Taken at face value, the latest figures on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, suggest a growing epidemic in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 15 percent of high school children are diagnosed with ADHD. The number of those on stimulant medication is at 3.5 million, up from 600,000 two decades ago. ADHD is now the second most common long-term diagnosis in children, narrowly trailing asthma.
But a new report in The New York Times questions whether these staggering figures reflect a medical reality or an over-medicated craze that has earned billions in profits for the pharmaceutical companies involved. Sales for ADHD drugs like Adderall and Concerta topped $9 billion in the U.S. last year, a more than 500 percent jump from a decade before. The radical spike in diagnoses has coincided with a 20-year marketing effort to promote stimulant prescriptions for children struggling in school, as well as for adults seeking to take control of their lives.
The marketing effort has relied on studies and testimonials from a select group of doctors who have received massive speaking fees and funding grants from major pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Keith Conners, a leading expert on ADHD, told The New York Times he questions the preponderance of ADHD diagnoses in the U.S., saying, quote, “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”
John Edwards talking:
Johnny was a—went into Harvard in 2006. And between his freshman and his sophomore year, I discovered he was on Adderall during the summer, when he was home. And, you know, I kind of questioned. I thought Adderall was—from what I understood, was for attention deficit disorder. And I had some questions. It didn’t seem—Johnny was a class valedictorian at his high school, a top high school in Massachusetts, 4.0, a brilliant kid. He was a—I think he was about a 4.0, a straight-A student at Harvard. And he was also doing stem cell research and working on grants between his freshman and sophomore year. And he was just a brilliant kid, which paled in comparison to what a wonderful human being he was. And it seemed rather odd that he would be on a drug for attention deficit disorder. He seemed like the last person that would be on drugs, how you could achieve what he’s achieved and have that type of issue. But, you know, from what he shared with me and what I understand, that it seemed as though in his particular case it may have—he may have been given it to somehow boost his confidence or for some other reason. And I found it all a bit odd.
And I noticed during the summer, when we were on summer vacation in New Hampshire, he was having these huge effects with—best way I can describe, these woosh effects, where he’d get these [inaudible] bouts of anxiety, and he said it was due to the time-released product he was on, and his doctors were paying attention to it and working it all out. And, you know, the problem is, when your kids go off to college and they turn 18, you’re no longer involved in their care, even though I requested—I made a request. I said, you know, “Would you mind if I spoke with the person who’s treating you?” And then he checked into it, and they said, “No, that’s not really necessary.” That’s what he told me. So I assumed he was under great care. I mean, he’s at Harvard, you know, wonderful, leading institution in the country.
And, you know, he then was prescribed a couple of additional medications, as well, which happened to be stimulants, as I learned later. And as part of that, he was feeling—over the coming months, I guess he had significant anxiety or concerns about it, even wrote an email to the person who had—he had been seeing, the nurse practitioner, and, you know, indicated, “Should I continue to take these?” And she said, “Yes, just make an appointment to come in and see me when you have a chance.” And, unfortunately, two days after that email, he committed suicide at Harvard Medical School, completely out of the blue. And, you know, I—none of us in the family had any idea that something like this was—he had just been home for Thanksgiving. And it was just—it’s obviously devastated myself, my family, my daughter, in particular, Julia, and been a very, very difficult time for us, the last six years.
