Pre-psychosis In The News

Attenuated psychosis syndrome, alternately called psychosis risk syndrome, pre-psychosis and prodromal disorder is going into section 3 of the DSM-5. This is the section for disorder labels that need more review, and which will not be reimbursable. The bad news is that it is in the DSM at all, and being in the DSM, it’s going to be considered as a disorder. The good news is that it is not an “official” disorder label, insurance companies are under no obligation to pay for it, and so its not likely to explode into an epidemic next year.

Researchers, it seems, much less fastidious than DSM revisers, are intent in studying people afflicted with this fictitious and elusive label. The latest rage in pseudo-scientific discoveries concerns this nebulous early stage in the development of psychosis. An article in the Detroit Free Press, Schizophrenia may give early warning signs, is typical.

Researchers in Chapel Hill looked at brain scans of 42 children, some as young as 9, who had close relatives with schizophrenia. They saw that many of the children already had areas of the brain that were “hyper-activated” in response to emotional stimulation and tasks that required decision-making, said Aysenil Belger, associate professor of psychiatry at the UNC School of Medicine and lead author of the study.

Now whether psychiatrized families actually think differently from non-psychiatrized families is anyone’s guess, and it could always be the topic for additional research should anybody choose to go there.

People who have a parent or sibling with schizophrenia are about 10 times more likely to develop the disease than those who do not. Signs of the illness typically begin in the late teens to mid-20s. These include declines in memory, intelligence and other brain functions that indicate a weakening in the brain’s processing abilities. More advanced symptoms may include paranoid beliefs and hallucinations.

Perhaps this sounds like an astonishing figure until you realize that it actually means 1 in 10 people rather than 1 in 100 people.  This is to say that among the 1 in 100 people that get described as psychotic, 1 in 10 of their closest relatives could also be so described. Unlike in the rest of the world where the rate stays more or less at 1 %. 1 in 10 means that chances are, if you are in a family haunted by the phenomenon of psychosis in one of its members, 9 out of 10 of it’s members most probably wouldn’t be described as psychotic anyway.

“Of all the people who seem to have compromised circuitry in their brain, if we come back and image them in later years, some may be moving toward the cluster of symptoms for schizophrenia while others may have other types of deficits,” such as bipolar disorder or attention deficit disorder, Belger said.

The article goes on to add, “Still others may avoid serious disorders altogether”, but the damage has been done. If you were an agent of the inquisition, let’s say, looking for witches, you are not going to be questioning the existence of witches. If you want to find fault in anyone, or anything, no problem. Just conduct a fault finding mission. If you are out to praise those people, well, hunting for future “mental illnesses” is just not the way to do so.

I think these researchers have better things to be doing with their time. We really have a problem when the DSM starts predicting disorders in people.  Ignoring any fork in the pathway that may lead to dysfunction, from functionality, is a major shortcoming, I would imagine. Ditto, in the case of paths that lead to folly from reason and wisdom. You are postulating that mental and emotional disturbances are a matter of predestination, and I imagine such leaps of faith belong in the realm of superstition rather than in the realm of scientific inquiry and skepticism.

This doesn’t mean that pre-psychosis isn’t going to make it’s way as a reimbursable disorder in a future edition of the DSM. I imagine, if things continue going the way they are going, it will. There is a lot of nonsense in the DSM. I would say maybe 100 % of the DSM is sheer nonsense. All the same, quite literally, even a listing as a category for diagnosis won’t make future psychosis a real disorder in present time.

Civil Rights Under Seige

If you thought former President George W. Bush, who wanted to screen every man, woman, and child of us for “mental illness” was bad, President Barack O’bama has climbed onto the same band wagon. President Obama essentially wants to turn our entire public education system into a mental health police state.

According to a report in the Bangor Daily News on the subject, White House wants $235 million for mental health programs.

President Barack Obama’s budget proposal will include $235 million in funding for new mental health programs focused on initiatives to help schools detect early warning signs and train thousands of new mental health professionals, an administration official said.

Alright that sounds benign enough, but just keep reading.

The new budget plan will propose $130 million for programs that train teachers and other adults to help recognize the early signs of mental illness in students. That includes $55 million for a new program called Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education), which will give states and local school districts grants to administer such programs, while also collecting data on how well they work.

