Credit to Marginal Revolution for sending me link-chasing down this rabbit hole – was dimly aware of this problem before, Tyler Cowen’s post made me actually find numbers. Also, the usual disclaimers: this post is not meant to disparage people with real disabilities, and nobody should take offense at any of the content here, including the humor.
Today I found the shocking statistic that 15.2% of students in US K-12 education have disabilities served by federal programs. And no, this isn’t from the Heritage Foundation or Cato, this is the Department of Education’s own website https://sites.ed.gov/idea/osep-fast-facts-50-years-of-idea/
I was oddly reminded of this joke I found on David Friedman’s Substack some time back
The director of the Moscow zoo noticed that one of the elephants was coughing. So he decided to add vodka, the universal cure, to this elephant’s bucket of water. The next morning that elephant was completely healthy but the other three elephants began to cough.
And yes, my suspicions were correct. The high number of disabled students isn’t a result of increased second-hand smoke inhalation during pregnancy or some actually normal reason. It’s just that therapists nowadays think “sad” = “depressive disorder,” kids think “sad” is sufficient cause to visit a therapist, and the government incentivizes this behavior by giving disabled kids advantages when taking tests. Sometimes parents procure these diagnoses with the explicit purpose of getting their kids testing advantages (documented in the Varsity Blues scandal for example).
There’s some more interesting statistics here if you’re curious (not very enlightening, so not an obligatory read) https://www.aei.org/education/leaning-disabilities-and-the-perils-of-well-meaning-programs/
This Atlantic article does a good job combining statistics with professors’ experiences and a narrative around how it got so ridiculous https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-university-student-accommodation/684946/ Un-paywalled at https://archive.is/6LcMx
The Atlantic article is the main reason I sent this, so if you end up reading only one of the links here, read that. This is just outrageous. 38% of Stanford undergrads have a disability, 34% at Amherst, and 21% at Harvard – you’d think everyone was getting around on wheelchairs, but no, they’re all just ADHD and/or depressed! I was a bit disappointed that even University of Chicago (oh that grand old bastion of Friedman and libertarianism!) has a physics professor complaining that there’s so many people claiming ADHD, that the low-distraction testing rooms are now more distracting than the main rooms – jokes aside, they actually did a cool thing with an anti-woke free speech policy (that’s a whole other issue I could get into), but I guess even they couldn’t beat this madness.
I think this whole thing about mental disabilities/disorders has gone too far. Some people have actual disabilities and/or disorders that need accomodation, but many of these diagnoses are complete nonsense. Schools give extra time on SAT and other tests if you have a disability, incentivizing well-off parents to procure these diagnoses for their children, and there’s no rigorous way of ‘proving’ someone has ADHD, allowing all kinds of absurd false positives. Kids have also been taught a victimhood complex, where feeling anything other than happiness 24/7 surely must be indicative of depression.
I have personally seen this. I know plenty of normal, well-adjusted people diagnosed with ADHD who are just as capable as everyone else of getting work done (even if perhaps a bit lazy) – some of them have even admitted they don’t know why they were diagnosed with it. I understand depression even less. I get that it’s in the mind and not visible to others, but it’s a bit infuriating seeing lots of people get advantages in exams when they very clearly are not impaired by whatever condition they have. I’ve spent 3-4 years in near-total isolation from kids my age in real life, and this last year was especially hellish for me because I had no friends in my classes, I was learning nothing, and the only fun parts were when teachers left me alone to do my own stuff. Did I get a depression diagnosis and ask for more testing time? No, I manned up and dealt with it.
Our generation lacks resilience, and all of this obsession with mental health has resulted in a significant degree of coddling and victim complex. I took my SAT while running a high fever and was pretty sick for a few days after. No extra time or testing accomodations, and I scored quite well. Why are we no longer encouraging kids to develop resilience and be able to work in spite of depression or other problems, rather than medicating them and/or giving them unfair advantages? Life is hard – people get tortured and killed, famines and wars happen, sometimes brilliant people get horrible diseases early in life. Our culture and education system used to inculcate discipline and prepare people to deal with these things, and we no longer do that – I see this as a loss. I’m not saying everyone should become a Prussian soldier, but perhaps there’s some traditions of the past worth preserving.
South Park did a funny episode on this ADHD diagnosis pipeline, here’s some relevant clips
How ADHD is diagnosed nowadays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e627KtKf0X0
The correct cure for ADHD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqR_PwcyyWo