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A Million Kids Misdiagnosed with ADHD?
Jamie was one of several people who submitted links to a story proclaiming that as many as a
million kids were misdiagnosed with ADHD simply for being the youngest and therefore least mature in their classes. Worse still, I wonder how many of those kids are permanently put on drugs.
Just let kids be kids?
Can't really say I'm all that surprised. The more responsible/seasoned parents out there pretty much called b.s. on this long ago and actually discipline their kids instead of medicating them.
I presume most of these diagnoses are based on kids simply being kids. They're packed with energy and ready for playtime at a moment's notice. The early years of schooling is/was geared towards training them to control that behavoir. What the heck happened? What's next? Treating restless leg syndrome?*
*Disclaimer: I know no one with this personally, nor do I know if this really, truly is a severe medical condition. I use a pillow between my legs at night if their existence is bothering me.
but the process of diagnosing ADHD would condemn just about every kid who took the test. "Doctor, doctor! My child runs around uncontrollably, can't keep his attention on one thing at a time, and doesn't like school...oh Doctor, what do I do?" "ADHD, MUTHA FUCKA!"
"Ghandi has ADD! Ghandi has ADD! You get it from toilet seats! Use a protective sheet!" Oh man, I miss Clone High...
Living With a Nerd
I maybe a special case. But I was diagnosed as a kid with ADHD. However I refused to take the medicine all of my life(I still have ADHD). But not being medicated didn't affect me. I always had top grades, and now enjoying finishing my PhD.d In physics. Anyway I am not advocating abstaining medication. But my point is, that drugging the kids is not always the solution.
I have a severely ADHD child- he's not normal, he needs serious drugs to function in school, and he knows it. (He's extremely bright and is fully aware of what he's capable of when he's on them- you ever have to deal with child sobbing because he can't focus on simple tasks?) ADHD is one of the most misunderstood conditions out there- it is real, it can be severe, and we need to avoid knee-jerk "It's all made up" reactions
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Its really easy to figure out if your kid was misdiagnosed. People without ADHD who take the medication (e.g. Concerta) have a very different reaction than, say, my kid who barely notices it but is able to concentrate in class.
When I was a kid, I was always outside running around with friends. Playing by the local pond catching tadpoles, frogs, fish, etc. Playing in the fields catching snakes and bugs while eating raspberries and strawberries. Playing in the woods and streams making dams. Riding our bikes _everywhere_. In the winter we were always outside sledding and having snowball fights. etc. etc. etc.
Why are we expecting kids to sit in one spot for hours on end staring at a teacher/board and expecting them to stay calm and fully attentive? I know school is necessary but that's 7 hours of basically sitting there and then the kids come home and are basically expected to just sit there and do homework and then just sit there and eat dinner. Are we just setting ourselves up for failure? I mean, are we just asking kids to _not_ be kids and then drugging them up to make them comply?
I'm only 30, and frankly I knew of _no_ kids with ADD, let alone ADHD. There were merely kids that liked to sit and read or play quietly and then there were the kids who wanted to play football all the time or otherwise be active.
Seriously, what happened to kids expending their energy? Why do parents/administration expect kids to be these calm and attentive beings who just sit there and want to be talked to all day?
Maybe there are some children who have an imbalance somewhere. It happens. But overall, when a kid wants to run around and play, guess what, they are KIDS! It's part of being a kid. Throwing drugs down their throat to turn them into the kid that is more convenient and calm isn't the answer unless there is a _real_ (read: rare) issue.
My fiance's son was recently accused of having ADHD by the social-workers masquerading as "teachers" at his school. See, unlike his older siblings, he doesn't LIKE school. It's not fun to him. He'd rather be outside running around, or shootin' zombies on the PS3, or just hanging out with Mom.
However, in today's Brave New World of elementary school, being "unhappy" is NOT ALLOWED and is a symptom of ADHD and depression. The "teachers" (and I will put quotes around the name because they were nothing more than armchair social workers) were hell-bent on getting him on ADHD. Not a single one of them was a medical doctor. But, they had all their ministry of education created "information sheets" that gave them a nice formula for identifying potential ADHD cases in the classes. And like the dutiful little Nazis they were, they religiously hunted down every kid that just wasn't happy enough for "further evaluation."
