For decades, the U.S. medical system has delivered amphetamines to skyrocketing numbers of Americans without clear evidence a defined disorder exists or of any long-term effects, says a New York Times Magazine article out Sunday. One in nine American children has an Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder diagnosis now, including nearly a quarter of 17-year-old American boys. This record number is more than triple the diagnoses in the mid-1990s, says the Times.

“From 2012 to 2022, the total number of prescriptions for stimulants to treat A.D.H.D. increased in the United States by 58 percent,” writes Times contributor Paul Tough. “Although the prescription rate is highest among boys ages 10 to 14, the real growth market today for stimulant medication is adults. In 2012, Americans in their 30s were issued five million prescriptions for stimulants to treat A.D.H.D.; a decade later, that figure had more than tripled, rising to 18 million.”

The article explores a devastating mismatch between research and practice in addressing so-called ADHD. This includes the longstanding lack of evidence that ADHD is a biological condition, rather than a psychological or sociological one. Researchers have found no definitive brain scan differences or clear genetic markers for the list of symptoms labeled ADHD.

“Despite Ritalin’s rapid growth, no one knew exactly how the medication worked or whether it really was the best way to treat children’s attention issues,” Tough writes. “Anecdotally, doctors and parents would observe that when many children began taking stimulant medications like Ritalin, their behavior would improve almost overnight, but no one had measured in a careful, large-scale scientific study how common that positive response was or, for that matter, what the effects were on a child of taking Ritalin over the long term.”

Now scientists know, Tough says, that Ritalin retards children’s growth, making them shorter. They also know that after fewer behavioral symptoms in the first year or so, kids who take Ritalin or Adderall behave the same as kids who don’t. And despite some improved focus, ADHD-medicated kids’ learning doesn’t improve, say studies Tough cites.

Meanwhile, schools and doctors continue to treat the alleged condition as if it is biological, giving unnecessary chemical stimulants to children as young as preschool. The American Board of Pediatrics exam to maintain a medical license even pushes ADHD diagnoses, as The Federalist recently reported. Why? Two reasons are obvious: active and distractable kids require more adult attention, and big money for the medical industry.

Kids With ADHD Often Have Other Problems

One-half of Americans now take a prescription drug, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Often chronic conditions cluster, which is true of ADHD: “Among children with current ADHD … 77.9% had at least one co-occurring disorder,” says a 2022 CDC study.

In fact, as clinical social worker Erica Komisar writes in her latest book, “In the United States, ADHD is a diagnosis that is too frequently used to describe depression and anxiety in children. Other countries, like France, consider ADHD as a psychosocial disorder and treat the condition by focusing on the underlying cause with psychotherapy and family counseling, an approach with which I strongly agree. This approach takes time and effort on the part of the parents. Far too often, teachers, pediatricians, and parents are quick to medicate away the symptoms rather than deal with the underlying emotional issues.”

Responding with anxiety to distressing situations is not disordered — it is appropriate. Teachers routinely tell me they notice a high correlation between kids with ADHD symptoms and home problems such as a divorce or distracted parents. As everyone knows, family dysfunction has worsened since the 1960s.

Yet rather than considering underlying causes for a child acting out, teachers, parents, and doctors often instead give kids mind-altering drugs. This enables dysfunctional situations rather than helping resolve them.

“For some parents, it may indeed be less stigmatizing, and more comfortable, to be able to say, ‘My child has A.D.H.D., a medical condition, so he needs to take this medicine every day,’ rather than, ‘I want my kid to succeed in environments for which he’s not well suited, so therefore I want him to take these pills,'” Tough writes.

Sometimes the “problem” is simply that kids aren’t a good fit for institutionalization, scientists told the Times. Just about all American kids are forcibly institutionalized now, and it increasingly starts earlier, with rising numbers of babies in daycare.

Teen boys told Tough they use amphetamines to navigate the cruel cultural pressure for “college for all”: “John also generally doesn’t take his Adderall during the summer. When he’s not in school, he told me, he doesn’t have any A.D.H.D. symptoms at all.” The article noted amphetamines can make “boring” tasks such as staring at worksheets seem artificially more interesting, yet at an increased risk for psychosis and a deadened personality.

Being a Boy Isn’t a Disease

I checked the criteria for ADHD in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and discovered three of my four boys meet it. Ridiculously, I think the majority of my friends’ sons do too. There is nothing wrong with any of them that some robust, father-directed discipline, keeping a close eye on them, a good amount of real work, and a lot of play outside doesn’t fix. Their school helps by offering two recesses per day plus standing desks for all and other boy-friendly pedagogy such as daily memory work.

Scientists say ADHD may be more about a mismatch between the child and his environment than something wrong with the child. In a 2016 study, Tough says, “Subject after subject spontaneously brought up the importance of finding their ‘niche,’ or the right ‘fit,’ in school or in the workplace … Many of them had sensibly chosen contexts that were a better match for their personalities than what they experienced in school, and as a result, they reported that their A.D.H.D. symptoms had essentially disappeared.”

Clearly, schools are a bad environment for a heck of a lot of little boys, if one-quarter have to be medicated just to go there. Indeed, the U.S. school environment is highly feminized: 89 percent of K-6th grade teachers are female, as are 64 percent of 7th-12th grade teachers, federal statistics say.

It should go without saying but needs to be said nowadays that boys and girls are different. Boys respond far better to competition, challenge, physical activity, clear and well-enforced discipline, pointed and fact-based debate, and other forms of positively directed overt aggression. Women often prefer female social norms instead, such as cooperation, agreeableness, personal safety, comfort, and consensus. These differences are at the heart of the “Longhouse” complaint against feminist control of academia and subsequently society.

Once, women were better at understanding men’s needs, but feminism has erased a lot of both sexes’ understanding of the other. Mary Eberstadt points out in Primal Screams that downstream effects of feminism, such as smaller families, play a role in this by depriving men and women of nonsexual experiences with each other as brothers, sisters, and cousins.

But even though men’s ways mystify women perhaps more today than in earlier eras, being male is not a disorder. Competition, discipline, fact-focused learning, and a need for strong physical stimulus are not dysfunctional. Whatever prevents them is. This includes out-of-balance feminist social and institutional norms that emphasize women’s preferences instead of making room for men and women to respect our differences.

Male energy is as good and necessary as female energy, and a healthy society needs them both in proper relation. In today’s feminist world, men must require that women recognize their needs just as women require that men recognize our needs. Needlessly drugging little boys who can’t sit still and shut up for eight hours a day is just one of the many evil consequences of treating masculinity as a disease.