At 10:25 AM -0400 7/7/96, Sandy Sandfort wrote:
Er... Tim... Ritalin is an amphetamine.
Yes, normally, but doesn't it have a paradoxical reaction for hyperactive children (i.e., it acts as a depressant for them)?
Yes. And for some of *them*, it makes them monomaniacal SOBs. ;-). I get more work done with Ritalin, but I'm *much* nicer without it. I've decided to live with ADD rather than treat it, which is what most people (including "Dr. ADD", Richard(?) Hallowell) do. Jolt cola is also popular. :-). Like a lot of pop-psychopharmacology, "syndromes" frequently get defined by whether the right drug has the desired effect. If prozac works, you're depressed, if Ritalin does, you're an ADDer, and so on. By Tim's anecdotal evidence, the little hellion (hey, *I* was one...) must be ADD because Ritalin works. You can actually see ADD with a PET scan, but the proper way to get a diagnosis of ADD is to get tested for it, which, in the case of ADD, is an expensive man-day or two with with some clinical shrink in your face, and a bunch of frustrating (if you're ADD) tests of your attention and ability to focus in the presence of a lot of distractions. Oddly enough, *another* pop-psychologist from Harvard was on "20/20" this week talking about "emotional" intellegence, and one of the determinants was inability to understand delayed gratification. Like most kids with ADD, I must have been a drooling idiot, in that case. However, I practically agree with Tim on all of his screed. (A good one, I might add. He probably only reread it once for punctuation and spelling before he did a command-e to send it on its way. After wiping the foam from his mouth, that is. ;-)) It seems to me that the very *last* person to be allowed to diagnose ADD is some crypto-socialist, fucking-statist, control-freak, industrial-mode, human-warehouse-zookeeping "educator". The humorous irony of all this is, of course, that my wife is a senior education bureaucrat for the People's Republic of Massachusetts. An "equal time" marriage indeed. And *she* pays the health insurance, because I couldn't keep a *steady* job if my life depended on it. (A compensatory mechanism?) Well, maybe if my *life* depended on it. That *might* get my attention. BarelyObCrypto: ADD is more about lack of attention *control* than lack of attention itself. Hyperfocus is also a trait of ADHD, and computers tend to cause hyperfocus for a lot of ADDers. How many easily distracted knee-jiggling wunderkind hackers do *you* know? Care to guess how many ADDers there are on cypherpunks? Wiping foam from *my* mouth, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "If they could 'just pass a few more laws', we would all be criminals." --Vinnie Moscaritolo The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/