Alan Schwarz talking:
It’s very atypical, OK, in terms of the ending, in terms of how despondent he became and how he acted upon it. I think what most people are particularly concerned about is the process through which Johnny received what is technically, I guess, medical care. He went to the student health center at Harvard, probably faked his ADHD symptoms, or at least exaggerated them, in order to receive Adderall and other stimulant medications. It happens all the time. The problem is, is that the procedure through which the diagnosis is made is really quite sloppy, in many cases. If you read the deposition in the Edwards case, because there are some legal proceedings going on, the nurse practitioner involved in the diagnosis and care said that one of the reasons that she put Johnny on stimulants is because he drank a lot of Red Bull, and that’s always a sign that somebody needs more attention help.
it is known that people with ADHD do get in more traffic accidents because of their lack of attention, or perhaps the impulsivity of just taking a right turn when you kind of shouldn’t, OK? But there’s a big difference between knowing that ADHD folks get in more traffic accidents or working backwards and saying that people who get in traffic accidents have ADHD.
the misuse of conditional probability, if I may, in this case and many others, is just laughable—or “laughable” perhaps not the right word here. But what you see is the misuse of the science. The nurse practitioner—and we are not dissing nurse practitioners. There are a—I mean, really, a lot of people think they’re better than doctors, so, you know, nurse practitioners, don’t send me hate mail. The thing is, is that, you know, she had heard about the science, about ADHD being—having 80 percent heredity. But that’s not what that statistic means. She thought that 80 percent of kids with ADHD have a parent with ADHD. And because Johnny told the nurse practitioner that his father might have had it—and, Mr. Edwards, you can certainly testify to that—you know, she took all these little signs as meaning ADHD. And this happens every day, hundreds of thousands of times across a year, of people just not really paying attention to what is a real diagnosis and causes real people real problems, and for which Adderall and other stimulant medications are an appropriate remedy. But we’ve gone way past that to the more recreational, cosmetic use.
Hundreds of thousands of college kids go to student health wanting Adderall, because it helps them stay up at night and study. There is a lot of conflicting evidence over whether you actually perform better on these drugs, whether kids perform better on average. But the problem is, is that a lot of kids really do benefit. And so they get seduced by the idea that I can stay up really late, I can do all sorts of great things, and sometimes it blows up in their face.
Jamison Monroe talking:
Johnny’s story sounds very familiar to mine, actually, just a little bit further on in time. So, I went to private schools, prep schools. I graduated number one in my class out of eighth grade and then went to a very competitive high school, extremely competitive high school, and, you know, was making decent grades. I had a C in an honors biology class. And, you know, people were talking. Counselors, parents were concerned. And, you know, it was just life was happening. High school was happening. There were girls, many more distractions. The courses were arguably tougher in high school than they were in junior high.
And—but my lab partner was taking Adderall, and so were some of my friends. And so, you know, I tried it. I got a few. And I took one, and it worked. It worked really well. I could stay up. I could go to sports practice. When I got home, I could study. I could do my homework. I could wake up early, take an Adderall, be right on target, be ready to rock ‘n’ roll. And so, I took it to get ahead, to get that advantage, to make better grades, to be able to study longer. And as we’ve alluded to a little bit here, it was that competitive nature. You know, I was just trying to keep up. it is a performance-enhancement drug. And that’s what I see.
And so, what happened was, then I realized that it worked, and so I went to my parents, and I said, “I think the reason why my grades are kind of falling from the past is that I have ADD, or I have ADHD.” And as any parent would say when a child comes to you saying that they have this clinical diagnosis that may hinder their ability to perform, especially academically, they took me to a doctor. And so I went to a doctor. And I love what Alan said, because I did exactly that. I completely faked my symptoms and acted like I was distracted during the 45-minute-or-so test that the doctor gave me. And sure enough, when I walked out of there, I got a prescription for Adderall. That was in 1995. I had that prescription in various forms for the next nine or 10 years.
what happened to me and what we see in a lot of kids that come through Newport Academy is that, in fact, the first drug they do take is Adderall or some sort of stimulant study drug. And then, you know, the next year, when I was offered a Vicodin or a Valium or some other type of pharmaceutical drug, my perceived harmfulness of these drugs was low. And what’s the difference between one and another? And that’s what happened to me and what was see in other kids.
