Are you kidding? My kid knows very well that he is not to take any drug unless it is given to him by myself or my husband, with a few exceptions (grandmas and grandpas). Medications vs. drugs is a pretty easy distinction to make in a child’s mind.
I was in several group homes as a kid. I remember some of the kids on Ritalin (I think they put all of us on it for good measure) used to crush it on the desk and snort it. I never got ‘better’ until I turned 16 and was legally permitted to refuse my meds.
Ritalin is, in my experiental opinion, a joke. I do not deny that in a few cases it could be beneficial, but it has been abused and over used as a cure-all for bad parenting.
I hope you’re not referring to all parents of children on Ritalin as bad parents.
I think you’re trying to pick a fight with me. Not only did I leave room for allowances, but this is an opinionated thread by its nature (see title), so hearing the story from my side is probably be ok’ed and welcomed.
I have seen the culture of washed out therapists prescribing errant medication for troves of good kids with washed out parents. That aritcle linked above (this one) points it out. I’m not alone in my criticism, check around.
Ginger , my point, if you please, is that the mindset, “I don’t like who I am, I’ll ask a doctor to give me medicine to change it”, is a serious mistake. If you start early with ritilan, might it not lead, later in life, to valium, xanax, et. al. The younger one learns to manage their condition naturally and with other resources the better off they will be. By the way, you would be surprised at how many people believe that just because a doctor prescribes a medication, it must be safe, legal to drive while taking that medication. This can be a fatal error.
Just for the record, I have been under psychiatric care almost half my life. I know first hand that even a good-hearted shrink can fuck you up with meds. Be imformed, ask your pharmacisit about any meds you take.
I’m not trying to pick a fight with anyone. I have a child who is on Ritalin. I am not a bad parent. You did not make a distinction between bad parents and parents of children on Ritalin.
I work in pharmacy. I know how stupid people can be with medications. I also know what works for my child. Coincidentally, so does his grandfather - our pediatrician. He is good-hearted, of course - but he is also a well-respected medical professional who has been practising for 35 years.
For the record, I fought tooth and nail to find an alternative to medications for my child. I moderated his schedule down to the minute; his diet by cutting out all processed foods and all sugars; tried any number of alternative therapies (oil of Valerian, etc) rather than ‘drug’ him. The end result is that he simply functions better during school hours (the only time he is medicated) when he is on Ritalin. He can focus and learn, rather jumping around every few minutes, wandering around the classroom, disrupting the other students, and not learning. My child is an honour student, thanks to being able to pay attention and learn. He is well-behaved and sociable, polite and a good conversationalist. He is a responsible young person. He also knows that the Ritalin helps him focus, and on the days when he doesn’t have it, he knows to try harder to pay attention to things.
As you have no doubt encountered medication during your psychiatric care, I do not see why you would think that medication is a bad thing - unless you’ve had bad or uninformed doctors.
You don’t think giving kids with diabetes any insulin is a good idea either, right? Give a kid medicine when their young, they’ll do drugs when they get older. :rolleyes:
Some medical conditions simply require pharmaceutical intervention.
Dani
Ginger , you have not had time to do that research, so I will concede that you are well imformed. Unfortunately, most people aren’t. I have no doubt that you are an excellent parent.
I was on my soapbox, forgive me. I am a recovering alcoholic, my father and his mother both died ugly alcoholic deaths. I almost made it a family tradition. I have strong opinions on sbstance abuse it is a tragic facet of our world and I believe that ritalin is a seed to this scourage. Someone told me that there is nothing more self-righteous than a reformed whore. I guess that’s me. (I hang my head)
Howard
Yes, I am well informed. It comes from having a child with a medical condition. He was diagnosed when he was two years old. I did not allow Ritalin until he was school age. I went through three years of alternative therapies.
No harm, no foul. I know things are rough for you just now.
Man, with credentials like these, why shouldn’t we listen to their opinions on clinical psychiatry and neurology?
Simple. You don’t give them the same old “say no to drugs” line. You allow them to learn about what they are taking, and why. You encourage them to become aware of their own mental states, and to gauge the effectiveness of the medication.
Quick question to opponents of Ritalin and other ADHD meds: are you, yourself, diagnosed with any of the various forms of ADHD?
Man did I open a can of worms or what… :smack:
My b/f told me he didn’t realize how upset I got over that article. Since it was one man’s opinion. And it wasn’t so much of being upset… But being pissed. I had to fight tooth and nail to keep my child in school. Sometimes I think everyone else gave up when I didn’t. I was determined to help my child. Is my child perfect… Heck no… There’s days I wish I could just pack him and send him to his fathers. Then I say to myself well that will get him no where at all.
I made the decision to put him on Ritalan, after I learned everything I could about his problems… But one of the main problems I have with him is his behavior. As his doctor tells me… that is a whole other problem. And I am still trying to figure out how to handle that. I am told I am easy on him… Yes I guess I am. Does he get away with more… Yes… Is it my fault… Yes… How do I fix it??? Well I know I have t be harder on him. But that is hard too… And the reasons behind that are long…Lets just say I almost lost him when he was 2. He’s had alot of medical problems when he was born. So I know I am not helping with things being easy on him.
I stand by my decision putting him on drugs. I beleive I am doing that right thing, for his well being.
** ms mom**, don’t sweat it. Every time someone starts a thread on kids and meds, somebody will crawl out of the woodwork and assume that anyone who uses meds just isn’t trying hard enough or is a bad parent.
I expect my older kid will be on meds lifelong. He’s on a very nasty cocktail indeed of an antipsychotic, a tricyclic and compounded dex. Yes, I’ve lost sleep over it, yes, we’ve tried everything else possible and in the end this is what works to keep him as stable as possible. You do your research, you see good hcps and you do what you need to do to keep your kid happy and functioning.
And avoid reading drivel like that article as much as possible and if you do, then put it where it belongs 
I have never once used an illegal drug.
It is precisely because I was on Ritalin from such a young age, that I have never used illegal drugs.
The tiny pill had a profound (and very beneficial) effect on my brain. At various time it was necessary to try other medications. Melaril literally made me fall asleep while standing up. I also read about Ritalin. This taught me that by brain was not the standard model. Ritalin is a stimulant. Stimulants make standard brains hyperactive and unable to concentrate, not calm and focused like they made me.
From that, I figured I really should avoid illegal drugs- they were potent things, which would affect my brain in unpredictable ways.
I am, however, rather fond of mead.
Ethyl alcohol in its myriad of forms has ruined more lives than all other illegal drugs combined. No cite but this is what I feel in my heart!!!
Ethyl alcohol is not illegal either in Virginia or Pennsylvania. However, bizarre import laws make it illegal for business to ship the stuff out of state.
That combined with the cost of a decent bottle of mead mean it is a treat I seldom get.
I have a few bottles of Manishewitz wine. I have a small cup of that during friday services in Temple B’nai DocCathode’s Living Room.
Other than that, the alcohol I have was given to me when my parents moved and will be given to various friends. The only time I was tempted to open a bottle was when I realized I didn’t have any rubbing alcohol and needed to clean something.
That should read “Bizarre import laws make it illegal to ship mead out of state.”
People engaging in the argument usually base their reasoning around behavioral problems as if the intent of the drug was to subdue a child. Although behavior may be affected by Ritalin it is not just the child’s ability to focus that makes the drug useful. It is the ability of the child to COMPREHEND information that makes it effective.
I took the drug for 1 year and my grades shot straight up. School was actually fun for that 1 year. I love to learn new things and school that year was like going to Disney World. Getting my tests back and seeing an “A” on everything was a real thrill.
I can’t say I enjoyed college at all (working full time didn’t add to the thrill). Statistics brought me to tears on more than 1 occasion because I had to reread everything until I understood what was being said. It was entirely a comprehension problem. I went from almost failing an Accounting class to getting an “A” in it because a buddy of mine spent an entire evening beating it into me. It was obvious that I was missing just a few key concepts but they were a house of cards for everything else.
I don’t think that’s entirely accurate; in my own head, it feels more like I don’t have the impulse control to control my attention with - for example, while another person might notice they would like a drink of water, and wait until they’re done what they’re doing in order to get that drink, in my case, it’s as though the impulse doesn’t get processed by my conscious mind before it gets sent on to action. I might not even realize I’m getting a drink of water until I’m up and doing it.
That’s not the only effect of ADD, but that’s how it feels for me.
ADD people do of course seek stimulation in a lot of circumstances, but it has to be pretty carefully controlled. Too much stimulation can be extremely uncomfortable for me; for example, I can’t watch CNN (with or without medication, incidentally) because of all the text on the screen. It makes it impossible to focus on the topic being covered, because my mind keeps flitting to everything else on the screen.
Indeed.
