ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma, and the Making of an American Epidemic by Alan Schwarz

Author:Alan Schwarz [Schwarz, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2016-09-06T07:00:00+00:00

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I. Vanderbilt, for example, made this mistake in its 2012/2013 student handbook, which relegated its discussion of stimulant abuse to the bottom of page 75. It said only that “some individuals” take the drugs for alertness, but that “They have not, however, been shown to improve academic performance in students without ADD.”

II. Even Supreme Court justices have snickered at the out-of-control college situation. Discussing a defendant who had been caught carrying Adderall not prescribed to him, Justice Elena Kagan shrugged: “If you go to half the colleges in America . . . and just randomly pick somebody, there would be a decent chance” they’d have ADHD drugs, too. The courtroom chuckled knowingly.

III. In 2013, a young and even younger-looking French newswoman, in a television series on life on American college campuses, went undercover to see how easy getting ADHD pills truly was. She learned of a Manhattan psychiatrist popular among local students, went to his office wearing a hidden camera and microphone, answered a few questions, and walked out ten minutes later with a prescription.

IV. Her absurd 80 percent claim almost certainly derives from a study by Steve Faraone, a member of Joseph Biederman’s group, which declared the “heritability of ADHD to be .76.” The number was broadcast throughout the field; problem was, that metric does not speak to the percentage of ADHD kids with ADHD parents.

V. This disclaimer is common among companies trying to minimize the dangers of their products. The National Football League, during its recent crisis surrounding brain injuries, reassured players that repeated concussions have no long-term effects “if each injury is managed properly.”

VI. The researchers made sure to note, for the inevitable “wait, what about”skeptics, that very few of these kids had any previous psychiatric history that could have caused or contributed to their delusions, and that any child showing an immediate intolerance to the medications was removed from the studies. So 1 in 500, they claimed, was probably an underestimate of the actual rate people should look out for in the real world.

VII. This is the same city where Gretchen LeFever had controversially found wild overdiagnosis of ADHD in children ten years before. Ironically, one of the children in her study back then—who went down as a boy not on medication, because he never had attention problems—was a fifth-grader at Trantwood Elementary School named Richard Fee.

VIII. Dr. Ellison had shown a somewhat counterintuitive approach to medicine in 1994 when he made a proposal to Philip Morris—one of the tobacco giants that used junk science to cover up the dangers of cigarettes. According to internal documents, Dr. Ellison, who was described as owning at least 3,800 company shares then valued at more than $200,000, said that he supported cigarettes “as something to be used for comfort and stress management.” One memo said that Dr. Ellison had, “to help raise the price of the stock,” strongly encouraged the company to “conduct a study to determine what motivates people to smoke cigarettes. Dr. Ellison believes that

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