“What does it mean? What is it, exactly? Is it real?”
That’s what Joe Rogan asked Dr. Gabor Maté about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder when he hosted the Canadian family physician and bestselling author on his podcast in 2022. A health and wellness influencer known for his nurturing approach to healing from trauma and addiction, as well as his penchant for challenging standard medical advice, Maté had recently published his fifth book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, and was making the publicity rounds.
ADHD is real, Maté replied; after all, he, too, has been diagnosed with it, as have two of his children. But then he offered the kind of anti-establishment response tailor-made for Rogan’s massive audience: It’s just not what the medical establishment claims it to be. “A lot of the so-called experts think about it as…another one of these inherited diseases,” he said. “I say it’s neither an illness nor is it heritable.”
Instead, Maté argued, hyperactivity and poor impulse control develop in particularly sensitive babies who are adapting to stressed parents, especially mothers. Absorbing that stress in infancy causes the child to “tune out,” he told Rogan, and “that tuning out is then programmed into the brain.”
Maté has pushed this idea in interviews with celebrity hosts who together have tens of millions of followers. Clips are shared by Instagram parenting accounts and in Reddit forums, where some therapists praise him as their go-to resource, and some parents express confusion or shame over having triggered their child’s ADHD.
But many experts say there’s one big problem with his theory: It’s wrong.
Researchers have more to learn about the nature of ADHD, found in 1 in 9 American children, but one thing is clear: It is highly heritable, with genetic differences accounting for as much as three-quarters of its prevalence. Low birth weight, brain injury, or severe neglect may sometimes be factors, but evidence that typical parental care causes ADHD is lacking. Researchers generally attribute the rising rate of the diagnoses to better awareness of symptoms, particularly in previously ignored populations like girls.
Maté frames his ideas about ADHD as “pure science,” as he told podcaster Mel Robbins last November. But none of the research papers he cited in The Myth of Normal make a causal link between parental stress and a child’s ADHD, nor do they discount genetics.
Instead, in his writing and in his replies to my queries by email, Maté pointed to a constellation of studies detailing child brain development or identifying correlations between parental stress and various child outcomes. “I rely on literature research, which I cite extensively, on hundreds of patient interviews, and on my clinical observations,” he noted.
Others say that Maté has taken leaps of logic not supported by the science he cites. The claim that this disorder is, as Maté’s website states, “a reversible impairment” with “origins in infancy” is “profoundly ignorant,” said Russell Barkley, a retired clinical neuropsychologist who is among the most prominent voices in the field. Not only does it show Maté doesn’t know the literature, Barkley told me, “he doesn’t care to know the literature.”
But Maté isn’t just wrong about ADHD. The theory he presents fits a familiar, pseudoscientific argument about a woman’s proper role in society and the dangers to her children should she deviate from that path—an argument long deployed by those who want to enforce conservative family values.
“Part of what you’re seeing is a campaign to convince women and others that these old ideas of gender roles are not only popular, they are better.”
This particular blame-the-mother thesis first appeared around the diagnosis of autism in the decades following World War II. Early autism researchers believed that by not loving their children properly, mothers caused what child psychiatrist Dr. Leo Kanner, one of the first to identify autism, described as children’s “inability to relate themselves” to the people and circumstances in their lives. He maintained that autism was biological and innate and defended mothers as being victims of unfair professional contempt.
That didn’t last long, as other psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, steeped in Sigmund Freud’s theories of the mother as the absolute arbiter of emotional development and wellbeing, weighed in. They decided that a specific kind of warm maternal love was an essential nutrient for healthy development, according to Marga Vicedo, a historian of science at the University of Toronto. With the nuclear family positioned as the best defense against the dangers of technological advancement and global instability of the Cold War, working mothers were often the target of their criticism.
Kanner eventually fell in line with other psychoanalysts in the 1940s and articulated what later became known as “the refrigerator mother” theory, in which autistic children were seen as having been “kept neatly in refrigerators which did not defrost” by mothers devoid of “genuine warmth.” In response, the child withdrew, “to seek comfort in solitude.” Bruno Bettelheim, once a legend of child psychology and later accused of having abused children in his care, popularized this theory in the 1950s with a distinctly “guilty until proven innocent” approach, Vicedo notes in her book Intelligent Love. Worried mothers who arrived in doctors’ offices with detailed notes about their child’s development were dismissed as obsessive and overly intellectual—not a resource, but a vector. Imagine, Vicedo told me, “your child is struggling and you’re struggling…then you go to a doctor, and he tells you that not only is it quite a dire situation, but it’s also your fault.”
By the late 1970s, as research on twins began to document the high heritability of autism, the refrigerator mother theory became a black mark on the history of psychology and child development. But a willingness to blame moms never really went away.
Fast forward to 1999 and the publication of Maté’s first book on ADHD, Scattered Minds, which claims “a disruption in the relationship between the caregiver and the sensitive infant” is the cause. “All the behaviors and mental patterns of attention deficit disorder are external signs of the wound, or inefficient defenses against feeling the pain of it,” Maté writes. As for his ADHD diagnosis, he says, his mother faced extreme stress as a Hungarian Jew during the Holocaust.
