… and now they’re coming for the Ritalin!
These American staples, the backbone of our thriving pharma-economy, are under assault by scientists who claim they don’t work for most people and that they can do terrible harm.
What’s next? Our babies’ antipsychotics??
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
January 30th, 2012 at 8:11PM
Of course everyone with half a brain already knew Ritalin and adderall were bogus treatments. As noted in the op-ed, there was plenty of data from decades of military use which established stimulants to have a universal effect and not some special effect on a supposed pathological subgroup. I did not have to read the Times to know these things, curious minds already were well aware.
I’d go even one step farther than the author of that op-ed, though. He claims that the fMRI studies on ADHD are given to flawed interpretation – specifically noting that these studies find a disordered condition but fail to properly investigate the origin of that condition and thereby leave intact the supposition that this is a congenital disorder. I think that’s still off the mark.
There simply is no such disease or disorder, the entire diagnosis of ADD/ADHD is bunkum. This becomes obvious when one looks at what children have done historically. Prior to the industrial revolution and massive urbanization, children didn’t sit in a school room all the time. Our society is subjecting all children to increasingly structured – and increasingly asinine, rote, unthinking “teach to the test” garbage ‘educational paradigms’. There is more and more scrutiny of children’s behavior (words and actions) – they are looking at everyone all day, everyday. Discipline in schools is increasingly idiotic and draconian: “zero-tolerance” for drugs, disruption, simple possession [rather than wielding] of a pocket knife, more cops in schools, charging 5, 6, or 7 year-olds with sex offenses [they are too young to understand sex].
In this ill-conceived, authoritarian approach to education necessarily leads to labeling increasing numbers of children as unable to follow the rules in one way or another [ADD/ADHD/conduct disorder/oppositional-defiant disorder].
As the author of the op-ed pointed out, insisting these things are ‘brain diseases’ and treating them with a pill relieves all parties of responsibility. He wants to keep the idea of physically based disease, yet seriously rethink etiology and treatment. My take is that there is no disease – all of this is purely subjective social construct – and seriously rethink how education of the nation’s children is conducted.
Psychiatry is fraud for profit.
Clin. psych. is well meaning folks who believe their own obviously flawed understanding of the world. [One excellent example in current play: Lack of job/financial security produces desperation, many people are suffering now due to this cause, therefore we cannot cut funds to deliver talk therapy even in this time of ‘fiscal austerity’. This is a non-sequitur; talk therapy does not restore job/financial security, thus it does not remove the suffering. Duh.]
January 31st, 2012 at 8:08AM
it’s crazy to feed kids developing brains these kinds of drugs and there are massive amounts of misdiagnosis but the truth is that there are a number of children who are truly hyperactive (and often suffer other issues of impulse control) and we don’t yet know why except that it has nothing to do with romantic notions of children being less free or having to endure the foolish trials of No Child Left Behind.