Earlier this week I wrote a story about how my son was prescribed a dose of melatonin 20x the amount he really needed.

Here’s the podcast version of that essay for those of you who prefer to here my voice.

Hi everyone, Joseph Pack. Today’s episode is a little different.

Because something happened recently that got under my skin. A comment. A public one. Made on a LinkedIn post I shared about my four-year-old son. Now normally, I ignore this kind of thing. I let it go. But not this time.

Why? Because the comment wasn’t just personal. It wasn’t just wrong. It was dangerous. It was arrogant. And it revealed something bigger about how we talk about ADHD, about mental health, and about so-called experts.

So I want to break it down — and dismantle it.

Let me start by reading you the original post I shared:

"The consultant paediatrician just suggested diagnosing my 4-year-old autistic son with ADHD so he can go on meds. AT FOUR YEARS OLD!!!

Thankfully my wife took the appointment, not me. Otherwise I would have exploded.

No, he will not be going for an ADHD diagnosis.

Why?

Because the only reason he'd need one is to get a prescription for medication. And I will NEVER EVER put him on ADHD drugs.

Instead he's:

* Attending a specialist school for autism that will accommodate his needs (rather than drugging him to fit in)

* On a specialist diet, that is working exceptionally well

* Allowed to be himself (running between each mouthful, bouncing all day, other traits that don't need to change)"

Now, here’s the full comment — word for word — that Sarah Templeton, a counsellor and so-called ADHD expert who works in the prison system, left under that post:

“Joseph Pack come back to me when he's arrested. Sorry, but that's what you are risking by not medicating an ADHD child. Never mind risking them not being able to focus and concentrate in class so they won't achieve their potential educationally. Never mind leaving them open to low self-esteem when they lose friendships by saying things impulsively and wanting everything their own way. There are literally 100s of reasons why not giving an ADHD child the chance to be their best self with medication is going to impact them. I understand your viewpoint because it would've been mine before I was diagnosed 10 years ago and spent the best part of 10 years working with ADHD kids and adults. My viewpoint then and yours now comes from not understanding what ADHD medication does for the brain so absolutely no judgement from me but strongly suggest you read any of my books which will help you understand what the medication actually does and why it is life changing for any ADHD child.”

Alright.

Let’s walk through this.

Because what you’ve just heard is a textbook example of what Nassim Taleb calls epistemic arrogance — overconfidence disguised as certainty. Advice given as a blunt instrument. And that’s what we’re going to break down.

I suspect also that this comment was reactionary and emotional. I'll let her decide if that's true or not.

Part One: "Come back to me when he's arrested."

Let’s just acknowledge how wild that is.

She doesn’t know my son. She knows he’s autistic. She knows he’s non-verbal. She knows he’s four. She knows he’s in a specialist school. She knows he has loving, neurodivergent parents who advocate for him daily.

But she sees ADHD — and imagines handcuffs. That’s not expertise. That’s projection. And a gargantuan bias based on her particular niche of ADHD work.

She works in prisons — that’s her lens. But working in a trauma-saturated system doesn’t mean every child who reminds you of someone ends up there.

Let’s talk numbers. There are roughly 97,700 people in UK prisons. About 25% — or 22,000 — are estimated to have ADHD.

Sounds significant, right? Until you consider: there are around 1.9 million adults in the UK with ADHD.

So, more than 1.88 million ADHD adults are not in prison.

It’s like saying: “Everyone who drowned last year drank water — so water must cause drowning.” Classic correlation confusion. Not something you'd expect from a so-called expert.

No. Environment matters. Trauma matters. Poverty, exclusion, racism, under-diagnosis — they matter. Medication? It’s not the magic bullet Sarah wants it to be.

She's at risk of sounding like pharmaceutical salesperson.

Part Two: "Never mind risking them not being able to concentrate…"

This is where things start to sound like a pharma brochure.

Yes, focus matters. Yes, some kids benefit from stimulant meds. But not all. And not without cost.

But let’s talk about this idea that Ronnie’s going to fall behind educationally if he’s not medicated. That he won’t reach his "potential."

He’s four. He’s non-verbal. He’s autistic. He’s not struggling with algebra — he’s learning how to exist in the world. He’s attending a specialist autism school designed to support exactly that: not to churn out doctors and lawyers, but to help children like Ronnie feel safe, regulated, and understood.

We are not focused on his academic milestones. We’re focused on his joy, his connection, his ability to be in his body without distress. That’s his curriculum. That’s his success. My wife and I will NEVER force academic success above happiness, joy, and the ability for him to be himself. It feels like Sarah wants to medicate him into compliance so he becomes a good little tax paying member of society one day.

And no — I’m not interested in numbing his instincts so he can sit still and appear more “teachable.” That’s not support. That’s control. That’s asking a sensory-seeking child to deny himself in order to fit a mould he was never built for.

