Scammed If You Do, Scammed If You Don't

In “Attention Deficit Disorder Is Over-diagnosed and Over-treated,” Allen Frances asserts that the increased diagnosis of mental disorders such as ADD is a fad caused by drug companies. First, the rates of ADD diagnoses increased exponentially in the 1990’s after more expensive medications came out that were not, for the most part, any different from the previous medications, prompting more aggressive marketing with the promise of profit. Second, these drug companies “educated” specialists to see ADD in children who before had been considered perfectly healthy, a step that helped people who truly needed medication but had been looked over, yet also labeled many “false positives”. Also, mental disorder medication is prescribed rather carelessly and quickly as a first solution to children showing signs of ADD, dyslexia, and others, where one might have seen results through simpler methods. This has often caused harmful side effects for those who are taking medication unnecessarily and even illegally due to the easy nature of procuring these mentally stimulating pills.

Frances, Allen. "Attention Deficit Disorder Is Over-Diagnosed and Over-Treated." The 

            Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 03 May 2012. Web. 08 Mar. 2012. 

            <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/attention-deficit-

            disorder_b_1206381.html>.

I thought that this article was very well written. It made the same assertion that the first article I read made, except this one gave concrete facts and statistics, as well as some history on the ADD "epidemic". It drew connections between the years of new medication releases and increases in diagnoses. I found it disturbing how easily a person could be diagnosed and medicated, without even clear proof that the patient has the disorder. This article opened my eyes to just how broad the definition of ADD is and how easy it was to be put into that category. Perfectly fine people are consequently put on medications they do not need, and more and more college students are obtaining these drugs for studying, putting them in danger of legitimate health problems.