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For decades, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder has sparked debate. Is it a biological illness, the dangerous legacy of genes or environmental toxins, or a mere alibi for bratty kids, incompetent parents and a fraying social fabric?

With 4.5 million U.S. children having received a diagnosis of the disorder -- and more than half of them taking prescription drugs to control it -- the question has divided doctors and patients, parents and teachers, and mothers and fathers.

Scientists maintain that they've been narrowing in on the origins and mechanics of disabling distraction, while gathering increasing evidence that ADHD is as real as such less controversial disorders as Down syndrome and schizophrenia. Their most recent progress is described in a Sept. 9 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, based on a new study that indicates a striking difference in the brain's motivational machinery in people with ADHD symptoms.

Some mental disorders aren’t merely common—they’re the norm.

Depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol dependence and marijuana dependence affect roughly twice as many people as had previously been estimated, a new study finds. Nearly 60 percent of the population experiences at least one of these mental disorders by age 32, say study directors and psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, both of Duke University in Durham, N.C.

That figure probably gets higher by the time people reach middle age, Moffitt suggests, as additional people develop at least one of these four ailments for the first time.

Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, lambasted the countercultural movement for marginalizing a chemical that he asserted had potential benefits as an invaluable supplement to psychotherapy and spiritual practices such as meditation. “This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s,” Hofmann groused in his 1979 memoir LSD: My Problem Child.

For just that reason, Hofmann was jubilant in the months before his death last year, at the age of 102, when he learned that the first scientific research on LSD in decades was just beginning in his native Switzerland. “He was very happy that, as he said, ‘a long wish finally became true,’ ” remarks Peter Gasser, the physician leading the clinical trial. “He said that the substance must be in the hands of medical doctors again.”

I am finishing up my dissertation and need to get my web-based survey out to MFTs in virginia. The other option is to get a national sample of MFTs...Does anyone know how I can get a listing of email addresses, or a way that I can get onto a listserv or anything whether it is for Virginia only or National? I am lost and I am on a tight deadline. Any help would be great! Email me at nunleyrs@yahoo.com if you have any ideas or suggestions. Any ideas about any listservs for licensed professionals (even if not just MFTs would be great)...I AM PANICKED AND DESPERATE!!