On Monday, The New York Times published a front-page story saying that "nearly one in five high school age boys in the United States and 11 percent of school-age...
On Monday, The New York Times published a front-page story saying that "nearly one in five high school age boys in the United States and 11 percent of school-age...
On Monday, The New York Times published a front-page story saying that "nearly one in five high school age boys in the United States and 11 percent of school-age children over all have received a medical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," according to data from the government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The story, by Alan Schwarz and Sarah Cohen with reporting contributed by Allison Kopicki, did not say that the figures came from an announcement or publication by the CDC. It said that the Times had "obtained the raw data from the agency and compiled the results" itself.
That's tricky. The CDC could make a mistake compiling and interpreting its own data; such things...
On Sunday, The New York Times ran a long story on page one by Alan Schwarz headlined, "Drowned in a...
On Sunday, The New York Times ran a long story on page one by Alan Schwarz headlined, "Drowned in a Stream of Prescriptions." It is about a 24-year-old college graduate named Richard Fee who was "getting dangerously addicted" to the ADHD medication Adderall. (That characterization came from his mother, not a doctor.) The young man later committed suicide.
It's impossible to know whether taking Adderall contributed to the suicide, or whether Fee's suicide was caused by withdrawal from Adderall. But Schwarz seems to know:
...after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his...
While I was puzzling over how to address the front page story in Saturday's New York Times on the abuse of stimulants by students seeking...
While I was puzzling over how to address the front page story in Saturday's New York Times on the abuse of stimulants by students seeking better grades, I discovered that some else had already done a superb job of dissecting the article--Matthew Herper at Forbes.
The Times story, "Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill," by Alan Schwarz, opens with a scene of a high-school student snorting a line of Adderall on the armrest of his car in the school parking lot minutes before stepping inside to take the SAT. "At high schools across the...