Lucy Zeli\u0107:<\/p>\n
How do we stop? Are we taking an easy way out here? Is every uncomfortable situation with a busy child now just being slapped with the tag of, \u201cOh, they\u2019ve got ADHD.\u201d I don\u2019t know, but I want to find out. And Clare Rowe is a leading Australian child psychologist and I\u2019m pleased to say that she joins me on the line now. Clare, good afternoon.<\/p>\n
Clare Rowe:<\/p>\n
Hello, Lucy. Good to be with you.<\/p>\n
Lucy Zeli\u0107:<\/p>\n
Oh, good to be with you again. I\u2019ve chatted to you on afternoons and I see you make so many salient points both in print and on broadcast when it comes to climate alarmism, for example, and how that\u2019s having an effect on our children and the anxiety levels that are being reported because of these very adult and almost, I guess, Armageddon-like conversations that we\u2019re having with children who are just too young to understand it in its entirety. But on the subject of ADHD and now the New South Wales, Minns government announcement today, is it fair to ask if we are overprescribing when it comes to this?<\/p>\n
Clare Rowe:<\/p>\n
I think it\u2019s absolutely fair to ask. It\u2019s not so much about the overprescribing. I just want to take it one step back. It\u2019s about the diagnosis process, that assessment process itself. And I think everyone agrees, I certainly agree on the fact that if a child or adult is genuinely struggling, has a developmental disorder like ADHD, a lot of these people are waiting months or years, they\u2019re spending thousands of dollars to access an expert assessment. I don\u2019t think that that\u2019s good enough, but look, yes, I have a concern that this isn\u2019t just about people having better access to care. My concern is whether we are maintaining the same level of diagnostic rigour.<\/p>\n
ADHD is one of the most complex conditions to diagnose properly. It cannot and it should not be done with ticking boxes. When we look for symptoms, and most people know the symptoms of ADHD, it\u2019s impulsivity and it\u2019s poor attention and hyperactivity, but they can be caused from a multitude of different causes. So it\u2019s about ruling out everything else.<\/p>\n
So you could have a child that\u2019s inattentive and impulsive and hyperactive who just might not be getting proper sleep, who might have a learning disorder, who might be just a little bit more immature than their peers, like you said. So it\u2019s about taking the time, having the support, having the expertise to get that diagnosis process correct. And when it is correct, we know that medication is one of the best treatments we have for this disorder, but in our providing of free assessment, if these are done quickly and not in that comprehensive expert manner, could we result in an absolute explosion of diagnosis and therefore over-medication? Yes, I would say that\u2019s a risk.<\/p>\n
Lucy Zeli\u0107:<\/p>\n
The thing that concerns me also, Clare, is that from speaking to parents \u2026 I\u2019ve got small children myself, a daughter and a son. I had a chuckle with my mum last night. And okay, there\u2019s an age disparity there. My daughter\u2019s just turned seven, my son will be five, but sitting at the bench very calmly, very peacefully was my daughter, happy to colour in and have polite, quiet conversations with my mum whilst my son had a football and was belting it against the wall.<\/p>\n
And I have listened to a lot of other psychologists, whether you agree with them or not, who some have even argued we should actually educate our children separately, boys from the girls, particularly at a very young age, because the boys with very high levels of testosterone between the ages of I think four and six, they need to get out, they need to get it out of their system and then get back inside and then sit down for maybe 15 minutes or half an hour of learning and then go back out again.<\/p>\n
So I\u2019ve heard a lot of different theories about how we educate our children. But similarly, I\u2019ve heard horror stories of, say, parents who were being told that they need to go and get their son off for an assessment because he put headphones on his head and then she finds out that later on it was because he was annoyed at his mate who couldn\u2019t stop chirping at him in class. The teacher also identified that this young boy, my friend\u2019s son, was tapping his feet repeatedly. And his very innocent answer to his mom was, \u201cMum, I was bored.\u201d There was no other way to kind of articulate how he had felt in that moment.<\/p>\n
