Flmmaker Roman Wyden and his wife were stunned when their seven-year-old son Khai was diagnosed with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), along with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), various learning disorders, and a tic disorder. Khai’s evaluation had been recommended by his school principal and teacher in the spring of 2016. “Our son?” wondered Roman and Khai’s mother. The collection of labels painted a picture of a profoundly dysfunctional child. That was not their son. Khai was certainly energetic and sometimes inattentive. He was also an active, high-energy boy, much like Roman himself was at that age. Labeling Khai “disordered” seemed absurd.
Medication was recommended for Khai, and the school’s principal warned his parents of the dire consequences of not medicating: Later in life, he could self-medicate, become a drug addict, and even end up in jail. But the prospect of medicating Khai with a stimulant, classified as a Schedule II drug by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) (along with methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl), felt wrong. Their gut instinct told them that they had to protect Khai from the mainstream narrative of ADHD, in which medication is the go-to remedy of choice.
After researching alternative therapies for behaviors that are labeled as ADHD, Khai’s parents decided to take a different path that would not involve drugging their son. Nine years later, their journey culminated in the book, ADHD Is Over: The Struggle Is Real. The Label Is Not. (Roman Wyden also hosts a podcast with the same title.) The book is meant to be a “diagnosis survival guide” for parents. It’s the manual that that Roman and Khai’s mother wished that they had when Khai was diagnosed. It encourages parents to trust their own intuition about what is best for their child, and to question diagnostic labels that don’t seem to fit what their parental instincts tells them about their child.
First, Khai’s parents decided to change his school. Fortunately, they lived in Los Angeles, where a variety of educational options were available. They chose a humanistic alternative school, Play Mountain Place, where children could learn at their own pace and their education was in large part self-directed. Khai did well at the new school. Slowly his tics disappeared, as did many of the behaviors that had been diagnosed as ADHD. He learned to read by playing with Pokémon cards, engaging in learning according to his interests.
Later, Khai’s parents chose to homeschool him. They also went to family therapy. Over time, Khai’s ADHD behaviors faded and he was able to express the healthy, intelligent, creative child that he was. Today, nine years later, ADHD is not part of Khai’s self-concept, nor does it shape the way his teachers and others see him. He is a diligent student, gets good grades, and holds a part-time job. He channels his energy in school sports and in exercise at a gym.
Khai’s parents turned to alternative views of ADHD. The first was radio host Thom Hartmann’s book: A Hunter in a Farmer’s World. Hartmann proposes that individuals with ADHD traits possess a “hunter” mentality,” a cognitive style that would have been highly advantageous in hunter-gatherer societies, but not in a world with structured routines and demands for sustained, focused attention. An article by Washington State University biological anthropologists Edward Hagen and Kristen Syme, “Researchers call for a New Approach to some Mental disorders,” supports this theory.
The Wydens found another influence in clinical social worker Erica Komisar, author of Being There, who has written: “We know that there is no genetic precursor to mental illness, none to ADHD, depression, or anxiety.” They also read my own book, A Disease Called Childhood, which cites French researcher Francois Gonon’s 2009 study in which he found that “psychostimulant medication does not improve long-term academic outcomes of ADHD children.” They read British psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff’s book, Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth, in which she attacks the notion of chemical imbalance as a cause for mental disorders: “The term doesn’t really make any sense. We don’t know what a chemically balanced brain would look like.” Other books that influenced the Wyden’s thinking were ADHD Does Not Exist by psychiatrist Richard Saul; The ADHD Advantage: What You Thought Was a Diagnosis May be Your Greatest Strength by psychiatrist Dale Archer; and Scattered Minds by physician Gabor Mate.
ADHD Is Over reviews these alternative narratives of ADHD and boils the ideas down to make them easier for parents to understand. Wyden hopes that the book will encourage parents to trust their own instincts about their child and seek alternative ways of viewing ADHD and alternative treatments for their children’s behaviors.
Some treatment alternatives to medication suggested in the book are family therapy, marital therapy, trauma therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), changing the child’s school or teacher, changing their diet, enrolling them in sports, and limiting screen time. According to some of the authors cited above, these steps could, over time, help rewire a child’s brain. Khai’s parents tried several of these treatments. They did so without feeling blamed as parents, but rather in the spirit of hopefulness and empowerment.
Modern neuroscience supports the point of view that brains have “plasticity” and neural networks can be changed with changed experiences. For example, A 2012 Danish study found that simply walking to school affects a child’s ability to concentrate. Physical activity can affect brain plasticty in children. Modern neuroscience also proposes the idea of neurodiversity, which challenges a medical model of seeing a child’s differences as signs of a disorder. These concepts guided the Wydens as they traveled their nine-year journey past labels for their son and toward hope.