Why doesn’t it occur to people to look shit up?
So I just saw a commenter complaining about how there’s a national epidemic of our boys having their penises stolen by Ritalin. I see people saying this all the time, so I figured I might as well look and see if it’s true.
According to the CDC, about 4% of boys aged 4-17 are medicated for ADHD. This is a big country, so that’s a lot of boys; it’s still a pretty trifling rate, though, and that’s what matters. Assuming a bell curve for displays of rowdiness, and assuming that only the most rowdy are medicated, then we’re likely several standard deviations from the mean before we get into pill-popping territory. The kids getting drugged are, like, the Mensa of misbehavior.
When you see the actual numbers and ignore the cultural frenzy, it looks like there’s probably not a problem at all.[1] It works out to about one kid per classroom; can you recall ever being in a K-12 class that didn’t have at least one disruptive asshole who couldn’t control himself?[2]
So people shoot their mouths off about this all the time, but none of them put in the 15 seconds with the Google that it takes to find the actual facts. Why? For the love of zombie Jebus, why? It ain’t hard, and it doesn’t require any fancy info-retrieval skills–I typed in adhd rates in children and got exactly what I wanted; hell, Google helped me out by auto-suggesting half the query.
People could do it easily, if it ever occurred to them to do it. Is the problem that they think the knowledge they hold must be true, so it’s not worth verifying?
[1] This ignores the problem of heterogeneity, in which there could easily be some districts with abusive, over-prescriptive policies. Those would be local problems, though, and the rhetoric always suggests a national problem. Even taking that into account, it’s interesting to look at the top chart and notice that the most heavily-diagnosed, heavily-prescribed states are poor and Southern. I have a fact-free suspicion why this may be so, but I’d be interested in seeing your theories first.
[2] Disruptive assholes who can control themselves are something else entirely, and I like to think we added a lot to the classroom discourse.
February 27th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
I can readily imagine–and perhaps after work will “look shit up”–that abuse rates are higher than prescription rates. I can also imagine abuse rates fluctuate wildly as distribution of any black market is difficult to maintain and difficult to quantify without affecting its maintenance.
There’s also this presumption that any measure of dicklessness must be a negative that affects me like the image of a man slipping on a banana peel.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:17 am
Does your fact-free supposition involve racism, perchance, and its little cousin classism?
‘Cause that’s my unsupported guess.