I developed a substance abuse problem, and then Adderall became just one of the many drugs that I was abusing and addicted to. I couldn’t—I couldn’t sit down and study, write a paper or study for an exam, without taking an Adderall. And so—and then, near late high school and early college, my peers and I, we would crush them up and snort them, and so we were drinking and using the stimulant as a recreational stimulant, as well as a study drug. And then that developed into, you know, cocaine and other drug abuse. And Adderall was always there for the all-nighters in the library. You know, it was absolutely necessary in order to get by and in order to study.
Gabor Maté talking:
Lawrence Diller, who’s a psychiatrist, or at least a child’s pediatrician, in California. And Diller says—Dr. Diller says that they, the pharmaceutical companies—referring to their success in inducing doctors to prescribe medications, Diller says that for an epidemic to take hold, there has to be a susceptible host—in this case, the medical profession. And then Dr. Diller says, quoted by Alan Schwarz, that they must know something about us that they can exploit. And what the pharmaceutical companies know about the medical doctors is that we’re in the grips of this ideology that reduces everything to brain biology and everything to genetics, so that it’s not just a question of ADHD, it’s a question of millions of kids being on medications of all kinds—ADHD drugs, the stimulants. There’s half-a-million children in the States on antipsychotics, who are not even psychotic; there are kids getting SSRI antidepressants for OCD, for depression, for anxiety—so that this template of the medical profession reducing everything to questions of brain biology and then thinking that they can solve problems by handing out pills is what has given the pharmaceutical companies the foothold, which they’ve exploited so brilliantly, as demonstrated in Alan Schwarz’s article.
And I’ll just add to that that absent from that awareness in the medical profession is the science, which is not even controversial, but most physicians are not aware of it, that the brain biology actually develops in interaction with the environment, beginning in utero and in early childhood, number one; and number two, that an individual’s physiology, including brain physiology, is in lifelong interaction with the environment. So when we have lots of children in trouble, when in Canada you have the number of prescriptions for ADHD going up 45 percent in the last five years, when you have the kind of figures that Alan has accumulated and demonstrated in his article, what are we looking at? We’re looking at the huge impact of the environment on the troubled functioning of many, many young people and children. And to reduce that to a question of brain biology and to try and smooth it out by medications is an abdication of medical responsibility.
Alan Schwarz talking:
let’s remember that the pharmaceutical companies are capitalistic organizations whose not only interest is making money, their legal responsibility is to make money for their shareholders. It is not to take great care of America’s children. [Hear this my drear friend. Why you still cheerleading a system which is not working for us? create new alternatives (not repeatition of old formulas.)] Now, hopefully those two things can be aligned, but when push comes to shove, they want to sell product. And so, the story that I wrote, and I think that the whole concept of the selling of attention deficit disorder, is more a story—is perhaps less a story of what Pharma did and more a story of what we let Pharma do. We have the underfunded FDA, that can’t check for advertisements ahead of time, that completely distort what ADHD is and what ADHD drugs do. Again, they’re very good for a lot of kids, but a lot of times—and a majority of times, I would attest—they do not get prescribed to kids with ADHD. I can prove that.
what you see is that they prey upon, typically, mothers’ fears that their kids are going to be friendless, that their kids are going to have substance abuse problems later on, that their kids are not going to succeed academically. And what the pharmaceutical industry does—and it ain’t no secret that this is what they do—is they take a study, that’s been funded with their dollars, OK, by “independent” researchers, that find a slight improvement on how many math questions get answered and how many math questions get answered correctly—a tiny, little immediate effect. And then they put in the ad: “improves academic performance.” And then, in one other ad for Adderall, there is a mother hugging her child, who’s holding a paper with a B+ on it, and the line is: “Finally, schoolwork that matches his intelligence.” Now, what mother thinks that their child’s schoolwork matches their intelligence? And it’s a shame, because the pharmaceutical industry could make a lot of money absolutely legitimately, OK? And God bless them. But it appears as if they’ve gone well past what ADHD is, and they are preying upon the fears of the population.