I’ve got nothing against ‘wellness’ nor ‘resilience’, I just have many reservations about whether that’s what we’re going to get out of these programs or not. On the other hand, training people to recognize signs of “mental illness” can be very questionable, especially when one of those early signs is being under the age of 18.

Another $50 million would go toward training master’s-level mental health specialists, such as psychologists, nurses and counselors, who work in schools. The idea is to expand the mental health workforce to prepare for the demands of millions of Americans who will gain health insurance coverage next year under the Affordable Care Act.

The “mental illness” labeling rate has been skyrocketing for years. Imagine the present “mental illness” labeling rate. Imagine that rate going up even further. It’s got to be extremely difficult to sell insurance plans, treatment options, and anti-”stigma” campaigns, without also selling the “diseases” that go along with them.

The consequences of this “mental illness” selling platform doesn’t concern the President very much as, following the Newton Connecticut tragedy, making scapegoats of people in the mental health system rather than achieving any real gun control legislation is one way for him to give the appearance that he’s doing something about the problem of gunmen in schoolyards. I’m afraid it is going to be causative in so far as increased “mental illness” labeling is concerned, and I’m also afraid that it’s not going to be preventative when it comes to massive acts of violence.

Sooner or later, later apparently, it’s going to come around to acknowledging that these citizens who have had their citizenship rights taken away from them are still citizens. Then comes the revelation, now that we’ve got two unequal castes of citizens, how do we refer to them? Dividing people into sick and well no longer works as what we’ve actually got is a legal distinction rather than a medical one. Sick people get well. Lower class citizens get lower wages, if they get wages at all, substandard living conditions, and the distinction of being deprived of their constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Bringing the war in the classroom home to your doorstep

Did somebody say it’s jungle out there? It isn’t a jungle, it’s a war zone, especially in the public school system. Among the new disorders in the DSM-5, such as adult ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) , you will also find childhood PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) listed.

Just read between the lines on the first paragraph of this ABC News report, Psychiatry ‘Bible’ DSM-5 Will Add PTSD for Preschoolers, and imagine millions, perhaps billions, of shell-shocked kiddies returning home from their school day.

 When the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5, is published in May, a small section could alter the lives of millions of children.

Not to be alarmed, despite this potential sharp rise in the number of children labeled ‘off their rocking horses’, mental health professionals tell us they’ve got treatment, and that this treatment can be effective.

Small children develop PTSD at the same rate as adults — one in four — and the number of potential sufferers is vast, said Dr. Judith Cohen, a psychiatry professor at Drexel University’s College of Medicine.

I imagine we could just give children signs on their first day of class, basing children numbers on adult numbers, of course. Numbers, you know, don’t change. 1/4th of the students would receive a sign that read PTSD, and 3/4th of the students would receive signs that read NORMAL. The students with the signs that said PTSD could then automatically be enrolled in a treatment plan.

And yet because existing DSM criteria doesn’t apply to young children, and because of society’s tendency to idealize children as resilient, pre-schoolers aren’t getting the diagnoses they desperately need, [vice chairman of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Tulane University, Dr. Charles] Zeanah [Jr.] said.

Children are idealized as resilient. Oh, that explains it! We don’t have the time to offer classes to parents, teachers, and children in ‘how to be more resilience’ then I guess. Notice, they desperately need diagnoses, too. You think so?

If you will excuse me, I think I’ve had enough of this nonsense, and so I think I’m going to return to my bunker for a little blissful shuteye. The prospect of a nation of shell-shocked children is just a little much for me to face head-on alone at the moment. I’ve got my own patch of green pasture that needs tending.

Repercussions from the Sandy Hook tragedy slight in Florida

It looks like Florida may not suffer as extensively from the fallout over the Newtown Connecticut massacre as some other states. The Palm Beach Post headline,  State May Shrink Mental Health Spending, doesn’t tell the whole story.

Despite a growth in the state’s anticipated revenue for the first time in six years, Gov. Rick Scott’s proposed 2013-2014 budget does not include any increase for mental health services. Neither Scott nor GOP legislative leaders mentioned the issue as a priority on the opening day of the legislative session Tuesday. And lawmakers appear split on the only two proposals in play — mandatory mental health screening of elementary school students and extending the observation period for patients who are involuntarily committed by law enforcement or health officials.

