The “Logic” of Researchers in ADHD

 

About 15-20 years ago or so, when I was still Director of Psychiatric Residency Training at the University of Tennessee Medical School, I went to a grand rounds (a teaching conference involving the whole department) to hear a talk by a doctor about adult ADHD. It turned out to be more of a drug commercial for some or other stimulant the sponsor of the talk was selling.

The guy basically said that this pseudo-diagnosis was in fact incredibly common – up to 14% of the adult population – and all of them should be taking significant doses of one of the most dangerous and addictive class of drugs that are available by prescription – classified by the FDA in the same category of abuse potential as opiates like morphine. Wow.

During the Q&A at the end of the talk, the subject of ADHD in children came up. Someone asked him why so many kids diagnosed with the disorder could go to a video game arcade (which had at the time only recently gone the way of the dinosaurs) and concentrate with tremendous focus on the game they were playing despite all sorts of buzzers and bells going off, flashing lights everywhere, and scores of people milling all around talking to each other. The speaker opined that this was “not concentration.” I’ve heard that sentiment many times before and since from Pharma shills. Well if it isn't concentration, I wondered, then WFT is it?

Another skeptic in the audience from child psychiatry asked him about the high incidence of alcoholism in the parents of ADHD patients. His response: “If you had a kid like that, you’d probably drink too!” Oh, I see. Alcoholism is caused by having rambunctious children.

I should have gotten up and cussed the dude out for saying heinous stuff like this, but my boss in the department might have frowned on it.

All this reminds me of another talk I once heard from someone from the National Institute for Drug Abuse during an outside medical meeting. He was going on and on about how cocaine, another stimulant BTW, depletes a chemical in the brain called Dopamine, which makes it nearly impossible for abusers to enjoy anything but the drug. Someone (again, not me) got up and asked, “But aren’t we doing that when we prescribe stimulants to our kids?” The speaker’s answer, “But the drugs work so well.”

So I’m guessing that the answer to the question that was actually asked, which the speaker completely avoided, was, “Yes.”

Drug Abuse and Drug Companies

As most readers will know, opiate abuse and overdoses have increased dramatically in recent years, and it’s all over the news. Some of the public may even be aware of the role of drug companies and drug distributors in the process – the latter being recently profiled on an episode of Sixty Minutes. Let’s look at the role of the drug companies.

A Pharma executive, a billionaire, was arrested in October on charges of bribing doctors to prescribe opioid painkillers. (http://fortune.com/2017/10/26/john-kapoor-insys-therapeutics-arrested-net-worth/). The Department of Justice arrested Insys Therapeutics founder John Kapoor, 74, in Phoenix. Kapoor was charged with using bribes and fraud to prop up sales of a pain medication called Subsys, a fentanyl spray typically used to treat cancer patients suffering excruciating pain. Fentanyl is 50 to 100 stronger than morphine, and contributed to the overdose deaths of pop stars Prince and Tom Petty.

When it comes to drugs of abuse, the lunatics seem to have taken over the asylum in medicine these days. In their push towards huge profits, dangerous drugs are being hawked when cheaper, less toxic, and less addictive alternatives are available for treating some conditions. And as discussed in this blog, whole diseases such as “adult adhd” have been invented out of whole cloth.

For those readers who may not know, potentially addictive drugs are referred to by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)  as “scheduled” drugs. Schedule I drugs are the illegal ones. Schedule II drugs are those with the highest abuse potential: narcotics and stimulants. Schedule  IV drugs are those considered to be of low potential for abuse. If you didn’t know how the drugs were scheduled, you certainly would never know it from listening to presentations by doctors working with Pharma.

Pharma hires doctors to do research on as well as give talks to other doctors about their products, totally with the goal of increasing sales – if patients do happen to benefit in some way, all the better – but that is hardly a requirement. The slides that are presented during the talks are furnished entirely by the drug company after being approved internally; the doctors giving the talks are not allowed in most instances to use their own slides.

