Not even Dr. Keith Conners, the psychologist who pushed to make ADHD a real diagnosis, believes there's any legitimate reason for the incredible spike in prescriptions for Adderall and other ADHD meds over the last decade.

"The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”

This great New York Times report—which is ultimately about the perils of loosely regulated pharmaceutical advertising—turns to Mercer Island for one example of the lengths pharmaceutical companies will go in order to convince parents their kids need prescription-strength stimulants.

There, public schools were handing out pamphlets, supplied by a Ritalin manufacturer, that read: "Parents should be aware that these medicines do not 'drug' or 'alter' the brain of the child. They make the child 'normal.'" The guy who brought us Adderall, another ADHD med, tells the Times he now sees the pills as "nuclear bombs" that shouldn't be marketed this way.

In the United States, according to the Times, ADHD is close to becoming the most frequent long-term diagnosis made for children. (At present, that's asthma.)