By Donna Wick
About five years ago I noticed that doctors were no longer claiming that ADD medication worked only for those who had ADD. Not surprisingly, this coincided with the dawning recognition that both the diagnosis and medication of ADD/HD had increased so dramatically (from 1 in 20 in the ’80s and ’90s to 1 in 9 today) that it was highly unlikely that everyone prescribed ADD/HD medication actually had the disorder. Children, parents, adults, and doctors were using stimulant medication for “cognitive enhancement” — the off-label use of these drugs for people who did not have ADD/HD — but claiming benefits from the sustained alertness these medications provided. Simultaneously, drug companies were effectively marketing and advertising stimulant drugs to cover an increasingly broader and looser diagnosis of ADD/HD. […]
This is a complicated question as the recent LA Times interview with Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler illustrates. Hinshaw and Scheffler have just published a book, The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medication, Money and Today’s Push for Performance (Oxford University Press), in which they discuss the economic pressures, government polices, and cultural differences that are behind the increase in diagnoses of this disorder. It’s all fascinating, but what caught my attention was Hinshaw’s discussion of a University of Pennsylvania study that came out in 2013.
Read more here.