Fortunately, our family doctor did not agree. He put a stop to this nonsense. Maybe he's one of the few, but our doctor said "Maybe he just doesn't like going to school?" Someone give that man a candy apple for stating the bloody obvious.
Like it or not, ADHD is an industry. A LOT of money is being made off the over-prescription of Ritalin. Children are being unfairly "accused" of ADHD simply because they don't fit some happy shiny ideal that no child should ever be if they are truly healthy.
I HATED school when I was a kid. The popular vernacular for elementary school in my day was "jail." I guess nowadays I would have been dragged off and drugged up for daring to crack a frown at the teacher.
My stepson has been tested twice for ADHD and both times they came out negative. The tests were recommended by his 1st and 3rd grade teachers (he is going into 7th now). He is one of the youngest kids in his class. However, he is in the gifted and talented program, has a high IQ and is currently reading books about the String Theory. We seek out teachers that can handle a child that is, probably, overall, smarter than they are. If we encounter a teacher who asks him to be tested, we show them the original 2 results. Then they can either suck it up or ask to have him moved to another class.
Alan
That's significantly lower than the 100% misdiagnose rate I was thinking of ...
There's no profit to the pharma companies in kids just being kids. When was it that we decided a significant percentage of all children suddenly had a mental disorder?
In 15 minutes they diagnosed me with ADHD and got me a prescription for the drugs (which I don't take) - while I was 20 years old.
If all the diagnosises are made that quickly then I'd be pretty worried about it.
Most of the teachers I had when I was in school neglected lesson planning, and instead assigned pointless busy work like writing vocab words 20 times each or doing 50 math problems where 10 would do. School really only needs to be about 4 hours long. Any longer than that and the kids lose focus, and the teachers run out of stuff to teach.
when my son was 4, he was in a very good pre-school. In the middle of the year he was moved up to the next age group ( 5 and 6 year olds. Luckily a girl was moved up at the same time. A month after the move, my wife and I were called in for a conference because the teacher had concerns about my son's behaviour. In the middle of the meeting, I asked a question about the age distribution in the class. The director and the teacher both looked at each other. You could almost see the light bulb going on. Of the 20 kids in the class, 10 were older 6 year olds, 8 were older 5 year olds. The other two were my son and the girl who had moved up from the 3 and 4 year old group. She was also having "issues". The meeting closed quickly with apologies.
{Full Disclosure: I was diagnosed ADD (nowa-a-days called ADHD-I) at an early age and have been on Adderall since then. Today, I choose to continue recieving the prescription.}
Not to be disrespectful or contrarian or anything, but are these drugs really intrinsically bad? Even under a misdiagnosis, isn't it possible that these drugs can provide tangable benefits for the child? I don't want to jump right on and say that there is, but shouldn't we at least examine the possibility that these drugs could provide benefits and (assuming they do even for the misdiagnosed) allow the parents (and the child once he's of an appropriate age) to choose whether to administer the medication?
What's really wrong with these drugs? Yes they have side-effects, and yes there are consequences and very different reactions in people who don't have what they are prescribed for, but should we jump to the conclusion that these are not worth it or that only those whom the drugs were researched for can benefit from them?
What? No, I don't have answers to any of these questions. I want to know people's opinions. I am of the opinion that it is neither right nor wrong to let nature take its course or to intervene. Of course, this simple opinion presupposes a lot about the point of views I may be arguing about. I want to here those views and understand them as well.
Demented But Determined.
I started to read the article and found it... oh look shinny rocks...
Actually, in ye olde days, parents used to just sedate them. Just read some ads from the late 19'th century or early 20'th century. They were selling some unholy mixtures of opium, morphine, heroin, chloroform, and in some cases alcohol as a way to keep your kids out of the way. And you didn't even need a prescription for that either.
And in the poorer countries they just used poppy tea, pretty much for the opium again.
Honestly, it's not something new. Don't let nostalgia paint a false image for you, there actually never was an age where parents and school just dealt with it responsibly. If there even was some wonder drug that let one turn off the kids -- either as in "asleep" or as in "drooling unfocused in a corner" -- there always were a bunch of parents who wanted that.