Doctors just lose sight of how they’re human beings and that when they’re paid to say things, they begin to believe it. Now, there are also doctors who get paid by the companies to go out and talk to other doctors and, for that matter, prescribe to real people, who, frankly, have just lost their minds, who don’t know what these drugs do. They don’t care what these drugs do; they just want to give it out, in part because they believe in it, and in part because it keeps the business coming in. And now, with the insurance company rules, that’s a little strong—but, you know, you can get paid for a five-minute med check, and so that’s all it takes. You prescribe medication, you get your med checks every three months. And I know psychiatrists—there’s one a couple blocks from here—where, literally, it will take you longer to fill out the paperwork in the waiting room than it will for him to diagnose you with ADHD and give you a prescription for stimulants. And that is not uncommon.
If you had ADHD as a child, you might still have it. About 50 percent of adults will retain their symptoms, and perhaps even impairment, as adults. So it’s a fair message.
But if you take the quiz at OwnYourADHD.com, and you look up in the top right-hand corner, it’s sponsored by Shire, the maker of Intuniv, Vyvanse and, in the past, Adderall XR. Now, if you take the quiz—we gave the quiz to 1,100 Americans, scientifically, over the phone. It was legitimate. Forty-eight percent of them took this six-question quiz and were told, through the algorithm, that ADHD was either possible or possibly likely, which is a curious diagnosis. Anyway, it’s—the test is rigged to get people to think they have the disorder. And that’s very powerful.
I don’t blame the test for human beings’ misuse of it. It is our fault. What they don’t say in there is that these symptoms are supposed to be severe, and they’re supposed to impair your daily life and functioning. And if they meet that standard, then you really do have ADHD.
Jamison Monroe talking:
one thing that I want to highlight real quick is, in one of Alan’s previous pieces, he had a great quote from a pediatrician, and this is something that I love that Dr. Maté addresses, as well. And a pediatrician, said, “I don’t have a whole lot of choice. We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment—the school environment, parenting—so we have to modify the kid.” So, you know, like we’re saying here, we’ve kind of been pushed into a corner. We need to develop, you know, parenting skills. We need to expand the school offerings, creative arts, creative outlets, things like that.
So, what we see at Newport Academy and in the filming of Behind the Orange Curtain, which highlights mainly prescription drug overdoses, primarily opiates, is that all of those kids—not all, but almost all of the kids that are highlighted in the documentary, and many of the kids we see coming into Newport Academy, the first drug they took was an ADHD stimulant medication. We see about 60 percent of kids that come through Newport Academy are on one, mostly multiple, medications, as Dr. Maté was alluding to, is that they’ll be put on an Adderall, and then they’ll be put on an antidepressant, and then it just compounds each other. And so, we see about two-thirds of our kids that come to Newport Academy are on pharmaceutical medications for one diagnosis or another, and about half of those have some sort of Adderall diagnosis, whether it’s legitimate or not. What we do is we’ll typically take kids off of these medications, because there is no baseline and there is no real test that has been done to give a proper diagnosis, and then we’ll be able to have a baseline to see if we need—these kids do in fact need medications. And only about 30 percent of kids leave Newport Academy on medications.
John Edwards talking:
I want to get the answer to the question if—you know, I agree with what Alan said exactly. On one level, these medications do have a purpose, that they’re to address serious issues. And one of the questions I have, related to Johnny, that I’ve not had answered is: How do you have a 4.0 or very close to that at Harvard and be considered to have something like attention deficit disorder? I would think that’s all you need to know, and you don’t need to be hunting for.
Dr. Gabor Maté talking:
As Alan Schwarz indicated, it’s a genuine problem that does affect a lot of people, myself included. The question is how to understand it and how to deal with it. And the first thing to say is that not everybody who’s got trouble paying attention or has impulse-control issues has ADHD. There’s all kinds of other reasons why people might have various manifestations. So to put them all into the ADHD basket is to ignore the complexity of human behavior.
