The Relief and the Small Print

If you are the parent of a neurodivergent child and you spend any time on Instagram, you will know the landscape. Board-certified psychiatrists in good lighting, speaking with calm authority directly to camera. Sixty seconds of validation. Your child is not broken. The label is wrong. The brain is just different. Save this. Share it with someone who needs to hear it.

I understand why it lands. I have felt the relief of it myself. I have watched parents feel it in my coaching work — that moment when someone says, in public, what you have quietly believed for years but been too frightened to say out loud. That your child is not the problem. That the question has been wrong all along.

I believe that too. I have believed it for thirty-five years.

But I think we need to look carefully at what this landscape is actually selling. Because the relief is real — and what comes with it, in many cases, is not.

Dr Steven Storage is a child and adolescent psychiatrist whose recent Instagram post — arguing that labelling ADHD and autism as disorders is wrong, that different doesn’t mean broken — gathered thousands of responses and a collective exhale from parents who recognised something true in it.

Dr Storage works for Amen Clinics, founded by Dr Daniel Amen. Amen Clinics have built their business around SPECT scanning — single-photon emission computed tomography — which involves injecting the patient with a radioactive substance and scanning the brain to map blood flow patterns. Dr Amen says these scans reveal not just ADHD but seven distinct subtypes of ADHD, none of which are recognised by mainstream psychiatric organisations. The clinic also sells its own line of supplements to treat what the scans find. Insurers will not cover the procedure. Parents pay out of pocket. Many of those parents are desperate. The clinics are not short of business.

I want to be precise about my argument here, because it is not that Dr Storage or Dr Amen are acting in bad faith. I have no way of knowing that. What I am saying is something more structural, and I think more important.

Do we scan neuro-average children’s brains looking for imperfections? We do not. Which means the scan is not neutral science. It is a search for what is wrong, conducted only on the children we have already decided something is wrong with. The conclusion is built into the methodology before the child walks through the door.

The Instagram post says: different doesn’t mean broken.

The clinic says: let us inject your child with a radioactive substance and look more closely at exactly how their brain differs from the norm.

That is not a contradiction the sixty-second clip mentions. And Storage and Amen are not alone. They are simply a particularly clear example of something that has spread across the social media landscape for neurodivergent families: the medicalisation of difference, dressed in the language of liberation. Scan the brain. Name the subtype. Buy the supplement. The child remains the site of the problem. The search for the deficiency continues. It has just found better lighting and a larger audience.

I want to be very clear here, because this is a place where the conversation often goes wrong in both directions.

Medication can help. For some children, it helps significantly. I have seen it. I would never suggest to a parent that medication is simply another arm of the disorder model to be rejected wholesale, because that is not true and it is not fair to families who have watched their child find some relief through it.

But medication without context will only get you so far. A prescription that is not accompanied by an honest look at the child’s environment, their relationships, their early experiences, the world they are living inside — is treating the signal while leaving the source entirely untouched. The anxiety that drove you to the Instagram psychiatrist in the first place does not go away because someone has named a subtype and sold you a supplement. It goes away, if it goes away at all, when someone finally looks at the whole child.

That is a harder thing to put in a sixty-second clip. It is also, I would argue, almost the entire point.

Gabor Maté is a physician who has spent decades arguing that ADHD is not what mainstream psychiatry says it is. He has a large following. He has written extensively and specifically about ADHD — his book Scattered Minds is devoted entirely to it. He challenges the disorder model. He is, in other words, doing something that looks from the outside quite similar to what the Instagram psychiatrists are doing.

The difference is in the direction he points.

Maté spent years as a GP in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, working with some of the most traumatised people in North America — people whose suffering was written into their bodies, their behaviour, their nervous systems. His conclusion, developed across decades of practice, is that ADHD is best understood not as a brain defect but as a response — to early relational experience, to environment, to what happened to a child in the years when their nervous system was still forming. To whether they felt safe. To whether they felt seen. To the quality of the connections around them.

Not what is wrong with the brain. What happened to the person. Who loved them. What their world looked like.

I have seen this myself in my work with traumatised children. Often they will arrive at school with a diagnosis of ADHD, medicated and sometimes managing but often not. What I have noticed over the years is that there is a big difference between a traumatised child and an ADHD child. The behaviours and the response to medication are often very different. Symptoms of ADHD and trauma in early childhood can look very similar and in my experience, many of the children I see every day are misdisgnosed ADHDers. Once the medication wears off, there is no difference in their behaviour. Whereas the ADHD kids raw-dog through the day once the meds have worn off. It’s a really clear signal.

Maté’s framing is not without its critics — some researchers argue he places too much weight on early experience at the expense of genetic factors, and I think it is worth holding that tension honestly. The picture is complex. But the direction he points is the one that changes things: outward, toward the child’s relationships and community and lived experience, toward the systems they are placed inside, toward the question of what they needed and whether anyone was able to provide it.

You cannot scan that. You cannot bottle it and sell it. You cannot get to it in sixty seconds of good lighting.

It requires sitting with a child’s whole history and asking a genuinely different question. And it is, in my thirty-five years of experience, where the real answers almost always live.

In 2008, researcher Dan Eisenberg and colleagues published a study in BMC Evolutionary Biology examining the Ariaal people of northern Kenya — a community where some members still live nomadically and others had recently settled. They found that men carrying the DRD4 7R allele — a genetic variant associated with novelty-seeking, impulsivity, and ADHD — were better nourished in the nomadic population, but less well-nourished in the settled one.

The same gene. Radically different outcomes, depending entirely on the environment it was placed in.

As Eisenberg put it, in a nomadic context someone with this profile might more effectively defend livestock or locate food and water — but those same tendencies are less beneficial in settled pursuits like focusing in school. Not a disorder. A mismatch. The trait is not the problem. The environment is.

The soaring rates of ADHD diagnosis are seen by many researchers not as evidence of over-diagnosis, but as a possible evolutionary signal — our gene pool responding to a rapidly changing world. These children may be showing us something urgent about where we are headed, and what capacities we will need when we get there.

Eisenberg’s study did not scan anyone’s brain. It looked at communities. It looked at environments. It asked not what is wrong with these people but what does this trait do in different contexts — and found that the answer depended almost entirely on the world around the person, not on anything inside their skull.

Maté would recognise that question immediately.

Rewired has been asking, since Issue One, who is being protected by the wrong question. I think the answer here is becoming clearer.

The Instagram psychiatry landscape — the scans, the subtypes, the supplements, the sixty-second validation — keeps the lens pointed firmly at the child. At the brain. At the deficiency to be located and managed. It does not point at the compulsory, standardised, sedentary, compliance-focused outcomes-driven childhood we have built and placed every child inside regardless of what their nervous system needs. It does not point at the relational poverty that Maté describes, or the evolutionary mismatch that Eisenberg’s data reveals. It does not ask what we have built, or what it is costing the children living inside it.

It keeps the child as the problem. It keeps the search for the deficiency alive. And it monetises, very effectively, the anxiety of parents who have been failed by a system that has no real answers, and who will try almost anything to help their child.

I understand that anxiety. I have lived it. I work with it every day.

But the answer to a system that has looked at the wrong thing for decades is not a more sophisticated tool for looking at the same wrong thing. It is a different question entirely.

What happened to this child? Who are the people around them? What does their world look like? What did their nervous system need, and how much of that can we still provide?

That is where this starts. Not with a scan. Not with a subtype. Not with sixty seconds of validation from someone in good lighting who has a supplement to sell you afterwards.

Maté has been asking the right question for thirty years. It doesn’t get many likes. It doesn’t have a product attached. But in my experience, it is almost always where the real answers live.

If you are a parent looking for daily support navigating life with a neurodivergent child, Willow was built for exactly this — the 11pm moments, the morning battles, the meetings, the doubt. You can find us at www.squarepegkids.com

*Rewired continues every Friday (sometimes more frequently — I have a lot to say!).