Latest / Radically Genuine / 92. ADHD: Pills, Profits, and Pushback w/ Gretchen LeFever Watson PhD

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92. ADHD: Pills, Profits, and Pushback w/ Gretchen LeFever Watson PhD · Radically Genuine

• Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. I am Dr. Roger McFillin. Sean, sometimes the universe is working in our favor. This past week and obviously our video, which got terminated through the YouTube account has gone viral. And I think there's a lot of eyes on it, but it's kind of fortuitous given who our guest is today. We, the Radically Genuine Podcast, you and I together, I think are just, our eyes are more open to the various tactics. that the pharmaceutical industry can employ in order to continue to push their product in the mainstream and be able to censor and quiet alternative research. For today's podcast, we are lucky enough to have her in studio. Dr. Gretchen Lefevre Watson is a clinical and developmental psychologist with postdoctoral training in pediatric psychology. She was among the first to document psychotropic overprescribing for ADHD amongst U.S. children and to demonstrate that disruptive conduct can be successfully reduced through school-wide interventions that simultaneously improve educational outcomes. By 1999, this work began to draw extensive scholarly and media attention, as well as ad hominem attacks by individuals with ties to the pharmaceutical industry. This led to false allegations of scientific misconduct. Although cleared of all wrongdoing, The episode led to improper termination of her federally funded research on the prevalence and impact of ADHD and school and community based non drug interventions. Dr. Watson is the author of your patient safety survival guide and runs a private consulting business in Virginia beach. She continues to write and speak out about the need for mental health reform. Dr. Watson, welcome to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and the Radically Genuine podcast. Thank you. It's great to be here. I'm glad it worked out that I could join you in the studio. Yeah, you're driving from upstate New York, visiting family on your way back down to Virginia Beach and we're right there in the middle. 13 minutes off my normal route home. So I said, how could I not come in here and meet you guys? This story is insane. If this was a couple of years ago, before COVID. I think a lot of people have a hard time believing that this occurs in American society, in a free American society. The bias that we have towards the medical authority, it's almost like we've handed over 100% trust to the medical authority that they are always acting in our best interest. And there's a lack of awareness about industry driven... marketing and the machine that is the pharmaceutical industry and its alliance with the medical establishment in the western world and how that really pushes mainstream research. Let's just get to it. I mean, you're gonna have to start at the beginning and take us all through your career because it's unbelievable some of the things in which they played out. Okay, well, I started out after I got my degree working at a naval hospital out in San Diego in the Department of Pediatrics I was part of a multidisciplinary team that evaluated children for a variety of behavioral developmental problems and the like and worked there for three and a half years during that time. We almost never diagnosed any child with ADHD. Dr. Justin Marchegiani What years was that? Dr. Julie Kwan That was in the late 80s to early 90s. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, very rare condition. Dr. Julie Kwan Right, very rare condition. I can remember the instances when the pediatrician said, gee, nothing— else seems to fit, do you think this child might have ADHD? Well, it just so happened that pediatrician retired from the military and went to Norfolk, Virginia Beach area to help open up a new Neurodevelopmental Center. And a year later, my family was relocated through the military to Virginia Beach, Norfolk area. I happened to move into the neighborhood he was living in. He heard I was there and came knocking on my door and said, Gretchen, you've got to come back and work with me at this clinic. We're going to do the exact same thing. So I started there at Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters in southeastern Virginia and was part of a multidisciplinary team, seeing what I thought were the same kinds of children for the same kinds of problems. And suddenly, the pediatricians wanted to call every. kid ADHD and I kept balking and balking and nobody was listening. So finally tallied up the data from our own clinic. The first hundred and 88 consecutive cases that I saw and said, Hey, look guys, we're diagnosing ADHD in over 75% of these kids. What's going on? And at the same time, I had a daughter who had entered kindergarten and I was hearing discussion about ADHD. on the soccer field, in the school, at adult parties. And my pediatric colleagues at the Neuro Developmental Center just said, look, we're the new game in town. And what you're seeing is a referral bias. We're just getting all the kids in town. But I just wasn't buying it. So I got encouraged to go see a pediatrician who had been brought to the medical school, Eastern Virginia Medical School, where I was faculty, to see what they were doing. escalate the amount of research that pediatric faculty were doing. And I said, you know, kind of went to him really nervously because I hadn't been thinking about a research career. I'd been doing clinical work. And I said, I think I want to do some research. He said, okay, write me a proposal. Yeah, right. Like, where do I begin? He said, just answer these five questions. So I went back and answered the five questions he gave me and turned it in and about a week later he called me to his office. And I see all this red line all over my paper. And he said, actually, this is the best epidemiologic proposal I've ever seen. You have to do this study. So I did. And long story short, I ended up with access to the school records for every single student in two huge school districts in southeastern Virginia, Virginia Beach and Portsmouth. And combined, they were a perfect representation of the entire. southeastern virginia region so it was just really wonderful you know one school district was suburban two thirds white affluent the other two-thirds black poor urban nice combination and uh... we looked at school nurse records for every child who'd been diagnosed with ADHD and was to get a dose of ADHD medication in school from a nurse according to a physician signed form confirming the diagnosis of ADHD. And that was in the late 90s. And already the data that came out of that study were totally different from what the industry funded ADHD experts were telling the nation. They were constantly saying, oh, ADHD is underdiagnosed and undertreated. We have to get more children medicated. And what we saw then was the rate of diagnosis was three to six times higher than the supposed prevalence of the disorder. But we also knew that was an underestimate because we were using the most conservative method you possibly could. We were only counting kids who were getting a midday dose of basically Ritalin in school and by then Adderall was available in long term or slow release medications. So we went back and we designed some more epidemiologic surveys that were able to capture a representative sample from the whole community. And what was really fascinating, the rate of school-based administration of ADHD medications was consistent in all our studies, but when we looked at the rate of diagnosis by parent report, it was twice as high. So we had already, 17% of kids in grades two through five. And when we went and looked at, we first looked at kids in grades two through five, because that's what other researchers had done years before. So what does that tell you when you see that the parents are rating their kids twice as high? Well, we knew that we had to look to see are they, were they really diagnosed? So for example, who diagnosed them? Were they being medicated? And like, what that meant was a lot of the kids, about half of them were being medicated before they left for school and they didn't require a noonday dose because they were on slow release or long acting medication. So I wanna pause there. I wanna go back into the mind of a psychologist late 80s, early 90s. How did you think about ADHD at the time? And what, I think you're referring it to be a rule out based on other conditions. So tell me just the thinking of a psychologist late 80s, early 90s. Well, My thinking was I was still really believing in the DSM, Manual for Diagnosing Disorders, and I thought that a diagnosis of ADHD was appropriate only if I could find no other