Overselling A.D.H.D.

“We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”

Unfortunately, we can't modify much of the environment without giving up a lot of what we have. And, that's the trade-off of rapid progress - evolution is no where near as fast. We probably should change the schools for many reasons. But, changing them so that they're somehow more natural is probably an impossible goal, at least until we invent more technology.

Humans have had to deal environmental diseases at every major milestone: choosing residential over nomadic; domesticating livestock; using grain as a primary food source; choosing urban over rural; inventing industry, the corporation, and desk jobs; inventing dangerous chemicals for products and fuel; inventing processed foods; inventing weapons of mass destruction. The diseases that have come with these have been trade-offs that we have accepted.

As a sufferer of several psychological diseases, I suspect that mine are all environmental in some way - stress, close-quarters living, giant social hierarchies, living by the calendar and clock, being exposed to all sorts of toxins, etc. My nature tells me that I should be out running through the forest and chasing game - not sitting at a desk and typing on a keyboard. But, am I going to live alone in the forest? Hell no; I enjoy what I have.

I take several psychological drugs, and they have awful side-effects. And, I self-medicate in other ways. But, those are the trade-offs that I've chosen to be able to do all the things that my mind conjures.

I started taking these stimulants like vyvanse in college about five years ago. Although I can exhibit symptoms from time to time, I do not think at all that it is medically necessary for me. After trying them once, it made things a lot easier, and besides a few episodes, the good effects have been able to balance out the bad. I do get very worried occasionally though that I will have to suffer long term consequences. I am very much dependent though now this fear has not yet been strong enough to get me to stop.

I challenge someone to provide evidence enough to scare me into stopping. Go ahead, save my life

It would be interesting to know if length of school day correlates with diagnosis rate (controlling for confounding covariates), or if, e.g., Montessori schools have fewer diagnoses than public schools (again controlling for confounding covariates like family income, etc.).

> And if we're not willing to change that environment--and I don't think we are--then we should medicate the kids so at least the experience is tolerable and they can have some success with it

And as a result traditional response has been amphetamine-salts for children as you say. But I completely disagree that this is something we should do.

For one I think we don't have good enough science to know how potentially dangerous or helpful ADHD drugs really are. Is it going to help them adjust later, or will it be harder? Are they going to be dependent on amphetamines their whole life? Evaluation of drugs which are primarily targeted at emotional and behavioral problems is difficult enough in neutral conditions, since it is hard to control/evaluate/quantify results. Yet the conditions we are dealing with are totally not-neutral.

Basically big pharmaceutical companies fund lots of research - if the research doesn't support their product they can shelve it and fund some other studies until they have research which does. It's an awful field with too much money and lots of dishonest science.

Secondly, using medications to treat ADHD (because that makes money for their producers) is as you pointed out making us avoid the cultural / environmental problems which cause this issue. But I disagree that this is inherently from the 7-hour school day as you point out. Kids went to school for 7-hours 50 years ago as well, but ADHD diagnosis and medication use has been constantly increasing. [0]

A large factor to this is the increasing amount of stimulation that kids today are actively exposed to that they weren't in the past (I can't remember references of the top of my head, I'll try and find one though). Basically if you grow-up with 4-6 hours of TV or video games per day, yeah it's hard to sit down and read a book. Obvious right? And your recommendation is really to give amphetamines to 7-year olds? Rather than limit consumption of mediums that are inappropriately over-stimulating for large durations?

[0] http://images.slideplayer.com/18/5690061/slides/slide_2.jpg