No, I'm not saying it's a _good_ thing. Just that it's not a new one.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Like everyone else is saying I also would have put on drugs. All my elementary report cards said, "Johnny talks to much in class!" With enough positive and negative reinforcement -- I learned to control my behavior.
I was an Honor Graduate of the Air Force Academy and a jet instructor pilot -- and a programmer in my later years! I hate to think what would have happened if I'd been drugged.
I hear about it frequently from a couple of friends of mine who are school psychologists. Parents come in with misbehaving kids looking for drugs to calm them down and make them more obedient - basically a pharmaceutical cure for their bad parenting.
We have an entire generation of kids who are being tagged ADHD when there is nothing wrong with them because parents don't want to deal with the responsibility of raising them, or because the parents have heard that Ritalin will make them get better grades, or for some other reason that has nothing to do with the behavioral health of the child.
A million misdiagnosed just because they're younger? Wait until they start looking into how many kids are misdiagnosed because they're too smart and not being challenged by our schools that are set up to cater to the lowest common denominator.
I was misdiagnosed with ADD as a kid. Turns out, I was just bored out of my fucking skull. Second, third, and fourth grades were the hardest for me because the material should have been covered in one year, not three. Some schools have realized this and starting pulling the smart kids out of 'general population' and putting them in their own curriculum track which is much more challenging.
That's what they should look into
Aero2600
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
(*) Telling someone who has actual ADHD any of these phrases is equivalent to telling a paraplegic to get up and walk. It might work if you're Jesus himself, otherwise it's an exercise in futility.
My parents had a theory about this. When I was young, Ritalin was the biggest fad. Better than half the elementary school was on it, and every day they would line up around the corner to get their medication. Further, it was recommended for nearly every child in the school whenever they got in trouble of any kind.
The contributing factors that made the perfect storm of Ritalin were as follows:
-The drug company wanted to sell as much Ritalin as possible.
-The company bought legislation that classified ADHD as a learning disability, so that schools got more money for each child who was diagnosed.
-The same legislation meant that if you qualified for government assistance, you'd get more money for each child that was on Ritalin.
So the school now became the company's taxpayer-financed agent to push Ritalin, a drug required long-term to treat a condition that no one quite understood. The school had a financial incentive to have the psychologist diagnose everyone he could with ADHD, and if you were on welfare they could extend an incentive to you as well. I can offer one other piece of evidence: I had a friend whose parents did not want to give him these drugs under any circumstance as they understood neither ADHD nor the effects of the drug. When they were pressuring the family to medicate him, they handed his parents a stack of teacher's notes ostensibly to show he's been acting up. As my friend's parents looked at the notes, they noticed that some of the notes had inconsistencies such as wrong gender (she vs. he) and wrong name. The administration making the Ritalin sales pitch had taken notes about a child with ADHD and simply changed the name on them! At this point, they pulled my friend out of school and moved to a different area.
Ultimately, I'm not surprised that this is the case. I'm only surprised that it took so long for people to see through the ruse. I'm happy that my parents did, and sad that most of my friends' parents could not be convinced that ADHD was for my generation a huge drug-pushing scam!
Modders, please check something before modding it. Searching for "ritalin stimulant" and "ritalin" depressant" both come back with results saying that ritalin is a stimulant. Even Wikipedia says its a stimulant.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
I did a lot of research, and found a nearly forgotten technique which has been recently discovered and shows a lot of promise: Disruptive Stimuli Refocussing Behavioural Therapy. Completely drug free, and a full course of treatment can be delivered in as little as one lesson.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I wonder if Doctors over diagnose ADHD for the same reasons they over diagnose depression.
Friend of mine is Doctor working for the UK National Heath Service and he's told me about how they can be offered cash incentives for prescribing certain drugs, particularly antidepressants. Consequently you go to the doctor with any vague symptoms there is a good chance you will walk away with low dosage Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors(SSRI).
