Are we at war with ADHD? David McMillian talks with co-author Richard Scheffler about his book “The ADHD Explosion – Myths, Medication, Money and Today’s Push for Performance.” Together they explore how the recents changes in the health care sector and the push for excellence in standardized tests resulted in a rise of ADHD diagnosis in […]
With ADD and ADHD becoming more common diagnoses, (as scientific advisor to the Foundation Dr. Steven Hinshaw writes his new book The ADHD Explosion) we all seem to know someone affected by it. “Our hope is that people connect with [the movie] and it gets them talking, sharing their stories, their experiences,” said movie co-writer Todd Camhe.
The line that separates the merely scattered and energetic child from one who fits the disorder’s full clinical criteria is not sharp. And Hinshaw and Scheffler argue that our shifting expectations of our kids’ (and our own) economic and academic performance have tilted the balance in favor of diagnosing an underachieving child and of medicating him or her with the stimulant drugs used to blunt the disorder’s symptoms.
In their forthcoming book The ADHD Explosion, Hinshaw and Scheffler—a psychologist and health economist, respectively, at the University of California at Berkeley—examine the causes behind the startling and rapid rise in diagnosis rates of ADHD, a neurobehavioural disorder that has somehow become epidemic.
Unless we’re careful, today’s preschool bandwagon could lead straight to an epidemic of 4- and 5-year-olds wrongfully being told that they have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Introducing millions of 3-to 5-year-olds to classrooms and pre-academic demands means that many more distracted kids will undoubtedly catch the attention of their teachers. Sure, many children this age are already in preschool, but making the movement universal and embedding transitional-K programs in public schools is bound to increase the pressure. We’re all for high standards, but danger lurks.
Richard Scheffler goes live on Fox News this morning to talk about the surge in ADHD diagnoses and the role education policy plays.
A new book, “The ADHD Explosion” by Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler, looks at this extraordinary increase in ADHD. What’s the explanation? Some rise in environmental toxins? Worse parenting? Better detection? Drs. Hinshaw and Scheffler—both of them at the University of California, Berkeley, my university—present some striking evidence that the answer lies, at least partly, in changes in educational policy.
In a new book, The ADHD Explosion, Stephen Hinshaw, PhD, and Richard Scheffler, PhD, recipients of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research, examine the overall marked increase in ADHD diagnosis over the past decade, along with significant regional differences in the number of ADHD cases diagnosed. They find that education policy could be a major factor fueling the trend.
“Competition in today’s global economy is fuelling the dramatic increase in the use of ADHD medications, especially in the United States,” says Richard Scheffler, a health economist at UC Berkeley. A study co-authored by Stephen Hinshaw, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, showed that gains among students who took ADHD medications were not enough to close the test-score gap.
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