Following an FDA study that found a 46% rise in ADHD prescriptions from 2002-2010, a review in Death and Taxes looks at better marketing and other possible causes of the increase. Among them is Robert Spitzer’s (formulator of the ADD diagnosis) concern that 30% of ADD is “misdiagnosed,” and Peter Breggin’s that “people are so eager nowadays for biological explanations, so physicians and the public grabbed on to what is essentially a PR campaign — perhaps the most successful one in the last 30 years in the Western industrialized nations — that if you have a mental disturbance, it’s biochemical.”