explanation for why a child would be having problems with impulsivity, hyperactivity, or inattention. And what would be those other conditions that would account for it? Anything and everything. Sleep deprivation was huge. academic issues, child abuse, worries about what's happening in school at home. The list is just so long that it's kind of a joke. I mean, how do you ever arrive at a diagnosis of ADHD? Now, I'm not sure that the average psychologist was thinking like that at that time because already the marketing was so aggressive that they were all. of the mindset as were some of these pediatricians who were supposedly experts in diagnosing ADHD, that if you could document the presence of the symptoms, the child had the disorder. Yeah, it was interesting. So back at that time, they said that these symptoms had to be accounted for under the age of, was it seven? Seven, they had to be present. Present. before the age of seven. And occurring in multiple contexts, right? So we would think school would be one of them, home would be another potentially out on the soccer field or other things, correct? Exactly. And is it just observational? Just observational. Yeah, they developed checklists, right? And so you fill out these checklists. There's a lot of misconception out there. There's people believe that ADHD is a... a neurological condition, genetic condition in which someone can be evaluated for scientifically and that there's really good science that supports its development. We can get into that a little bit later, but I just want to stay here within the timeframe because I was in the schools in the early 2000s. And what I was seeing was the school person and I was a school counselor applying for my doctoral program, getting into my doctoral program while I was working in the schools. And what I saw was teachers. really stepping out of line and suggesting at a high rate to parents that their kids get, I'm not even going to use the word Medicaid, you know, I don't like using that word drugged into compliance. So they were majority boys. They were boys who were active, active kids, may have been athletes, or the some of them came from, you know, poor homes, they had other they had other adverse conditions that they were facing was very difficult for them to kind of follow the rules of sitting in a classroom. And so the teachers in these team meetings and parents meetings would suggest that maybe they have ADHD and that they can do well on a stimulant because they struggled to manage the behavior of these kids, which I would say 99% was accounted for by legitimate other conditions and they were fine in other contexts. So I saw that. really increase in the early 2000s. So somehow the school systems really became brazen in this and they were doing the work for the pharma companies. And then the other thing I saw was anxiety disorders, worriers, and this was where it was more for females. So the female perfectionist worrier was getting diagnosed with this inattentive type and starting to take stimulant drugs because you know what, it was disproportionately assigned to boys and they like to level the playing field they developed you know this attentive type so that girls can be identified with ADHD as well. Well you know it's so fascinating there's so much there and what you just said a friend of mine Sue Perry is a long time parent advocate around this kind of issue and she and her husband are very open about the fact that the schools kind of tried to aggressively diagnose one or multiple of their sons with ADHD and they really weren't buying it. But in the process, they were given a handout from the school written by Dr. Larry Silver, MD. And it was explaining the diagnosis of ADHD and how effective medication was. And it was just riddled with factually incorrect information. And it turned out that it was actually produced by one of the ADHD drug manufacturers and then given to school districts around the country for free. and they had a parent version and a school professional version. So it was propaganda going directly to people, educational professionals, to school them up on becoming spotters of ADHD. So they thought they were doing their job when they saw these behaviors, and they referred kids for diagnosis and treatment. And we know that once a teacher says, I think Johnny has ADHD and the parent takes that to the pediatrician. What the pediatricians would often say as well, the teacher sees this child in the context of other children his age for many hours a day. I'm only going to see him here for a few minutes. So if the teacher thinks he has ADHD, he probably has ADHD. So a teacher suggestion becomes a doctor diagnosis. Because as a school counselor at the time, I'd be able to go into various account classrooms and observe the kid. And, uh, you know, some of the worst teachers, least effective of, of teachers within classroom management were making the most referrals. And then you'd see this kid do very well, maybe in another classroom where the teacher was engaging. There was an active way of like, of teaching the class and getting the kids to move or, you know, a kid who was generally a little bit more hyperactive. a teacher, for example, might use that kid as a volunteer, get up and hand out these, these pieces of paper, they were just masters at being able to manage the kids. So the environment was just so absolutely critical. And I used to kind of take it personal because I was that kid in middle school and high school. Yeah, I remember. And there's no doubt if I was in a different time period. I was in the 80s and early 90s. I would have been diagnosed, I would have been forced into the mental health system and probably pushed those drugs just because I was a naturally active kid who also liked the challenge authority. Which you know, I've said your other surprising outlet for that. So anyway, then I'm in I'm in my doctoral program. Well, I had my master's degree, then I went into my doctoral program. And I was reading a lot of this focused kind of textbook driven. ghost writing of studies that would suggest that an untreated ADHD individual was then vulnerable to all these later mental health and substance abuse diagnoses. So like it was critical to be able to diagnose somebody early for ADHD and get them medicated. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And you know, it's interesting. There's a woman. Nadine Lambert who was a school psychologist out at Stanford or Berkeley, I forget where, and she had longitudinal data over like 20 years that was coming out that was gonna show that children who were medicated for ADHD were at increased risk for smoking and cocaine abuse. And the ADHD industry funded experts would have nothing to do with it. They attacked her at the NIH ADHD consensus conference, which happened I think in November of 1988, just viciously. And Russell Barkley, who's one of the leading ADHD kind of authority figures. We'll get into him. Yeah, went after her on film. I have, again, compliments to Sue Perry, a film, I don't remember where it was from, where he was really going after Nadine. And she got accused of scientific misconduct. And surprise, surprise. And her research was shut down. It took a long time to get her cleared just as it did for me. And then she got hit and killed in a head on collision with a Mack truck before she was ever able to resume that work. And it's just been buried. Nobody's ever uncovered it. And then you have people like Joseph Biederman, who just recently died, a child psychiatrist from Harvard. One of the people were saying, if you don't get your child with ADHD medicated, oh my goodness, all these terrible things are gonna happen to him. And his paper, that got cited for years and years and years and media reporters pulled it up all the time, actually had 19 subjects in the critical cell and used complicated statistics that were inappropriate for that data set. that data size made no sense. And yet it got published in a prestigious journal. Two of the most powerful thought leaders who were on the farm of payroll, Joseph Biederman and Russell Barkley. Thank God. So let's get back to your story here. So you were talking about your epidemiological work and what you were discovering. So I was discovering this and my boss was an epidemiologist. Well, actually, back it up a little bit. So when I first started doing this, I suddenly, I was a top performer in my clinical unit, doing extremely well, just nothing but good reviews from my same boss who I had worked with for years before. And one day he shows up with a request that I resigned. And he said, we're just doing some restructuring. I'm like, huh, what? And I just didn't bite on it right away. Oh, it'll be okay, I'll help you find another job. And it was just all so mysterious, and I was kind of holding out. And while I was at