The NYTimes released an article that finally recognizes the enormous disconnect between the science on ADHD and the daily practice of treating it with stimulants:
I’ve spent the last year speaking with some of the leading A.D.H.D. researchers in the United States and abroad, and many of them, like Swanson, express concern over what they see as a disconnect between the emerging scientific understanding of A.D.H.D. and the way the condition is being treated in clinics and doctors’ offices. Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a researcher in psychiatry and neuroscience at King’s College London, described the situation in personal terms. “I’ve invested 35 years of my life trying to identify the causes of A.D.H.D., and somehow we seem to be farther away from our goal than we were when we started,” he told me. “We have a clinical definition of A.D.H.D. that is increasingly unanchored from what we’re finding in our science.”
One more quote from the article because it’s paywalled and I want to share at least the most crucial parts:
That ever-expanding mountain of pills rests on certain assumptions: that A.D.H.D. is a medical disorder that demands a medical solution; that it is caused by inherent deficits in children’s brains; and that the medications we give them repair those deficits. Scientists who study A.D.H.D. are now challenging each one of those assumptions — and uncovering new evidence for the role of a child’s environment in the progression of his symptoms.
And just one more:
Some scientists have begun to argue that the traditional conception of A.D.H.D. as an unchanging, essential fact about you — something you simply have or don’t have, something wired deep in your brain — is both inaccurate and unhelpful. According to Sonuga-Barke, the British researcher, the traditional notion that there is a natural category of “people with A.D.H.D.” that clinicians can objectively measure and define “just doesn’t seem to be the case.”
The facts on ADHD come out in the exact pattern as facts about COVID. People who contradict the propaganda narrative are screamed down, vilified, and accused of wanting to murder grandma. Then, after a while, everything such people said gets recognized as true but no amends are made and no recognition of mistakes made is offered.
There is a large number of absolutely deranged beliefs held by the American public on matters of health. One example is the belief that the extraordinary rates of obesity in the US are “genetic” and utterly unconnected to food quality and eating habits. Another one that I encountered only last week is that people eat sugary breakfast cereals after being diagnosed with diabetes because doctors tell them to eat a high-carb diet with this disease.
Other such beliefs I will not name because I honestly don’t need the drama that will inevitably ensue. All that the NYTimes article says I’ve known for a long time because it’s very easy to find. It’s as easy to find as “don’t eat sugar by the spoonful if you have diabetes” but people will still be shocked when these facts are revealed.
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I notice my spam newsfeed has also just TWICE in two days brought up ’causes of rising autism rates’
Not coincidentally, this is hot on the heels of RFKJ promising we’d have an answer to that by September. I think the medical-industrial folks are trying to get out ahead of possible health-agency transparency on these subjects, and they are in a big dang hurry about it.
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I read recently that 20+% of US 17-year-olds are diagnosed with ADHD. If this illness is unknown in other countries, doesn’t that mean that something culture-related is happening? Shouldn’t that be an area to explore?
But no, as long as you can get medicated for it, nobody cares to explore anything.
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20% of American parents either can’t stand their own kids and prefer to drug them over dealing with them as they are, OR are completely willing to do anything to give them a perceived social/academic edge.
Don’t get me started on orthodontics…
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Students in college eat Ritalin like candy and swap pills with each other. I know because they discuss it completely openly. A whole generation of young people was taught that taking speed to prepare for an exam is a normal thing to do. But it’s impossible to discuss this because people act like you are about to wrench their pillbox out of their hands by force.
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That started when I was still in school. We now have *generations* of amphetamine addicts.
And then we wonder how meth/fentanyl got so bad…
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And people wonder why there has been a significant erosion in trust in academia and science. A lot of it has been taken over by political ideologues. If there is one thing Trump is doing right is throwing all these parasites out.
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May I write you an email tomorrow or soon? Wanted to ask for advice re something.
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Of course, any time. I’m always here for you.
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\ Of course, any time.
