When starting school, younger children are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD
FiveThirtyEight ran an article on ADHD prescriptions [1]. It&#x27;s getting pretty silly. If people don&#x27;t know ADHD was not recognized as a disorder until 1968. And the popularity of drugging people for it didn&#x27;t really take off until the 90s when a pharmaceutical industry astroturfing group called CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit) started marketing ritalin hard. Since then the use of using various pharmaceutical stimulants has become extremely widespread - jumping up by multiple orders of magnitude.<p>I&#x27;m unsure what the latest numbers are but they offer the data to 2013. And just between 2008 and 2013 adult usage of ADHD medication doubled. It was at 2.8% and has likely continued to rapidly increase. That&#x27;s completed dwarfed by what we&#x27;re now doing to kids and particularly boys. In 2013 we were up to 9.8% of all boys 12-18 years taking ADHD drugs. And those numbers again were, and presumably still are, rapidly increasing.<p>I have this likely decreasingly controversial view that history is not going to look back so kindly on psychology and our decision to start pretending we can create a pill for everything. I mean what could possibly go wrong getting 10%+ of boys setup with stimulants, and increasingly often other sorts of psychotropics as well, from their earliest and most critical developmental years?<p>-----<p>Of course I&#x27;m sure people will now respond with how these drugs saved their life and without them they&#x27;d be homeless, in prison, etc. To these people I have a simple logical question. Let&#x27;s assume this is true that you would indeed be homeless, in prison, etc without these drugs. We now see these drugs numbers are absolutely skyrocketing to the point that sizable chunks of our entire population are on them. So if we go back in time, why don&#x27;t we see skyrocketing prison&#x2F;homelessness&#x2F;etc as a consequence of people not being able to have these drugs? Given the exponential increase in prescribing rates you don&#x27;t need to go back far. We should be able to see huge and causably linked differences just over the last decade or two.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;dear-mona-how-many-adults-take-adhd-drugs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;dear-mona-how-many-adul...</a>