The problem concerns these two pieces of legislation that I hope our legislators will have the common sense and decency to table or vote down. Busting school children for “mental illness” is what mandatory mental health screening is all about and, frankly, if there’s one thing we don’t need, that is it. Labeling children “mentally ill”, and putting them on powerful pharmaceuticals, is not good for their educations, nor is it good for their futures. Extending the Baker Act would be a completely absurd, unnecessary, and as far as humanity goes, a wasteful thing to do.

Thankfully, given our republican controlled legislature, as bad as things are, these representatives are not in hurry to make them worse. Praised be the tightwad when the spending he isn’t spending on is repressive and draconian legislation.

The issue with spending is that it could, if it were used for something else besides busting people for “mental illness”, reduce mental health spending in the state anyway.

More than half of Florida’s mental health spending goes to hospitalization. Other states, on average, spend less than 30 percent on hospitalization, said Florida Council for Community Mental Health President Bob Sharpe.

Hospitalization is very costly. Keeping people out of the state hospital system through building a statewide community mental health care system is one way to potentially save a lot of money.

As for the Baker Act…

DCF estimates that 35,000 out of 110,770 people held under the Baker Act last year had been Baker Acted before. Sharpe points to at least one man who was Baker Acted 100 times in a single year, meaning he was hospitalized nearly the entire year.

It would seem that one person would have a pretty good case for suing the state, if he had any legal rights to stand on at all, which apparently, as a mental patient, he doesn’t.  On the other hand, when the state can Baker Act one person 100 times in the course of a single year, there is certainly no reason to extend the Baker Act. It seems institutions here have that power already.

Policing Mental Health In The Schools

If you want to erase the “stigma” of “mental illness”, stop labeling people nutzoid. All the discrimination and harm that comes of “mental health” treatment has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is with the diagnostic tag.

The sad part is that now children are being labeled “mentally ill” at incredibly young ages, 2 year olds, 3 year olds, 4 year olds, 6 year olds, 8 and 9 year olds. I’ve got news for you people. Psychiatric drugs are no replacement for good parenting practices.

If folks knew this, perhaps they would be less inclined to label their toddler a problem toddler. All 2 year olds, for instance, are a world of trouble, as are all teenagers, and I’d think more than twice about labeling them, too.

I know it’s not bad parents, it’s ‘bad’ children, but all the same. I remember when we used to think of children as innocent, and when we used to put a great deal of emphasis on child rearing. If I remember correctly, there was much less childhood “mental illness” back then as well.

The problem we’ve got now is a big part of the Obama administration solution to violent school massacres.  Primary and secondary school workers, from principals on down to the janitorial staff, are being turned into mental health police. That’s right, the idea is to bust children for “mental illness”.

Well, the only thing we’re likely to get out of making our educationalists mental health cops is an increase in troubled peoples. When troubles are pathologized, hey, that’s a cinch for compounding them. The big tab for Obama care, as a result, is likely to get much much bigger.

Reversing the damage as treatment paradigm

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a disease that didn’t officially exist until 1980, has been astoundingly successful at making drug companies happy. Just look at outcomes. Pasted at the bottom of much of the recent ADHD bad news is something like the following from a USA Today article, Childhood ADHD often can linger into adulthood.

Among those age 27 who had been diagnosed with ADHD as children:

– 37.5% had no ADHD and no psychiatric disorders

– 33.2% had no ADHD and one or more psychiatric disorders

– 23.7% had ADHD and one or more psychiatric disorders

– 5.6% had ADHD and no psychiatric disorders

ADHD is said to affect roughly 9 % of the adolescent male population, and somewhat less for the adolescent female population, in the USA.

Conventional wisdom has gone completely bonkers in finding these statistics a motive for increasing mental health spending. Increased mental health focus and funding will mean an increased ADHD rate, and given that increase, an increase in the diagnostic labels that accompany it.

Mental health treatment IS the problem when that treatment is a matter of encouraging children not to seek the self-reliance and financial independence that comes with adulthood. Mental health treatment essentially represents providing much disincentive to the process of growing up. What do we get out of this treatment? An oxymoron, ‘adult children’.

The recovery rates for people with what are typically thought of as much more serious disorders–schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder–parallel the recovery rates for ADHD. They might be a little worse, 10 % or so, but not much.

The reasons for these bad outcomes are two-fold. First, the major form of treatment is with ineffective and often harmful psychiatric drugs. Although these drugs may be effective for the short term, in the long term their effects are disastrously debilitating. Second, you’ve got a dependency system that instead of ushering people back into the real world of everyday life cripples them forever.