a conference, one day he called somebody in the office and said, cancel of Gretchen's patient. She doesn't work here anymore. And I got alerted to this, went to work the next day, and get accosted in the waiting area in front of colleagues and patients, demanding that I give my keys and computer back and told I don't work there anymore. And... I just handed it all over, left. Fortunately, somebody who was the administrator for the pediatrician who I went to about starting this line of research happened to be there and observed this and reported up the chain of command. Long story short, my boss had to apologize to me in writing and verbally witnessed. And I was of course invited back to my clinical practice because there was no reason to ask me to resign. In fact, it was an unsanctioned request. Who got to him? Well, he had become the head of the billing company for all the pediatricians at the local hospital. So the local hospital there is called Children's Hospital, the King's Daughter, CHKD. It's affiliated with the medical school, EVMS. So all of us. who worked there, who were faculty, were faculty at EVMS with clinical rights at admitting privileges and such at the Children's Hospital. And the pediatricians had managed to secede from the rest of the medical school and develop their own independent billing company. And it was the billing company that was offering me an opportunity to resign. And it was the medical school President who called me into his office and said dr. Lafeeva Who signs your paychecks? I don't know and finally after batting my head around for a while. He said If you don't hire them, you don't fire them. They had no authority to ask you to resign You're you're in perfect standing go back to work. And so anyway, I spoke to the chair of pediatrics and I didn't want to go back to work under those circumstances. And the research center that was a joint venture between the medical school and hospital had been trying to create a position for me to come over as a part-time researcher. And they said to the chair of pediatrics, how about we just take her full-time as a researcher? I said, sounds good to me. So that's how I switched over from being a practicing clinician to a full-time researcher. And then I thought everything would be fine after that. I mean, I was really naive. And I then continued on with my research and the pediatricians, again, the same people who were probably trying to get me to resign through unsanctioned processes. were aware of my findings and they invited Russell Barkley to come to town as the keynote speaker for their annual pediatric conference. So he also knows what's about to come out. And he puts on a lecture for the public that's open the night for the yes. Now for our listening audience, we have to give a little bit of a background on Russell Barkley. So Russell Barkley, Sean, and I know you're outside of the field. He was the guy when it came to ADHD and he was a psychologist, research psychologist, clinical psychologist. I mean, he wrote the books on this. Like his entire career was around the treatment of ADHD kids. Yeah, entire career. And little did I know he was on the pharma payroll. Right? So, tell me what you know about that. Oh, so a large portion of his income comes directly from the pharmaceutical companies. I think it's in that paper that you pulled up back years ago. I think it was 19% of his income maybe came directly from Eli Lilly. He was also funded by CHAD, Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder, which is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. And that's everything that he reported. And maybe he reports everything, but most of them didn't back then. So I would presume over the years he's taken millions. from the pharmaceutical industry and. And that's not to mention the textbooks and the other things, right? Oh yeah, it's an enterprise. He is just part of the machinery. You know, he's really like a pharmaceutical rep in clinical psychologists clothing. Yeah, yeah. And so you were identified as a threat. As a threat. If they're gonna throw Russell Barkley at you. Right, that's a big gun. Right. They're taking the biggest of the biggest guns and they're saying there's something about the work that you're doing that is threatening. Exactly. What was that movie? Erin Brockovich? Yeah. You're like Erin Brockovich of the in the ADHD world. Yeah, yeah. I need a dollar for every time somebody has said that or gee, this is a story by who's the guy who did all the law books? You know, it's not like Tom Clancy, but he's all the CIA stuff. It'll come to me. Yeah, exactly. He's the pop culture guy. Yeah. So they threw him at me and he, uh, the local newspaper quoted them a big story. We asked Dr. Barkley and of course the newspaper usually doesn't refer to psychologists with the title doctor, but they did for Barkley. Yeah. Um, we asked Dr. Barkley is ADHD overdiagnosed. And he, they said he unwound no, and no, no matter what the people read, he hear or see it is not overdiagnosed. The problem is it's underdiagnosed and undertreated. So in other words, don't listen to anything you might hear or see. I'm telling you the truth. Yeah. So interesting. Did you have data about how other countries were diagnosing ADHD? I had information I didn't have. Prevalence rate. I didn't have hardcore prevalence rates. We had a few studies that were percolating that were showing that they were diagnosing it at lower rates. But I did have the DEA contacted me and they said, hey, we have a data set on Ritalin consumption rates for every community in the entire US. How about you take this? So I'm like, yeah. This is where the John Grisham novel gets very interesting. Yeah, John Grisham. John Grisham. Bingo, there you go. Can we put some music? Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So I took that and I was able to look at what was going on nationally. And the cities in Southeastern Virginia where I was conducting my studies were in the top 1% for the entire US. So I was very responsibly saying, look, ADHD is not universally overdiagnosed. but we know in some communities it really is. And we can't just, you know, sweep this under the rug, this is a real problem. And at this point they were communicating ADHD as a biological condition, like with a genetic component to it that they believe they have identified, correct? Oh yeah, 80% genetic, didn't you know that? Yeah, how was that tested? I mean, it's with the chemical imbalance lab tests I'm still waiting on with all my clients. The Freedom of Information Act will reveal it to us. Yeah. And that's the thing I think it's really important for our listeners to understand that ADHD is just a constructed diagnosis of constellations of symptoms. There is no attention deficit hyperactivity biological disorder that we've identified in constellation of symptoms. So when people say my ADHD, they're often just kind of, and it's such a part of popular culture now, they're just talking about their struggle to concentrate in a certain situation, right, or maybe feeling a little bit hyperactive or bored. And it's become, you know, so ingrained in our lexicon right now. But back then, in the 2000s, I mean, you speak to most people, ADHD was this biological condition that has sound science behind it. And you had You had these people like, is it Biederman? Joseph Biederman? Yeah, Joseph Biederman and Russell Barkley and they were just well-known figures. They were doing the media tours. They were publishing the books and it was like diabetes or any other identifiable condition and they're reporting these drugs are like insulin for diabetes, they correct this condition. And it wasn't what I was seeing as a young man in the schools. What I was seeing with kids not feeling well, decreased appetite. Some of them became very drowsy or sedated. You'd have the kids say how they felt horrible. Oh yeah. And they'd stop taking the drugs in the summer because of how bad it felt. I mean, there was the concerns about stunting of growth, which I think is real. And parents were reporting different things. Like they said it was magic for some kids in the way that it kind of subdued them. but they lost their kid, right? The magic about who they were was just gone. And Russell Barkley said that in 1978 in one of his publications before he went to the dark side. And when he was doing honest, non-industry funded research, he said, well, this... you know, affects their classroom behavior, but it really doesn't help their learning. And it's really just subduing that. Which we know for a fact. I mean, this is part of some of your further research, right, around learning. Yes, and so what I was seeing also, I was a clinician. So I was seeing the same thing, where these kids are told they have ADHD. Even I had two-year-olds then. This is back in the 90s and