We Are Not Broken Brains
When Restlessness Becomes Revenue
I step into this slowly, like entering a chapel that once held grief and now holds something more dangerous: certainty. There’s a silence in the room before the diagnosis. Before the clipboard clicks shut, before the pills are pushed, before a child is told they are broken in a language dressed as care. And I want to ask, gently but with fury beneath the words, who benefits from the branding of brains as disordered? Who sits behind the curtain counting pills while parents cry in carparks clutching scripts like lifeboats?
It’s easy to say every second child has ADHD now. It rolls off the tongue like a joke, but it’s not. It's a story we’re telling ourselves to make sense of chaos, to find patterns in the play of childhood. The data tells us something quieter, something less cinematic: globally, around five percent of children meet the criteria. Not half. Not even close. In the United States, it creeps higher, eleven percent and climbing. Australia follows the same slow rise. The difference is in the definitions, not necessarily in the children.
In 2013, the rulebook changed. The thresholds lowered. Restlessness became pathology. Daydreaming became a symptom. Energy was repackaged as excess. Behind those decisions were committees of clinicians, many with ties to the companies that sell the cure. This is not a conspiracy. This is capitalism with a stethoscope. And it’s working. Methylphenidate production rose tenfold in twenty years. Stimulants now sit in schoolbags beside sandwiches. Teachers write referrals. Parents watch TED talks. We are diagnosing faster than we are understanding. Selling faster than we are questioning.
None of this is to deny that some people finally feel seen. That a diagnosis can be a key, not a cage. That many autistic and ADHD adults have fought long to be named and known. There is truth in their relief, and I honour it. But there is also danger in the drift. Suzanne O’Sullivan calls it the age of overdiagnosis. A time when labels soothe and sedate but do not always heal. When to be normal is to be medicated, measured, managed. When we forget that boredom and brilliance often sit side by side in the same mind.
I’ve been in classrooms. Hundreds of them. I’ve seen the misbehaviour. I’ve seen the meltdowns. I’ve seen children hit, spit, swear and throw. I’ve seen children stand on desks and scream. But I’ve also seen the parenting. Or the lack of it. I’ve watched as parenting standards have quietly collapsed while teachers are told to pick up the pieces with a smile and a sticker chart. Once, children came to school ready to learn. Now, they come hungry for boundaries. Starving for structure. They come in need of something schools were never designed to give. We are no longer educators. We are behaviour managers with whiteboards. And the blame, when it all goes wrong, is handed to diagnosis like a hall pass. He’s got ADHD. She’s on the spectrum. They’re not bad, they’re broken. But what if they’re neither?
I am not here to mock the medicated. I am here to mourn the narrowing of what we consider human. I am here for the boy who talks too much and is given a script instead of a story. For the girl who stares out the window and is told that wonder is a condition. For the non-binary teen whose trauma is misread as disorder, whose truth is drowned in a prescription pad. I am here because difference is not disease. Because some of us are meant to be unruly, unquiet, uncontained.
Like Luca. Fifteen. Wild. A little warrior of want and impulse, with fists full of feeling and no filter for fear. He’s not my blood, but he’s my boy. Like a nephew, like a shadow of who I might’ve been if I hadn’t learned to tame my tongue or talk pretty enough to stay out of trouble. He’s had every label under the sun. ADHD. ODD. Attachment disorder. You name it. He wears them like battle scars. He is brilliant, infuriating, tender. Once, he pulled a knife on his mum, not to hurt her but to make the world stop spinning. To say, “See me. Hear me. Help me.” I was the one who talked him down. Spoke soft while the blade trembled in his hand. No pill would’ve reached him then. No diagnosis could’ve translated his despair.
And still, the next morning, he was given new meds. A higher dose. The system doesn’t speak his language, so it silences him instead.
There’s Marnie, too. Ten years old, bouncing off the walls like a spark set loose. Her teacher told the parents to “get her assessed.” The GP signed off in six minutes. She now takes Ritalin every school day and weeps on Sundays. Her parents call it “calmer,” but her drawings have gone grey. No more unicorns. No more lightning bolts. Just tiny boxes. Black boxes. All the same size.
Or Liam, who once told his school counsellor he felt “sad and distracted.” His mum was grieving a miscarriage, his dad working away. Instead of a hug or a safe space or a week of grace, he got a label. A pill. A plan. His sadness had an acronym now. His soul was collateral.
This is not about denying neurodivergence. This is about demanding nuance. About asking if the rise in diagnosis reflects a rise in suffering, or simply a fall in tolerance. A culture that cannot sit with stillness or stimulation, that cannot hold discomfort without labelling it a dysfunction, is a culture that will medicate the wildness out of us all.
And there is wildness worth saving. I’ve seen it. The fire in Luca’s eyes when he builds something from scratch. The way Marnie can mimic any birdcall after one listen. The way Liam wrote a song for his little sister with chords he taught himself. None of these things were on their NDIS plans. None were measured by the forms. But they matter. They are the pulse of what it means to be a person still forming.
I want tools, not labels. I want care, not commodification. I want a world where a child’s light is not dimmed to fit a syllabus. I want us to stop and ask, what if the system is sick, not the child? What if the cure we’re selling is silence?
This is not a clean ending. It’s a candle lit in the middle of a room filled with noise. It flickers. But it does not go out.