Thank you. 🙂
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Have you ever seen the ADA (American Diabetic Association) recommendations for carbs? If I ate like that I would FOR SURE be insulin-dependent right now. Doctors actually take that coca-cola sponsored idiocy seriously. In order to get the most basic, sane advice to just use your damn glucometer, eat something, and check how high it puts you to see if it’s OK or not… you have to go to “fringe” sources like Jenny Ruhl and Dr. Bernstein to find anything practical, sane, that doesn’t just spring from the assumption that you are a functional retard who can’t figure out how to use a glucometer, and you’re gonna die in a few years anyway.
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This obsession to pop pills for anything is almost unique to American culture. There is no space and time to experience and resolve the spectrum of emotions — sadness, happiness, anxiety, angst, anger — which is an integral part of human experience and growth for any age. But as soon as one points this out about how much harm someone can inadvertently inflict on themselves and their loved ones, one is immediately branded an anti-vaxxer or, at the very least, antediluvian.
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Very, very unique. In other cultures, there’s a million things available before people go the medication route for things like pain, emotional dysregulation, etc. I took nothing, not even Tylenol for my post-op recovery. I have a scar longer than my index finger, but I know how to regulate pain. This doesn’t mean one needs to go crazy and demand to be operated on while conscious. But it shouldn’t be between that and opioids for every instance of pain.
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It’s not realistic to expect parents who’ve inflicted this harm on their own children, to realize and admit to it. Multiply that by the bazillion parents who’ve done it…
Now extrapolate that to gazillion parents who’ve done this with SSRIs, growth hormone, hormonal birth control, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, etc.
That’s a helluva built-in resistance to biological/medical fact.
I think there’s at least some hope on the vaccine front, in all this, simply because they’re required to put your kid in school and doctors recommended them: that means there are built-in scapegoats so full culpability needn’t fall directly on parents. Someone *else* damaged their children.
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I was active on a now defunct internet forum about 15 years ago when the topic of ADHD came up. One of the frequent posters was a psychology researcher, and she set off a complete shitstorm by writing that ADHD was not a “disorder”. People kept trying to prove to her that ADHD was “real”, and she had to carefully explain that something can be “real” and not be a disorder. Her view was that ADHD is socially constructed, nothing is really wrong with anyone’s brain, but the ADHD brain is poorly suited to many aspects of the modern world (like long school days and most office jobs). She said it would be like society collectively deciding that basketball was the most important thing in the world and then declaring shortness is a physical disability.
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I knew a handful of people growing up, who if born 30 years later would certainly have been drugged to the gills for ADHD. A dozen projects in various stages of completion, all the time. Smoked like chimneys. Also, astonishingly creative and productive people. Just not… A-students or office fauna material. Could not sit still, had to have some project in their hands all the time. They arranged their adult lives around that. And they were extraordinary.
The one I remember best, died some years ago. Lung cancer of course. Her kids were all grown up. She’d been so lively, so central to that family, and had such a large presence, that everything was broken without her. Husband died not long after. I heard that years later, her purse was still sitting on her bed, right where she’d left it going off to the hospital that last time, because nobody was willing to disturb it– the space was too sacred.
I’m not saying that’s healthy, but just– you have to understand how huge of a person she was. We adored her. Everything she touched was made beautiful. It galls me that for like three generations of kids now, we’ve been trying to drug this personality out of existence.
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I grew up around a lot of people like this (soviet immigrants in the 1990s who are generally against medication).Yes, many people who are astonishingly creative. But also could be incredibly destructive within their own families to their own children. Among people I know my age (~ 40), I thing a large part of accepting the medication narrative is not having any other answer for dealing with the damage done *to them* by their larger-than-life, beloved-in-the-community family members.
-YZ
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So… people are drugging their kids to avoid having those kids turn into their grandparents?
I mean, I grew up with parents who were difficult people to live with, but who are amazingly good and helpful people in their peculiar outside-our-home spheres, so I’m sympathetic, but also… confused by this idea. Like if I saw those traits popping up in my own kids, I still can’t imagine medicating them for it.
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Not so much people are drugging their kids (many of the more damaged people chose not to have kids), but I think this is why medication is more socially acceptable in those circles than I think it should be.
-YZ
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That’s an excellent way to put it. And it’s similar to what happened during COVID when opposing school closures was often taken to mean you didn’t believe COVID was real. It is very real. I had it twice and it’s a bastard of an illness. Yet I’m still convinced that such long school closures did a lot more harm than good. Arguing about mitigation doesn’t equal denying the existence of something.