early 2000. Two-year-olds medicated for ADHD. Sick. And it was, yes. I have a two year old and depending on what time he's ADHD. He's not because he, I see him. He is running around. He's really hard to focus sometimes around meal time right before bedtime too. And when he it's like, he's trying to regulate himself, those darn monster trucks, right? If those monster trucks are around, he's not focusing on some of the things you want them to do, like take a bath or things like that. You know, what really gets it going at bubbles, bubbles get his ADHD fired up. He goes crazy. But that's the insanity of all this, right? Insanity. That you take normal childhood behavior, and there's, it's just variable, right? Right. Because the world is varied and diverse, and we need the world to be diverse, because I'm driving into my practice and they're building all these different like apartment complexes and stuff, and I could never do that. I can't be out there and, and work in construction all day. Right? This is kind of my job, right? So every, the way society works is you have the diverse minds and interests. And this entire ADHD industry, in my opinion, has targeted some of the most active and creative individuals. Absolutely. That had a hard time functioning in this restricted way that we were told we were supposed to be able to behave. Who, what kid likes to sit in the rows of a classroom and be focused on the teacher? And what we've seen is, over the course of that time, And if you remember like the Bush era around the importance of no child left behind and testing is they started taking away recess too. Oh yeah. Virginia Beach was one of the first school districts to do it. I didn't even know it except I was at the annual American Psychological Association Convention and somebody brought up, I think it was a Time magazine and talked about it. They had taken away by 2000, 2001, recess. across the board in one of the largest school districts in the entire country. Yeah, so you put kids who are naturally active, right? And then you put them in those types of environments. And then what is also happening at this time, technologically, if you just think about where we are uniquely as a human race and through evolution, is we have this increase in technology with smartphones and video games, which hijacked the brain. And that is the focus of attention. And you put them in an environment where they're not allowed to have their phones. And it was a period of time where there was certainly an adjustment from moving from the traditional classroom into implementing technology. So kids are using technology in their day-to-day lives. And then you go into the classroom and then you have to sit there. And I was just a part of that. And I saw that transition. And now kids are getting... diagnosed with ADHD at even higher rates because of their difficulty focusing in that one environment. Right, and you know, ADHD also opened, I think, the floodgates to children being diagnosed with lots of mental health conditions and diagnosed and medicated for those conditions. So that diagnosis converts children into psychiatric patients because over time, If they're on the drugs long term, eventually they don't work so well or the secondary effects of the drugs start becoming more pronounced, then the primary effects, that's a predictable phenomenon. So if you take stimulants long enough, you will eventually get depressed or your inattention will get worse or both can happen. And so you'll get a stronger dose of the medication and then you'll get up to the maximum dose you can be given. So they'll switch drugs or maybe they'll add an antidepressant. And then the next thing it goes to a mood stabilizer. And before you know it, you have kids on antipsychotics. And we have now a large portion of ADHD-diagnosed children receiving multiple drugs simultaneously, including antipsychotics. And that's what happened as early as 2000 in southeastern Virginia. It was the epicenter for this over-prescription of psychotropics. Yeah. She's. and its criminal negligence, in my opinion, at the highest level of incompetence, the experimentation on developing brains. Well, experimentation is really the interesting word because it was an investigative journalist, Jeanne Lenzer, who's known in the international circles, who came to Southeastern Virginia when I was under attack. And she's the one who uncovered that the pediatricians in the area had formed a contract research organization. a CRO is what they're called. And they had contracts with over 40 pharmaceutical companies to run the children seen at the hospital through clinical drug trials, including ADHD drug trials that Russell Barkley was involved with. So that's the driving force behind getting children into the studies. It's how... Presumably Russell Barkley knew in advance about what was going on. And. All right. So take us, they threw the big gun at you. Yeah. And I, you know, I, so, um, I was really shy until I was in my early forties. I had barely ever spoken out about this. I had not yet taken it to a national platform. So I knew I had to go and get it published. So I got it published and there was a little bit of a delay. Um, I sent it to pediatrics, thought this is a pediatric issue, and went through the standard review process where you have three people review it and rate it, whether it's acceptable as is, needs to be revised or rejected. And pediatrics came back and said, we're rejecting this paper. Well written, they had no methodological concerns, but they rejected it because two of the reviewers said, and this was in writing, sounds like she's suggesting overuse of Ritalin. Well, that is what the data are suggesting. So they rejected it. And the pediatrician who was helping to foster research among the pediatric faculty said, Gretchen, let me get in touch with that editor of the journal. I know him. This is unacceptable. I said, no, no. This is really a public health issue. I'm going to take it to the American Journal of Public Health. Let's send it there instead. So I did. They accepted it. But they said, these data are so shocking. Would you mind having it? an independent biostatistician run your data and confirm that they're finding what you're reporting us had no problem. So we did that and they published it. And that just really is when Barkley and his colleagues and, you know, members of his club, if you will, really started getting riled up. So at this point, what was your anxiety level like? I'd imagine I'd be like checking for bombs underneath my car in the morning. I was still, I was, I was still Sounds crazy, but Now we're really in the Grisham novel. No, I would today perhaps, but back then I had no clue. I was still pretty naive and Barkley wanted to debate me locally and I was hesitant. I said no and finally they set up, well we'll just have you both give talks. I said okay because I was too intimidated, I admit, to get on a stage and debate Barkley. So this was at Regent University. And I'm assuming you both got equal time. Oh, no, no. He got 45 minutes and I got 15 minutes. So I presented for 15 minutes and then Barkley gets up to give his presentation. And he starts by just saying, no, I didn't. I didn't. But you know what, I still want the patriarchy right there. I won. Oh, I ran into that all the time. So where's the feminist coming to your I, at that point he gets 45 and you get 15. I got 15. Well, he was the expert. Yeah. So he spent those 45 minutes talking about the science on his side and not attacking you at all. Oh no. He started his talk literally open and comments was that I was not a scientist. So he just dismiss me. Yeah. What is a scientist? Wait, if you're not a scientist, then what are you? I don't know. Just someone who is making up my data apparently. So anyway, the audience said that I won the debate hands down. So he had- So 15 minutes beat his 45 minutes. Right, because I had the data on my side. You know, you just couldn't argue with the data were so solid. So he went around the country saying all kinds of things about my research, which he knew were not accurate, not true, but who was to question them. And then- I got invited last minute to be part of a big panel at the APA annual convention. Which APA? American Psychological Association. Yes. I call it APA and big psychiatry to keep them separate. It turned out that it was supposed to be a discussion about various ways of treating ADHD, but what it was, was again a debate and it was Barclays opportunity on a national stage to come after me. But again, I was prepared. I just stuck to the data. And that's when people from around the country started joining me and David Antonucci, who is a really well-known antidepressant researcher at that point said, you know, keep on keeping on doing what you're doing. So I did. And Barkley then published