There’s a news feature in the New York Times today (“Drowned in a Stream of Prescriptions”)  that focuses on the problem of addiction to ADHD medications.  While the article deals mainly with college students and young adults who deceive mental health professionals into thinking they have ADHD so that they can receive these highly addictive...Read More

Yesterday in the New York Times an op ed piece appeared entitled ”Successful and Schizophrenic’‘ that affirmed the importance of neurodiversity and the value of strengths in people with mental health labels.  Written by Elyn Saks, who has lived with schizophrenia all her life yet been highly successful in several fields (professor of law, psychoanalyst, MacArthur fellow), the piece...Read More

The American Institute for Learning and Human Development has just produced five short videos that take up the concept of neurodiversity (the idea that disabilities should be regarded instead as diversities), and apply it to the following diagnoses:  learning disabilities, autism, ADHD, intellectual disabilities, and emotional and behavioral disorders.  In each video, the executive director...Read More

The December 14th shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, have opened up a Pandora’s box of issues related to mental health.  One controversy in particular relates to the shooter Adam Lanza’s alleged identification as a person with a mild form of autism spectrum disorder called Asperger’s syndrome.  This hearsay diagnosis in turn has ignited a strong rebuttal from the...Read More

A new study reported in the journal Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, revealed that the youngest children in any given grade are more likely to do poorly on standardized tests, and more likely to be prescribed stimulant medications for ADHD compared to older students at the same grade level.  The...Read More