Into the Mouths of Babes

If you had looked at the health section of a bookshop during the 1970s, and if you were the parent of a rambunctious child, the boldly titled Why Your Child Is Hyperactive, by Dr. Ben Feingold (1899–1982), might have caught your attention. That a book on hyperactivity should be a big seller is not, in itself, all that surprising. ¹ During the 1970s in North America, hyperactivity was a growing concern, a disorder of epidemic proportions. Estimates suggested that between 5 and 20 percent of North American children were afflicted. ² Rarely mentioned in psychiatric journals prior to the 1960s, hyperactivity inundated the pages of journals such as the American Journal of Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Archives of General Psychiatry by the 1970s. Moreover, most psychiatrists had ceased to conceptualize hyperactivity as a developmental problem that children eventually outgrew and now implicated the disorder in adult depression, criminal behaviour, and even schizophrenia. Indeed, the public seemed ripe for a popular book about hyperactivity.