Secondly, to make the assumption that even if somebody has these traits, and even if they have them over a lifetime, that the significant or the only answer is medication is to ignore, again, the complexity of the human brain and human behavior. So, what we have here is a vast oversimplification of what is a fairly sophisticated problem. And it’s that oversimplification then that the pharmaceutical companies exploit to their great advantage, as Alan has documented.
Alan Schwarz talking:
I was a sports guy at the Times. I was lucky enough to be able to cover the concussion issue from the beginning and get to break a lot of stories in that realm. And then, when I was a little tired of that, when I heard that high school kids were snorting Adderall before the SATs, I questioned: How much pressure are we putting on these kids? I don’t think they want to do this. And so the first story that I did was in the context of academic pressure and what some kids will do in order to deal with it.
And after doctors—doctor upon doctor upon doctor—told me that, “Oh, this is not an overdiagnosed condition; this is underdiagnosed,” and I looked at the numbers, and it was—it’s a preposterous assertion. I said, “Wait a minute. What are the doctors doing here? What are their motivations? What are their biases? How do they misunderstand probability and statistics?” And so, I looked into it further, and there were so many issues at play here, with regard to why doctors prescribe, how often doctors prescribe.
I think one of my regrets is that I haven’t been able to do a story on the good that Adderall can do. I try to acknowledge it in my stories. But, of course, it’s a good drug. What we have to be careful of is, how do we use it?
Dexedrine, an amphetamine, were around for a very long time. Benzedrine used to be an inhaler in the 1930s and ’40s, straight amphetamine, and people abused it then. They would take out the little soaked gauze pad and put it in their mouths in order to abuse amphetamine. And then Dexedrine became on the market in the ’50s and ’60s. So did Ritalin, by the way. And it was so abused among college students and adults in the late ’60s that that’s why we now have the Controlled Substances Act, was because of the Dexedrine epidemic. Now, cocaine took over in the ’70s and ’80s. But then, of course, that became—you know, it’s obviously illegal, and other issues.
But then, attention deficit disorder became so well known and so accepted among parents, and perhaps even appropriate for a lot of the kids in the ’80s and ’90s who got diagnosed—Jamison Monroe notwithstanding—what you see is that there’s now a very easy mechanism to get amphetamine if you want it. If you need it, you can get it, yes, but if you just want it, you can get it, too—free amphetamine, because it’s covered by insurance. And so, when a pharmaceutical executive named Roger Griggs, who had his own little—relatively little pharma company, he heard that this diet pill named Obetrol, OK, might have an application to this relatively newly appreciated childhood condition called minimal brain dysfunction, which is a charming name for it.
But, OK, fine. And he said, “Gee, I wonder if this could treat that.” And, lo and behold, it could. But, of course, it’s been well known that amphetamines, you know, and diet pills have been abused. Hell, there was a Family Ties episode about it in 1984. And so, this has been a long-standing issue. I think now the main problem is that 15 percent of children, by the time they graduate high school, have been told that there is something basically permanently wrong with their brain chemistry, for which some of the most addictive and abusable substances known to medicine are the primary antidote. Now, a lot of people can take them just fine. It’s not the devil’s drug. We’ve seen a father talk about his son who committed suicide after, and we want to be careful that—
But it’s not as if every kid, or even 2 percent—I mean, no, that’s an extremely rare, terrible disintegration of these people’s minds. We have to realize, you can take it safely. Just look out for the signs that things are going wrong.
