TBF, this could be said of the vast majority of journalism…
The BBC and Panorama has become such a joke. Can’t trust a thing they say about anything.
‘Private doctor misdiagnoses someone’
They should do psychs in the NHS next.. ” based on our 10 minute interaction I think you have anxiety, here take these powerful mood stabilisers that are normally given to people with bipolar disorder”… “what do you mean you have no motivation and now can’t get out of bed?!?, sounds unusual to me. You need to go and see your GP because it’s definitely nothing to do with us”
Don’t really get the backlash. They’re pissed the documentary team didn’t reach out to them and edit them in days before they aired?
One of the points is that it’s not a full view of the private care available, did the show ever claim it was? It was clearly a short look at a few of the worst offenders, to show that this kind of cash for prescriptions stuff is going on.
If anyone needs support or advice on ADHD you’re welcome to join us at r/ADHDUK
we’ve got a friendly community (admittedly one waving its pitchforks right now), and we can signpost support or advice on diagnoses or living with the condition. We’ve got an [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHDUK/wiki/faq/) as well that covers a lot of ground
I’m glad to see serious rebuttals to this gutter-press journalism. Notably, the day after we get articles from the BBC suggesting that record numbers are out of work because of issues with mental health (amongst other things). Perhaps part of the problem is the utter lack of mental health care available for people, yet this ‘documentary’ only further stigmatises those who try to access it by any means available to them.
I’d expect it from the daily mail, not the BBC.
I can see both sides to this. I got diagnosed as an adult a couple years ago. I’m the model late-diagnosis patient. A woman, a long childhood history of ADHD symptoms and a severe case of gifted child burnout. My experience was positive and professional. I know everyone with ADHD is different, but its odd to see people I’ve known for years suddenly get diagnosed and use it as an excuse for everything. Especially when those people showed no signs of it before.
Private clinics can be very shady, but the NHS is no better. Every boy with behavioural problems is diagnosed with ADHD and pumped with medication. Meanwhile girls who have textbook symptoms are ignored. The whole thing is a mess. It doesn’t help that the symptoms are so subjective and nearly everyone struggles with some of the symptoms at times.
It’s a shame it’s become fashionable. TikTok is really doing us no favours too.
Ever tried to get assessed?
Go to a GP and they may as well laugh in your face. Have private health insurance. It’s not covered. “Why didn’t you get it done when you were a kid?” Unfortunately, “no responsible adult believed me and just called me lazy” doesn’t count.
And now they have the nerve to pooh-pooh all these organisations as if they weren’t picking up the slack in a monumentally underfunded sector.
Perhaps if ADHD wasn’t treated as a joke by an ignorant public who can’t conceive of experiences different to their own, we wouldn’t be here.
Nice to see a rebuttal from someone trusted. Yes, there are people riding coattails and making excuses and calling it ADHD but given the condition, people with it get told they’re doing just that even when they’re being sincere.
This condition will be taken more seriously in time.
I’ve gone private because the wait was 5 years in my area. I was only diagnosed after several interviews and assessments one of which was with a parent. Regular blood and weight checks to confirm if the medication is still appropriate. Even sent across all my school reports.
I don’t think this documentary is an accurate reflection of private ADHD assessment. Not even a mention of how long waiting lists are now. My NHS GP just dismissed it as anxiety.
The first time I was prescribed antidepressants by a GP, I was 17 and it was precisely 5 minutes after I went in for my appointment that I came out with a prescription. I went in with headaches. Never mentioned feeling sad or low or anything about any childhood history.
13 years, and 5 or 6 different mood/anti-depressant medications later, some of those repeated multiple times, I was diagnosed with ADHD by one of the clinics mentioned in the BBC Panorama episode.
I’ve been on my ADHD medication for just over a month now and it has been life changing. My mental health has been the best it’s been since before I can remember.
Because the GP cocked up my Right to Choose referral 4 times, I also had to pay out of pocket for this.
If this gutter journalist Rory Carson has made my future attempts to get shared care from the GP in place next to impossible, I’m going to be stuck paying £120 a month for medication. A massive stretch for me, but with 2 high-needs autistic children and a business to run, I can’t afford not to.
“The NHS psychiatrist was given advance notification that this was part of an investigation and would be filmed.”
*Jesus-Tap-Dancing-Christ*
So the only body that didn’t diagnose this chap’s false
answers was the one that happened to in the loop on his TV show. Top science!
