Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder was named in the 1980s, and by the end of that decade forty people in Britain were being treated for ADHD, all of them children. Now more than 800,000 are in a queue for assessment and diagnosis. A government report is set to recommend changing that, so that symptoms of ADHD no longer put people on that uphill road to getting a formal diagnosis.

Wes Streeting ordered the review last December in response to rises in diagnoses of ADHD and other mental conditions, against a background of rises in sickness and incapacity benefit. Professor Peter Fonagy, a psychoanalyst at University College London, is leading the review, and has said people are being incentivised to get a diagnosis.

‘Incapacity and unemployment benefits now harm a great many of the people they are designed to help.’

‘Incapacity and unemployment benefits now harm a great many of the people they are designed to help.’

In 2000 NICE first issued guidance on treatment of childhood ADHD. In 2008 its guidelines first covered adults too. Last month a Lancet study in England said 1.19% of the population has an ADHD diagnosis recorded in their GP records. The authors expressed concern not that this was so high, but that it remained substantially below published estimates. Medicine worries intensely about........

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