I’ve coached kids who say meds make them feel flat. Like their personality has been sucked from their body. I've seen side effects from chronic mouth ulcers to cardiovascular damage.

I live with ADHD. I can’t take meds for health reasons. That’s why I built a method — for people like me. People who don’t want to or can’t go down that route.

And again: Ronnie can’t tell us how medication makes him feel. So no — we’re not gambling with his emotional world just to appease someone else’s idea of "achievement."

Putting him on drugs now isn’t support. It’s sedation. It’s compliance training. It’s an attempt to make us feel more comfortable — not him.

Sarah genuinely seems to think there's something wrong with him and that the meds fixes that. Isn't that everything the ADHD advocates are trying to fight against?

Crazy stuff.

A Word on Long-Term Medication Risks

There’s another thing that’s missing from this entire conversation: the long-term physical risks of ADHD medication. Something I’ve never heard Sarah acknowledge publicly.

There’s a massive Swedish study — published in JAMA Psychiatry — that followed over 278,000 people with ADHD. And what they found should be part of every parent’s decision-making process.

After just 3 to 5 years of ADHD medication use, participants had:

* A 27% higher risk of cardiovascular disease

* A 72% higher risk of hypertension

* A 65% increased risk of arterial disease

And these weren’t short-term effects. Even beyond five years, the risk remained elevated:

Each additional year on medication increased the risk of CVD by 4%.

So when someone calls medication “life-changing for any ADHD child” and pushes it as the default — without even mentioning these risks — that’s not responsible. That’s not expert advice. That’s omission.

Especially when we’re talking about kids. About children like Ronnie who can’t speak for themselves. We’re not just giving them a pill. We’re setting a long-term trajectory — one that could lead to very real health consequences years down the line.

And when you’re making decisions for someone who can’t yet make them for themselves — don’t you want the full picture?

Part Three: Beyond the Bullet Points

This is where I want to shift the tone — away from dissecting every line of Sarah’s comment, and towards something deeper.

Because here’s the truth: this isn’t about me being offended. It’s not even about Sarah, really. It’s about dismantling the idea that what she said represents solid, professional, unquestionable truth.

It doesn’t. It represents overconfidence. It represents a narrow worldview. And most importantly — it represents the danger of mistaking one’s experience for universal authority.

She’s not a psychiatrist. She’s a counsellor. That’s fine. That’s valuable work. But let’s not confuse it with medical expertise. She can’t diagnose. She can’t prescribe. And yet she speaks with the certainty of someone who believes her anecdotal experience gives her the moral high ground.

That’s arrogance, not authority.

Let’s also be clear: saying publicly that a child you’ve never met — a four-year-old — is on a path to prison unless medicated, isn’t just unprofessional. It’s reckless. It tells me everything I need to know about how she sees children like my son. And about what she values: compliance over context, obedience over curiosity.

Her comment isn’t compassionate. It’s controlling.

And I’m not here to say I’m right and she’s wrong. I’m here to say: the conversation is bigger. ADHD is bigger. Ronnie is bigger.

And if you can’t start from a place of humility — if you can’t admit that you might not have the full picture — then you shouldn’t be advising parents at all.

The Expert Problem — And Why Psychology Suffers From It Profoundly

(If you're listening to this as a podcast, you can check out the accompanying post or show notes to see a brilliant visual that perfectly illustrates this concept — a graphic split down the middle: on one side, "Things That Don’t Move" like surgeons and plumbers — true experts with clear outcomes. On the other side: "Things That Move" — economists, political scientists, and yes, psychologists — where overconfidence often leads to failure. It shows how humility and acceptance of ignorance lead to stronger outcomes, while arrogance and overconfidence lead to fragility. That is exactly what we’re dealing with here.)

Let’s go even deeper.

Because there's another critical issue we need to look at: the reliability of the very research this entire expert class depends on.

Roughly 40% of scientific studies don’t replicate — and in psychology, that number is often even higher. I've seen some say it could be as high as 99% in certain strands of psychology. What does that mean? It means that nearly half the time, when someone tries to repeat a published study’s results, they fail.

Even worse, incorrect or flawed studies tend to get cited more than correct ones. Why? Because incorrect studies are often more “exciting” — they confirm biases, stir controversy, and generate headlines. As Ted Gioia put it in his essay on the death of the expert: “False research spreads faster because it's more seductive.”

This isn't just a glitch. It’s a systemic flaw. And it means that the very foundation of many so-called expert opinions in psychology — ADHD included — is built on shaky ground. The appearance of authority, without the robustness of truth.

So when someone like Sarah Templeton says, “Read my books,” I have to ask: what are those books built on? Clinical experience? Possibly. But how much of that is selectively interpreted? And how much of the 'science' she's referring to is part of this unreproducible, citation-chasing machinery?

