An interesting e-mail in response to my post on Ritalin:

I can vividly recall my one experience of the entire ADHD racket. (Compared to most, I got off lightly.) When I was once Kapellmeister to a church choir,
we had in our ranks a manipulative rehearsal-and-performance-wrecking creep (mid-20s) who'd persuaded his entire family (i.e. most of the rest of the choir -
antagonizing that choir was sort of like antagonizing the Borgias in late-15th-century Rome) that he'd had ADHD since the year dot.

What he actually had was an Eminem-sized ego and a pair of parents who spoiled him rotten, however much he humiliated them in public. No psychiatric verdict by dirigiste educrats was so stupid, pernicious, or laughable that those
parents didn't believe it. If an educrat had diagnosed their darling boy as having needed a taxpayer-funded sex change by next Wednesday, the parents would have arranged a taxpayer-funded sex change by next Wednesday. And they weren't occupying the shallow end of the gene pool either; they were rich, clever, half-educated, masochistic whites with that Pelagian outlook which seems so often to accompany being born into the upper middle classes. Just the sorts whose kids, the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR indicates, are likely to
end up on the Ritalin route.

Eventually I had to get outta there, to save my sanity. (I suspect that any clergyman who had dared to querythe "ADHD" label in this youth's case would have been hit with a phony sexual-abuse rap before he could say "Jack Robinson".)

Such touching parental trust towards "professionals" peddling bogus - or at the very least, over-diagnosed - diseases in a moral vacuum made an interesting
demonstration of the saying "I never said the state couldn't harm you, I just said it couldn't help you."