The Emperor's New Clothes Are Fading Fast
When Harvard Pill Pushers Meet the Wrong Kind of Funny
Hello, and Happy Easter to all!
Just a quick note to alert those who may have missed it to the latest blockbuster story on ADHD featured this month in The New York Times Magazine. The whole feature is well worth a read, but if you don’t have time, the irreplaceable Joy Pullmann has a great summary over at The Federalist:
Doctors Give Kids ADHD Drugs For Adults' Convenience
And the full Times story can be read here:
Have We Been Thinking About ADHD All Wrong?
Some points in response (beyond my initial reaction, which naturally was ‘who are you calling we, buddy?’):
Longtime readers will recall the story of the father of ADHD, Dr. Keith Conners, repentantly devoting the final years of his life to raising the alarm about the monster he created. He ended his career denouncing ADHD treatment, apologizing for his role in, and alerting the country to the disaster at hand. This is an incredible, newsworthy story, akin to a broken, weeping, remorseful Dr. Fauci showing up to townhalls across the country, warning the nation about the dangers of mRNA vaccines. In the field of ADHD, this really happened! Unfortunately, the media, the medical community, and Big Pharma ignored it, and the ADHD hoax didn’t lose a step. Well, in the New York Times feature this month, we learn of another giant in the field following Dr. Conners’ path. Since Fauci is taken, let’s call this one the Dr. Birx of ADHD. Dr. James Swanson is the researcher behind the landmark M.T.A study in the 90s that purported to show the effectiveness of stimulant medicine - a study that got tremendous media attention and led to the explosion of prescriptions for children. What didn’t get media attention is the fact that, when he conducted follow-up on the study, it turned out the meds did not work after all. Cue the Times:
Swanson is now 80 and close to the end of his career, and when he talks about his life’s work, he sounds troubled — not just about the M.T.A. results but about the state of the A.D.H.D. field in general. “There are things about the way we do this work,” he told me, “that just are definitely wrong.”
I am glad - I truly am - that influential doctors like Conners and Swanson, as mortality dawns, have found the wisdom and bravery to go public with their regrets. As for the rest of us, I promise you don’t need to wait til you make the move to Del Boca Vista to take the time to think about the big picture of whether drugging kids to sit still is a moral good. Seize the moment, folks, and doubt Big Pharma lies while you’re young! That way, you’ll have plenty of time to enjoy retirement and won’t have to neglect playing with your grandchildren to go on a cross-country apology tour.
When I wrote this essay about the sacred, intertwined nature of love and attention, I worried that it might be a little, well, far out. Representative excerpt:
Do I want [my child] to worship at the altar of School? Because dosing her with mass-produced neurochemicals designed to make her love her homework may leave her incapable of loving anything – or anyone – that matters.
Pretty hippy dippy stuff, right? Well, over to you, New York Times:
On stimulant medication, those emotions flipped. “You start to feel such a connection to what you’re working on,” one undergraduate told Vrecko. “It’s almost like you fall in love with it.”
I rest my case.
Years ago, writing in First Things, I wrote about how the ADHD diagnosis and totalitarian conformity must of necessity go hand in hand. The message becomes inevitable: conform or be drugged. In case you though I was being overly dramatic, I close with this final excerpt from The Times. Read it, and let it sink in. Then consider that these are the ‘experts’ we are entrusting our children to.
A third article, by Roberto Olivardia, a clinical psychologist who lectures at Harvard Medical School, gave advice to clinicians on how to respond if parents say they are worried that stimulant medication is muting their child’s sense of humor. The suggested response: Maybe your child was the wrong kind of funny. “Parents should know that not all personality changes sparked by medication are negative,” Olivardia advised. “If a child known for his sense of humor seems ‘less funny’ on medication, it could be that the medication is properly inhibiting them. In other words, it’s not that the child is less funny; it’s that they’re more appropriately funny at the right times.”
Thank you for reading, please share if you’d like, and, above all, please go out there and be the wrong kind of funny today.
Thanks for sharing this story Adrian! Truly stunning and sad. I met one homeschool parent many years ago who pulled her son out of school because teachers suggested that he should be put on Ritalin because of his "disruptive" behaviour. Instead she took over his education and allowed him to move around while learning. He loved to dance, and over the years this became his passion, and he is now a professional ballet dancer.
Thanks for covering this. Longtime AHHD critic here. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3918118/Conners emailed me to say I was “right about everything I said.”