Lawrence Diller M.D.

Lawrence Diller is a behavioral/developmental pediatrician and family therapist. He has evaluated and treated more than four thousand children and their families over the past forty years. He practices in Walnut Creek, a San Francisco Bay area suburb. He lives with his wife of forty-seven years, Denise, in the nearby Oakland Hills. Both his grown sons pursued performance music careers. Currently, Martin is a graduate student at the Wright Institute, pursuing a MFT degree (playing jazz on the side). His younger brother Louie, is a successful pop music producer/mixer in Los Angeles and hopes to resume performance after Covid. Dr. Diller is an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. He has written many articles on children's behavior and psychiatric medication for the professional and lay literature, that have garnered national and international notice. His book, Running on Ritalin: A Physician Reflects on Children, Society and Performance in a Pill, published in 1998, was featured in a Time magazine cover story on Ritalin. His second book, Should I Medicate My Child? Sane Solutions for Troubled Kids With—And Without—Medication was published in 2002. Dr. Diller has appeared many times on television and radio nationwide, including Nightline, PBS Newshour, Good Morning America, CBS Early Morning, the Today Show, Frontline and NPR's Fresh Air. His two-part series, "Kids on Drugs," featured in the online magazine Salon.com, won the Society of Professional Journalist's "Excellence in Journalism" award in 2000. He provided expert testimony on Ritalin before a U.S. Congressional Committee in May 2000 and the President's Council on Bioethics in December 2002. The Last Normal Child: Essays on the Intersection of Kids, Culture and Psychiatric Drugs was released in September, 2006. His last book, Remembering Ritalin: A Doctor and Generation Rx Reflect on Life and Psychiatric Drugs, was published in 2012 and is a thirteen year followup of children featured in Running on Ritalin. Dr. Diller's four part series in the Huffington Post, "The United States of Adderall," was central background for a 2018 Netflix documentary, Take Your Pills, in which he is also featured.