ADHD

Hey Doc; I was wondering if before you see me the next time and tell my parents that I still need to be medicated for ADHD, you might consider a few things about me that you might not know. You see as a kid who can barely pick out an outfit that matches, make my bed, or wake up not hoping it's Saturday, I kind of have an active imagination. Like nearly all of my friends, I hate taking baths and I like to daydream. And when I daydream, I seem to not pay attention to what others are talking about. I kind of get lost in my own little world where rainbows do lead to pots of gold, leprechauns are real, life often feels like my favorite video game, and fart jokes never get old.

In a philosophically rigorous article, Spanish researcher Marino Pérez-Álvarez examines the logic of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Researchers from Philadelphia and Baltimore find, in a study of Medicaid records for 50 states and the District of Columbia, that antipsychotic prescribing to...

-MIA Bloggers Jonathan Leo and Jeffrey Lacasse review the New York Times' history of reporting on ADHD and the ensuing epidemic of ADHD.

Study of students without an ADHD diagnosis finds that stimulants (Adderall) have little impact on cognitive performance.

Before we get to the meat and potatoes documenting how this headline is not only shocking but also accurate, you must know that a secondary goal of this blog is to test a few theories. I have been pondering these theories because it seems to be a mystery as to why (after more than two decades of whistleblowers warning the public) so many adults have not heard or heeded the news that ADHD stimulant drugs, which are not that different from cocaine, are extremely dangerous for kids.

It now looks as if the U.S. approach to mental health is fast gaining purchase in a country that formerly boasted a great, perhaps too sophisticated (Lacan et al.) psychoanalytic tradition, but also a holistic psychosocial tradition when dealing with psychological disturbance in children.

In what they describe as the first large-scale, long-term, nation-wide study of its kind, Danish researchers have confirmed that ADHD stimulants double the risk...

For the New York Times Well blog, Katherine Ellision writes about how the rise in ADHD diagnoses globally is sparking “debates about the validity of the diagnosis and the drugs used to treat it.”

Researchers believe they have found "the smoking gun" that links common contaminants leaching from plastics to "adverse brain development and hyperactivity."

The New York Times reports on a new study finding that ‘ADHD’ is the most common diagnosis for children under 12 who die by...

Individuals diagnosed with psychotic disorders have an earlier onset of psychosis if they have previously been exposed to prescription stimulants, according to new research currently in press in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

Article Abstract: Although research supports the stigma and labeling perspective, empirical evidence also indicates that a social safety net remains intact for those with mental...

Robert Whitaker appears on Science for the Public on March 20, 2013, speaking about how the ADHD is diagnosed and why users of medications...

Twice as many teenagers with ADHD experienced severe psychosis when taking Adderall, as compared to Ritalin, according to a new study.

New research is investigating how “poverty reduction promotes cognitive and brain development.”

L. Alan Sroufe, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, writes in the New York Times Sunday Review that there is no...

Healthline reports that as five second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs) lose patent protection, Medicaid expenditures for antipsychotics are projected to be cut in half over the next five years. But some worry that the decrease in spending may lead policymakers to lift existing restrictions on antipsychotics at a time when most SGAs are prescribed to children for off-label reasons.

At the risk of stating the obvious, ADHD is not an illness. Rather, it is an unreliable and disempowering label for a loose collection of arbitrarily chosen and vaguely defined behaviors. ADHD has been avidly promoted as an illness by pharma-psychiatry for the purpose of selling stimulant drugs. In which endeavor, they have been phenomenally successful, but, as in other areas of psychiatry, the hoax is unraveling.

Data drawn from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project show that children raised in institutions in Romania exhibit elevated symptoms of ADHD, anxiety, depression, and...

Hello and welcome to my inaugural blog! It's an honor to join the insightful and talented team of writers at Mad in America. This exciting opportunity is the perfect complement to my efforts to help kids worldwide live childhood drug-free.

The FDA just approved sales of an electrical device called the Monarch eTNS to be used on the brains of children diagnosed with so-called ADHD. The device “sends therapeutic signals to the parts of the brain thought to be involved in ADHD,” according to the FDA press release. “Therapeutic signals”? Really?

New research suggests that when parents model emotion suppression strategies in social interactions, their children’s approaches to social engagement may suffer.

Calling ADHD a diagnosis, i.e., something with the capacity to explain the behaviours that it describes, is like saying the headache is causing the pain in my head or the inattention is caused by inattention. Scientism has turned ADHD from a vague, difficult to pin down concept into a fact of culture masquerading as a fact of nature.

From STAT: Concerned about the potential adverse effects of ADHD medications, some parents are addressing their children's ADHD through nutrition-based approaches. Article →­