Pharma is particularly known for employing what they call “Key Opinion Leaders” (KOLs) to give promotional talks to doctors around the country. The more academic credibility they seem to have the better – that is one source of determining who might be a KOL. But it is not the only one.

Pharma can actually get any given doctor’s prescribing records from the pharmacy industry (unless the doctor “opts out” of allowing his or her data to be mined in this way. Most docs are not even aware of this option—and having the information publically available is the default position). Pharma then uses this data to see if prescriptions for their products increase after one of their KOLs makes a presentation. 

Those doctors that make the best salesmen are hired again and again, while those who do not measure up are dropped.

A colleague of mine has taken a course required in Tennessee for licensure that discusses the “proper way” to  prescribe drugs of abuse. The course was sponsored by our malpractice carrier. According to him, one year the leader of the course scolded the doctors present for not prescribing enough opiates to people with chronic pain. 

The doctors were told how much suffering they were causing these patients by withholding these medications. Just one year later, after the “opioid crisis” hit the news, the same course was given. Only this time, the doctors were scolded because they were prescribing these “suddenly” dangerous and highly addictive substances to their patients with chronic pain!

I have discussed in previous posts how the risks of that class of medication (Schedule IV) have been wildly overblown in the medical literature and in public news stories. As well as being classified as “low abuse potential” by the DEA, they do not cause intoxication, and have next to no side effects compared to just about any other class of meds in most patients. I am not saying they are never abused, but usually only by people that mix them with opiates and alcohol. 

And of course any individual can have a bad reaction to any drug. It seems benzo’s are never discussed without the admonition that the “are addictive,” or have a few side effects in (some) patients – while drugs like amphetamines (Schedule II) that are abused far more often, and have more potential adverse or toxic side effects, are enthusiastically pushed.

And I do mean pushed, as in supplied by pushers masquerading as drug companies. I recall a “grand rounds” (a major lecture at an academic department in a medical school) from maybe 18-20 years ago in which the KOL was saying that about 18% of all adults should be on high doses of speed, that the reason that many of the parents of kids diagnosed with ADHD were substance abusers was because, "If you had a kid with ADHD, you'd drink too," and that kids who had ADHD could concentrate intensely on video games in an arcade despite multiple and pervasive loud distractions all about because that is "not concentrating." (I always wondered what the heck it supposedly was). I kid you not.

As another amazing example of drug pushing, one news service for psychiatry called MDLinx devotes a whole e-mail newsletter to articles extolling the use and virtues of drugs like Adderall and Concerta. Some recent examples:

MDLinx Psychiatry 3/13/18 - Ranked, sorted, and summarized by MDLinx editors from the latest literature.

IN THE NEWS SHP465 mixed amphetamine salts effective, safe for ADHD in adults Liz Meszaros, MDLinx, 03/08/2018

Researchers investigate the link between ADHD and risk of self-harm Paul Basilio, MDLinx, 02/23/2018

Study of 23,000 people links ADHD with genetic signature for delay discounting. Paul Basilio, MDLinx, 12/11/2017

They also have a section of their more general psychiatric newsletters also devoted to this goal that is called the ADHD Resource Center: A collection of articles and features related to ADHD with articles like:

AAP Experience - American Academy of Pediatrics              National Conference & Exhib Conference Of course, none of these Pharma sales mechanisms would matter that much if there were not already a ready market for abusable medications. That market is growing, and adverse childhood experiences and family dysfunction are a huge part of that problem. Still, as Steppenwolf used to sing, “G-d damn the pusher man.”

ADHD: More Misleading Propaganda

In the never ending effort to con the world in general, and physicians in particular, into thinking that most inattentive and rambunctious children and adults have a neurobiological disease, a Dr. Samuele Cortese and his colleagues presented yet another MRI study that they allege shows that children and adults who have been diagnosed with ADHD have abnormalities in their brains. 

