On June 29, 2026, psychologist Adam Omary published a landmark observation in the Boston Globe, titled “The disability accommodation trap on college campuses.” As he observed:
“It was well-intentioned when the Americans with Disabilities Act was amended in 2008 to include mental health conditions and learning disabilities as eligible for accommodations. But in practice, it created incentives for overdiagnosis. As The Harvard Crimson reported in December, the share of Harvard undergraduates receiving disability accommodations rose from roughly 3 percent in 2014 to 21 percent in 2024, a seven-fold increase in a decade.”
I find this observation more than a little disturbing. Forty years ago, one of my daughters was diagnosed with dyslexia, inherited from her grandmother through me (as often occurs; my generation was “skipped” by this complex disorder). She was home-schooled in sixth grade through high school, admitted to a junior college and then to upper division status at a branch of the University of California. She was one of those who benefited from accommodations that granted her extra time in some of her examinations and exempted her from reading aloud in some of her classes.
My daughter was and still is a very bright lady. She graduated cum laude in English. When she left employment 12 years later to start her family, she had served as an assistant vice president for network services at a multi-branch community bank.
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For some readers, articles like that of Dr. Omary might call into question whether my daughter was unfairly advanced over others equally or more qualified. However, Dr. Omary also places this issue importantly in context:
“No one wants to be accused of indifference to suffering. But over diagnosis is not compassion. It teaches a generation to mistake the ordinary difficulties of being young for evidence that something is clinically wrong with them and dilutes resources and attention away from the people who need them most.”
As a health care educator with three decades of experience in public health policy for the treatment of pain and addiction, I entirely agree with Dr. Omary’s observation. However, I am forced by years of study in these issues to suggest that in some ways, Omary barely scratches the surface of a much larger problem. Many educators and researchers no doubt have related stories.
In the field to which Adam Omary speaks, my concerns date from nearly 50 years ago. One of my most formative books was by Martin L. Gross: “The Psychological Society: The Impact and the Failure of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and the Psychological Revolution” (Random House, New York, 1978). Gross’ references go back to the 1950s. Those references are highly damning of the entire field of psychiatry and psychology and should be well known to most students of these fields.
Among my own 400+ publications, the following may be illustrative: “Psychogenic Pain and Iatrogenic Suicide,” published by the Global Summit for Diagnostic Alternatives, sponsored by the Society for Humanistic Psychology in 2013.
Allen Frances, MD, also quotes at length from my patient survey work in “The medically ill speak for themselves, and don’t want to be labeled as mentally ill.” Psychology Today, April 2013.
Among Dr. Frances’ several books, one seems particularly important: “Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life.” For those who may not immediately recognize his name, Dr. Frances led the development of the DSM-4 and became one of the harshest critics of the DSM-5, precisely on the same grounds as those explored by Dr. Omary.
More broadly and quite germane in this discussion is the rejection by the National Institute for Mental Health of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, as an organizing framework for psychiatric research. This rejection occurred in 2013, ten days before publication. The American Psychiatric Association then struggled almost ten years to publish DSM-5-TR, a major though largely unheralded revision that is highly consequential in debunking many recent statements by CDC concerning addiction risk among chronic pain patients.
Anyone who reads the scientific literature should also be aware of the replication crisis and Retraction Watch. The former mess informs us that expectation bias among clinical trials supervisors and data analysts appears to have been responsible for many present “principles” in psychiatric practice that simply don’t hold up under independent examination. Retraction Watch research takes this understanding much further, to show us that an alarming number of conclusions in psychology and other fields of science are substantially fabricated. As of January 2024, the Retraction Watch database contained over 50,000 entries across a wide range of scientific fields.
As American statistician Carroll D. Wright admonished us in an 1899 speech, “The old saying is that ‘figures will not lie,’ but a new saying is ‘liars will figure.'”
This is not to say that liars even most of the time know they are lying. But when the public has no basis for checking what the authors of science papers write, it becomes altogether too easy to become careless of facts and interpretations, even if authors do not actively seek to bias their published results. In an era increasingly characterized by ever-greater distortions introduced by artificial intelligence and large language models, this insensitivity to fact checking can become deadly both in the abstract and in concrete outcomes.
If there is a remedy for the mind traps that now prevail in wide areas of our public life, then perhaps it lies in a basic phrase: “Show me!” It may be time for every editor, every peer reviewer, and every academic dean to demand a detailed review of methods, of data, and cause-and-effect relationships claimed by all authors of science, before their work goes to press.
This article is discussed on The Podcast by KevinMD: Why overdiagnosis is failing the students it claims to help.
This essay is cited in the KevinMD record on mental health.
Richard A. Lawhern is a nationally recognized health care educator and patient advocate who has spent nearly three decades researching pain management and addiction policy. His extensive body of work, including over 300 published papers and interviews, reflects a deep critique of U.S. health care agencies and their approaches to chronic pain treatment. Now retired from formal academic and hospital affiliations, Richard continues to engage with professional and public audiences through platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and his contributions to KevinMD. His advocacy extends to online communities like Protect People in Pain, where he works to elevate the voices of patients navigating restrictive opioid policies. Among his many publications is a guideline on opioid use for chronic non-cancer pain, reflecting his commitment to evidence-based reform in pain medicine.