In recent years, the rise of wellness influencers and the popularity of similarly dubious, sweeping theories about trauma found in books like The Body Keeps the Score have paved the way for a resurgence of Maté’s message. In his 2022 work, The Myth of Normal, written with his son Daniel, Maté further concedes some role for genetics, though a narrow one: Children with ADHD inherited a sensitivity from their parents, he argues, but it’s the stress of the family environment that unlocks the condition. “If there was only the sensitivity and optimal conditions,” he told Robbins, “they’d never have ADHD.”
What are those optimal conditions? How perfectly must they be maintained in the context of a family in which some amount of stress is inevitable? He doesn’t say.
In an email, Maté rejected the parallel between his theory and that of the refrigerator mother, which he called “nonscientific and misogynistic.” But while his work delves into breakdowns in the social fabric of capitalist societies and leaves room for the effects of fathers and other caregivers on child development, he repeatedly positions mothers as the ultimate arbiters of “optimal development.”
“The harm that we did to families back then can’t be undone, but we can make sure we don’t repeat it again.”
In The Myth of Normal, Maté points to research—again, with correlational findings that don’t control for genetics—linking stress during pregnancy or postpartum depression to a child’s risk of ADHD. Those studies make correlational findings that don’t control for genetics, and they broadly overlook the fact that the mother may have ADHD, which her child could have inherited. Indeed, researchers have found that some women with ADHD are more likely to face mental health struggles during and after pregnancy.
He cites “voluminous research” linking ADHD to stress in early childhood, referencing a 2017 study that connects ADHD and adverse childhood experiences, such as neighborhood violence, familial mental illness, abuse, or poverty. But the authors of that study and others noted that their evidence does not support a strong causal claim. ADHD can also predict adverse childhood experiences; families in which children or parents have the condition are more likely to experience adversity. Trauma may not be the cause of ADHD, but its consequence.
Stephen Faraone, professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, and physiology at SUNY Upstate Medical University and president of the World Federation of ADHD, a research and education organization, described Maté’s approach as “cherry-picked science.” It’s not a cohesive theory, he said, but one with the potential to do real harm if it dissuades families from seeking evidence-based treatment, including effective medications.
Crystal Britt, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist in California who specializes in working with neurodivergent adults, worries about the effect Maté has on mothers who may have undiagnosed ADHD. Women with ADHD often struggle with low self-worth, and the message that it’s caused by parents inflicts “further emotional strain on an already vulnerable population,” Britt said.
Similar concerns prompted Barkley, the ADHD researcher, to create a series of YouTube videos deconstructing Maté’s argument and calling him “worse than wrong” on ADHD. “We’ve been through this before in the history of psychiatry and psychology,” Barkley told me. “The harm that we did to families back then can’t be undone, but we can make sure we don’t repeat it again.”
Maté often hears from people who credit his work with transforming their parenting and their child’s trajectory. “That does NOT, of course, make me right in theory about anything,” Maté told me. “But it does speak to why I am confident about the value of my work.” Blaming parents for their child’s ADHD is “unscientific and cruel,” he continued, and anyone who sees his work as doing so has misunderstood his writings. The wellness industry often conflates personal failings with health conditions that are strongly connected to genetics and shaped by social determinants of health, said Andrea Love, a biomedical scientist who writes about health misinformation, noting, “It is easy to create a simple villain that people can band together and foment outrage about.” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said ADHD symptoms are caused by chemical exposures. The New York Times wrote about those who see him as a “supporter of mothers,” citing a quote “crunchy conservatives” often attribute to him: “The last thing standing between a child and an industry full of corruption is a mom.” Provided she’s the right kind of mom. On a March episode of the podcast The Diary of a CEO—which was viewed 1.8 million times in its first three weeks on YouTube—Erica Komisar, a clinical social worker and contributing editor at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank, said it is an “inconvenient truth” that parents can cause their child’s ADHD by subjecting them to stress, including divorce, day care, and the muddling of traditional gender roles.
“It is easy to create a simple villain that people can band together and foment outrage about.”
The conservative vision for the future relies on more women choosing to be “mothers that matter,” says Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. “Part of what you’re seeing is a campaign to convince women and others that these old ideas of gender roles are not only popular, they are better,” meaning that “comfort may be found if you narrowed your economic, political, and social equality.”
Maté told me that he rejects conservative policies that “generate untold stress” by undermining community and emphasizing dependence on the nuclear family, which he considers an “evolutionary aberration.” Yet, intended or not, when Maté points to mothers as a potential agent of harm, the implications extend beyond ADHD. By focusing on mothers to explain a complex diagnosis, he further undermines trust in science and revives a harmful anachronism. Ultimately, by fueling maternal blame, Maté robs parents of something he generally champions: a chance to see their children and themselves clearly and to get support in being the very caregivers their kids need.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.