Dr. Cortese is listed as a consultant for Shire Pharmacueticals, a major manufacturer of stimulant drugs for “ADHD.” Or as some might say in ordinary language, Shire is a drug dealing syndicate. One of the most egregious examples of same, at that. Shire’s interests are served by having the largest number of people taking their “legal” amphetamines as possible, while also spreading the word that their competition, “illegal” amphetamines, are dangerous and highly abused drugs.

I use the word “diagnosed” with ADHD in the first paragraph above rather than “have” ADHD because, as I have demonstrated in previous posts, the evaluation of patients who seem to have these problems leaves out an entire and absolutely essential part of their lives – the behavior of their families that provides a context for the child’s “symptoms.” 

No effort, or only a half-baked one, is made in these studies to differentiate acting out from other possible causes for the patient’s hyperactive behavior or difficulties in maintaining focus.

The new study, published in the issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, proves the following point beyond a shadow of a doubt: people who are not paying good attention to a particular task in which they are engaged exhibit less activity in those brain centers involved in paying attention to tasks than people who are paying strong attention.  Wow. Who’d’a thunk it?

And as we all know, any difference simply must be an abnormality.

In fact, the study says absolutely nothing about whether these research subjects cannot pay attention or simply are not paying attention.

The study in question (Cortese et al, “Toward Systems Neuroscience of ADHD: A Meta-Analysis of 55 fMRI Studies,” Am J Psychiatry 2012; 169:1038-1055) combines statistics from 55 different studies of ADHD, many of which use very different diagnostic “tests” which are merely symptom report lists and pay little attention to the pervasiveness of the symptoms, let alone the psychosocial context in which the symptoms take place.

Here are the results. Hypoactivation is a term meaning that the affected part of the brain is less active, on average, than it might be in a comparison subject. Of course, how active such a brain part might depends strongly on the motivations of the particular subjects. (This is analogous to the results of IQ tests, which are biased against those people who don’t give a damn about how well they do on the test).  Hyperactivation means the opposite.  

Surely, whether more or less activity in a region of the brain is pathological is entirely pre-supposed by the authors without any valid justification. It is basically a value judgment.

“Fifty-five studies were included (39 for children and 16 for adults). In children, hypoactivation in ADHD relative to comparison subjects was observed mostly in systems involved in executive function (frontoparietal network) and at­tention (ventral attentional network). Sig­nificant hyperactivation in ADHD relative to comparison subjects was observed predominantly in the default, ventral at­tention, and somatomotor networks. In adults, ADHD-related hypoactivation was predominant in the frontoparietal system, while ADHD-related hyperactivation was present in the visual, dorsal attention, and default networks. SignificantADHD-related dysfunction largely reflected task features and was detected even in the absence of comorbid mental disorders or a history of stimulant treatment.

Conclusions: A growing literature pro­vides evidence of ADHD-related dysfunc­tion in multiple neuronal systems involved in higher-level cognitive functions but also in sensorimotor processes, including the visual system, and in the default net­work. This meta-analytic evidence extends early models of ADHD pathophysiology that were focused on prefrontal-striatal circuits.”

The studies being "meta-analyzed" are designed on purpose to make it appear that normal differences mean something other than their just being normal differences.

Let us look at the distribution of how strongly people “pay attention” to boring tasks to which they have no particular motivation to do well (other than their desire to be co-operative with an experimenter). Most of the tasks during which brain activity is measured are, let’s face it, at least somewhat uninteresting.

This distribution, like almost everything else in nature, will look like a bell-shaped curve, or what is called normal distribution. We don’t even have to invoke the fact that some people may habitually pay less attention to most activities because they might be compulsively and habitually playing a role ["unambitious"] within their family of origin that allows them to get labeled as having ADHD.

The self report instruments and diagnostic interviews through which a diagnosis of ADHD is made will, in effect, sort the patients so that those labeled with ADHD will fall, on average, at point A on the bell shaped curve in the figure above. Since those individuals will then be taken out of the pool of study subjects, those that remain will have an above average tendency to pay attention to boring tasks – their average will be at point B in the diagram.