I spent years trying to figure out how to make school work for me - and I don’t think dropping out of school and abandoning my goals is a good solution either. Even when I do successfully get things done, the process of forcing myself to sit down, and keep returning to task whenever I (inevitably) get distracted is miserable for me. Nor is it just school; I like movies and books, and I hate being unable to sit still for a whole movie or half an hour of reading a book.
Assuming the ADD kid isn’t too busy throwing paper airplanes at the other students. Besides, who’s going to miss a fire outside the door? No one’s that focused - except at ADD person who’s “hyperfocused” on something.
ADD people have their own learning styles, and they tend to be unique to the individual. But in my case, the notes never got taken because by five minutes into class, I would find myself singing, or reading something else, or drawing little pictures in my notebook. (Which, admittedly, I still do. But now I can limit it to when the professor’s blathering on about something irrelevant rather than missing important information.) It would never have come to attention in my case if I had been able to focus enough to take notes or pay attention in the first place - so, during 19 years of life, 13 of them in school, and very strong achievement until college, I for one never developed any miraculous techniques to compensate. My compensation was teaching the material to myself out of the textbook later, which works only until the material becomes too difficult to do that.
I wasn’t getting anything creative done without drugs. If you’re not creating because you can’t finish a project, then where’s the creativity of the ADD kid?
I think one thing that’s not given adequate attention is the internal state of someone with ADD. Aside from lectures from parents and teachers about how “you’re not following through” and “you need to get yourself in gear”, I felt like I was failing myself, because I wasn’t accomplishing my own goals. I want to do more than flit between TV, computer, and other forms of mindless entertainment at five-minute intervals, but I wasn’t having much success without drugs.
And the sheer discomfort of my thought process is worth noting. It’s impossible to stay on task, but it’s uncomfortable for ADD people to switch between things as well - there’s that feeling that you’ll never get back to what you were accomplishing. So in my own head, I was wrestling between wanting to give in to distraction and wanting to remain focused, and it was unpleasant even when I was outwardly successful. Having to constantly remind myself to shut up when I felt the urge to talk wasn’t fun; being so distracted that I couldn’t enjoy the things I wanted to do sucked.
The medication doesn’t make all distractions go away. It just gives me control over them. I can notice an impulse to get a drink of water, and yet not act on it. I can remember that I’m expecting an email without dropping what I’m doing to see if it’s here yet. And I can listen to an interesting lecture of Espronceda’s romantic poem “Canción del Pirata” (Song of the Pirate) without the constant urge to sing “The Pirate King” from The Pirates of Penzance, and enjoy the new appreciation of one of my favorite poems as well. After all, I really enjoyed Dr. Snow’s literature class; he was a fascinating, insightful professor. And yet, the one day I missed a pill, I couldn’t listen to him no matter how much I wanted to.
If you can’t see the distinction between a pill for a medical condition and an illegal drug, or you can’t explain it to a kid, you have no business having them, because you’re not ready for the responsibility. And besides, what kid would listen to, “Drugs are bad. Don’t take them because I say so. Trust me.”? I know I sure as hell didn’t.
Besides, there may not be a pill for everything, but there is a pill for ADD. Unless, you know, you expect us to take the argument of a musician over the argument of a psychologist.
Kids in group homes abuse drugs. A lot of prescription drugs can be abused - if narcotic painkillers are only indicated for a few patients, do you wanna be the one to tell a cancer patient or an accident victim that you don’t “believe” in morphine, so they can’t have any? A drug’s potential for abuse is relevant in exactly how its prescribed, but in my case, the fact that I can only get my Ritalin in a thirty day supply completely eliminates whatever desire I might have to sell them or abuse them.
What about “I’m can’t accomplish the things I try to, and my own thought process is uncomfortable for me”? Or “I’m about to flunk out of school, even though I try as hard as I can, and really want to succeed”? Should I just suck it up and accept that, even though I’m smart, insightful, and could be a great urban planner (that’s my course of study), in the end I’m just a failure and should make peace with being unhappy, working at miserable jobs that don’t challenge me, and dying without accomplishing anything? Great. Sorry if that sounds a little bitter, but your philosophical objections for medical care ignore the fact that for a lot of people, these drugs are tremendously useful. I want to be able to harness my abilities for something worthwhile. If parts of my brain are working against them, then I should be able to treat them just as much as I should be able to treat my diabetes. What’s next? Condemning the mindset that says “My pancreas makes me sad. Please change it with drugs”? Telling diabetes patients that they should accept their pancreas for what it is?
