I'm interested in you developing the last thought you had.
This is just classical bayes rule dude, there will be a lot of false positives _no matter what_ unless the diagnosis rate is an absurdly high number. You're blaming other people for not knowing that's the way the numbers always come out?
https://www.math.hmc.edu/funfacts/ffiles/30002.6.shtml
> Suppose that you are worried that you might have a rare disease. You decide to get tested, and suppose that the testing methods for this disease are correct 99 percent of the time (in other words, if you have the disease, it shows that you do with 99 percent probability, and if you don't have the disease, it shows that you do not with 99 percent probability). Suppose this disease is actually quite rare, occurring randomly in the general population in only one of every 10,000 people.
We've moved to a model where "raising standards" in education and increased evaluation of teachers equates to formulaic, inflexible school curriculum that younger kids cannot handle. So they act out and get referred for evaluation. My public school district begins assessing children using computerized testing starting in November of the kindergarten year. There's a big difference between a 5 year old born on January 1 and a five year old born on August 1, and those later born kids are going to get labeled with mental health conditions for life and drugged because they are square pegs that don't fit in the prescribed round hole.
The article didn't claim that ADHD doesn't exist either. A key quote:
> Zoëga says the only country studied so far where the relative age of young children doesn't seem to have an effect on ADHD diagnosis is Denmark, where there's more flexibility for when children enter school
Bullshit ADHD diagnosis are bad for people like you who are genuinely affected, as the resources available to help you end up getting shared and stretched to cover disciplinary and structural educational problems. A non-ADHD child isn't helped by ADHD prescription and unnecessary services, and an ADHD child isn't helped by not getting the attention he needs.