So you talk about those processes that we need to be following and how they need to be accurate and it\u2019s not just this box ticking exercise. What percentage of GPs are actually doing this rigorous process adhering to the protocols that you\u2019re saying need to be put in place versus the ones that are just happy to get a bit of government funding and just ticking those boxes?<\/p>\n
Clare Rowe:<\/p>\n
Well, exactly, and we don\u2019t have those details. So that means government is telling us that they\u2019ll be put through training courses for this, but I don\u2019t have that details in front of me of what that entails. I would actually argue too though that this is naturally anti-GPs. I see a lot of quick assessments done by psychologists, by paediatricians, by psychiatrists. This is across the board. We all need a little bit of a wake-up to making sure that we are not just looking for symptoms, because that is not how\u2026<\/p>\n
It actually isn\u2019t how diagnosis works across any medical condition. You could have multiple symptoms for something in your body that could be attributed to a form of cancer or could be attributed to workplace stress. You can\u2019t stop at symptoms and then jump to a label, you need to look at underlying causes. Like you said, I\u2019ve got a boy and girl myself. On average, we know boys need to be more physically active, more impulsive, more sensation-seeking than girls.<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean every boy is how proactive and every girl is quiet. But yes, there\u2019s well established average behavioural differences that begin in early childhood for that. And we really need that nuanced assessment to go, \u201cHang on a second.\u201d For example, I will not diagnose any child with ADHD if they are spending excessive hours into the evening on screen time, they\u2019re not getting quality sleep. I can see any other difficulties in there that may be resulting in these ADHD-like symptoms. We need to clean all of that up first and then I need to see what\u2019s left over after that.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s often not a quick process and that is why it costs so much money if you want it done comprehensive and done it in that expert manner. So that is my concern is that we\u2019ll become looking for symptoms and a shortcut through to a label, which often, yes, then does result in medication.<\/p>\n
The biggest long-term danger in medication when we don\u2019t have the diagnosis correct is that we\u2019re missing actually what the problem may be. So we may have someone who has a learning disorder and that\u2019s why they\u2019re not paying attention in class. Or someone with sleep apnea and that\u2019s why they\u2019re impulsive and behaviorally difficult. Whatever it may be, we\u2019ve put a Band-Aid on that doesn\u2019t actually solve the underlying issue and then we\u2019re preventing that person from actually getting the help they require. So that\u2019s the biggest long-term danger in this.<\/p>\n
Lucy Zeli\u0107:<\/p>\n
And common sense and sound principles there from you, Clare. We might need to clone you and shove you in all of these GP clinics. So we can actually get to the bottom of this in, as you say, in a rigorous way that follows process. And unfortunately, it is expensive, but ultimately you need to factor in everything. And the fact now that these kids are growing up in a digital era, that constant dopamine hit that they get from scrolling and watching things and the impact that that has on their attention span. There are so many facets to this, but I really appreciate you taking the time to break that all down for us. Clare Rowe, thank you so much for your time.<\/p>\n
Clare Rowe:<\/p>\n
Thanks very much.<\/p>\n
Lucy Zeli\u0107:<\/p>\n
You\u2019re with Lucy Zeli\u0107 filling in for Clinton Maynard on Sydney Now.<\/p>\n
This transcript of\u00a0Clare Rowe\u00a0speaking on the Sydney Now with Lucy Zeli\u0107 on 2GB\u00a0from 29 June 2026 has been edited for clarity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lucy Zeli\u0107: How do we stop? Are we taking an easy way out here? Is every uncomfortable situation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3148,23,4384,33265,33266,602,3162,29740,247],"class_list":["post-42299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sydney","tag-adhd","tag-australia","tag-behaviour","tag-diagnosing","tag-diagnosis","tag-human-rights","tag-mental-health","tag-psychology","tag-sydney"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}