evidence: I’ve been seeing this story making the rounds about how the alleged "inventor" of ADHD (a Dr. Eisenberg) had a sort of deathbed confession, and, in an interview with Der Spiegel 7 months before he died at 87, said, "ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease." Leon Eisenberg, the father of ADHD, is quoted as saying in Der Spiegel that "ADHD is a fictitious disease" (shortly before his death). [...] We found that the German-language version of Der Spiegel ran an article in 2012 that skeptically examined the large increase in diagnoses of mental disorders in recent years and quoted Dr. Eisenberg on that subject. A software-based translation of that article from German to English does describe Dr. Eisenberg as the "father of ADHD" and report that during his "last interview" he said something similar to "ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease." However, when one allows for the vagaries of translation from German to English and reads the statement in context, it's clear that Dr. Eisenberg wasn't asserting that ADHD isn't a real disorder, but rather that he thought the influence of genetic predispositions for ADHD (rather than social/environmental risk factors) were vastly overestimated: