Except your employer *doesn’t *like giving you a day or two of taking it easy on the sofa with tissues and chicken soup for a mere cold. Call him back when there are major missing limbs or crews in hazmat suits are scrubbing your house.
That’s part of the issue, from something as trivial as a cold to something as serious as diagnosing a developmental disorder in a child, there is a socioinstitutional expectation that everyone will show up on time every morning ready to put in a full productive day of work or school at or above the expected norm of productivity/learning. In many cases people are scared to actually *take *their sick days, or to use their vacation days (vital for stress control), lest it be counted as lack of commitment come performance review time.
For me, those things helped a bit, but I didn’t feel any significant improvement in my depression until I began taking a combination of Zoloft & Welbutrin. Incidentally, those four steps were/are a LOT more effective when I’m taking those meds than when I’m not.
I guess I’m just a dupe of Big Pharma[sup]TM[/SUP].
Forget about employers. Even we “little people” don’t have much tolerance for other people’s issues.
Say someone at work is operating suboptimally due to menstrual cramps, migraines, stuffy nose, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, or aching back. How many of us would be understanding if that individual refuses to take any medication? I know I wouldn’t be, especially if their poor performance is jamming me up.
And although it would be nice if our employers accommodated our every medical and mental health need, it just isn’t realistic. My mental health improved tremendously when I was transferred from a noisy cubical into a quiet window office with a door. I was on anti-depressants when I was in the cubical, and it didn’t take long for me to taper off of them once I was in my office. But giving everyone their own quiet window office just ain’t gonna happen.
The way I see it, drugs can keep you stable while you go about making the lifestyle changes you need to make. It can take a long time for the right combination of lifestyle changes to come together. At the very least, a drug can keep you in a holding pattern so that your situation doesn’t get any worse.
Yeah, most of us are reluctantly coming around on the idea that depression is a legitimate mental illness (at least, we mindless drones of the pharmaceutical conspiracy who acknowlege that there’s such a thing as legitimate mental illness). But now other mental helth issues, such as ADHD, are getting it.
Serious question: does this actually happen? And “the school suggested it, the parents than took the kid to a professional who made a proper evaluation” doesn’t count. What does “teacers were influencing diagnoses” mean, and how do you know?
If teachers who are not medical doctors are prescribing medications, that’s something that should probably be taken up with the school board, or the attorney general.
Oh, have we shifted to that now? I guess in another generation the pendulum will swing back to mocking “Everyone Gets A Trophy Day.”
Unless we can simultaneously complain about “schools treating all the students the same” and “schools telling children what special snowflakes they are.”
I wish people had the capacity to stop themselves right at that point. Sadly, for some reason, this topic gives people license to hold forth with absolutely no basis in fact.
It’s pretty clear to me we’re over-spectacled. Everything Big Optic tells us is a symptom of so-called “myopia” can be addressed by lifestyle changes. Who’s to say what “normal vision” is, after all? Just because my way of seeing things is different from yours doesn’t mean my way is wrong. And now schools are giving kids vision tests. How can a kid develop normal vision if we’re going to stick glasses on them at age 7? Maybe the problem is schools expecting them to see things, did anyone ever think of that?
First of all, no, a teacher would obviously not whip out a prescription pad and start prescribing adderall or something. However, here was my experience and that of many of my son’s peers:
Go in to talk to the teacher for a conference. Teacher says there may be a problem with you child’s behavior. Asked if we would agree to an evaluation and also, along with the school counselor, made the recommendation that we talk to the doctor immediately to get a prescription. I was with her on the evaluation, but when a teacher or counselor says “medication,” my brain comes to a screeching halt then screams “WTF?” Obviously we want to know if my son is having a problem, but ADD and other medications can significantly affect a kid - I don’t want to put him on anything for anyone’s convenience if he doesn’t need it.
Evaluation comes back with no discernable issues identified based on the school’s test. We talk through the evaluation with the counselor, the teacher, the principal, the school psychologist, the special school psychologist and the gifted specialist - all of them agree that the test is negative. The counselor insists that it’s negative but my son still needs additional testing for autism and that he should be on medication. I say absolutely not - you’ve given me no credible evidence that he needs it and your own test disproves that.
In the meantime, we also had our pediatrician and a family therapist evaluate our son. Both stated that he was well within the range of normal for attention, behavior, social function as well as cognitive function and identified zero learning disabilities and agreed that medication was completely inappropriate.
School sends us papers to have our son put in school for his “special needs” based on the counselor’s recommendation. I call the counselor who reiterates that he needs to be on medication. I ask her to tell me why she believes that if her tests and a medical professional indicated he was within the normal range. Her response? “There’s just something there.” So I send a formal refusal to the school.
Other parents approach me to sign a petition, which goes to the school board. It turns out that many other children in my son’s class were encouraged to go on medication - by that counselor and their teachers, who were apparently encouraged to recommend medication by the counselor. (In fact, last week after I’d gotten engaged in this thread, yet another one of my son’s peers was recommended for medication as well.)
I advise the school in no uncertain terms that I expect that I will not hear from the counselor again and that my son is to have no contact with her unless I am expressly notified and provide my permission. The next year, my son goes from getting Unsatisfactories to getting Outstandings. He has zero behavioral problems.
If the above isn’t a counselor influencing a diagnosis and a school backing her up regardless, I’m not sure what is. What’s sad is that I have no doubt that some of the kids in my son’s school need help. But that experience has so soured any faith I had (and that many of my son’s peers’ parents had) in the school system that I would actively recommend against taking the school’s advice and strongly encourage any parent in the same situation to talk to their doctor instead.
I think it’s at least as parsimonious to suggest a counselor on the take (or, less facetiously, unable to see past their own professional or, perhaps, philosophical bias) as School wants to medicate kids because medication, or because that’s what society is doing nowadays.
