Treating ADHD may reduce criminality
Pharmaceutical treatment of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with reduced criminality according to a study published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study of over 25,000 Swedish adults with the disorder found that men undergoing pharmaceutical treatments had a 51% chance of committing at least one crime in a 4-year period compared to 63% for those not in treatment. The risk of criminality for women with ADHD was 25% for those taking medication, and 31% for those not in treatment. It’s possible, of course, that the reduction in criminality associated with treatment was due not to the treatment itself, but to other factors, such as desire to improve behaviour, which could have both motivated treatment and reduced criminality. However, even when the investigators adjusted for likely confounders, they found that treatment was associated with significantly reduced criminal offending. Thus, their findings are at least suggestive of a causal relationship between medication and reduced crime.
It will be interesting to see how such a relationship, if it can be further supported, will be viewed by the general public and medical profession. Will it be seen as strengthening or weakening the case for ADHD treatment?
A Dyslexic boy in a Trojan horse
‘Come in’, said the Well Known Educational Psychologist. We did. ‘Please sit down’, she said, and we did. She didn’t waste time, and quite right too. We wanted to know.
‘Tom and I have had a very interesting afternoon.’ That sounded bad.
‘He’s a very able child indeed’. That sounded worse, because it came with the emphatic pause that always indicates a big ‘but’.
In the pause I wondered why we’d done this. Why we’d taken a little boy out of the woods and out of his playground to have someone fumble inside his head with blunt tools: indices, probes, inventories, and assumptions about normality.
‘He’s quite dramatically dyslexic, I’m afraid.’ My wife shared her fear. There was a lot of it sloshing around. ‘But his IQ is so high that he’ll be able to use lots of coping strategies. And he’s still very young: there’s lots that can be done.’ And she told us what it was. Regulations could be invoked, tribunals could be convened, cards could be flashed, phonemes could be chanted. He could be imprinted like other children. It would just take longer. It would be hard work, for Tom and for us, but there was every reason to be hopeful of a ‘good result’.
And what the hell did that mean? I asked myself. I was too polite to ask her. I didn’t want a result. I wanted my son. Continue reading
The ethics of a chemical break-up
UPDATE: AUDIO NOW AVAILABLE HERE.
Forthcoming talk: If I could just stop loving you: Anti-love biotechnology and the ethics of a chemical break-up
| Date & Time: | 30th Nov 2012 4:00pm-5:30pm |
| Description: |
Abstract: “Love hurts” – as the saying goes – and a certain degree of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since, as it is often argued, some types (and amounts) of suffering can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other essential components of a life well-lived. But other times, love is downright dangerous. Either it can trap a person in a cycle of violence, as in some domestic abuse cases, or it can prevent a person from moving on with her life or forming healthier relationships. There other cases of problematic love as well: |
Could there be a Third Way for Criminal Psychopaths?
Last week, Steven Farrow was convicted of murdering a grandmother and a vicar. 77 year old Betty Yates was stabbed in the face. He had planned to crucify the vicar but had left behind his hammer an nails, instead covering his dead body in pornographic DVDs, party poppers and condoms. Though Farrow is likely to spend the rest of his life in jail, the family members questioned why he had been free in the first place.
Should you be prosecuted for feeding junk food to your child?
By Charles Foster
Fast food permanently reduces children’s IQ, a recent and unsurprising study reports.
What should be done? The answer is ethically and legally simple. Parents who feed their children junk food, knowing of the attendant risks, are child-abusers, and should be prosecuted. If you hit a child, bruising it, you are guilty of a criminal offence. A bruise on a child’s leg is of far less lasting significance than the brain damage produced by requiring a child to ingest toxic junk. A child injured by a negligent or malicious parent can also bring civil proceedings against the parent.
The findings of the recent study mirror those in other jurisdictions. And now that they have been widely disseminated it will be hard for parents to plead ignorance. Continue reading
A Lack of Olympic Spirit
This morning, the men’s Olympic under 80 kg Taekwondo competition takes place. However, the British competitor widely regarded as the world’s best fighter in that category will not be taking part. Instead, a competitor ranked 59th in the world will be fighting in his place. Neither the British Taekwondo Association, nor the British Olympic association, nor the World Taekwondo Federation come out of the affair looking good. In particular, the latter two bodies seem to have shown either a basic ignorance of human nature, or a wilful refusal to resolve a gross injustice.
On being yourself
‘I was always the life and soul of the party, flirting with everyone’, wrote Lucille Howe, in ‘Fabulous Magazine’, (22 July 2012), ‘but I wanted John to fall in love with the real, quieter me’. In the same article, Charlotte Ruhle notes how her psychotherapy helped her to recover from a broken relationship. ‘[My] friends started saying I….seemed more like my old self.‘
The media, and indeed our ordinary conversations, are awash with this sort of language. Not only are we conscious – having a sense that there is an ‘I’ that is in some sort of continuity with the ‘I’ that existed yesterday, will hopefully exist tomorrow, and to whom things happen – but we have firm convictions about the nature of the ‘I’. When it is not allowed to express itself – to ‘be itself’, we complain. Depending on our education, we say that we’re ‘out of sorts’, ‘not myself’, or ‘ontologically vertiginous’. Continue reading
Parkinson’s medication blamed for sexual offences
Adrian Carter and Wayne Hall, from the Neuroethics group at the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research, Australia
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The medication that provides significant relief from debilitating motor disturbances in people with Parkinson’s disease appears to cause a range of psychiatric disturbances that are as distressing and difficult to treat as the motor symptoms they aim to relieve.
Parkinson’s disease is usually treated with dopamine replacement therapy (DRT). This involves daily dosing with either levodopa (a precursor to the neurotransmitter, dopamine) or dopamine agonists (such as pramipexole and ropinirole) that mimic the effects of dopamine in the brain. The aim of DRT is to reduce the effects of the loss of dopaminergic neurons in specific regions of the brain involved in controlling bodily movement. However, dopamine is also a key neurotransmitter in a range of cognitive processes from executive control and memory to motivation and bonding. It is perhaps unsurprising that many Parkinson’s patients experience adverse psychiatric and cognitive side-effects from taking large doses of dopamine every day.
Parkinson’s patients can experience severe anxiety, depression and mania and have a higher risk of suicide. A significant minority of Parkinson’s patients treated with dopamine replacement therapy will also develop impulsive and compulsive behaviours that appear to be caused by their medication. These include pathological gambling and hypersexuality, and compulsive eating and shopping. In rare cases, patients have committed criminal offences. Continue reading
Should minimally conscious patients be allowed to end their lives?
Two recent articles by neurobiologist and science writer Mo Costandi raise ethical quesions about the treatment of brain-damaged patients in the light of new research. Doctors distinguish between patients in a vegetative state, who are completely unresponsive and assumed to lack conscious awareness, and patients in a minimally conscious state, who some degree of responsiveness and are assumed to have some awareness – although it is unclear what their experiences are like and what mental abilities they have. A third category of patients are those in a “locked-in” state. These people are fully aware and awake, but paralysed and unable to communicate except through eye movements. Patients in a persistent vegetative state are highly unlikely to recover from it, and in most countries the law allows, under certain conditions, passive euthanasia for this group, for example by disconnecting a feeding tube that provides life support. But is this policy ethically defensible, and should we also allow euthanasia for patients with the other diagnoses?
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