a, what he called international consensus on ADHD. So that's what I love this stuff. They throw this word consent. They were doing this with COVID too and the vaccinations they were using these words like international consensus among scientists and then transformed into trust the science. It's part of that really strong marketing message that communicates to the general public that somehow anything that is against the prevailing narrative is, you know, extremist, right? And there is a consensus that exists and which is really, you know, it's science in itself is something that is consistently evolving and scientists, which of course you're not one of. Thank you for that clarification. Scientists are open to this idea, right? You're trying to find the... alternative argument to your data set, like because you're, you're the search, it's a search for truth. Right. And so any, then that's red flag number one is whenever somebody gets really offended by science, when there's published research and there's data and someone gets offended by that, that person, in my opinion, is not a scientist. They're an ideologue. An ideologue. So, and that's the, that's the difference. So Russell Barkley wasn't intrigued. by this data in his search for truth. He is defending his position, which is defending his work and it's defending his salary. I mean, this is financially driven, right? It's financial, ego and finance. I mean, it was his ego too at that point. He never once asked me any methodological questions about my research, not once. Yeah, those are these ad hominem attacks, right? They're just going to, he's going to discredit you. Discredit me. And when he wrote his international consensus, which was signed by 89 other people, it was on the heels of the national institutes of health publishing an ADHD consensus conference report that he didn't like. So he, instead of acknowledging and rejecting that report, he just went off and wrote his own report. And Sammy Tamimi, a psychiatrist, child psychiatrist in England, wrote a response and said, why would anybody who's basically a scientist want to force stall debate about these issues? And Sammy Tamimi, who I'd never met at that time, mentioned my research as evidence that we were over diagnosing ADHD, that we were medicating a large number of kids for this socially constructed concept. And That's what really put Berkeley over the edge. And he responded with another article that was not backed up with science and called for an investigation of my findings. And within days or weeks of that, the medical school received an anonymous complaint that I had fabricated my data. So I just wanna make sure I'm understanding. Like your research. recognized that there was more people in your area being prescribed or being diagnosed with ADHD but then there was recommendations that your team was pursuing as alternatives to medication right what are the harms in that I'm I don't know what the problem was well you know what you know what the harm sorry well financial of course I mean it would decrease to an outside person to an outside person you know as a parent I would I would look at the recommendations wanting to pursue as completely reasonable. Well, we would think so, but they were interfering with the sale of drugs. But what about the parents in the area that were? Oh, the parents, it was a phenomenal response. So I was a clinician at heart, not a researcher. So I said, well, let's take this to the community. And we built a community-based coalition open to the public. And instead of me thinking, I have all the ideas, I said, you know, look, this is obviously an issue. Where do we begin? What are the priorities? We went through a long process to identify what the community as a whole thought was the best way to begin to tackle this problem. And then my colleagues and I wrote grant proposals to secure funding to be able to implement and evaluate every one of the strategies that the community had identified. And we were really... Doing great. I mean, I had more funding per square foot than any other faculty member at the research center at that time. For a brief period of time, I was the golden child there at the medical school. And we were working really hard. And the community was very responsive. And we were engaged with the media back and forth. They were dialoguing with us and tracking what was going on when everything got shut down. out false nefarious really allegation got leaked to the press. This local reporter thought he had a big story on his hands and he ran around interviewing and scaring all my collaborators in town and they started thinking, oh my gosh, we've been participating with Gretchen and her team and they're just anti-medication zealots. who are making up data and scaring the community. Scientologist. I got accused of being a Scientologist, of course. I've been accused of that as well. Yeah. So anyway, it was a long, messy process because every time the medical school thought they were getting a handle on going through the process of clearing me of scientific misconduct, they would receive. another bit of information suggesting something else. I had done it. All anonymous. It's unbelievable, I can't be taken seriously. Right, knowing that anonymous and typewritten, but I was never allowed to see the complaint. Now today, I wouldn't tolerate that. I look back and I think, I can't believe I put up with that. Anonymous, typewritten complaint, because I was told it would be too upsetting, quote unquote, for me to read the complaint. Come on. No, I'm not kidding. It's unbelievable. And Sean, just to like to consider the zeitgeist of this period. So Tom Insull, who we've mentioned on this podcast a few other times, was the head of the NIMH. And there were billions that were being invested in trying to identify mental illness as a brain condition. And the alignments that existed between the pharmaceutical industry and academic psychiatry were legitimately growing. such a profound rate. That idea of the chemical imbalance was really marketed to the entire American public. So ADHD fit right into that. And the way that they were communicated, even the parents, is they believe that there was a safe solution to their child's behavioral problems. So a behavioral treatment takes time and effort and a lot of work from parents too. And the other thing is we don't mention enough is that there are parents who really have a degree of like shame. If their kid is having problems, and they are kind of protecting and defending that they're doing it to their kids, right. So the idea that there would be a biological problem is protective against parenting. And I remember, and my kids were toddlers and young at that time. And we would be driving in cars and you know, kids would have in the back of the minivans, they'd be able to watch television and they could have like an iPad that was in front of them. I used to always say to my wife, never doing that. Right? We're never getting to the point where they can't sit and tolerate the lack of stimulation, right? There is value to being bored. because it allows your mind to work and to create to play games. Remember, you're in the car and you'll be driving and you'll, you know, how many license plates from other states can we get? Or you're, or the conversation that could exist. Punch buggy red, I'll punch you in the arm. Those things. And so what ends up happening, and we saw this shift is, I want to use it. Lazy parenting. They would give the technology as a way to keep their kids quiet. And that definitely. has an impact on that adaptive brain, right? Oh, absolutely. Johann Hari, I don't know if you know him, he wrote a book, Stolen Focus. He's written, it's his third book, They've All Been Great. But he realized that it's not something that was wrong with his brain. He started to feel like he had ADHD. His nephew he took on a trip is acting like he's got a really bad case of ADHD. And over time, he realizes there's really nothing wrong with our brains other than the technology gurus out in Silicon Valley are purposefully learning to hijack our attention. And that's why we can't focus. So our ability to focus is getting worse, but it is recoverable. Yeah. And I want to reframe it too. I believe, I don't believe our ability to focus is getting worse. our ability to focus on non-stimulating tasks is getting worse. So it's actually that with neuroplasticity, our brain is adapting to be able to integrate like all this novel stimuli at high rates of speed. Like imagine like a video game and everything that we're doing with technology and texting really fast. Like you see how the brain adapts. because it's now there's more novel and interesting stimuli. And so we do have less tolerance for certain emotional experience, including boredom or lack of stimulation, but we have all this