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  • 2013-05-16 (xsd:date)
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  • Dr. Leon Eisenberg: ADHD Is a 'Fictitious Disease'? (en)
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  • Dr. Leon Eisenberg, who passed away at the age of 87 in 2009, was a prominent figure in the field of child psychiatry who during the 1950s and 60s conducted medical studies of children with developmental problems, including some of the first rigorous studies of autism and attention deficit disorder. As described by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Dr. Eisenberg transformed child psychiatry by advocating research into developmental problems: Although describing Dr. Eisenberg as the inventor or father of attention deficit disorder (ADD) and/or attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might be challenged by some as a bit of an exaggeration, he unquestionably contributed a great deal to the body of knowledge on which modern diagnoses and treatment of those disorders is based. Given Dr. Eisenberg's recognized authority and expertise in this field, therefore, those who feel that ADD and ADHD are misused and over-employed diagnoses which serve to excuse bullying and recklessness and offer a sense of alleviation of personal responsibility among those diagnosed would indeed find validation if Dr. Eisenberg had proclaimed ADHD is a fictitious disease: Example: [Collected via e-mail, May 2013] The claim that Dr. Eisenberg asserted ADHD is a fictitious disease is reproduced on countless web sites as something he said seven months before his death in his last interview, which would place the date of his utterance around February 2009. When documentation for the putative quote is provided, it references an article (often described as a cover story) published in the German weekly Der Spiegel on 2 February 2012. We found that the German-language version of Der Spiegel ran an article in 2012 that skeptically examined the large increase in diagnoses of mental disorders in recent years and quoted Dr. Eisenberg on that subject. A software-based translation of that article from German to English does describe Dr. Eisenberg as the father of ADHD and report that during his last interview he said something similar to ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease. However, when one allows for the vagaries of translation from German to English and reads the statement in context, it's clear that Dr. Eisenberg wasn't asserting that ADHD isn't a real disorder, but rather that he thought the influence of genetic predispositions for ADHD (rather than social/environmental risk factors) were vastly overestimated: On a related note, an August 2012 Der Spiegel English-language interview with (now retired) Harvard psychologist Dr. Jerome Kagan quoted Dr. Kagan as being critical of fuzzy diagnostic practices and the over-prescription of drugs such as Ritalin for behavioral problems in children, and as referring to ADHD as an invention: (en)
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