The cash incentives avoid being bribes in a cunning way. If a doctor prescribes enough of a certain pill he gets invited to conferences where they apparently give them more information about the drugs they prescribe. Of course this is out of work hours and the drug companies feel they should compensate the doctors for their time, usually cash in hand with jaw dropping amounts and somehow the after parties end up in hotels with coke and hookers. ''Prescribe our drug and you can come to the next party! ''
I wish I didn't believe him but first hand I went to the doctors with a headache and lethargy and walked away with a months worth of venlafaxine though I never took them after reading the side effects list. 3 years later I passed all the tests to join the Intelligence Core in the British Army but failed the medical because I had apparently previously been diagnosed with depression.
...that I didn't RTFA
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
Alamazadarnit, your quote illustrates the whole problem. Been there, solved that.
I have Attention problems. I spent about five years semi-scientifically describing its effects down to the activity parsing level.
If someone has ADD, (*Note the missing H - there are multiple variants!), they get called "moron". Getting called "moron" is what makes you depressed. So an SSRI is a total disaster! What's the chief side effect of SSRI's? Lethargic fatigue! So it makes you more of a "moron".
If the guy has ADD, FIX the ADD. Ritalin, Strattera, custom natural cocktails, whatever. But get the guy thinking straight so he isn't called "moron", and watch him magically stop being depressed.
P.S. SSRI side effects are in fact nasty.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Indeed, I wonder how many supposedly ADHD kids just really need a good thumping to keep them focused.
'Thumping' may be counterproductive.
Personally, I vote for 'More gym time'. Schools that eliminated gym in favor of more classroom hours saw no academic improvement and increases in disruption. Schools that instituted gym time* saw reductions in disruption/discipline issues.
You don't even necessarily need organized gym, you just need to get the kids *MOVING*.
As a result you both need fewer drugged kids, you also have healthier kids.
*Basically exercise. ANY exercise.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm in my 40s so for those of you not old enough to know this, for the past 30 years in the USA, parents, schools and doctors have all been looking for the quick fix for "problem" kids.
In the 1980s psychiatric hospitals were the answer. The kids were all "crazy" and need psychiatric help. Some got put on medication. Some did not. But if you caused a problem anywhere, your butt was going to a psych hospital to get you "help".
In the 1990s, everybody was diagnosed as being hyperactive and put on ritalin.
Roughly since 2000, now the answer is that all kids have ADD or whatever term du jour they use for it. So maybe now instead of getting ritalin you get some other drug, but you're still on medication.
So since the medical community and the schools change their method of treatment and diagnosis every 10 years according to whatever faddish diagnosis takes hold, is it really any wonder that people question whether ADD/ADHD or whatever you call it exists? Because 20+ years ago these same kids were sent to psychiatric hospitals and nobody every said they were "hyperactive" or had "attention deficit disorder". And prior to the 1980s, NOBODY went to psych hospitals or got pumped full of pills for simply being bored.
Look I'm sure that some people really do have ADHD/ADD or whatever they call it and really do need medication for it. But do I think that most kids diagnosed with it have it? Nope.
Except for one sentence the article gives no clue as to whether there is sexual bias at work in the selection of the little victims here.
I've read many press reports about ADHD over the years and it seems clear that it is overwhelmingly boys who are diagnosed and that normal young male behaviour is being treated as pathological.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
I mean no disrespect to parents trying to raise a child who legitimately has ADHD or to teachers trying to teach such a child, but the idea of:
1) Segregating students by age
2) Expecting them sit all day
may work for girls, but it doesn't work for boys. I can remember clearly my first grade teacher (in the late 70s) talking with another teacher about which of us were quiet (=good) and which were loud (=bad). And she went through _each student by name as we were forced to listen_. And guess who was good? Nearly all of the girls and a minority of boys, the ones who were quiet by disposition. Why? Because those of us who were normal didn't want to sit still and be quiet all day.
As for age segregation, if boys see older boys modeling good behavior, they tend to do so as well, either because they 'want to grow up to be like them' or they know they'll get smacked if they don't.
Now, take an extreme version of a 'bad' kid coupled with the willingness to drug said kid for the sake of classroom harmony, and you have an obvious explanation for this report.
