ABC misspeaks about ADHD study

ABC has been big on antiscience woo-woo for a while now, and it usually shows whenever they talk about ADHD.

Back in June, ABC ran a bizarre piece encouraging giving kids toxic ADHD drugs even earlier in life. Now they've completely misread a new study on ADHD.

This study followed 300 men from New York City. Half of them were diagnosed with ADHD in their youth and drugged, but later stopped taking their ADHD drugs. The other half were not diagnosed with ADHD or drugged.

The panelists who had taken ADHD drugs were much more likely to have later suffered negative life experiences. These men were 7 times more likely to have quit school than those who were not drugged. They also earned $40,000 less per year. They were over 3 times as likely to have gone to prison. Sixteen percent of the drugged men had a diagnosable personality disorder - compared to 0% of the men who hadn't been drugged.

What does this study tell us? To any thinking person, it shows that ADHD drugs have an unmistakably negative effect. But the American media isn't much on thinking, and ABC has its own spin on the report. According to ABC, the study is "proof" that the panelists who were drugged stopped taking their ADHD drugs too early.

Seriously. They said that.

Let me break this down for you: A scientific study showed that people who took ADHD drugs were significantly more likely to quit school or go to prison than those who did not. But ABC reports that this is because they weren't drugged enough. ABC's coverage completely contradicts the study's findings.

There's a word for ABC's coverage of this story: thickheaded. More to the point, ABC is displaying "smart idiot" syndrome. A "smart idiot" is a person who doubles down on their views instead of accepting reliable evidence that contradicts them. Some examples would be climate change deniers or the armchair hawks who thought Saddam Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction in 2003.

People like that are probably a lost cause. That's why it's so dangerous for them to be in charge of anything. I wonder what the FCC would have to say about ABC distorting a story like this.