opportunity. So just the scrolling, the TikToks, the nonstop, it's activating our brain and it's distracting us from the emotions that we experience. And there's just the less tolerance that younger people have for the feeling of being bored or reading. or sitting with something that is not as stimulating. Why? Absolutely. And I think the brain is supposed to adapt that way. Yeah, thankfully it does. Yeah, it's how we evolve. You know, I wanna go back, if I may, to one of your points you brought up about the school teachers referring all these kids. So something really interesting happened. In one of my early studies, we surveyed teachers about how many children they thought in their classroom were diagnosed with ADHD and how many more they thought had it. And the number came out to be about 21%. Then fast forward a couple years later, I get this grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, to study the prevalence and impact of ADHD in my region, along with researchers in two other parts of the country. Mark Walrach, a pediatrician out in Oklahoma City, and Robert McGowan down in Columbia, South Carolina. And we had a common core to our research. plus I did a lot of other things that they weren't doing. But in our common core research, we had a survey that we all used and we had behavioral rating scales that we all gave to teachers in our school districts or schools that were participating in the studies in these three sites, all selected to represent the populations from the general areas. And In all three school districts within one percentage point, teachers rated 21% of the children as having ADHD. Diagnostic rates were very different from one community to another, but consistently, different studies, different times, different parts of the country, teachers are identifying 21% of the kids as having ADHD. So one in every five kids? One in every five kids. Sounds like normal to me. Sounds like normal. So about one in five kids has a little more difficulty paying attention or sitting still in school. That's just part of being on the normal distribution. So what's happened over time is those referrals or complaints by teachers have been taken so seriously that now what's the prevalence of children actually diagnosed and treated for ADHD? Well, nationally, the CDC will say 10%. But if you really dig into that data, it's higher. And then there's the kids who are on a stimulant who've never received the diagnosis. Oh yeah, well, plus those, yes. Like I've been seeing some stats around college kids. You're talking about recreational abuse. Well, I mean, recreational abuse. I witnessed it in the late 1990s at the university level was people snorting it. I was like, what are they doing? I had no idea what it was, but, um, do you know how easy it is to get a prescription now? Because they have these online health, whatever they are, mental health related sites where you can meet with a doctor and get your, your prescription for your stimulus prescription for your ADHD. And how do you get diagnosed with ADHD? Well, you say you have ADHD, right? Yeah. And it's just another avenue to get those drugs out there. And the students and young adults are well aware of this, as our adults now want it. You know, a study came out this year though, which was really interesting, looking at the abuse of these prescription drugs in middle schools and high schools. And we're seeing a huge uptick from 2005 to 2020 of ADHD, intentional ADHD drug abuse among middle school students. Unbelievable. Yeah. And it correlates with the more kids diagnosed in that school, the more children are abusing the drugs. So you have these grants, you're providing these grants, multi-site study. And I'm under investigation for scientific misconduct, which was really pretty brutal because the medical school put me on leave without pay, to seize my computers, cut me off from my staff. I could only communicate. with them through an attorney. So my attorney bills are going through the roof while I'm on leave with no pay. And if I leave to get another job, I never get my name cleared. So to get my name cleared, I have to stay. And I was in the process of a divorce at that time as well. So my assets are frozen. So it was just really a nightmare and it lasted for almost two years. And... I, in the process, somewhere along the line, somebody from one of the school districts supposedly went marching into the dean's office, who was a newly appointed interim dean, and said to him that, you know, we had no idea of what was going on with this research, and they're basically washing their hands of it because they were afraid, based on what the reporter was telling them, that I'd been conducting research without proper consent, which of course was not true. And this new dean apparently got advice from their corporate attorneys who said, shut down the research. We can't manage this level of risk. Who knows what really happened. But that's the story I was told. And so I'm notified that the dean has now permanently terminated my research. Well, I'm still under investigation to be cleared of scientific misconduct. And they've found nothing wrong. other than a typo in the appendix of one of my publications that they determined was of no consequence. So the research was terminated and the school superintendents were informed in writing that data would never see the light of day. And so then the CDC said, well, we have no recourse but to sever our cooperative agreement with you because Your medical school has shut down your research. And then after that, they decided to add a clinical research consultant to this multi-site investigation that was going on. And guess who that was? Who? Russell Barkley. Get out of here. I'm not kidding you. I don't think I read that in the paper. Did I miss that? No, it wasn't in the paper. Okay. I mean, can you, it's just so hard to believe. I'm like, oh my gosh. That's the end of chapter 11. It's a page turner. Yeah. I don't even know why I get surprised anymore when I hear these things. I'm almost like, get out of here. How can this be? How can it be? And you're like that too, but I just, I can tell you how it can be, right? We believe that there's a just world. And there's no way that these things can go on in this conspiratorial way behind the scenes. And so we just ultimately believe in the ultimate good of institutions to protect the welfare of others and we're conditioned that way to think that. You know, if I had not been through this myself, I'm not sure I would believe it. The story is so hard to believe. Yeah, I have a hard time with it. I mean, I know you do have nightmares. I'll take the labels that have been assigned to me in this room. But that's The constant stories that we keep getting to me, it's just, it's eye-opening and frightening. Yeah, Gretchen, we used to, when we first started this podcast, it was in the aftermath of COVID and a lot of the things that were happening that I was disagreeing with. And I've been through it before with the pharma industry and mental health. So I knew a lot of these games and Sean just couldn't believe it. He moved out from Los Angeles, you know, to join this podcast, enjoy this practice. And we ended up giving him a name. We were calling him Dangerously Naive. Because he could not believe that scientific recommendations could be fraudulent. He just ultimately believed in the good of institutions and government. I'm an optimist. Well, you know, I'm an optimist too. I really am. How did this change you? How did it change me? Well, for a long time, I think I lost my certainty about things that I was saying. Not that I ever doubted myself. But somehow it just made me... feel a lot less secure. I guess I'd been so threatened and that was hard. It makes me feel like the genie's out of the bottle and I can't put them back in. I see this every day, everywhere I go. I'm not looking for it, it just pops out at me. And you can't walk away from it. People think, why do you do this? Well, how do you not talk about this once you see what's going on and you see how it's affecting people's lives. We have to get you on the Joe Rogan podcast. Absolutely. Yeah, we have to find a way. Because these are the stories that people have to hear, legitimate scientists. And this is before really, you know, social media really blew up. In this article called, "'Shooting the Messenger' where you lay out your case, which is, was published in 2013. So that's a decade ago. Decade ago, yeah. And I sat on it for a long time. I mean, you know, ask how did it affect me. David Healy and David Antonuccio, who are co-authors on that paper, encouraged me from the get-go to write that paper. And I kept thinking, oh gosh, you know, I just survived and barely got through all of this. Why would I open up this can of worms? And despite the medical school