Patients diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at an elevated risk for suicide. No prior work has assessed the association between stimulant prescriptions and death by suicide in this population. This retrospective cohort study included Department of Veterans Affairs patients with an active ADHD diagnosis that received stimulant medications between 2016 and 2019. We found that months with active stimulant medication prescription was associated with decreased risk of suicide mortality compared with months without stimulant medication (odds ratio 0.57, 95% CI 0.36–0.88). Our results suggest that prescribing stimulant medications for patients diagnosed with ADHD is associated with decreased risk of suicide mortality.

Many popular books and articles that purport to explain how people, companies, orideas succeed highlight a few successes chosen to fit a particular narrative. Weinvestigate what effect these highly selected “success narratives”have on readers’ beliefs and decisions. We conducted a large, randomized,pre-registered experiment, showing participants successful firms with foundersthat all either dropped out of or graduated college, and asked them to makeincentive-compatible bets on a new firm. Despite acknowledging biases in theexamples, participants’ decisions were very strongly influenced by them.People shown dropout founders were 55 percentage points more likely to bet on adropout-founded company than people who were shown graduate founders. Mostreported medium to high confidence in their bets, and many wrote causalexplanations justifying their decision. In light of recent concerns about falseinformation, our findings demonstrate how true but biased information canstrongly alter beliefs and decisions.

The ventricular assist device is being increasingly used as a “bridge-to-transplant” option in children with heart failure who have failed medical management. Care for this medically complex population must be optimised, including through concomitant pharmacotherapy. Pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic alterations affecting pharmacotherapy are increasingly discovered in children supported with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, another form of mechanical circulatory support. Similarities between extracorporeal membrane oxygenation and ventricular assist devices support the hypothesis that similar alterations may exist in ventricular assist device-supported patients. We conducted a literature review to assess the current data available on pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics in children with ventricular assist devices. We found two adult and no paediatric pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic studies in ventricular assist device-supported patients. While mechanisms may be partially extrapolated from children supported with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, dedicated investigation of the paediatric ventricular assist device population is crucial given the inherent differences between the two forms of mechanical circulatory support, and pathophysiology that is unique to these patients. Commonly used drugs such as anticoagulants and antibiotics have narrow therapeutic windows with devastating consequences if under-dosed or over-dosed. Clinical studies are urgently needed to improve outcomes and maximise the potential of ventricular assist devices in this vulnerable population.

This essay offers an account of Kierkegaard’s view of the limits of thought and of what makes this view distinctive. With primary reference to Philosophical Fragments, and its putative representation of Christianity as unthinkable, I situate Kierkegaard’s engagement with the problem of the limits of thought, especially with respect to the views of Kant and Hegel. I argue that Kierkegaard builds in this regard on Hegel’s critique of Kant but that, against Hegel, he develops a radical distinction between two types of thinking and inquiry: the ‘aesthetic-intellectual’ and the ‘ethico-religious’. I clarify this distinction and show how it guides Kierkegaard’s conception of a form of philosophical practice that involves drawing limits to the proper sphere of disinterested contemplation. With reference to two rival interpretations of Kierkegaard’s approach to the limits of thought—which I call ‘bullet-biting’ and ‘relativizing’—I further show how my ‘disambiguating’ account can better explain how, and why, his work courts a form of self-referential incoherence, in which it appears that certain limits of thought are at once affirmed and violated.