What is ADHD, after all? Ken Jacobson a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, at Amherst, recently completed the first cross-cultural anthropological study of ADHD. In it he employed research techniques usually used in the study of apes. Jacobson concludes: "I think the default condition of children is to be talking, moving around, and fooling around, all the classical ADHD-type behaviors…If you’re predisposed to label any child as ADHD, the distracted troublemaker or the model student, you’ll find a way to observe these behaviors. And if you’re predisposed not to find it, then you’ll find ways of overlooking these behaviors."

Using animal research techniques designed to measure the presence or absence of particular behaviors with great objectivity, Jacobson observed a group of "normal" English schoolchildren (free of ADHD, or any disruptive behavior disorder or learning disability) over randomly selected, fifteen-second intervals. He compared their behavior against a checklist of thirty-five behaviors, such as "giggling," "squirming," and "blurting out." Repeating the study on three English schoolchildren diagnosed with ADHD, Jacobson found no significant differences. "In both groups, you’d have kids exhibiting concentration, alertness, and control at certain moments and restlessness, inattention, and defiance at others" said Jacobson. Jacobson concludes that ADHD is culturally-specific, not biologically specific.

For all the claims of biological, neurological and genetic bases for ADHD, primarily from researchers with financial ties to the psychiatric/pharmaceutical cartel, none have been found. Might it be because the millions upon millions of kids said to have it are normal, exactly as Jacobson has found. Might it be that teachers all over the US and Canada (where diagnosing is just as frenzied) and increasingly around the world are being programmed to "see" and "diagnose" ADHD in the normal population. And then, of course, to see that their parents, under penalty of expulsion, get them to a physician, who, if nothing else, will give them a Ritalin or other amphetamine prescription. This is the new "discipline." It works for psychiatry. It works for their controlling partner—the pharmaceutical industry.

In England, less than 1% or elementary school students get an ADHD diagnosis. Compare this with Virginia, where more 20% of white, male, students are said to have it, and the US—nationwide, where 5-6 or 6-7 million; well over 10% of the public school enrollment K-12, are said to have it.

For a breath of fresh air, get this. In the UK educators use looser diagnostic categories, such as Emotional and Behavioral Difficulty (EBD), which are not considered to be a biological-clinical diagnoses. The English "don’t consider EBD clinical," says Jacobson, "but behavioral, and something you can correct through discipline." The perversion of all things special educational, i.e., of the disruptive behavior disorders, and the learning disabilities, as well as all diagnoses within US biological psychiatry, is that each and every one is proclaimed to be biologic, a defect within the brain of the child—not something that you can correct through discipline or through competent teaching.

The US spends nearly $9.0 billion per year on special education, more than 4 x the amount spent in 1998 on federal Head Start programs. Pundit Mary Eberstadt terms special treatment for children with ADHD "affirmative action for affluent white people."

What one and all seeking any advantage that comes with the ADHD label for their child, will learn, is that it is a "two-edged sword," a certain amount of the victimhood will invariably stick.

Jacobson’s study was released at the meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November, 1999.