Dr Max Pemberton, the psychiatrist who diagnosed himself.
A psychiatrist of over twenty years had himself assessed for ADHD as research for a documentary. He was diagnosed, prescribed medication – and doesn’t accept the diagnosis.
His account raises a genuinely awkward question: what happens when the person best placed to judge a label doesn’t trust it either?
What happened
Dr Max Pemberton paid £1,200 for a private online ADHD assessment, the same route thousands now take each year.
An hour and a half of questions later, he was told he had combined-type ADHD – inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive traits together – and prescribed a stimulant medication.
He recognised the traits. Poor timekeeping, losing his phone several times a day, fidgeting, working to loud music to stop his mind wandering. He’d simply never called any of it a disorder.
What unsettled him wasn’t the traits themselves, but how quickly the label got into his head – noticing a lost phone or a re-read paragraph and thinking “is that my ADHD?” when nothing about him had actually changed.
Professor Katya Rubia, who has spent thirty years scanning the brains of people with ADHD, told him no scan can identify who has it, because, as she put it, “it’s a concept which is based on behaviour.”
There’s no single ADHD gene either – only many genes of small effect, most of which also turn up in depression, autism and schizophrenia. Here’s how his argument actually breaks down:
Worth knowing…
- He isn’t arguing against medication. For people whose attention and impulsivity genuinely overwhelm day-to-day life, he says he’d never take that away.
- His concern is the ease of the label, not its existence. A quick private assessment and a prescription is simpler than examining why a life has become unmanageable.
- Diagnosis itself can shape behaviour. He describes “diagnostic overshadowing” – once a label is attached, everyday difficulty starts getting read through it.
- Brain and behaviour aren’t fixed in one direction. Rubia’s point that the brain is plastic cuts both ways – a difference showing up in a scan could be the result of how someone has lived, not proof of an unchangeable cause.
The wider argument
Pemberton’s case is really about diagnostic criteria widening over time, not about any individual’s diagnosis being false.
His argument: children now grow up with devices built to capture and fragment attention, in an education system that measures how still they sit and how well they test.
Behaviour once considered unremarkable increasingly falls inside diagnostic thresholds that haven’t kept pace.
He took the medication himself for three weeks, as part of the same investigation. He describes it as dulling rather than sedating – he could still work, but felt flattened, less curious, nothing striking him as funny. He stopped, and says he wouldn’t take it again.
Sources: Dr Max Pemberton, “I was diagnosed with ADHD – here’s why I don’t accept it,” The Times, 13th August 2026 – his own account of a private assessment, diagnosis, and three-week medication trial undertaken for a Channel 4 documentary, The Great ADHD Myth?