14 May What Four Corners got wrong about ADHD in women
When Four Corners aired Attention Deficit in April 2026, hosted by Dr Norman Swan, it proposed that the significant rise in diagnoses in women is being primarily driven by social contagion.
The problem with this hypothesis is that there’s plenty of research, expert opinion, and real-world evidence of alternative, highly plausible reasons why more women than ever are being diagnosed with ADHD.
The other problem is far more harmful. Women with ADHD all over Australia felt gaslit all over again, just as they were finally starting to feel better understood. It gave people permission to doubt whether their ADHD diagnosis was real.
So I wrote an article about why this hypothesis is flawed, which was published in Women’s Agenda.
The piece covers why the misdiagnosis theory is in the wrong ‘direction’ – historically, it’s well documented that women have been misdiagnosed with other conditions while ADHD was missed.
It also explains how the data was framed in a way that didn’t tell the whole story.
Perhaps most disappointing, though, was the near-total omission of what ADHD actually looks like in women’s lives. The truth is, we often experience far more psychological distress and have to juggle many more roles in society than most men with ADHD.
It actually makes a lot of sense that more women are being diagnosed than men now that there is a lot more awareness of how ADHD shows up in females.
If you know people who watched it, please share it. You can check it out here:
