Dr. Thomas E. Brown Responds to New York Times ADHD-Bashing

We’ve never seen a balanced news article about Adult ADHD on The New York Times front page, nor in the Opinion-Editorial section. Quite the opposite, in fact. Why is that?

This question is timely given the series of “hit pieces” on ADHD from The New York Times reporter Alan Schwarz, now compiled into a book.

My goal is not to create more publicity for this person. Therefore, you’ll find no links here. Instead, I aim to validate readers’ concerns about sensationalized reporting on ADHD. It’s newly foisted on the public and making the NPR talk-show rounds with unquestioning hosts. The result: Life made even harder for vulnerable people.

What is Yellow Journalism, by the way? Briefly, the term referred to stories that were sensationalized for the sake of selling papers.  It was so named after the “Yellow Kid” cartoons (pictured above). More below.

“For Crissake—Alan Schwarz Again?”

One of my blog’s readers sent me a link to a New York Times Book Review of A.D.H.D. Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma, and the Making of an American Epidemic. The reader wrote:

Hi Gina – would you please address this. There is no ‘comments’ section for this article, and I am too exhausted and demoralized to address it, even if there were.

For crisssake – Alan Schwarz again?!

In blatant conflict of interest, book-review editors had one New York Times reporter review a fellow reporter’s book.  Steve Silberman simply regurgitated Schwarz’s angle as truth and lauded it. Silberman has no expertise in neuroscience.

It became a loathsome pattern over the years, The New York Times making blood sport of delegitimizing ADHD. In fact, it ruined many a Sunday for the ADHD community: The New York Times dropping these stink bombs. We finally stopped responding to the clickbait. But that meant a greater concentration of ADHD deniers.

“Yellow Journalism” of Mental Health

Just a few decades ago, who could have imagined the resurgence of Yellow Journalism on a public-health topic?

We can define Yellow Journalism this way:

A pejorative used to decry journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion:

• • • Little or no legitimate research
    • Eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers
    • Exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism.

(For background, see U.S. Diplomacy and Yellow Journalism, 1895-1898)

Today, the prize seems the thing. What else but aiming for a Pulitzer with Schwarz’s “hard-hitting series” on ADHD can explain the string of sensationalized stories?

But let’s back up for a second. Why did the Times’ editors assign a sports reporter to the ADHD “beat”? Did they associate Schwarz’s laudable coverage on sports-related head injuries with expertise  in neuroscience? The evidence fails to support that judgment.

Instead, his ADHD reportage treads light on facts, lighter on balance. Paragraph by paragraph, it reek of blood-lust distortions from fringe players and experts from yesteryear who had not kept up (and maybe missed the limelight).

Taken altogether, this suggests a major motivation is the web-traffic—and personal vainglory.

Aiming for Pulitzer—On the Back of ADHD

With Schwarz’s second article, it seemed obvious: He aimed for a Pulitzer in writing stories to be collected in a book.

In fact, yes, his book publicity refers to him as a “Pulitzer Prize-Nominated” author. It sounds impressive but only if you don’t understand one detail: Any book can be nominated. It’s the winning that matters.

You can read more about this at The Atlantic: Journalists, Please Stop Saying You Were ‘Pulitzer Prize-Nominated’. Alexander Abad-Santos explains:

To call that submission a Pulitzer ‘nomination’ is like saying that Adam Sandler is an Oscar nominee if Columbia Pictures enters That’s My Boy in the Academy Awards.

Many readers would realize that the Oscars don’t work that way—the studios don’t pick the nominees. It’s just a way of slipping ‘Academy Awards’ into a bio. The Pulitzers also don’t work that way, but fewer people know that.

The Latest New York Times Hit Piece on ADHD

The latest hit piece landed with more distortions. Esteemed ADHD expert Thomas E. Brown, PhD, points them out in his public Letter to the Editor, which I share below.

If you missed the story (sorry, my policy is not to link to stigma-increasing clickbait), here is the upshot:

• The rate of stimulant medication prescriptions being filled is growing exponentially! (No mention that, when last studied, only 1 in 10 adults with ADHD had been diagnosed. In other words, increasing treatment rates comes as good news to those of us who care about people finding the explanations and help that they need.)
• These are controlled substances! (Scary)
• A couple of anonymous people talked to Schwarz about how they’re abusing the stimulants! (News flash: Some humans abuse drugs. They have throughout human history. Schwarz has no idea how many people are abusing stimulants in the workplace or if it’s truly a problem.)
• Ergo: We have an epidemic of “dangerous” stimulants being abused at work!

What legitimate reason could there be to post that outsized, out-of-context melodrama on the front page?

New York Times’ Anti-Psychiatry Fixation

This is not a new pattern for The New York Times.

A few years ago, the paper ferociously attacked the credibility and career of the most highly cited pediatric psychiatry researcher and other noted researchers. Why? Because he suggested that bipolar disorder, a highly heritable brain-based condition, could manifest in children and they might benefit from treatment.

I was shocked by the disregard for science and the cherry-picking of data about Biederman et al.’s reported income from research grants. It showed no understanding of the Big Picture. I privately wrote to the reporters, urging them to be more responsible with their reporting on mental health. Real lives depend on it.

“Gina, Children Cannot Have Bipolar!”

One of The New York Times reporters responded to my e-mail that “Gina, children cannot have bipolar” —because they couldn’t overcharge credit cards or have promiscuous sex. Staggering ignorance. Psychiatric conditions manifest according to developmental age. Toddlers and young children don’t have credit cards but can have extreme moods, self-destructive behaviors, and chronic sleeplessness due to bipolar disorder.

