Re:FDA approves new ADHD drug for children
by jasonkester on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @03:26AM
(#26709051)
To be fair, this response was likely written in response to the second paragraph of my comment, which I have since removed (since it could be read to mean exactly what the comment in question understood it to). So itβs probably not as uncharitable as you think from reading it in its current context.
Re:FDA approves new ADHD drug for children
by majewsky on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @11:35AM
(#26713136)
> we've seriously fucked our own society in ways that aggravate this
My money is on this option. We have so much more things to cope with, and so much more change in these things to cope with, than we would have had 1000 years ago. I can imagine that this constant information overload would push some people over the edge that would have functioned well in an earlier society.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a specialist in psychiatry or anything like that.)
There's also the possibility that we're patholgizing normal behaviour. I'm not leaving that out as an option.
Incidence rate is probably higher than you think. Average college enrollment rate is less than 50%. Worse, 25% of kids drop out of high school. Also the kids who have been expelled due to behavioral problems.
Looking at the numbers, I'm leaning towards that too. 9.4 percent of children are diagnosed with ADHD, and that's just the confirmed cases, nothing about estimated prevalence. Either we're screwing up the diagnostic criteria and overlabelling people (or worse, we're diagnosing them out of convenience), or we've seriously fucked our own society in ways that aggravate this, and medication is at best a stopgap.