Everything else being equal, the “ADHD” subjects and the control control subjects could all be completely normal, and the study result would be identical to a study in which a real disease were being studied! The authors have no way of knowing which of these possibilities their study is demonstrating. They do not clearly acknowledge the above considerations as a weakness of the study, although they do concede, “fMRI data cannot define an absolute or quantitative baseline of activation…” (p. 1053).

That disclaimer is added to give the authors plausible deniability, and will of course be completely ignored by readers if it is noticed at all.

The authors start their discussion of their results with the sentence, “ADHD is increasingly being conceived of as a disorder underpinned by dysfunctions in multiple large scale brain networks.” Yeah, because of pseudo-scientific conclusions made from a multiplicity of studies done the way this one was.

Adult ADHD: Another Dubious Hyped Disorder

Here's a song I wrote for some of my symptom-obsessed fellow psychiatrists who are - what's the word? - oh, yes - incompetent:


Take some of these and you’ll feel better
Forget about those hippies who claimed, “speed kills”
You’ve got ADHD and just a touch of bipolar
Things are always better when you’re taking pills

Your family life’s a mess but that we won’t mention
What’s crucial is your trouble paying attention
You say bad memories make you a sad girl
If your ma drank too much, that’s ‘cause you were a bad girl

[chorus:]
So what if your husband’s out chasing booty?
So what if your brother’s coming on to your kids?
If you find that you’re feeling moody
Your brain’s miswired, that’s all that is!


Those things you remember, they’re all distorted
Your stepfather couldn’t have fondled you
If he had he would have been reported
Others must have been there, not just you two

[repeat chorus]
[repeat first verse]
[repeat chorus]


(Anyone who wants the chords, please feel free to contact me).

Freddie the Freeloader and Minnie the Moocher

Hey, all you youngun's. If you don't know who Minnie the Moocher and Freddie the Freeloader are, look up Cab Calloway and Red Skelton.

In the advice column Annie's Mailbox of a couple of days ago (http://www.creators.com/advice/annies-mailbox/lippy-20-year-old-is-all-play-and-no-work.html), a letter writer expresses dismay that his twenty year old son bailed out of home schooling by getting a GED.  His wife had corrected all of his son's homework before it had been submitted, but the son still could not seem to handle high school.  He now works a whole two hours a day, will not help around the house, and has an attitude problem. 

The writer complains that his wife refuses to charge the son rent, and pays for his car, insurance and cell phone.  The father had to kick the son's girl friend out of the house and stopped the son from " filching beer from our refrigerator."   His wife tells the writer to cool it when he gets upset.  Meanwhile, two younger brothers are beginning to play follow the leader with their deadbeat slacker older bro.


Is it just me, or is everyone seeing more and more twenty somethings who are freeloading off of their parents with their parents' cooperation? (You can discount the parents' complaining about the kids - after all, that's what their children do). Of course, the fact that the father in this case complains about his wife but does nothing to stop her from enabling the son might remind readers of my blog post of March 9, 2010 about younger children, Recipe for Producing Frequent Tantrums in Children.  The parents' behavior, as time goes on, produces the future Freddies and Minnies.

I am certain that if these twenty somethings were dragged to many psychiatrists, they would be immediately diagnosed as "Adult ADHD" or some other bullsh*t diagnosis.

Why do children react to their parents enabling behavior in this crazy way? My theory is that, because the parents compulsively do everything for their kids and expect nothing from them, their kids get the idea that providing for children is an extremely vital activity for their parents.   If the parents fight over what to do with the kids but never come to any kind of agreement or compromise, the kids think they like to do that as well.  Far be it from children to deprive their parents of a cherished role.

Do children really give a damn about what their parents expect from them?  Readers, what do you think about all of this?

Psychiatry's Latest Manual Goes Too Far

Allen Francis was chairman of the task force that created the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), which came out in 1994. Although this essay does not talk about the disease mongering of the pharmaceutical companies as a factor in the expansion of psychiatric diagnoses to "encompass every eccentricity," it does discuss the absurdity of some of the newly proposed diagnoses. Written by someone who should know. Click on the title of this post to link to the essay.