author to play lone truth-teller.
What makes pieces like this so corrosive is not that they question ADHD. Questioning is healthy. What corrodes trust is the performance of certainty without responsibility — the casual flattening of decades of contested, self-correcting research into a morality play about villains, victims, and brave truth-tellers.
ADHD does not require mythologising to be real, nor does it collapse under scrutiny. What does collapse quickly is contrarianism that mistakes volume for rigor and suspicion for insight. When complexity is framed as deception, and uncertainty as proof of fraud, the conclusion has already been decided before the evidence is touched.
There is a profound irony in accusing an entire field of being profit-driven while producing content that follows the same incentives: provoke, polarise, publish, repeat. The difference is that clinicians, researchers, and people with ADHD live with the consequences of being wrong. The contrarian pundit does not.
If this article accomplished anything, it is not the exposure of a scam, but a reminder of how easily public discourse can be derailed when lived experience is dismissed, expertise is selectively caricatured, and confidence is mistaken for courage.
ADHD is not a hoax in need of debunking.
This genre of writing, however, might be.