We will start with the expression “burden to society” and go from there. The question remains, how does society “unburden” itself of this problem it has produced for itself? Well, one thing is certain, it doesn’t “unburden” itself of the “burden” by making the “burden” an industry. This is essentially what we have today. We have a mental health treatment system that is involved primarily in the manufacture of more and more cases of “mental illness”.

I don’t encourage people to go and seek mental health treatment. I don’t encourage them to do so because in so doing they stand a good chance of losing many of their basic rights as citizens. “Stigma” is not in the hearts and minds of their fellow human beings. “Stigma” is in laws and mental health treatment records that make up the hearts and minds of their fellow human beings. Records that will follow them around to the end of their days.

On The Presumption Of Future Guilt

Now is not a good time to be in mental health treatment. Although people talk about reducing the “stigma” associated with “mental illness” labels, give the public a tragic massacre of the dimensions we saw at Sandy Hook, and everybody who has ever received mental health treatment automatically becomes a suspected future mass murderer.

It just ain’t so.

The problem is not medical, the problem is human. You take any individual who is not solely concentrated on making a million dollars by the time he or she turns thirty, and you’ve got a troubled individual. Our view of success is twisted in the extreme. We’ve got all these so called mental health advocates screaming, “Give, give, give”, because  all sorts of behaviors and emotions are being pathologized.

Bad conduct is not a disease. Shyness is not a disease. Boredom and inattention are not diseases. Anxiety and sadness are not diseases. Elation and excitement are not diseases. Silliness is not a disease. They aren’t real diseases anyway, but you can begin to get some idea of how these mental health treatment sales people put out these crazy (and I don’t mean “mentally ill”) 1 in 4 needy people statistics.

With 1 in 4 people characterized as “mentally ill”, it’s easy to see how any individual from out of this large population of people could cause devastating damage with a gun. With 3 in 4 people characterized as not needing “mental health” treatment, it’s easy to see how any individual out of this large population could cause devastating damage as well. Problem is, once that damage is done, the 3 in 4 becomes a 1 in 4. The armchairs come out, and the diagnosing begins.

Multiple murder is not a symptom of “mental illness”. Multiple murder involves the commission of multiple felonies.  The law imagines every man, woman, and child of us to be capable of committing murder. The only people the law picks up as potential suspects in future murders are people who have been diagnosed “mentally ill”.  If they had the rights of people in the criminal justice system they would not be presumed,  individually or collectively, guilty of these future crimes.

Sage advice is something young people aren’t born possessing. Inexperience always was one of the shortcomings of youth, and walking arm in arm with inexperience goes folly. If you’re going to learn by trial and error, you’re training is going to be fraught with many errors. Wisdom, it has been said, comes with age. Inexperience is not a disease either, but the problem with treating it as such is that then wisdom becomes more elusive than ever. There is no wisdom drug on the market, and there is not likely to be one any time soon.

A pill bottle is not a good substitute for parents, nor is a pill bottle a good substitute for sage advice. When the parenting role has been demoted due to conflicting responsibilities and priorities, the social mentoring role assumes all that much more importance. Folly is a right. Making mistakes comes with making decisions. Making decisions comes with freedom of choice. You are going to make a wrong decision. To err is human, to correct an error is also human. When correcting error ceases to be a human endeavor, you will have nothing but errors.

Forcing mental health treatment on people out of a fear of future violence is one of the biggest threats to freedom this country has ever faced. Force involves the deprivation of liberty.  Liberty is one of the fundamental values behind the foundation of this nation. When 1 in 4 people are categorized as “sick”, 1 in 4 people in this nation become suspected future killers. This 1 in 4 is much more than it once was, before mental health treatment, and with mental health treatment, drug company profits, became such a hot item.

The tragedies at Columbine, V-Tech, and Sandy Hook are byproducts of this mental health system pharmaceutical industry honeymoon, romance, and marriage. Perfect children don’t shoot perfect children. Perfect children don’t exist. Imperfect children have been deemed fodder for the pharmaceutical industry. Imperfect children are all children. Inexperienced children are innocent children. Wise children are adults. What did I say? You’re not going to find wisdom in a pill bottle.

Mental Health Policing On Miami Teacher Curricula

Did I say teacher curricula? Actually school workers across the board are being trained to walk the mental health cop beat. As the Miami Herald reports, in a story bearing the heading, Miami teachers get mental illness training…(Really? They train people in that, do they?)

