Navigation

Entries in ADHD Medication (1)

Thursday
Feb172011

Sedation nation the cost of taking boisterous out of boys

I have an acquaintance who, apart from being a practising professional, successful academic and author of several important books, is a pianist capable of rendering entire Bach cantatas as casually as you or I might plunk out Chopsticks. He also has seven equally accomplished children, an undisclosed number of complex relationships, a flourishing side-career as a magician and a personal presence so intensively entertaining that catching up once every few years is enough. These days, I imagine, he would be diagnosed with ADHD and medicated into normalcy. And it's this that makes me wonder. Assuredly there are those who benefit from Ritalin, but a fourfold increase in seven years? And five times as many boys as girls, almost all of them pubescent? Surely this should give us pause for thought.