Medium shot. Sixteen business types strut across London’s Millennium Bridge to the accompaniment of a revved up version of Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights. The business types are not ordinary business types – they are GP business types.
Voiceover: It’s the job interview from hell. From across the country, Britain’s brightest GP commissioning prospects head for London.
Cut to smug GP business type, large phallic buildings in background.
Smug GP: There’s absolutely nothing mediocre about me. I’m supremely intelligent, ambitious, I’m an all round gifted individual.
In an explosive display of attention deficit hyperbolicity disorder, the Mirror didn’t so much let the genie out of the bottle, as plaster it all over the ceiling. ‘
Two old stories by a curious but telling coincidence made it into the top news last week. One re-ignited the ADHD isn’t bad parenting or poor diet, it’s an illness (and genetic to boot) debate; the other reminded us just how determined Big Pharma can be when it comes, as they say in financial circles, to helping us grow our GDP. The theme which unites these two stories is medicalisation – that tendency to transform the vagaries of human nature into ‘real’ illnesses.