At 5:02 PM 7/7/96, Robert Hettinga wrote:

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.

Probably so, and I think I recall my friend mentioning that this was the kid needed the dose. Whether it's an upper or a downer or whatever is immaterial: it acts as a downer for this kid. A zombie drug, at least on this kid. (And I gather that this is the main effect on the many California schoolchildren who are getting their school-administered doses of mind control drugs.)

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.

From what I've read--and I'm no expert, having long had essentially the _opposite_ of "attention deficit disorder," assuming it really even exists!--most children getting Ritalin are just being sedated. Behavior control in its purest form. While the kids stop their wandering attention and constant physical motions, it's because they're in a mental fog, just one step away from drooling. (The 8-year-old friend of my friend's son is so zoned out he can't play video games well at all...until the drugs wear off.)

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

Au contraire, I almost _never_ rework my posts. They are sent out as I write them, just as conversation is not reworked and edited. For an informal list, the conversational mode works best for me. (I get a kick out of John Young's obscure stuff, but if he _talks_ this way, whoah!)

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?

BTW, I saw a comment that Bill Gates is almost certainly an ADD person...or maybe the comment was that he is borderline autistic? (I think it was the latter, based on his focus on things, his physical mannerisms, etc. Perhaps growing up in rainy Seattle made him a kind of "rain man.") --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."