Gabor Maté talking:
Johnny Edwards case, part of the issue is how the diagnosis was made. I mean, you don’t make a diagnosis by asking a college kid if he’s got trouble concentrating, because there’s all kinds of reasons why he might. Depression could have been another reason why that kid had all of a sudden trouble concentrating. You have to take a lifelong history. You actually have to talk to the family. You have to have information from the school that he went to as an elementary and a high school student. In other words, it’s a lifelong diagnosis. It doesn’t come along all of a sudden in college. And you don’t take somebody’s word for it. You actually have to do a much more rigorous questioning of the individual and people significantly known to him, and that way you can arrive at a sort of a globally based diagnosis. So, that young man was really badly treated by the medical system. I think, as Alan demonstrates, it’s not untypical. And the end was untypical, but the process was not untypical.
Alan Schwarz talking:
Dr. William W. Dodson, a psychiatrist from Denver, stood before 70 doctors at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Spa in Pasadena, Calif., and clicked through slides that encouraged them to ‘educate the patient on the lifelong nature of the disorder and the benefits of lifelong treatment.’ But that assertion was not supported by science, as studies then and now have shown that perhaps half of A.D.H.D. children are not impaired as adults, and that little is known about the risks or efficacy of long-term medication use.
this fellow was paid by Shire to indoctrinate doctors about their new long-acting formulation of Adderall XR. And he told them that it is a lifelong condition, and you should medicate for the rest of the person’s life. And, unfortunately, it’s been known, then and since, that only half, roughly—some say 30 percent, some say 70 percent, whatever, but roughly half of adults are not impaired as adults. I talked to Dr. Dodson about his assertion that day and since, and he said he does not believe that that is true, and that if you have ADHD, you have it for life, and he recommends to all of his patients—hundreds, perhaps even up to a thousand—that they do this. And I think it’s up to us to decide if he’s telling these people the truth.
Dr. Keith Conners at Duke was one of the earliest advocates for recognition of ADHD. I mean, he came along in the late ’50s, early ’60s, when kids were just labeled—kids with this condition, severe condition, were just labeled “bad kids” and then thrown aside. What he did is he got a lot of people to realize this is a real issue, and he was one of the primary advocates of the use of Ritalin in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s. I think that some of the articles—at least he’s told us that the articles that we’ve written this year in The New York Times have really woken him up to the fact that what he had evangelized, he did an awfully good job, and now, as we’ve talked about, 15 percent of high school kids graduate having been diagnosed with ADHD. And when he read that, and he read some of the horror stories of young people abusing these medications, I think he decided that he realized that he had been part of a problem, and he now wants to be part of a solution.
Dr. Joseph Biederman, the prominent child psychiatrist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. A Senate investigation revealed his research on many psychiatric conditions had been substantially financed by drug companies, including Shire, which owns Adderall, which sells Adderall. Those companies also paid him $1.6 million in speaking and consulting fees. He denies that the payments influenced his research.
he is not really that atypical among prominent psychiatrists in the field, the degree to which he participated in pharmaceutical research and public statements about the use of medication for many psychiatric—child psychiatric diagnoses. He has been very involved with Risperdal and other antipsychotics. And, you know, he conducted a lot of studies that came in three flavors: One, ADHD is seriously underdiagnosed; two, it has devastating consequences if left untreated; and three, the medications associated with it—Ritalin, Adderall, Conserta, whatever—are basically harmless. And so, he sort of seeded a lot of the pharmaceutical messages that said, “Hey, look, we’re just relying upon the science of a Harvard University professor, an eminent psychiatrist.” And, yeah, they were.
I think that what some people are concerned about was just how one-sided he was. And whenever anyone would say, “Look, I think you’re a little off base here,” he would really shut down. And so, some people are concerned that he played such a role with giving pharma the messages that they wanted, that they now question, you know, whether that was appropriate. I certainly wanted to talk with him about the concerns that a lot of people had. And, by the way, this is not new. He is the most controversial figure in child psychiatry—by a lot. He didn’t respond to my requests to talk with him. And that was not unpredictable. And so, you know, I think that one point that we made in this story is that a lot of his critics say that his primary motivation was not financial gain; he was trying to help severely impaired kids. He went to a point that many people think was way too far.