This is why humility matters. This is why overconfidence is dangerous. And this is why we must challenge the entire framework that tells us to blindly trust 'the expert'.

Because there’s something bigger at play here — something Nassim Taleb calls the expert problem. And nowhere is it more visible than in psychology, and particularly ADHD.

Taleb writes:

“Let us ask the following questions: Would you rather have your upcoming brain surgery performed by a newspaper’s science reporter or by a certified brain surgeon? On the other hand, would you prefer to listen to an economic forecast by someone with a PhD in finance from some 'prominent' institution such as the Wharton School, or by a newspaper’s business writer? While the answer to the first question is empirically obvious, the answer to the second one isn’t at all. We can already see the difference between 'know-how' and 'know-what'."

This distinction is crucial. Because what Taleb is saying is that when you're dealing with things that don't move — like brain surgery — expertise is real, measurable, repeatable. But when you're dealing with things that do move — like human behaviour, psychology, ADHD — it becomes much murkier.

“Simply, things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don’t move seem to have some experts. In other words, professions that deal with the future and base their studies on the non-repeatable past have an expert problem.”

Psychology deals with prediction based on messy, incomplete, non-repeatable past experiences. There are no guarantees. There are no universal outcomes.

And yet — people like Sarah speak with the confidence of an electrician working on a fixed, regulated system, in a field that is nothing like that. ADHD isn’t wiring. It’s not a circuit board. It’s a moving target — dynamic, unpredictable, shaped by emotion, environment, development. To talk about it with that level of certainty is not expertise. It’s hubris.

That’s not harmless.

“Expert problems (in which the expert knows a lot but less than he thinks he does) often bring fragilities, and acceptance of ignorance.

Translation: overconfidence in uncertain fields creates damage. Especially when there’s no accountability for being wrong.

Sarah Templeton believes she’s helping. I believe she’s contributing to the exact fragility Taleb describes — making families feel powerless, pushing single-path solutions, and ignoring the chaos and complexity that defines real people’s lives.

And if you ask me, the real experts in ADHD? They’re not always the ones with books or clinics or TEDx talks.

They’re the people living it. The parents. The kids. The adults who’ve navigated it — medicated or not — and made sense of it for themselves.

Where I stand

I’m not an expert. I’m a dad. I have ADHD. I’ve coached kids, worked with families, built a method that helps people without drugs. That doesn’t mean I know everything. It means I’ve paid attention.

And most importantly: I know I’m biased. Toward drug-free strategies. But I own that. I keep testing it. I keep listening.

Sarah? She doesn’t seem to know she has a bias. That’s the difference.

My son is not a statistic

Ronnie is four. He’s non-verbal. He’s sensory seeking. He’s wildly active. And he is allowed to be exactly who he is — safely, lovingly, supportively.

He’s not a case study. He’s not a future prisoner. He’s a boy.

And if there’s one thing I want this episode to leave you with, it’s this:

The future isn’t fixed. Especially not for neurodivergent kids. And anyone who tells you otherwise — no matter how well-credentialed, how many books they’ve written, or how loudly they shout — does not deserve your trust.

Recently, I’ve been feeling a lot of shame about having ADHD.

That surprised me – and probably many of you reading this. I’ve usually been good at blocking out what the media says, but lately, that hasn’t come so easily.

I’ve also stayed quiet with some of my more misinformed family members, people who still believe ADHD is made up, a lazy boy’s excuse. I haven’t corrected them. Worse, I’ve sometimes reinforced their misunderstanding, feeding their lack of awareness with my silence or even denial.

Looking back, that denial came from shame. I didn’t want to have ADHD. I didn’t want to be seen as lazy, weak, or broken. That internal conflict led me to say things I don’t believe – telling others ADHD doesn’t exist, or that I never had it. I even told people I can’t use ADHD as a reason for how I behave anymore.

Of course, that created confusion. People took me at my word. They began to treat me differently, and understandably so. The result was a slow build-up of pressure, confusion, and emotional distance that finally boiled over last month.

The turning point came when I sat down with my wife to watch Chris Packham’s documentary, Inside Our Minds, about ADHD. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

There’s a young man in the film, maybe in his mid-twenties, who creates a short piece called Tombola Man. He describes ADHD as being followed constantly by someone throwing balls at you. Each ball is a thought, a task, or a memory. They come at you randomly. One moment he’s brushing his teeth, and the next he feels an overwhelming urge to research the world’s biggest fish – which completely derails him from what he was meant to do, like going to the post office.

That visual hit me hard.

Despite my diagnosis, despite working in this space for years, despite coaching others with ADHD, it stopped me in my tracks. I realised how deep I’d gone into denial. Of course I have ADHD. Of course it’s real.