Teachers, cafeteria workers and janitors in Miami-Dade County middle schools and high schools will receive training on how to identify early-warning signs of mental illness.

All you Miami area students out there remember ‘the straight and narrow’ because if you ever forget you’re likely to wind up somewhere near a mental health counseling center, if not in Dante’s Inferno.

The Herald reports the training will be administered by mental health professionals to about 100 school district psychologists and counselors. They, in turn, will train other employees. Possible signs of mental illness can include sleeping through class, bizarre writings and extreme risk-taking.

Students are advised to be wary and take necessary precautions. Take uppers (so called performance enhancing drugs) if you have to do so to get through boring classes. Hire a non-creative writing tutor if you think it will help you get to graduation. Scratch the idea of launching your own Jackass type film production as a video class project.

Beyond this you need to do a little research, and it wouldn’t hurt to get an outline of the teacher police work curricula to better escape detection and diagnosis. A little knowledge would allow you to move more easily under the radar so to speak. Students, that is to say, given teachers with “mental illness” training, need to hone their own mental health skills. If you’ve any question about what mental health skills entail, read a book on any “mental illness” label there is, and exclude from your daily behavioral repertoire those behaviors listed as “symptoms”.

Flamboyance, eccentricity, and non-conformity are to be suppressed until after graduation if possible. Free and critical thinking as well. The idea is to study the idea of dull until you have it down by heart. Breathe dull, think dull, act dull. Got it! Study dull. Dull will win you awards. Dull is the way to go. Dull is blood brother to “normal”. Dull will get you a job with a multinational corporation. Successful people work for high paying multinational corporations.

The Government’s Response To The Sandy Hook Tragedy

The good news is that President Obama wants some form of gun control when it comes to automatic weapons and ammo. If we limit the number of massively killing machines that there are out there, we limit the number of chances that you will get the kind of body counts you got at V-Tech and Sandy Hook. Body counts, in fact, almost rivaling the Oklahoma City bombing. Unfortunately, gun control measures are not likely to get very far in today’s atmosphere. You’ve got the gun lobby and a Republican controlled congress to contend with. Talk about gun control always triggers a gun buying frenzy among certain segments of the public as well. The gun control measures are perhaps the least likely items on the agenda to get passed.This leads us to the rest of the counteracting measures, and that’s the bad news.

First there is this matter of closing the loopholes in the federal background check database. The problem here is that people labeled “mentally ill” are actually less likely to commit violent crimes than the general population. This group has become the scapegoat for the acts of violence committed by a very few failed and frustrated individuals. None of the people who committed the multiple shootings we have seen in the recent past would have been caught by such a database even if the so called loopholes were closed. This database targets not only people who have known the inside of a mental institution, but also foreigners in this country illegally, spouse abusers, and ex-felons. This database will be used by law enforcement for harassing the people who are in it. The database itself constitutes a loophole in the bill of rights of the US constitution as none of the people in the database are to be accorded the rights that full citizenship would ordinarily accord a person. As such, it represents a loophole in constitutional protections of citizenship. This certainly creates quite a challenge for the people unfortunate enough to find themselves listed. They’ve got the fight for the civil rights that have been taken away from them, ahead of them.

Additionally, there is the matter of mental health insurance parody. Parity is too good a word. This parody involves insurance companies treating psychosomatic conditions as if they were physical conditions. The key words here are “as if”. We’re expected to allow insurance companies to take up the slack for a broken mental health system. Really. If the mental health system were recovering contributing members of society this wouldn’t be a problem, but that’s not the case. People receiving “mental illness” labels are expected to languish for the duration of their lives in some form of convalescence for which someone else picks up the tab. Insurance parity, on top of job discrimination, equals economic damage. Malingering should not be turned into the kind of a career that insurance parody of this sort can turn it into. This is economic damage. It is economic damage to the individual and it is economic damage to the nation as a whole. It is keeping people weak and dependent who should be strong and independent.

