Drugs, Greed and a Dead Boy

Andrew Francesco was a rambunctious, athletic and joyful child, but also a handful. When he was 5 years old, a psychiatrist prescribed Ritalin. As he grew older, he disrupted classes and was given a growing number of potent antipsychotic and other medications.

These didn’t work, so he was prescribed more. Pushed out of one school after another, Andrew grew frustrated, unhappy and sometimes alarming. His parents hid the kitchen knives. Then his mother died at 54; the family believes that the stress of raising Andrew was a factor.

These Illustrations Perfectly Sum Up What It's Like To Have ADHD It's so much more than being "not focused."

ADHD, also known as as ADD, affects 6.4 million children between the ages of 4 and 17, according to the CDC. 

 

Defined as a chronic condition that includes symptoms such as fidgeting and impatience, as well as difficulty concentrating and processing information quickly, ADHD isn't just limited to children:  50 percent of children who are diagnosed with it experience symptoms of ADHD into adulthood. 

 

In an effort to break down the stigma surrounding ADHD -- and unfortunately there still is one -- Buzzfeed's Caroline Kee put together illustrations that will hit very close to home for anyone with ADHD. 

 

The Decline of Play and Rise in Children's Mental Disorders Children are more anxious and depressed than ever before. Why?

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Rates of depression and anxiety among young people in America have been increasing steadily for the past fifty to seventy years. Today, by at least some estimates, five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depressionand/or an anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant.

7 Qualities That Make a Great ADHD Doctor

I think one of my kids might have ADHD! (© 2015 Mark Aro)

My husband thought our new family doctor was doing a great job relating to him when he offered up his own experience: “I took Ritalin,” the doctor admitted.

Eagerly, Mark asked, “So you have ADHD, too?”

His doctor’s response shocked him: “No, I just tried it, you know, in college.”

The doctor tried to laugh it off and cover his limited knowledge of ADHD by asking my husband how long he’d had the disorder. He looked shocked when Mark told him he’d had it all his life.

Psychiatry’s Identity Crisis

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CreditLeonardo Sonnoli 

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AMERICAN psychiatry is facing a quandary: Despite a vast investment in basic neuroscience research and its rich intellectual promise, we have little to show for it on the treatment front.

With few exceptions, every major class of current psychotropic drugs — antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti-anxiety medications — basically targets the same receptors and neurotransmitters in the brain as did their precursors, which were developed in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sure, the newer drugs are generally safer and more tolerable than the older ones, but they are no more effective.

10 Things I’d Tell My Former (Medicated) Self

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CreditYann Kebbi

In the fall of 2014 the author decided to quit the prescription medications she has been taking to treat her anxiety, depression and insomnia, and began the process of gradually reducing her dosages. In Going Off, a series of Anxiety posts that began in February, she has chronicled the challenges she has faced from both the drugs and the withdrawal. This is the final installment.

How to Cut Children’s Screen Time? Say No to Yourself First.

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CreditPaul Rogers

Parents are often at fault, directly or indirectly, when children and teenagers become hooked on electronic media, playing video games or sending texts many hours a day instead of interacting with the real world and the people in it. And as discussed in last week’s column, digital overload can impair a child’s social, emotional and intellectual growth.

Today’s Exhausted Superkids

There are several passages in the new book “Overloaded and Underprepared” that fill me with sadness for American high school students, the most driven of whom are forever in search of a competitive edge. Some use stimulants like Adderall. Some cheat.

But the part of the book that somehow got to me most was about sleep.

It’s a prerequisite for healthy growth. It’s a linchpin of sanity. Before adulthood, a baseline amount is fundamental and nonnegotiable, or should be.

But many teenagers today are so hyped up and stressed out that they’re getting only a fraction of the rest they need. The book mentions a high school in Silicon Valley that brought in outside sleep experts, created a kind of sleep curriculum and trained students as “sleep ambassadors,” all to promote shut-eye.

Parents’ Denial Fuels Childhood Obesity Epidemic

Not only was the 16-year-old boy 60 pounds overweight, but a blood test showed he might have fatty liver disease. At last, his mother took him to a pediatric weight management clinic in New Haven. But she did not at all like the dietitian’s advice.

“I can’t believe you’re telling me I can’t buy Chips Ahoy! cookies,” said the mother, herself a nurse.

The Medical Model Discovers Heroin Addiction

Heroin Epidemic

The United States is experiencing an epidemic of heroin addiction and a sharp rise in opiate over-dose death. Contrary to addicts being introduced to opiate addiction through street heroin, 75% of new addicts became addicted through prescription opiates. When the OxyContin becomes too expensive ($80/pill), people switch to the cheaper street heroin ($5-10/hit). Nora Volkow of NIDA, Tom Frieden of the CDC, and Michael Botticelli of the President’s Office of Drug Control Policy have advocated the expansion of methadone programs and buprenorphine treatment to respond to the epidemic. SAMSHA, the federal agency which regulates methadone maintenance programs, suggests that we call these interventions “Medication Assisted Treatment” (MAT) rather than opiate substitution programs so as not to stigmatize people.

Mind Your Body: Inward Bound

The mysterious connection between emotion and physical sensation is coming into ever-sharper focus.



The sight of a blazing sunset, the sound of a ringing phone, the aroma of fresh bread as you pass a bakery—we tend to think of sensory perception as the way we process external stimuli with our eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and skin. Yet there’s another form of sensory perception, known as interoception, that involves the feelings that originate within the body, such as hunger, thirst, breathlessness, pain, temperature, heartbeat, muscle tension, and bladder pressure.

None of the Above An emerging group of transgender people is looking beyond “man” and “woman."

OUT OF THE BOX: "This isn't something people are making up," says CN Lester, who is genderqueer.

When CN Lester shows up in the waiting room of, say, a doctor’s office and is asked to fill out a personal information form, the inevitable question arises: M or F? The tattooed 30-year-old has developed a habit of inking an extra box and checking it.

“The sheer act of doing so often makes someone take the form back silently,” says Lester, a classically trained musician who lives in London. “You can sometimes feel like a legal nonentity. It’s really frustrating.”

Lester, who as a child hated being called a girl but never felt quite like a “man trapped in a woman’s body,” came out as transgender 15 years ago. As an umbrella term, the word transgender refers to those whose sense of their gender differs from what is expected based on the sexcharacteristics with which they are born.