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I live in a country with a high quality socialized health care system, but even my general practitioner doesn't have access to the kinds of specialized equipment you'd find in a high-end research laboratory.  That doesn't mean that such equipment doesn't exist.

To quote a recent article in NYT:

To put it mildly, I wouldn't consider the New York Times an authoritative source.

And these fantastic observations of behaviour have now given us a population full of mental disorders. A recent survey (the National Comorbidity Survey Replication) done by the National Institute of Mental Health "found" that half of the population in the US have or will develop a mental disorder. And of course many will "need treatment".

And studies by oil companies indicate that global warming is a myth.  What's your point?  Studies have been used incorrectly in every discipline and every field of endeavour.  That doesn't mean anything other than that every industry has its share of slimy marketing people.

You would get proof if you would ask your psychiatrist to measure your serotonin level and then tell if it was normal or not, imbalanced or not. There is simply no test in the individual case. For real illnesses there are objective tests in the individual case.

There are many techniques to determine chemical levels in the brain.  Even with my limited layman's knowledge of the subject, I was aware of Positron Emission Tomography, which allows scientists to monitor chemical levels in the body and has contributed to the growing body of neuropsychological research.  

You seem to be very confused about the difference between diagnostics and the science behind the treatment.  Scientists spend a great deal of time studying how the brain works and how to fix its problems.  Treatments like Ritalin are based on that body of real science and have been extensively tested.  They do what they are intended to do.

Diagnosis is a different issue.  General practitioners are just that -- generalists.  They don't have access to the specialized equipment or training to create the drugs, but they understand how they work and they are trained to properly administer them.  If they're not doing so, then it's an issue of medical ethics in the diagnostic phase.  It's not a reason to condemn the science out of hand.

It's very much like someone bringing a malfunctioning computer to me and asking me to fix it.  I don't have access to the equipment or the training to monitor at the physical level what is happening in the basic components of that machine, but that doesn't mean the knowledge and the capability to do so doesn't exist.  Instead I will use diagnostic techniques to infer what is happening in the machine.  I can do this on extremely complicated systems with a very high degree of accuracy.  

If you take your machine to Microsoft, they'll probably tell you to reinstall the OS.  This is a fix which probably isn't related to the root cause of the issue.  The problem isn't in the science, it is in the support personnel at Microsoft and the culture which produced them.  You're doing the equivalent of jumping up and down and screaming about how this proves that computer technology is all smoke and mirrors without any real science underneath it.  Quite simply, you're wrong.  The techniques to accurately diagnose the problem exist, and the science behind the treatment is real and valid.  If some people can't or won't properly apply those diagnostic techniques in favour of taking the easy road, then that's a problem with the ethics of those people.

I'll say it again: these drugs are based on real science and they do what they are intended to do.  If they are being misused, then it is a problem of prescribing physicians who can properly diagnose these problems and properly apply treatments, but for some reason are not doing so.  This is not a failure of science, it is a failure of ethics.