Drugged for being boys: The TRUTH behind the ADHD scam



Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that people are born with.

Well, at least that’s long been the narrative in the medical field.

But the fact that ADHD diagnoses and Adderall prescriptions have skyrocketed in recent decades, especially in young male populations, has many — even the left’s “experts” — questioning if ADHD is actually congenital. It seems they can’t help but ask: If ADHD is something you’re born with, why the enormous surge in diagnoses?

In a recent New York Times article titled "Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?" writer Paul Tough challenged the idea that ADHD is solely a fixed, biologically driven condition and suggested that it might also be driven by various environmental factors, including increased academic pressure, pervasive screen time, sleep deprivation, and post-pandemic stress.

In response, the Daily Wire published an article titled "The ‘Experts’ Are Finally Admitting That ADHD Is A Scam,” in which the writer acknowledged that mainstream sources are finally beginning to question what many of us have known all along: ADHD is a misdiagnosis of normal behavior.

The writer alleges that the feminization of education, pharmaceutical greed, and the mislabeling of normal male behavior are what’s really driving ADHD diagnoses and prescriptions.

On a recent episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn dove into these new conversations revolving around ADHD.

“The truth is we've been told not that a feminized education system has increasingly punished normal male behavior it doesn't understand; it's not that schools have lost their capacity to educate male students; it's not that smartphone use and electronics in general have become distractions teachers have been unable to control. Instead, we're led to believe that boys have suddenly become afflicted with a severe psychological disorder,” Glenn reads from the Daily Wire piece.

He agrees that what’s being done to boys in education is a travesty.

“Everything is just push the girls, push the girls, push the girls — ‘you can be anything.’ ‘Shut up, sit down, have some Ritalin’ to the boys,” he condemns.

The boys who are being written off as distractible and out of control are really just being typical boys. The Daily Wire article mocked one experiment conducted at the University of Central Florida, in which children were placed in front of a computer and shown two videos: a math lecture involving basic addition, subtraction, and multiplication, and a pod-racing scene from “Star Wars.”

Surprise, surprise — the kids were more likely to fidget and spin around in their chairs during the math lecture than they were when watching the “Star Wars” scene.

Using these “groundbreaking” findings, the UCF published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology titled “ADHD Kids Can Be Still — If They’re Not Straining Their Brains.”

The Daily Wire ridiculed this, arguing that the study merely “discovered the concept of boredom.”

Glenn agrees and humorously compares the UCF study to discovering that your children “like sugary cereal over bran flakes” and then trying to “get them on LSD” to correct the problem.

While it’s true that some children struggle to focus in school more than others, it doesn’t mean they have a psychological disorder, Glenn says. It means that “all kids are wired differently; boys and girls are wired differently.”

Our differences are not the problem. The problem is that "public schools are made for everybody to be the same."

To hear more of the conversation, watch the clip above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Boys are suddenly failing out of kindergarten. Here's why.



Boys and girls are different. That’s a statement you’ll never see debated here.

But just how different are they? According to physician, psychologist, and best-selling author Dr. Leonard Sax, they are so different that they respond vastly differently to nearly everything — discipline methods, parenting styles, and even academic environments.

Dr. Sax tells Allie Beth Stuckey that the cognitive differences between boys and girls can actually be seen using brain imaging in the womb.

These prenatal scans reinforce something that has long been known about boys and girls: “Boys mature much more slowly than girls.”

In fact, the average 18-month-old boy has a vocabulary of 40 words, while his female equivalent has a vocabulary of 90 words.

It’s no surprise, then, that boys tend to struggle in our modern school system more than girls — especially in the lower grades.

But this wasn’t always the case, says Dr. Sax. Back in the 1980s, kindergarten could be described as “duck-duck-goose and singing and rounds and arts and crafts and field trips to go to the park and splash in a pond and chase after tadpoles.”

But that changed in the 1990s, when there was a sudden push to get kindergarteners to “read and write and do arithmetic.” Suddenly kindergarten became more like first grade.

This has posed enormous challenges for young boys, says Dr. Sax, because “the language areas of the brain of the 5-year-old boy” are equivalent to that of a “3-year-old girl.”

Thus “it is not developmentally appropriate to expect a 5-year-old boy to sit and learn about phonics and diphthongs for 45 minutes,” he explains. “The result is many 5-year-old boys fail and decide that they're dumb and … that they hate school.”

This attitude of defeat stays with them as they advance to higher grade levels, tainting their overall academic experience.

“Researchers have found that once those attitudes are formed, they are global, stable, and non-contingent.”

Global, Dr. Sax explains, means “he doesn't just think he's dumb in reading and writing, he believes he's dumb in every subject.” Stable means that if you “track him down in 10th grade, he still believes that he's dumb and that the teacher hates him.” Non-contingent means that “he doesn’t think that there’s anything he can do about it or anything that you can do about it.”

Over 20 years ago, Dr. Sax wrote a paper advising parents not to enroll their 5-year-old boys in kindergarten and instead wait until they are 6 years of age.

“I still think that’s a good idea [today],” he says.

To hear more of Dr. Sax’s parenting advice, including his stance on social media, discipline, and navigating culture, watch the episode above.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.