having handled this very inappropriately, I'm still very grateful that medical school is in my community. I still support it. There's a lot of great things that go on there. I think I really got caught in a unique chapter of the medical school's history. And I was afraid that if I wrote it, that I would be sued. And finally, it was David Healy, who himself has been through one of these ordeals, said, Gretchen, the best thing that can happen is that they sue you because they will have to disclose all their documents. So if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to lose. And I thought, gosh, you know, he's right. Bring it on. So I finally wrote the paper and held my breath that the medical school didn't come after me and 10 years have gone by and they haven't come after me. So I don't think they're going to, you know, famous last words. They'll probably just egged it on, I hope not. But no, but really there's nothing to hide. So I would love for them to have to disclose their documents. My whole scientific misconduct hearing was tape recorded and they would not let me have a copy of the tape recording. And I've made it clear over and over again, hey, you can release that tape recording in total to anybody anytime. I have nothing to hide. I would love for people to hear that and see that. So I'm an open book when it comes to all of this. So you're part of a very important movement. And there's a section in this paper, a professional call to arms. And again, this paper was published a decade ago. With mounting evidence, and this is from the paper, of serious risks associated with widespread use of psychotropic drugs, the case of the attack on the fever and suppression of the data she generated can serve as a wake-up call for mental health professionals. The case provides an object lesson about why tenure is so important in protecting academic freedom. Without tenure, the risks to the independent academic can be great if billions of industry dollars. may be threatened. It is up to independent scientists to address the inflation of benefits of drug therapies and the minimization of risks. David Healy is quoted on that. So that's where we are because when we, I got into the data on antidepressants because of how many antidepressants were being prescribed. And I was certainly aware of a lot of the harms related to antidepressants as I was going through a number of the sites that I've worked at, as well as polypharm drugging as mental health frontline treatment. But I remember when I was in graduate school, the New England Journal of Medicine released a paper that basically came to the conclusion with publication bias, so the studies that did not get published. Antidepressants were nothing more than placebos with side effects. This must've been, I think it was 2007. I was in my doctoral program. I thought that was going to be on the nightly news. You know, I'd go home, I watched NBC news. I was like, this is amazing. Like antidepressants are now going to probably take steps to go off the market. Nothing. Silence. Crickets. Yeah. So this is what happens all the time. So really important study gets published. but it doesn't suit industry interests. So nobody pitches it to the media. Or if you pitch it yourself to the media, the media then goes to its usual cadre of experts, the Biedermanns and Barclays of the world, and says, hey, what about this? And they'd say, ah, no. And they just discount it. So it gets no attention. Whereas when a rigged study by the pharmaceutical company, that isn't worth the paper it's written on gets published. They send out their troops and they send out press releases and Nightly News says, latest, greatest, breaking, you know, new study. We've got a great new drug. Yeah, they fund the legacy media. Yeah. So the legacy media really cannot, because that's their advertising dollars. I mean, they're just so absolutely powerful. And that's why it's independent. researchers, voices, podcasts, like the legacy media has to fall. And I think it is, I think it is falling. And so if we believe in science, we believe in freedom, freedom of speech against censoring, open dialogue, making sure scientists are able to replicate their data and we can have open debate. It requires the independent media to be able to... promote this. Like if you go to WebMD right now, they're still talking about a chemical imbalance of depression. Yeah. Yeah, if you talk to the average person on the street, even the average physician still thinks that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Every once in a while, I'll ask somebody just for kicks. And they all still believe it. And when I tell them, have you not heard about this? Maybe and their eyes just glass over. They've just been so a culture to think in terms of a chemical imbalance, but these are biological diseases in us, something in us is broken, and it can be fixed by with a pill. But when you really even think about that, that doesn't even make sense. I know. And it's not just, uh, mental health, right? It's, it's so widespread with so many medical conditions that the pharmaceutical industry has just funded these academics to write the textbooks. and the major medical organizations are developing guidelines based on really horrible science. And the alternative science is being censored. And Google is so powerful right now that most people aren't going to go more than three pages deep into Google. They don't go past the first page. Is that the date you have data on that? Wow. Yeah. I mean, when I worked in the marketing advertising space, if your page wasn't on, if your site wasn't on the first page and even the first three to five lengths, it was pointless. Wow. Yeah. That's really interesting. Well, you know, one of the things that I keep saying is, and I've been saying for decades now, it seems, the change that is necessary is obviously not gonna come from within the medical establishment because there are too many incentives to keep doing what they're doing. There's too many disincentives to change. So we really have to mobilize the populace, which is what your podcast is doing, thank you. And You know, all politics is local. So what that means is we really need to get local data in the hands of people. Because I saw in Virginia when people from Hampton Roads or Southeastern Virginia saw that in their own backyard, children were being medicated for ADHD at an unacceptably high rates and with lots of drugs, not just stimulants. It was intolerable to them. But if you tell people nationally, oh, we're medicating too many children, nobody knows what to do with that. So you have got to make this information available at a local level where it's meaningful. And you've got to begin to really work from the ground up to make this kind of change. So you're speaking at an upcoming conference. Can you share a little bit about that? Yeah, so it's a farmed out conference that's... a project actually of Georgetown University Medical Center. It's been running for, I think, over 10 years now, headed up by Dr. Adrian Fubauman. And they do all kinds of things throughout the year to provide continuing education seminars that are free of pharmaceutical industry influence, hence the name Farmed Out. And every year they put on a great conference and they bring experts from a variety of fields together to talk about whatever topic, you know, is their focus and really parse out for people what we know independent of what the industry-funded science would tell you. And it's a really valuable conference. So it is there where I'm going to be the first time in a long time I've had a chance to talk in depth about. we really need to get back to reporting data at a community specific level. So the CDC now tracks ADHD, but they never report it beyond the state level. And they never really get down into the nitty gritties where why don't you tell us CDC, how many white boys are diagnosed with ADHD? They don't report that because that number probably would shock people and people don't know what to do with it. So I'm really advocating for local data, which we can now, we now have at our fingertips, but we don't realize it. Through the use of electronic health records, a hospital's clinical effectiveness department, and most of them have them, can readily, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but with few keystrokes, pump out information on how many children, or people under 21, are on psychotropics, and what drugs are they on? I think my community would be appalled if they had actual access to that data. And I just signed a petition. Oh, awesome. Around that and then posted it out on my Twitter. Oh, thank you. This weekend. So hopefully that is something that continues to grow and we get enough signatures for that. Right. Thank you very much. Yeah. So we've put together just this past week a