Alan Schwarz > Quotes

“While researching for his talk, Conners had noticed that North Carolina, his adopted home state, owned the dubious distinction of having the nation's highest rate of kids diagnosed with ADHD.”
― Alan Schwarz, ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma, and the Making of an American Epidemic

“Baseball, however, is the most individual of team sports: In perfectly discernible packets the game reduces to one batter versus one pitcher, with each assuming responsibility for the other, every matchup a still photograph that flipped together form the moving picture we call nine innings.”
― Alan Schwarz, The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics

“Leon Eisenberg was growing uncomfortable with this enthusiasm. However rooted in science, Conners’s symptom questionnaire measured not necessarily a child’s behavior, but outsiders’ impression of it—their tolerance for it. The evaluations remained dangerously subjective, allowing a parent or teacher to circle 2’s and 3’s depending on their own values, even whims. Eisenberg cautioned: “Whereas the adult comes for treatment largely because of his own distress and at his own initiative, the child comes to our attention because of his family’s or his community’s initiative. Who, then, are we to classify diagnostically: the child, the family, the community, or all three?” He feared now that the Conners Scale, unleashed upon the real and imperfect world, would begin green-lighting widespread overuse of Ritalin.”
― Alan Schwarz, ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma, and the Making of an American Epidemic