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Nice to know that someone is scanning kids’ skulls for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The essential problem with this sort of thing is that psychology and psychiatry are descriptive endeavors and particularly flexible when it comes to describing ADHD. It’s unlikely that all the behaviors associated with the syndrome have a common physiologic structure. This is especially true when the behaviors categorized under ADHD keep expanding. Basically, at this point, you just need to upset people in authority to have ADHD. This is becoming a bit like Soviet psychiatry. Unfortunately, long-term use of prescription stimulants is likely to have detectable and predictable physiologic results.

Charles Warren
San Francisco, Calif.