What was I thinking?

For years, I told myself I didn’t understand why people feel shame about ADHD. That, too, was denial. I had simply turned away from what I didn’t want to feel.

Watching that documentary reminded me of The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. One of his central ideas is that we can’t trust the voice in our heads – and this was a perfect example. That voice had been steering me completely wrong.

So, this moment became a line in the sand. I want to come back to myself, to this community. I want to lead with compassion again – for you, and for me.

Thanks for reading Drug Free ADHD! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The truth is, over the past few months, my content has suffered. I’ve been less engaged, more reactive, sometimes even aggressive with those who disagreed with me. My compassion all but disappeared. Maybe my coaching clients didn’t see it, because I put everything I had into showing up for them. But inside, I was struggling. I was pouring energy into hiding the fact that I was running on empty.

Last Wednesday or Thursday, I broke down in tears. That almost never happens. I cry maybe once every five years. I’m not someone who cries easily, but this time I couldn’t hold it in. When I let go, the relief was overwhelming – like something heavy had lifted, like I could finally breathe.

In that release, though, was pain too. Pain at knowing I’d let people down. Pain at seeing how far I’d drifted from the truth and from myself.

So here I am, being as honest and vulnerable as I can be. I’m done turning away from this. I’m coming back to this community. I’ll be more present, more supportive, and less antagonistic. Especially when it comes to one of the most polarising topics of all: medication.

I still have strong views. I still believe that long-term medication use can be harmful, and I personally can’t imagine ever supporting the idea of giving it to children. But I also want to say this: your decision is your own. It’s not mine to make.

If you feel the benefits outweigh the risks, that’s valid. I only ask that you do two things. First, learn the risks for yourself. Don’t rely solely on what your doctor says. Do your own research. Second, understand what the real benefits are. If the benefit is simply that you can focus better at a job you hate – is that truly a benefit?

Your brain was built to work a certain way. Medication forces it to operate differently. Is that a good thing? That’s not a question with a clear answer. It’s a question of values, of philosophy. But it’s worth sitting with.

Anyway, I’m going off track.

The main thing I want to say is this: I’ve felt a deep, heavy shame about having ADHD. But over the past few days, that shame has started to lift. I’m feeling more open, more grounded, and more ready to embrace the truth of who I am.

I want to do more. I want to be here again – fully.

Thank you so much for reading. Until next week.

§

PS: Group Coaching is coming. The launch has also suffered as a result of the mess I’ve made of myself this year.

But I’m more motivated than ever to make this the best it can be. So I’ll be launching with a maximum of 12 early adopters later this month — if you want to be one, hit reply and let me know.

Last week, The Guardian published a puff piece on ADHD medications, parroting claims from a questionable study — but without naming the study or linking to it, leaving readers in the dark.

In this episode I dismantle that piece and explain how you can protect yourself from misleading scientific reporting.

4000 people read my weekly newsletter on ADHD skills (not pills). Join them: https://www.drugfreeadhd.org/

On today's episode I speak to Amanda Perry. We discuss:

• Men minting money off ADHD women
• Building brain 1st businesses
• Being the Benjamin Button of business

Enjoy!

In this solo-episode, I explain why I don't take ADHD meds.

I've also just opened up more spaces for 1:1 ADHD coaching with me.

So if you...

• Want to manage ADHD without meds


• Build an environment (work and personal) that suits your unique traits.


• Take control and reduce your reliance on anything other than yourself

There's a great chance I'll be able to help you.

​Click here to apply​

I accept clients with Access to Work funding

EPISODE OVERVIEW:

Nature Doc founder Lucinda Miller reveals the powerful connection between nutrition and brain function, with special focus on ADHD management through diet. Learn which specific nutrients can transform focus and motivation, and understand why avoiding ultra-processed foods is crucial for cognitive health.

KEY TOPICS:

• Essential brain-boosting nutrients

  
  



• Natural ADHD nutrition strategies

  
  



• Truth about supplement quality

  
  



• Latest research on children's brain health

  
  

Essential listening for parents navigating ADHD, health practitioners, and anyone interested in optimising brain function through nutrition.

I interview ADHD coaching Christian Ehmen.

We discuss:

• What ADHD coaching is supposed to do



• How to spot a s**t coach



• Why coaching isn't for everyone with ADHD


• And why psychiatry has too much to lose

In this interview was ADHD coach Jolanta Eriksson, we discuss:

• Ice baths


• Surrender


• Regulating the nervous system


• and how to be a hunter in a farmers world

Enjoy!

This is a one-off podcast episode hosted by ADHD coach Carly Watson.

Carly interviews the wonderful ADHD nutritionist Dana Chapman.

In the episode they discuss:

• Nutrition for ADHD


• The gut microbiome


• Supplements for ADHD