The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medication, Money, and Today's Push for Performance

Faced with hard questions, notes psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, people will frequently seek to answer easier ones instead. The controversies over attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and stimulants are a good example. What does the massive increase in ADHD diagnoses and stimulant use over the past twenty years say, if anything, about profound changes in childhood, mental health diagnoses and treatment, education policies, economic conditions, government regulations, health insurance, pharmaceutical companies, family composition, health professionals, and other environmental aspects? What factors have driven this increase, and how do they interact? Such questions are very complicated, so we usually get a watered-down version of them in the popular press: Why is ADHD overdiagnosed and stimulants overused? Who is to blame for this abuse? What do these phenomena say about America and its future? The “answers” that follow are, as one would expect, as simplistic and unsatisfactory as the questions that trigger...