petition asking that beginning in Virginia that people come together to figure out how they can report this data for a region, making sure that it's the process and mechanism is overseen by people who are free of financial conflicts of interest. Great, I'll get a link to that. I'll put it in the show summary. Everybody go look right now, scroll, click, read it. Yeah, we all want that information. Yeah, I appreciate that very much. So if we get enough signatures, hopefully we can probably go to the legislators and say, we need your help. Let's make this happen, because it's doable. Absolutely. And are you aware of some of the news right now about the Adderall shortage? Yeah. I mean, we have so many people taking Adderall. There's so many people diagnosed ADHD that there's supply chain issues and production issues around it. Yeah. I mean, I don't think they were ever prepared for as many people would want that drug. And here's some of the dumb things that we continue to hear in our health care settings every day. that when somebody doesn't have their Adderall and they experience kind of like a withdrawal reaction from the Adderall, the doctors will say, well, there's your ADHD, right? That's why you need to be on it. So not understanding this as a future podcast for us, all the adverse effects of long-term stimulant use and dependence and what happens when you take it for a long time and then you run out and you don't take it like, all this information has to be communicated to the general public because the doctors are saying insanely ignorant things like that, you know, that's why you need to be on these drugs for life. Yeah, that's a really important podcast. I'm really glad you're going to tackle that. And I think you're going to have to tackle it multiple times by, you know, drug class by drug class, but also then overall, because people don't realize that for all psychotropics, and opioids, they're all psychoactive drugs. So by their very nature, what happens when you take them long-term, they cause your symptoms to worsen eventually. And you become physically dependent and when you withdraw from the drugs, you look really quote unquote sick. Yeah, there's a section here and what's the harm of casually diagnosing and aggressively medicating ADHD. And so like. When we talk about casually diagnosing or saying you just walking into your pediatrician's office, if you're a parent and easily getting a prescription, and now the same way with antidepressants. And if you're adult, I mean, obviously it's even easier. It's got to jump on a website that wants to benefit from the sale of those drugs, but there are significant effects from being drugged and you know, you've done, you've done a good job of making the case for, you know, usually walking down the direction like because you're only you're gonna get a drug for one period of time until your brain begins to adapt and then You're gonna need higher doses and they're gonna get you another one and then another one and before you know it you're hooked on multiple drugs with that are experimenting on your brain with adverse consequences that aren't even public and not part of the informed consent process Is this where your career is now is your career focused on these issues? That's what my career is focused on. Yeah, so I took a detour for about 10 years and worked on organizational safety starting with patient safety in hospitals and then working in industrial companies. But I'm coming back to this. Interestingly enough, I'm going to be spending a week observing Mary Vieton. She's somebody you should probably have on your podcast. She does this amazing program all through a nonprofit organization, Warfighter Advance. She brings vets from anywhere in the country who are suffering from post-traumatic stress issues. She covers their airfare. If they need somebody to fly with them because they're too stressed out, she'll arrange that. They come and she spends seven days, seven nights kind of deprogramming them from what they've been told about post-traumatic stress disorder. There's nothing wrong with you. You're having an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation and that is normal. Yes. I think Chuck Ruby brought up warfighter in our last discussion and there was a link to that. I'll include the link to this in our show summary as well. Yeah, so I told Mary that I would like to see how I can adapt what she's been doing for 10 years very successfully for less intense, maybe over an eight week period, courses for parents and teachers to basically deprogram them from thinking in terms of the medical model in terms of all of these kinds of issues. It's kind of a depathologizing movement. Yeah, exactly. And then getting back to just some core science on human nature. And if we're going to consider ourselves scientists in any regard, we have to legitimately understand what is it like to be normal, the experience of going through adverse conditions and circumstances and what is the varied reactions amongst human beings and how they respond to stressful experiences. And then how can we help them cope and adapt and overcome and move completely away from biological psychology, DSM categorical diagnoses, and a lot of this misinformation that just continues to be communicated through decades. I think we've been harmed so significantly since the 1990s, you know, and it really starts with, uh, pharmaceutical industries. direct to consumer advertising and its alliance with the medical establishment in the United States has just created indelible harm. As a culture, we have to change. And we all have to realize what is happening and has happened to our young people. The statistics are alarming, absolutely alarming. I do wanna kind of conclude this with just reading the summary from this paper because I think it says it all in... in only a few sentences. ADHD experts with ties to the pharmaceutical industry and or Chad repeatedly watched ad hominem attacks on work by Dr. LeFavor Watson and research findings conflicted with drug industry interests. These attacks ultimately led to a decade of significant ADHD research and community based interventions being mischaracterized in professional venues and media outlets. You become that dangerous to their narrative. They are coming after you and your research. They are not interested in enhancing the welfare and benefiting human nature. They are interested in their shareholders. It's that simple. The net effect was the research on psychosocial interventions that also raised questions about the effectiveness of ADHD drug treatment was terminated and study findings were suppressed. This helped pave the way for continued escalation. and expansion of ADHD diagnoses and drug treatment among American children, youth and adults, the rate of ADHD now exceeds all reasonable estimates of the true prevalence of the disorder if we want to call it a disorder to begin with. As a consequence, ADHD drugs are readily available on American high school and college campuses, where they are increasingly abused with serious and sometimes lethal consequences. So everyone out there who is developing a brand around ADHD and in your Twitter profiles, you have the word ADHD and you're producing TikTok videos and the American teachers and education where you are pushing this diagnosis and pushing kids into these drugs, this is harmful, absolutely harmful. We need to wake up. And I hope a podcast like this can bring some attention to what happens when You're trying to promote scientific findings that are outside of the narrative. So we have, we are limited in what is sent to us and which we are consuming. We are consuming the pharma narrative. It is up to us as individuals. It doesn't matter whether you're a psychologist, a teacher, a parent. We have responsibilities to maintain within our culture, fair, free, truth, information that protects our wellbeing. And the moment we give up that right, you're gonna see what has happened over the course globally from this pandemic is governments and industries, they start taking more and more of your own personal liberties and freedoms. This is a big issue and it's critically important. Well said. Anything before we conclude? Thank you. Thank you very much, both of you. Sean and Roger, this is a great opportunity to be here. I really appreciate it. Gretchen still has a long drive to go, Roger. She does. Yeah. Six hours back to Virginia Beach. I've done that drive plenty of times, twice a year. It's not bad, other than that little bit of the Pennsylvania turnpike where the... trucks are. Yeah, it's squashed between the trucks and the Jersey wall. Other than that, it's smooth. Yeah, through Delaware through Maryland. Is that the way you go? Down 13. Easy. Dr. Gretchen, the fever Watson. Thank you so much for a radically genuine conversation. Thank you.