Actually, Ritalin has been around for decades and it's been used to treat ADHD since the 60s.
But the jury is still out on its long-term risks. The
Wikipedia has a lot of well-cited information on this subject.
Obviously, ADD and ADHD are real (as I mentioned, a kid in my class had ADHD, and I've seen it up close). However, I think there's a lot of overdiagnosis, especially over the last 20 years or so as schools have become increasingly focused on worksheet-type seatwork and less focused on developing creative abilities while cutting recess. And honestly, I don't think that the type of work handed out in public elementary schools necessarily teaches concentration skills. There's too much busy work, too many short worksheets with multiple choice questions, and too little work that requires real, sustained concentration on a single general idea.
For example, how many novels do public school kids read
as part of school by, say, fourth grade? By that I mean, read, discuss in class, and write about? I do NOT mean reading AR books at home and filling out a reading log and never analyzing the book. And how much time do fourth graders spend reading one- or two-page sheets with a small group of multiple choice questions used to "assess comprehension?" These worksheets teach kids how to read in units of sound bytes and how to answer questions on high stakes tests. They certainly don't teach them how to read a serious book and analyze it. I wouldn't have sat still for this, and I don't have ADD.
So it's just easier to drug some kids. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to claim that there's some kind of conspiracy. I just think that these labels have become popularly known and it's easy to think of them as a result. Plus, ADD and ADHD are defined loosely enough to make it easy (too easy, IMO) to justify the diagnosis.
Just my 2c.