I was wandering how he got an NHS appointment in under 5 years and how it lasted three hours (regular punters do not have 3 hour assessments!) The answer was Panorama booked it in as a tv slot.
FFS. Why is panorama so crooked?
The response at issue is trying (poorly) to say the following. The BBC would have done well to speak to us, because we could have helped the BBC to see that many (most?) private providers of the ADHD tests do their job properly.
I myself am not in a position to know whether the last claim – viz., that many (most?) private providers of the ADHD tests do their job properly – is true. Also, having not watched the programme, I do not know whether the programme denied that claim.
Whenever there’s a rise in reports that’s paints a group as ‘cheats and fakers’ I expect there’s some kind of unpopular gov policy in the works that needs those impacted to be given the blurry image of ‘they might be lying cheats’ to remove public sympathy.
Bit like build up to PiP for the disabled
The issue I have with the Panorama programme is that nearly all psychiatric diagnosis is subjective. Anyone who watched the programme will have noticed that when the reporter went through the ‘proper’ diagnostic procedure, he wasn’t administered an objective test to show the presence of a ‘disease entity’, it was just a more in depth assessment of his overall mental wellbeing and behavioural tendencies. The delineation between what is a psychiatric disorder and what is just a personality trait is still completely subjective and arbitrary.
If psychiatry had established this as a real disease, with an identifiable organic cause, then this wouldn’t be an issue at all. But they haven’t established that there is a real disease, it is just a cluster of behavioural tendencies and personality traits that are deemed to be pathological past a certain threshold.
Harley Street responded, claiming the BBC has silenced them and highlighted the BBC’s track record when it comes to reporting on this issue
But it never sticks, does it? Whenever we get yet another grifter journalist in the UK doing a bad faith mental health ‘expose’, the rebuttal comes out independently, unacknowledged by the original offender; the bad faith journalism remains in prominent view on its elevated platform; and the grifter, after keeping their heads down for a couple of weeks, skips off to do it all over again.
I think we have national problem with our media sector. There’s no real accountability and no effective correction to bad pseudo-journalism.
If you’re a dishonest journalist you’re have a better chance of becoming Prime Minister than of being called to account in any effective way.
16 comments
TBF, this could be said of the vast majority of journalism…
The BBC and Panorama has become such a joke. Can’t trust a thing they say about anything.
‘Private doctor misdiagnoses someone’
They should do psychs in the NHS next.. ” based on our 10 minute interaction I think you have anxiety, here take these powerful mood stabilisers that are normally given to people with bipolar disorder”… “what do you mean you have no motivation and now can’t get out of bed?!?, sounds unusual to me. You need to go and see your GP because it’s definitely nothing to do with us”
Don’t really get the backlash. They’re pissed the documentary team didn’t reach out to them and edit them in days before they aired?
One of the points is that it’s not a full view of the private care available, did the show ever claim it was? It was clearly a short look at a few of the worst offenders, to show that this kind of cash for prescriptions stuff is going on.
If anyone needs support or advice on ADHD you’re welcome to join us at r/ADHDUK
we’ve got a friendly community (admittedly one waving its pitchforks right now), and we can signpost support or advice on diagnoses or living with the condition. We’ve got an [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHDUK/wiki/faq/) as well that covers a lot of ground
I’m glad to see serious rebuttals to this gutter-press journalism. Notably, the day after we get articles from the BBC suggesting that record numbers are out of work because of issues with mental health (amongst other things). Perhaps part of the problem is the utter lack of mental health care available for people, yet this ‘documentary’ only further stigmatises those who try to access it by any means available to them.
I’d expect it from the daily mail, not the BBC.
I can see both sides to this. I got diagnosed as an adult a couple years ago. I’m the model late-diagnosis patient. A woman, a long childhood history of ADHD symptoms and a severe case of gifted child burnout. My experience was positive and professional. I know everyone with ADHD is different, but its odd to see people I’ve known for years suddenly get diagnosed and use it as an excuse for everything. Especially when those people showed no signs of it before.
Private clinics can be very shady, but the NHS is no better. Every boy with behavioural problems is diagnosed with ADHD and pumped with medication. Meanwhile girls who have textbook symptoms are ignored. The whole thing is a mess. It doesn’t help that the symptoms are so subjective and nearly everyone struggles with some of the symptoms at times.
It’s a shame it’s become fashionable. TikTok is really doing us no favours too.
Ever tried to get assessed?
