Tag: Ritalin

Leading ADHD researchers outline four mistakes that turned ADHD from a description of behavior into a medical disease.

When comparing kids with the same symptoms who were either diagnosed with ADHD or not, those who received the diagnosis had worse outcomes.

“Efforts to improve learning in children with ADHD should focus on obtaining effective academic instruction rather than stimulant medication.”

Risk of depression increased when children were taking methylphenidate for ADHD, but once they stopped taking the drug, depression risk dropped to normal levels.

The article suggests that research challenging the evidence for ADHD drugs does not lead to changes without public campaigns.

Sami Timimi discusses the lack of findings for a genetic or neurobiological basis for ADHD, and explores the short- and long-term effects of stimulant drugs.

Both the idea that there are some characteristic brain-based abnormalities for those diagnosed with ADHD, and that the medications used have specific properties that target a disease process—like a chemical imbalance—are false.

We now spend over twenty billion dollars a year on treatment for something called “ADHD.” For that amount of money, we could pay the mid-career salaries of an extra 365,000 teachers or 827,000 teachers’ aides.

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

A recent Cochrane review has found that serious adverse events occur for about 1% of children and adolescents treated with Ritalin.

New evidence suggests that children on ADHD medication may have stunted growth initially but more rapid increases in body mass over time.

Even though it is extremely unlikely that in France we would reach the kinds of percentages we see in the USA, where in some states nearly 10% of children are treated with methylphenidate or other psychostimulants not used in France, overprescription is highly probable. Why?

From The Conversation: University students are increasingly using "smart drugs," including amphetamines and Modafinil, to enhance their academic performance. These drugs tend to be addictive and...

Findings suggest that treatment not only fails to reduce the severity of “ADHD” symptoms in adulthood but is associated with decreased height.

A new analysis of FDA data, published on September 10th by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today, reveals the dangers of the common prescription of...

Peter Gøtzsche’s new book, Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial brings up an important and complex  issue.  How do psychiatrists get up in the morning and damage people all day long while pretending to help them?  The book is elegantly referenced – and I encourage everyone who practices thoughtful psychiatry to read it, because you need to be much better educated to practice high-quality mental health than you do to act as a dispensing machine.  Gøtzsche is absolutely right; on all levels psychiatrists are in denial about the damage that they are doing to patients.

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?”

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

Dr. Max Pemberton “The Mind Doctor” weighs in on the Cochrane review which questioned the evidence for Ritalin for ADHD. He writes: “History is...

The authors of a large scale well-conducted systematic review of methylphenidate, also known as Ritalin, conclude that there is a lack of quality evidence for the drug’s effectiveness. Their research also revealed that Ritalin can cause sleep problems and decreased appetite in children.

The abuse of ADHD drugs on college campuses has reached epidemic proportions, according to the authors of a recent review in the journal of Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry. ADHD drugs, like Ritalin and Adderall, have become so commonplace on college campuses that students abusing these drugs for studying, weight loss and partying have underestimated their risks. As a result, we have seen exponential increases in emergency room visits, overdoses, and suicides by students taking these drugs.

A new study suggests that service members who take stimulant medications to stay alert are five times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, the LA Times reports. “Those who had been prescribed multiple stimulants and the biggest supplies of the drugs were the most likely to have PTSD.”

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, relates the story of Andrew Francesco, a boy who began taking Ritalin at age five and died from complications with Seroquel when he was fifteen. His father, a former pharmaceutical industry executive, reveals the industry’s greed in his memoir “Overmedicated and Undertreated.” Now the industry is pushing for a first-amendment right to market its drugs for off-label uses.

I imagine that everybody on this side of the issue knows by now that the eminent psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, Chief Psychiatrist at Columbia, and past President of the APA, called Robert Whitaker "a menace to society." The grounds for Dr. Lieberman's vituperation were that Robert had dared to challenge some of psychiatry's most sacred tenets! But in all the furor, it was largely ignored that in the same interview Dr. Lieberman had said something else that warrants additional discussion.

Whether it’s the Nurtured Heart Approach, or any other method that’s truly up to the task, we need these effective strategies and ways of thinking to be more widespread so we can lessen the pitfalls of the medical model’s limited prospective which has no idea of how to turn intense into immensely great.