At the time, there was a unholy alliance against psychiatric researchers. It included Nebraska Senator Chuck Grassley (R), a staffer overly eager to experiment with data-mining, and The New York Times. The paper failed to mention that Blue Cross/Blue Shield, a top campaign donor, had a vested interest in avoiding paying for newer psychiatric medications. Given that Grassley chaired the Senate Finance Committee, so did Medicare.

The Witch-hunt of Top Pediatric Psychiatry Experts

The sad result? The paper’s actions helped to launch and justify a witch hunt against a venerated researcher and his lab associates, casting doubt on the very notion of pediatric psychiatric conditions. I spoke to him about this a few years later. The pain had left a mark. His family had fled Nazi Germany, he explained, and he never expected to see such targeting of scientists in the U.S..

New York Times Blogger Questions ADHD

Let’s look elsewhere in the paper for a minute.

The New York Times columnist KJ Dell’Antonia writes about her children in a blog called “Raising Devils” (ahem). She claimed that the children Schwarz reported upon were being “drugged” only because they were poor.

Neither Dell’Antonia nor the readers commenting (including a self-described pediatrician) seemed to understand one critical point: ADHD is a risk factor for poverty.  These children might be suffering from the most severe ADHD symptoms, compounded by their parents’ ADHD and other risk factors such as substance abuse disorders.

Understanding this context would require scientific sophistication missing among bloggers such as Dell’Antonia. She writes:

Particularly given that there is still a debate among practitioners and researchers regarding whether ADHD has a biological basis, or is a label given to a collection of symptoms.

With so many good journalists out of work, how uneducated, unsophisticated individuals remain employed?  The usual explanation: They do the publisher’s bidding, and the Executive Editor has less power.

Don’t Feed the ADHD Clickbait Beast

The New York Times has long deserved public shaming for two clear issues:

1. Maligning and creating more stigma around ADHD as well as other psychiatric conditions
2. Reducing the Paper of Record to a cheap broadside

If you know little about ADHD, you want to believe that The New York Times is correct.  You don’t want to believe that the venerable “Grey Lady” is grossly untrustworthy. (Unless you are ideologically opposed, but that’s another can of worms.) You depend on them for coverage in many areas (as I used to). Simply put, the Internet and competition for traffic has changed everything.

There remain pockets of stellar reporting at The New York Times. But they don’t happen to be on any aspect of psychiatry.

Dr. Thomas E. Brown To The New York Times:

Dr. Brown is Associate Director of the Yale Clinic for Attention & Related Disorders, Dept. of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine (retired). He now has a ADHD clinic in Southern California.

Here is his open letter to the editor of The New York Times about their most recent article about ADHD medication:

“Abuse of Attention Deficit Disorder Pills Graduates Into the Workplace”

Under this headline on page 1 of its Sunday issue for April 19, 2015, The New York Times published another of its series of sensationalized stories about the dangers of misuse of medications prescribed for ADHD.

It is certainly reasonable for Times reporter Alan Schwarz to call attention to the fact that some adults endanger their health by misusing medications prescribed for ADHD, trying to gain advantage on their jobs by jacking up their productivity with stimulants.

Lack of Balanced Reporting on ADHD

What is problematic about this article is that it does not include even one sentence to acknowledge that many adults and young people take these medications quite appropriately not to jack themselves up for unfair advantage, but to alleviate their chronic problems with sustaining focus and effort for important tasks of daily life.

In this article, as in his previous pieces on this topic, Schwarz dramatically warns about the dangers of ADHD medications as though there were no safe or appropriate uses of such medications. He does not seem to recognize that there are many adults and young people who are significantly impaired by chronic problems with their ability to organize and get started on their work, to prioritize their tasks, to focus their attention, to sustain their efforts, and to keep in mind what they have just read or heard.

He does not distinguish between appropriate use of medication treatment for those who legitimately suffer from these inherited impairments of ADHD and those without such problems who are misusing those medications in potentially dangerous ways.

Sensationalistic Journalism Poses Risk

The risk of such sensationalistic journalism is that it may frighten people who are suffering from ADHD impairments and could benefit from appropriate medication treatment, giving them the impression that any use of medications for ADHD is likely to be unhealthy and dangerous.

When a person has been carefully evaluated and found to have significant impairments from ADHD, and when dosing of prescribed medication for ADHD is adequately fine-tuned, complied with, and carefully monitored, those medications can provide safe and effective treatment for ADHD impairments. These medications are not equally helpful to all those with ADHD, but they provide significant improvement for about 80% of those who use them as prescribed. It would seem that Mr. Schwarz has noticed only those who misuse ADHD medications.

Thank you, Dr. Brown!

A.D.H.D Nation Languishes in Obscurity—but Damage Remains

In closing, Schwarz’s book was published in September 2016. Two years after Schwarz’s 10,000 toddlers broadside. By 2019, Amazon ranked Schwarz’s book at 362,000. By mid-2024, it’s 1,564,615!

It turns out, all those PR-placement NPR radio interviews where Schwarz practiced his breathlessly dramatic storytelling failed to make a lasting impact—at least in terms of book sales and popularity. But the damage to the legitimacy of ADHD remains severe.

By contrast, my book, Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.?, came out 16 years ago. I had no budget for PR-arranged NPR talk-show fanfare. (Covert pharma industry funding buys PR for and elevates people as ADHD experts who have no credentials as such. I’ve always rejected pharma industry funding.) While A.D.H.D. Nation hovers at 1.5 million, my book is ranked at 16,000. The moral? Write with accuracy, honesty, and compassion to create a lasting positive impact.

Schwarz has since left the paper. I heard he was teaching high school math. A friend shared a website where he was offering to sell his “gripping narrative style” to CEOs to produce their biographies. Good. Better he channels that “gripping narrative style” where it won’t hurt anyone. Or will it.

—Gina Pera

Originally published in 2015. Updated September 2024