Not bloody likely. Patients who have a tendency toward addiction should be monitored carefully on any psychiatric drug. But Valium and Xanax are sedatives; they’re benzodiazepines, an entirely different class of drugs. They don’t do remotely the same thing and for an ADD patient, they’d be counterproductive, and probably pretty unpleasant. After all, the drugs you’re condemning are stimulants.
What’s the point of this? I tried managing it other ways. Sometimes I was almost successful, but never for long enough to avoid serious trouble. And managing it in other ways basically means “Suck it up and deal with it”, which is miserable. It sucks having to fight all your own impulses, all the damn time.
You’ve probably seen, then, psychiatric medicine at its worst. There are bad doctors who prescribe drugs to shut their patients up. And there are medications that don’t work, and treatment regimens that turn people into zombies. But you’re not making a fair comparison, either. Treating serious mental illness is difficult, and all the antipsychotics, both traditional ones and the modern atypical ones, have nasty side effects. For some conditions, the only hope is improvement, not normal functioning, and even then it can be hard to come by.
Ritalin, however, is an old drug, and it’s been used very successfully for a long time to treat ADD. It has very few side-effects, it’s been shown not to cause long-term health problems, and it’s made a lot of peoples’ lives a lot better.
Any time you’re on a drug, you should get informed, and that goes double for any mental health drug. I didn’t get on the stuff till I’d read several books about ADD; my doctor was quite informative, and I take a very active role in my health. If you have kids with ADD, you have to play both roles - managing the disease, and educating the kid about it. It’s a tough thing to do. But it’s easier if you don’t have one hand tied behind your back.
Then I suspect we agree. The decision to take any drug, and especially a mental health drug, has to be made with a lot of consideration and a lot of care. The thing is that it doesn’t matter in my case if Ritalin is overprescribed. Perhaps kids are getting it to quiet them down, and make a class of thirty-five kids easier to handle. If that’s a common occurence, then it needs to be stopped. But that’s not relevant to me, since I need the drug, and it helps me a lot. Antibiotic drugs are used far too heavily, but no one uses that as an argument against them. Some people get prescribed penicillin by lazy, incompetent doctors to treat head colds. But that doesn’t mean that a pneumonia patient needs to be told that they oughtn’t be taking these nasty, overprescribed drugs. Whatever anyone else may do with Ritalin doesn’t change the way it’s made a huge, huge difference for me.
Absolutely. And eating right and getting good exercise are both integral parts to the treatment of ADD - no one would argue that. Plus, the average American needs a hell of a lot more Omega-3, for their heart at least, and perhaps for their attention span. What I argue with is the quackery that blames sugary diets, or artificial colors, or any other popular nonsense for ADD, because these things have already been adequately shown to be unhelpful in the management of ADD. Eat right, get your exercise, and take care of yourself, but don’t expect that to magically make your ADD disappear. It will help, but it’s not always enough.
People with a specific agenda blame food additives for ADD, or bad diets, or various other what-have-you. These things have been demonstrated not to be at the root of ADD, and it’s telling that these same alternative gurus seem to discover that whatever their into treats twenty different health problems. There’s a lot of good in eating a healthy diet, but it’s silly to think that it’ll make all the difference. That’s like trusting Andean Spiny Orange extract, or whatever other exotic nonsense is popular this week, to treat yourself. Alternative medicine is useful, but you can distinguish the relevant claims from the quackery by noting that the real treatments have been proven in scientific studies, and they don’t claim to treat every medical problem under the sun.
For several years I saw a doc that gave me a steady and ever changing cocktail of drugs, typically an anti-deppressant, an anti-psychotic, and a diazapam drug plus something new, now and again. For the past 6 years I have been seeing a psychiatrist that prescribes meds and works in conjunction with a therapist that assists me doing cognitive behavior therapy. Things are working great, my meds are at a minimum and I can actually “think” my stress away. I will not take antipsychotics again. I have been on mellaril, haldol, and respiredal and have been given thorazine in emergengies. None of them stopped the hallucnations and they usually made me a zombie or made me shake too bad to do anything. I enjoy hallucinating and I accept that some things I perceive are not real so it doesn’t count.
My wife has a child from her first marriage that was diagnosed ADHD and being a recovering addict she decided not to put her child on an amphetamine. Instead, she put her daughter in dance class. in little league, in karate, and any physical event that happened to trake her intrest. It was a lot of work for my wife but her efforts wee very fruitful. My step-daughter is a fine young woman with a reasonable job and a family of her own and once a guy kept hitting on her in a bar until she kicked him in the jaw. I’m proud of her. Her mother died last week and I asked her to move in and shack-up with me. She said that she would look for me a og.