Running on Ritalin: A Physician Reflects on Children, Society, and Performance in a Pill

In a book as provocative and newsworthy as Listening to Prozac and Driven to Distraction, a physician speaks out on America's epidemic level of diagnoses for attention deficit disorder, and on the drug that has become almost a symbol of our times: Ritalin.

In 1997 alone, nearly five million people in the United States were prescribed Ritalin—most of them young children diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. Use of this drug, which is a stimulant related to amphetamine, has increased by ...