Go to a GP and they may as well laugh in your face. Have private health insurance. It’s not covered. “Why didn’t you get it done when you were a kid?” Unfortunately, “no responsible adult believed me and just called me lazy” doesn’t count.
And now they have the nerve to pooh-pooh all these organisations as if they weren’t picking up the slack in a monumentally underfunded sector.
Perhaps if ADHD wasn’t treated as a joke by an ignorant public who can’t conceive of experiences different to their own, we wouldn’t be here.
Nice to see a rebuttal from someone trusted. Yes, there are people riding coattails and making excuses and calling it ADHD but given the condition, people with it get told they’re doing just that even when they’re being sincere.
This condition will be taken more seriously in time.
I’ve gone private because the wait was 5 years in my area. I was only diagnosed after several interviews and assessments one of which was with a parent. Regular blood and weight checks to confirm if the medication is still appropriate. Even sent across all my school reports.
I don’t think this documentary is an accurate reflection of private ADHD assessment. Not even a mention of how long waiting lists are now. My NHS GP just dismissed it as anxiety.
The first time I was prescribed antidepressants by a GP, I was 17 and it was precisely 5 minutes after I went in for my appointment that I came out with a prescription. I went in with headaches. Never mentioned feeling sad or low or anything about any childhood history.
13 years, and 5 or 6 different mood/anti-depressant medications later, some of those repeated multiple times, I was diagnosed with ADHD by one of the clinics mentioned in the BBC Panorama episode.
I’ve been on my ADHD medication for just over a month now and it has been life changing. My mental health has been the best it’s been since before I can remember.
Because the GP cocked up my Right to Choose referral 4 times, I also had to pay out of pocket for this.
If this gutter journalist Rory Carson has made my future attempts to get shared care from the GP in place next to impossible, I’m going to be stuck paying £120 a month for medication. A massive stretch for me, but with 2 high-needs autistic children and a business to run, I can’t afford not to.
“The NHS psychiatrist was given advance notification that this was part of an investigation and would be filmed.”
*Jesus-Tap-Dancing-Christ*
So the only body that didn’t diagnose this chap’s false
answers was the one that happened to in the loop on his TV show. Top science!
I was wandering how he got an NHS appointment in under 5 years and how it lasted three hours (regular punters do not have 3 hour assessments!) The answer was Panorama booked it in as a tv slot.
FFS. Why is panorama so crooked?
The response at issue is trying (poorly) to say the following. The BBC would have done well to speak to us, because we could have helped the BBC to see that many (most?) private providers of the ADHD tests do their job properly.
I myself am not in a position to know whether the last claim – viz., that many (most?) private providers of the ADHD tests do their job properly – is true. Also, having not watched the programme, I do not know whether the programme denied that claim.
Whenever there’s a rise in reports that’s paints a group as ‘cheats and fakers’ I expect there’s some kind of unpopular gov policy in the works that needs those impacted to be given the blurry image of ‘they might be lying cheats’ to remove public sympathy.
Bit like build up to PiP for the disabled
The issue I have with the Panorama programme is that nearly all psychiatric diagnosis is subjective. Anyone who watched the programme will have noticed that when the reporter went through the ‘proper’ diagnostic procedure, he wasn’t administered an objective test to show the presence of a ‘disease entity’, it was just a more in depth assessment of his overall mental wellbeing and behavioural tendencies. The delineation between what is a psychiatric disorder and what is just a personality trait is still completely subjective and arbitrary.
If psychiatry had established this as a real disease, with an identifiable organic cause, then this wouldn’t be an issue at all. But they haven’t established that there is a real disease, it is just a cluster of behavioural tendencies and personality traits that are deemed to be pathological past a certain threshold.
Harley Street responded, claiming the BBC has silenced them and highlighted the BBC’s track record when it comes to reporting on this issue
https://harleypsychiatrists.co.uk/bbc-panoramas-devastating-criticism-of-private-adhd-assessments/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8534718.stm
I’m glad to see this rebuttal.
But it never sticks, does it? Whenever we get yet another grifter journalist in the UK doing a bad faith mental health ‘expose’, the rebuttal comes out independently, unacknowledged by the original offender; the bad faith journalism remains in prominent view on its elevated platform; and the grifter, after keeping their heads down for a couple of weeks, skips off to do it all over again.
I think we have national problem with our media sector. There’s no real accountability and no effective correction to bad pseudo-journalism.
If you’re a dishonest journalist you’re have a better chance of becoming Prime Minister than of being called to account in any effective way.