Gabor Maté talking:
you can have attention problems without hyperactivity, so when you add the H, it’s simply to signify that a child or an adult also has difficulty regulating their body, in the sense of sitting still, not fidgeting, not interrupting, not being able to wait their turn in line, and so on. So it just adds a physical dimension to the hyperactivity that takes place in the brain itself, where too many thoughts follow one another randomly and with no rational progression. So it’s a physical manifestation of the emotional and intellectual dynamics that already occur in the brain of the person with ADHD. Boys, in general, tend to be more the hyperactive kinds. Girls very often have the attention problem, if they genuinely have it, without the physical manifestation.
Cigarettes contain nicotine, and nicotine is a stimulant. And so, actually, a lot of people hooked on cigarettes are self-medicating ADHD, whether they know it or not. But the psychiatrist who Alan Schwarz quoted, who said that you don’t grow out of it, has it completely wrong, because he’s just not aware of the factor of neuroplasticity—neuroplasticity meaning the brain has capacity to develop new circuits even later on in life. So a lot of people actually do grow out of the deficit—that’s the first point—because their brains develop, number one.
Number two, there’s a lot of other reasons why kids might have difficulty paying attention. And the question very often is: Do they grow out of ADHD, or do they grow out of school? In other words, do they just grow out of an artificial environment, where human beings were never meant to sit for eight hours and behind a desk, and not be able to run around and play and not be able to create and express themselves and do art and be noisy? All the things that the human child naturally wants to be, and is, are suppressed, and very often in the school setting. So, we’re creating an artificially induced problem by the environments that kids are reared in. And so, when kids leave those environments, naturally they don’t have those symptoms anymore.
So, there’s all kinds of reasons why that psychiatrist who stands in front of a group of doctors and asserts that once you’re diagnosed, you have it for the rest of your life, is completely scientifically inappropriate.
And finally, not to mention that this isn’t unique. You know, I went to one dinner, at least, 15, 20 years ago, a medical dinner, where a high-priced expert, flown in from Australia, was telling physicians that every woman, post-menopausal, should be on hormonal replacement therapy. And, boy, did they rake in the money. Well, of course, then it turned out that in fact those same hormones can cause heart disease and increase the risk of cancer and so on, so that this pharmaceutical propaganda that bewitches the medical profession—and they always find the experts; you can always find an expert to support whatever point of view—it’s unfortunately not unique to the problem that Alan has depicted in his recent article.
Alan Schwarz talking:
The point is, is we have to look at the process, the process through which these diagnoses are made, the process through which we allow pharmaceutical companies to prey upon the fears and needs of, typically, mothers. And it’s pretty adjustable. We can make things better if we just pay a little attention. And I think that people have picked up on that in the stories. They’ve tried not to be hysterical. They’ve tried to just point out, hey, if—perhaps you want to take this into account so that we can do a better job for kids and adults. It doesn’t mean stop doing good by prescribing the medications when necessary. I mean, look, a chainsaw is a really helpful tool, you know? But sometimes, you’ve got to—or, usually, you’ve got to just be really careful with it. No one bans chainsaws. No one should ban Adderall. There’s just a way to handle it a lot better. And we, as human beings, are responsible for that.
— source democracynow.org
Alan Schwarz, an award-winning New York Times reporter who has extensively written about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. His most recent article, “The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder,” looks at how the number of diagnoses soared amid a 20-year drug marketing campaign.
Jamison Monroe, former teenage Adderall addict who now runs Newport Academy, a treatment center for teens suffering from substance abuse and mental health issues. He is also the executive producer of the recent documentary, Behind the Orange Curtain, which looks at the prescription drug epidemic.
Gabor Maté, physician and best-selling author of four books, including Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It. His latest book is In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.
John Edwards, his son, Johnny Edwards, committed suicide in 2007, just months after he was prescribed Adderall and antidepressant medications at the Harvard University Health Services clinic.