<story><title>Ritalin Gone Wrong</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/childrens-add-drugs-dont-work-long-term.html </url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>trotsky</author><text>When Sroufe suggests the brain disorder known as ADHD may simply be the result of environment without providing a bit of supporting evidence, he ignores mountains of data that show strongly correlated multi-generational symptoms even when there was little or no contact. There is a reason science doesn&apos;t get presented on opinion pages. Trying to convince parents that it may not be a real disorder, or may not be developmental, or that drugs are ineffective does a serious disservice to the diagnosed. Stimulant drugs are unlikely to be the end all and be all for ADHD treatment, but they are currently the best we have and they&apos;ve been shown again and again to provide significant benefit.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ritalin Gone Wrong</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/childrens-add-drugs-dont-work-long-term.html </url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_delirium</author><text>On a more basic level before even getting to treatment, imo it&apos;d be useful to have more studies on what the distribution of some sort of trait called &quot;attention&quot; is in the population to begin with, perhaps in various common situations. That might provide some sort of baseline: if, for example, 90% of people have &quot;abnormally low&quot; attention by some measure in some situation, then the definition of &quot;abnormal&quot; is probably wrong. In that case, rather than concluding that 90% of people need to be treated for a disorder, it might make more sense to conclude that the alleged &quot;normal&quot; characteristics are actually quite rare, demanding a characteristic that &amp;#60;10% of humans naturally have. Of course, other numbers might lead to different conclusions.&lt;p&gt;Put differently, it feels like it&apos;d be easier to have rigorous discussions about deviations from normal mental functioning if we first had a good, data-based picture of &quot;normal mental functioning&quot;. I&apos;ve looked but have had difficulty finding any such studies.</text></comment>