"Ritalin and other stimulant drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder should carry the strongest warning that they may be linked to an increased risk of death and injury, federal health advisers said Thursday.

The Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted in favor of the 'black box' warning after hearing about the deaths of 25 people, including 19 children, who had taken the drugs. The vote was 8-7, with one abstention.

... Doctors prescribe the drugs to about 2 million children and 1 million adults a month."

"Stimulants like Ritalin lead a small number of children to suffer hallucinations that usually feature insects, snakes or worms, according to federal drug officials, and a panel of experts said on Wednesday that physicians and parents needed to be warned of the risk.

The panel members said they hoped the warning would prevent physicians from prescribing a second drug to treat the hallucinations caused by the stimulants, which one expert estimated affect 2 to 5 of every 100 children taking them. Instead, they said, the right thing to do in such cases was to stop prescribing the stimulants."

A healthy mind screens out a good many potential threats; an unhealthy mind fixates on and is consequently paralyzed by the first indication of peril. In an unhealthy fixation on potential signs of emotional danger, a team of Arizona State psychologists think they may have isolated the reason that children of divorced parents are particularly at risk for certain kinds of emotional disorders.

Analyzing data collected from 109 young adults from intact, bereaved, and divorced families, the researchers identify three different psychological outlooks. Among the young adults from intact families, the Arizona State scholars find - as they expected - "a 'protective bias' that functions to direct attention away from negative cues, thereby limiting vulnerability to affective disorder." In contrast, among young adults whose parents have divorced, the researchers recognize - again as expected - a "threat vigilance" of the sort that "may increase the risk of mental health problems." In their statistical analysis, the researchers underscore the difference they detect in attentional bias separating young adults from intact families on the one hand from peers from divorced families on the other (p<0.01).

What surprises the researchers, however, is the mental outlook of young adults from bereaved families (that is families that have lost a parent through death). Although these young adults lacked the "protective bias" of peers from intact families, they also did not manifest signs characteristic of the kind of "threat vigilance" seen among peers from divorced families. 

The researchers acknowledge their initial perplexity: "Our finding that participants from divorced families rather than those from bereaved families showed vigilance toward loss-related cues was somewhat unexpected." But the researchers recognize the congruity between their findings and early studies in which "fear of abandonment, suggestive of sensitivity to loss, has been shown to be strongly related to anxiety or adjustment problems in children of divorce." Indeed, it would appear that, even more than parental death, "divorce can produce a general sense of vulnerability to abandonment or loss."