Finally officials want to beef up mental health policing and surveillance in the school systems. They would have more money pumped into counseling and screening children and adolescents in the hopes that they could catch problem kids before they left school and shot bunches of people. The problem is that such an effort is likely to have a result opposite the one intended. Early intervention is not prevention; it actually amounts to causation. Putting money into mental health in the schools is invariably going to increase the numbers of school children labeled “mentally ill”. These numbers have increased dramatically recently in no small measure due to the focus that mental health has received in the mass media. Children that enter mental health treatment don’t always leave mental health treatment alive. There is a statistic that indicates the failure of the mental health system that I alluded to earlier. If 1/2 of the people labeled lifelong mental patients are labeled by the age of 14 years old, as it is indeed said they are, do we really want to label more children? Increasing the numbers of children labeled “seriously mentally ill” is going to increase the numbers of adults labeled “seriously mentally ill”. Children grow up, but they don’t always grow up healthy. A healthy mental health system is a system that is contracting. An unhealthy mental health system is a system that is expanding. We’ve got better things to do than to sell “mental illness” under the pretext of selling mental health.

The government has better ways to serve the people of this country than by beefing up it’s mental health security force the way it wants to do in the schools. This patrolling the hallways of our nation’s schools for errant behavior is going to result in more students penalized, and in many cases, pathologized, for annoying behavior. Children, as a rule, grow up. As they are children, we have to expect them to engage in a certain amount of foolish and silly behavior. We have to expect them to make mistakes. We also have to expect them to be able to learn from mistakes to correct mistakes. Lowering the expectation for some of them that they will ever attain the wisdom that comes with age is not an improvement. Damaging the futures of children in the name of mental health, although the course we are set on, is not the kind of thing we should be doing with our nation’s children.

Just Wait Until “Adult ADHD” Rates Catch Up

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) rates are going up. Hardly a shocking finding. If you invent a disease, disease rates are likely to go up rather than down without an effective way to expose you, and with you, it. As reported in Psychiatric Annals, Rate of ADHD diagnosis increased in past decade, researchers looking at trends among 842,830 schoolchildren aged 5 to 11 found the following.

According to the researchers, rates of ADHD diagnosis were 2.5% in 2001 vs. 3.1% in 2010, a relative increase of 24%. During the same period, the rate of ADHD diagnosis increased among whites (4.7% to 5.6%; RR=1.3; 95% CI, 1.2-1.4), blacks (2.6% to 4.1%; RR=1.7; 95% CI, 1.5-1.9) and Hispanics (1.7% to 2.5%; RR=1.6; 95% CI, 1.5-1.7). Rates of diagnosis among Asian/Pacific Islander and other racial groups remained unchanged.

We’re more hyperactive then in 2010 than we were in 2001, that is to say, that boys will be boys, and not only will boys be boys, but girls will be girls. Confused? You’re not alone. Or to be more on target, children will be children.

The rate increase among blacks was largely due to a growing number of girls with an ADHD diagnosis (RR=1.9; 95% CI, 1.5-2.3). Boys were more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD, but study results indicated that the sex gap may be closing among blacks. The researchers also observed a much higher rate of ADHD diagnosis among children living in high-income ($70,000 per year or more) households (P<.001).

Just imagine, sex equality in pathology. Things must be improving for folks of color out there, wouldn’t you say? Or, maybe not. The good news is the arrival of the spoiled brat syndrome so you folks out there in the ghetto don’t have to feel like you’re alone in your misery. Or, maybe not. Mommy and daddy uptown can buy success for junior, can’t they? …Oh, well…Them’s the breaks.

“Although the reasons for increasing ADHD rates are not well understood, contributing factors may include heightened ADHD awareness among parents and physicians, increased use of screening and other preventive services, and variability in surveillance methods among institutions,” the researchers wrote.

Okay dokey. If awareness induces contagion, no wonder they say ‘ignorance is bliss’. Screening for figurative disease is going to increase the incidence of figurative disease. Undoubtedly. Calling screening and miseducation preventive is the real kicker though. Rates go up, and you’re preventing. Oh, yeah? Uh huh. Alluding to surveillance is more to the point. This isn’t about letting children be children, this is about training the next generation of corporate bureaucrats, and maybe, just maybe, we’ve got better things to be doing in the first place.

One factor  not listed, although the authors did mention not having any published ties to pharmaceutical companies, is the influence of drug markets on this increase. I can’t imagine it doesn’t have anything to do with stimulant, and the miscalled ‘performance enhancing’, drug sales, does it? Check out stock exchange figures sometime. I reckon, if anything, ADHD treatment drug makers aren’t suffering. The wall street party goes on and on, even if from here on out at a tightly guarded secret location.