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Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex has said as much
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I think part of it is also people trusting too much in the doctors, therapists, and school officials.
When I was in 4th grade, (it might have been 3rd, but I think it was 4th.) For whatever reason either a school official or a doctor told my mother that I needed to take ritalin and later adderall in order to focus. I was on the damned stuff from then until the first few years of college. I hated it, but I trusted that my mother knew what she was doing. Not realizing that she was trusting the doctor to know what he was doing. Who even knows at this point if that doc was being paid to push those drugs or not.
I was distracted in the last years of high school and first few years of college, and kept forgetting to take it. Horrible stuff really, I hated taking it because I felt kind of numb, but also wrathful. As in burn the world to ashes wrathful. In retrospect that might have just been normal teen hormones getting mixed with the stuff. Either way I hated it and as soon as I was in college I went from occasionally forgetting to take the stuff to quitting cold turkey.
Mom later on was quite apologetic about putting me on the meds. I frankly don’t blame her and told her I didn’t blame her in the slightest. She was doing what she thought was the correct thing. After all, for all our lives we had been taught you can trust the docs, you can trust the schools, etc. It is only in this last decade to 15 years or so that the truth is really starting to come out, and the chickens coming home to roost.
But yea, terrible stuff that. I have wondered occasionally what it does to your mind when your on it for years and years, especially during the teen years when your body is producing a chemical cocktail for puberty.
Going back to the main article. A lot of what was diagnosed as ADHD at least for the boys, was simply boys acting like boys have for all of history. We don’t do well in schools because we have energy that needs to be burnt off. Add that to some people have traits where they have to have multiple irons in the fire at the same time, and well. Honestly I think using meds outside of major stuff is a bad idea anyway. That is my $0.02 anyway.
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My nephew was diagnosed with ADHD 20+ years ago (not in the US) and my sister was told to put him on meds. She was adamantly opposed to it and didn’t do it. I didn’t quite understand her decision then (I was also quite young) but now I see her wisdom.
I work with a lot of college kids and I wonder often if all the meds they are on are the cause or a contributing factor to many problems they have. It is kind of scary to think about how many are on stimulants for ADHD/ADD and how many are on antidepressants or nowadays hormones if they are trans. This must not be good but everyone just goes along with it.
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There’s this idea that this is a consequence of the feminization of the public school system, forcing boys into behaviors that are not natural to them. Boys are naturally more rambunctious than girls, and less likely to sit through the drudgery that is the hallmark of the modern classroom. So we just medicate them.
What do you think?
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I think part of it is having co-ed classes where boys and girls are being taught together. They are not the same and they mature at different rates. On average, boys are more playful and it is harder for them to sit still. I believe there is an advantage to having boys separated from girls for education purposes, and the advantage may be mainly for boys.
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Yes, the advantage is for boys. Girls begin to underperform academically once boys are removed. Female collectives tend towards dumbness.
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It’s that for sure and also something else. We had the exact same thing in the USSR where boys were heavily discouraged from typical boy behaviors and girls from typical girl behaviors. A generation of timid men and unhinged women is easy to control.
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That’s important information for people who weren’t there!
Is there a scholarly or literary account of Soviet life which mentions this? (Doesn’t have to be in English.)
I ask because books are still a way for information that is otherwise anecdotal, to enter the western understanding.
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It’s possible but I don’t read books about the USSR. I don’t expect to find anything new, so what’s the point?
If anybody on here knows, please recommend.
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One reason why the regime was so rabid about denying the lab-leak thesis was that it represented the collective failure of the professional managerial class (the Experts™). The Scientists who we’re told can do no wrong fucked up on such a colossal level that it shut down the world economy. So the reason had to be officially peasants in wet markets.
They can handle all kinds of criticism. Hell, they even welcome our hate. But the one thing they cannot deal with is accusations of incompetence, because their entire mythology (“We’re the only people qualified to wield power) rests upon that assumption.
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Speaking of experts. I remember when Michelle Obama repeated this blood libel at the DNC.
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