Why the hell are teachers making an ADHD diagnosis in the first place? That is something that requires a medical degree. In Oregon, it is against the law for the school staff to tell you your child has ADHD -- which didn't keep my daughter's principle from insisting she as not normal and needed to be medicated. Needless to say, we did not comply -- we transferred her to another school where they treated her like all the other kids and her "behavior problems" instantly disappeared.
Inattentiveness is not necessarily a sign of ADHD -- it can also be a symptom of depression, trauma, or abuse, as mentioned in this article.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
My daughter's birthday is just shy of the beginning of the school year, making her one of the youngest in her class. In fourth grade her teachers and counselors called me in for a meeting, said it was clear she was ADHD and strongly recommended I get her on Ritalin immediately. I refused. A few months later, another meeting, this time including the vice principal, same forceful recommendation.
Wondering if they were on to something, I took her to a specialist, but when he found out what the issue was, he gave me a questionnaire to fill out, and prescribed Ritalin without ever actually seeing the child. Apparently the medical profession gets a lot of these cases, and they rotate them through as quickly as possible.
This cavalier approach started alarm bells ringing, and I started doing research. As a result, I ended up getting her some *real* help (she is severely dyslexic) and continued to resist efforts by the school system to prescribe drugs for her.
In what turned out to be the final meeting with school offials (sixth grade), I brought in the results from two different specialists and gave an impromptu lecture on dyslexia, it's effects in the classroom, and how this pertains to my child. (Ok, I'm a geek, I probably overprepared.) Eleven expressionless faces looked back at me. When I finished, the principal said "that's all very well, but we are not medical doctors and are not qualified to evaluate this. The school system doesn't recognize dyslexia as a medical condition."
Ok, so let me get this straight. You decline to consider the results from specialists because you're not medical doctors. Yet you have diagnosed my daughter with a neurobehavioral disorder and prescribe drugs for her.
It didn't go well after that, and I pulled her out of school. She was homeschooled for three years and then was accepted into an art magnet school, where she thrives. And her counselors have never, ever, suggested she take Ritalin.
The point is, we're geeks here, we're more likely to have the resources and inclination to dig into the problem and expose this kind of corruption. Dick and Jane, IQ 95 and 97, don't have the wherewithal, and Dick doesn't have time from his backbreaking job at the sprocket plant, and Jane is pretty much incapacitated from her antidepressants, but like any good parents they really do want Dick Junior (IQ 93) to succeed, so when the school says Dickie has a problem and should take these pills...
What's insidious about this is that some kids (about 2%) really do need the drug to function. It's not the drug's fault. What started as relief for a genuine (although somewhat rare) disorder has turned into a huge cash cow.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I was the little kid who preferred to draw rather than interact, due to being picked on all the time by kids during recess for being small and geeky. So, I was given time release ritalin, which I chewed due to a gag reflex. I literally have no memory of that chunk of my life, save for the occasional bizarre hallucination, and people yelling at me for having nervous tics. I got off it, and suddenly I had friends, I was social, I was doing great in school, and I could actually recollect what had been happening. I'm a grad student now. I can keep up with the schoolwork just fine, and have no issues with focus. According to my mom, who works in neurology now, the company that made Ritalin went around to schools and started giving heavily skewed presentations on ADD and ADHD to teachers, so that the teachers would tell parents that their kids has ADD/ADHD, parents would tell doctors that, doctors would administer a bullshit battery of tests, and kids would do kiddie meth and get stoned.
I am not going to say that no one is ever misdiagnosed but I think that economic models used here are not always the best predictors for medical issues and that studies like this have been used for years to try to cut funding for special education in public schools. It is honestly not that hard to tell the difference between an immature or young kid and one that has ADHD if you have some expertise with ADHD and I suspect if proper diagnoses was allowed by HMOs and PPOs there would be little problem. Having pretty bad dyslexia meant that I went to private school for kids with learning disabilities that did not effect ID (e.g. dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, ADD and ADHD) and I have got to tell you that the idea that the ADHD and ADD kids don't have an issue other than just being immature is insulting, a gross misunderstanding of the problem, and something kids with learning disabilities have had to fight with for years.