Stimulants

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.

In my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined being drawn into a story of intrigue involving my own government’s efforts to hide, from the public, reports of psychiatric drugs associated with cases of murder, including homicides committed by youth on the drugs. But that is precisely the intrigue I now find myself enmeshed in.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new data indicating that as many as 75% of young children who are diagnosed with...

A new analysis of the information that the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) publishes for parents about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) concludes that the children’s experiences and contexts are ignored and that medication is presented, misleadingly, as the only solution supported by research evidence.

A new study published in the journal Neuroscience finds that rats given regular doses of amphetamines during adolescence have brain and behavioral changes in adulthood....

Researchers found that pediatricians vary greatly in how often they diagnose and prescribe drugs for ADHD and other mental health conditions. “The proportion of...

A study of rats given regular, high doses of amphetamine finds that those exposed to the drug at an age corresponding to human adolescence...

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that, three years into an Australian study that is following 178 children with ADHD and 212 children without ADHD, the...

A study of 378,881 subjects aged 4-17 years by the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database found that the likelihood of receiving an ADHD diagnosis and treatment was...

The New York Times considers new research from Taiwan that suggests the possibility that the relative neurocognitive immaturity of younger children in a school cohort,...

A new study found that children taking ADHD drugs had, on average, lower bone density than their peers. This included children on common stimulants...

“Children with attention-deficit problems improve faster when the first treatment they receive is behavioral therapy — like instruction in basic social skills — than...

"It's no secret that stimulant medications such as Adderall that are prescribed to treat symptoms of ADHD are sometimes used as 'study drugs' aimed...

Psychologist and Professor Amber Gum has published the story of her personal journey of rethinking psychotropic medication in a special issue on "The Politics of Mental Health" in The Journal of Medicine and the Person. Influenced by Mad in America and the work of Robert Whitaker, Gum became aware of evidence that “suggests that psychotropic medications are less effective and more harmful than most believe” and now hopes to encourage other mental health professionals and researchers to engage in open-minded, critical self-assessment of standard practices.

Following a lawsuit brought by Andrew Thibault of Parents Against Pharmaceutical Abuse (PAPA), the FDA has produced adverse event and severe adverse event reports...

Lawrence Diller continues his series on the uses and abuses of Adderall. "You take some Adderall, go through withdrawal, build up tolerance, take some...

A simple, one-time visit to an unfamiliar counselor resulted in my diagnosis of ADHD. That same visit started my avalanche of drug abuse. I was 19 years old when I was falsely diagnosed with ADHD, and it forever changed my life.

Writing for Huffpost, medical doctor Lawrence Diller looks at the effects of the ever increasing diagnoses for ADHD and the addiction and abuse issues...

In his NY Times article “A Drug to Cure Fear,” Richard Friedman noted: “It has been an article of faith in neuroscience and psychiatry that, once formed, emotional memories are permanent.” This has not been a principle of these disciplines, including clinical psychology, for many years. Consolidation-reconsolidation-extinction models have been around for some time now, applied in particular to persons suffering from traumatic memories; e.g., Holocaust survivors, war and genocide survivors, etc.

Revealing the false information provided about psychiatry should cause any thinking person, patient, thought-leader or politician to wonder: “how many otherwise normal or potentially curable people over the last half century of psych drug propaganda have actually been mis-labeled as mentally ill (and then mis-treated) and sent down the convoluted path of therapeutic misadventures – heading toward oblivion?”

Stimulant medications like Ritalin and Adderall, often prescribed to treat children diagnosed with ADHD, are known to cause hallucinations and psychotic symptoms. Until recently these adverse effects were considered to be rare. A new study to be published in the January issue of Pediatrics challenges this belief, however, and finds that many more children may be experiencing psychotic symptoms as a result of these drugs than previously acknowledged.

Miriam Stoppard writes an opinion piece on the lack of good research on Ritalin, a drug often used for ADHD, and discusses the latest Cochrane review which found a high percentage of side-effects in children. Despite the lack of quality evidence, “NHS figures show that nearly one million ADHD prescriptions were handed out last year in England – a number that has more than doubled in 10 years.”

Yesterday, the FDA approved Pfizer's “QuilliChew ER” chewable methylphenidate for ADHD in children as young as six. “CNS stimulants, including Quillivant XR, QuilliChew ER, other methylphenidate-containing products, and amphetamines, have a high potential for abuse and dependence.”

Citing a 43 percent jump since 2003, researchers estimate that 5.8 million school-aged children and teens in the US now have an ADHD diagnosis, a staggering 12 percent of this population. The new NIH-funded analysis also found that the percentage of girls diagnosed with ADHD was up 55% and that the percentage of Hispanic children diagnosed shot up 83% over the same timeframe.

Eugene Raikhel reveals ads from 1966 where Ritalin, now prescribed largely for ADHD, was marketed as a “kind of mind antidepressant for housewives.”  “I...