José C. Perales 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🏀🏃

Os voy a decir varias cosas que teníamos hace 40 años y ahora no: 286 actos terroristas (42 muertos, 196 heridos). 1310 muertes por sobredosis. 5500 atracos a bancos. 6402 muertos en accidentes de tráfico, Paro, 21%. 4.5% de analfabetismo. Tasa de abandono escolar, 40%.

Os voy a decir varias cosas que teníamos hace 40 años y ahora no: 286 actos terroristas (42 muertos, 196 heridos). 1310 muertes por sobredosis. 5500 atracos a bancos. 6402 muertos en accidentes de tráfico, Paro, 21%. 4.5% de analfabetismo. Tasa de abandono escolar, 40%.

The claim that the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop until age 25 is completely made up. It’s not a scientific finding. The researcher Jay Giedd selected age 25 because it sounded good.

We trace this to the Nostalgia Effect: scientists cite older work as careers progress, ~1 month per career year. The paper that most anchors a researcher's career is typically published TWO YEARS before their own first publication. Imprinting that persists for decades.

It’s often repeated that children with ADHD receive 20,000 more critical comments over the course of their childhood than neurotypical children. I’ve been told it at conferences, seen it in articles, and most recently, read it in Alex Partridge’s best-selling book Why Does Everybody Hate Me: Living and Loving with Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria. I may have even referred to it myself in training. It is widely accepted and spoken about as truth.   But that claim – the 20,000 cuts – I started to wonder. Where did it come from? Who was the comparison group? How did the researchers come to that conclusion – because surely they did not count 20,000 critical comments? Partridge said it was an ‘estimate’ – but what sort of estimate? Based on what data?   I set out to fact check, and what I found surprised me. This figures, as far as I can find, is based on no data at all. It can be traced by to a thought experiment by a child psychiatrist (Michael Jellinek) in a non-peer-reviewed journal (MD Edge Psychiatry) in 2010. He asks us to imagine a hyperactive child at school who could, he suggests be corrected by a teacher an average of three times an hour. Then he multiplies that up and says “In school alone, a child with ADHD could receive 20,000 corrective or negative comments by the time he or she is age 10.” Yes, they could. But also, they could not. This is an entirely imagined scenario. No comparison with other children, no data collected. No clear definition of what sort of comments might be deemed to be ‘corrective or negative’.  No recognition that children with ADHD are very different to each other, some will not attract negative attention at all. Also no acknowledgement that this happens to other children too – those with learning disabilities, for example. Or those whose behaviour is challenging in a group environment. ADHD is not the only thing that is problematic in a school classroom. That, as far as I can tell, is the source of the 20,000 critical comments claim which is now all around us.   The thing is, this figure feels right to lots of people. It chimes with lived experience, and so it gets repeated. And the more it is repeated, the more true it feels because it is familiar. We don’t stop to fact-check because we think ‘I’ve heard that before’.  I’m not blaming Jellinek, he could not have known that his claim would have the power it had. He was, after all, just asking us to imagine a possibility.   But, it’s become a viral claim, we all accept that it must be true without stopping to ask why.   Why does this matter? Because this is building on foundations of sand. Whole narratives are being developed – but there is no firm data underpinning it. It stops us from really understanding people’s reality, because we’re extrapolating instead.  Imagining reality, rather than working out what is really happening.     We (and I mean me)  have to get better at checking our sources. Just because something feels true, doesn’t mean that it is.