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...
Category: adhd
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...
16Oct 2012
Sometimes the most obvious questions are the hardest ones to see. After thousands of studies on the pros and cons of using Ritalin and other stimulants for ADHD, Ilina Singh, a researcher at King's College London, spotted one such question: What can we learn from the children who take them?
In a...
Sometimes the most obvious questions are the hardest ones to see. After thousands of studies on the pros and cons of using Ritalin and other stimulants for ADHD, Ilina Singh, a researcher at King's College London, spotted one such question: What can we learn from the children who take them?
In a new study--the first to ask children taking ADHD drugs what they thought about the treatment--she found that many said medication helped them to manage their impulsivity and to make better decisions.
It's astonishing to me that nobody thought to ask this question before. And so it surprises me that the coverage was relatively sparse. The story received some attention in England, but almost none in the U.S. The study--the press release is here, and the link to the study is here--included American and British children...
About two weeks ago, the journal PLoS ONE published an article titled "Why Most Biomedical Findings Echoed by Newspapers Turn Out to be False: The Case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder."
As The...
About two weeks ago, the journal PLoS ONE published an article titled "Why Most Biomedical Findings Echoed by Newspapers Turn Out to be False: The Case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder."
As The Economist noted in a September 22 story titled Reporting Science: Journalistic Deficit Disorder, this did not turn out to be a popular subject with newspaper reporters themselves, in fact, "as The Economist went to press, a search on Google News suggested that, a week after its publication, not a single newspaper had reported [the] paper."
In fact, the only reason I knew about the paper is that Andy Revkin at The New York Times called my attention to it, both by e-mail and in an...
The authors of an article on the website of Scientific American Mind are entitled to their opinion on whether or not children can get bipolar disorder. They are not entitled to dress up their...
The authors of an article on the website of Scientific American Mind are entitled to their opinion on whether or not children can get bipolar disorder. They are not entitled to dress up their opinion as reporting.
The article, by Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz, is headlined "Do Kids Get Bipolar Disorder?" That promises a broad examination of the topic. But that's not what we get.
The authors begin their story with a boy with behavior problems. But he's a fabrication. The story begins: "Imagine an eight-year old boy whom we will call Eric..." Imagination is a beautiful thing, but we should be wary of imagining characters in nonfiction. (Although it's a lot easier than finding real kids.)
They then recite statistics showing that the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children has risen sharply in...
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...
A few tidbits from the past week or two, thanks mostly to suggestions from Tracker...
A few tidbits from the past week or two, thanks mostly to suggestions from Tracker readers and Twitter friends:
• The Boston Globe put out a fine feature piece Mar. 20th on Ryan Westmoreland (left), once a top Red Sox prospect, who is now recovering from a sudden illness that could have killed him. The story is by Charles P. Pierce, a Globe magazine staff writer. You could call it a sports story, or a medical story. However you want to characterize it, it's one heck of a piece of writing. From the lede:
The afternoon is fading, and he is...
How many stories do we have to read about overmedicated kids? And why on earth, if the New...
How many stories do we have to read about overmedicated kids? And why on earth, if the New York Times felt the need to do yet another one, would it feature the thing so prominently?
I'm referring to Duff Wilson's "Child's Ordeal Shows Risk of Psychosis Drugs for Young" in today's paper.
I'll save you the trouble of reading this 2,000-word monster. Here's what it says: Some doctors are too quick to give drugs to kids who don't need them.
Is that front-page news? Some doctors are too quick to give drugs to 80-year-olds, too, or to middle-aged New York Times reporters who have sore joints because they just got divorced,...
Is ADHD a legit psychiatric diagnosis, or a label psychiatrists and drug companies have slapped on rowdy kids?
Addressing this...
Is ADHD a legit psychiatric diagnosis, or a label psychiatrists and drug companies have slapped on rowdy kids?
Addressing this question in a story is a little like addressing global warming a decade or so ago: There are two points of view, but one is held by an overwhelming number of people, the other by only a few.
Katherine Ellison, in a story in today's Washington Post, addresses the controversy head-on with a report on a new study that found differences in the way people with ADHD process the neurotransmitter dopamine, when compared to people without the illness.
Ellison opens her story with the question I used above, except hers is more...
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