I’m pretty sure that I did not accuse you, or anyone else, of blithely using meds, or saying that you used them as a first or last resort. I HAVE mentioned cases of OTHER people that, in my opinion, are mistreating their children. I am a little mystified by your defensiveness.
We are discussing a subject, human psychology, which I have four years of college training in. Since a great many people do not have degrees in this subject, I don’t think sharing what I know is the same as an assumption of general ignorance on the part of others. However, if you feel that my posts are nothing more than arrogant presumption, please feel free to ignore them. There’s no reason to act as if I have attacked you. I’m pretty sure that I have not.
I did not set out to lecture you or anyone else. I set out to try to explain my position more clearly to the people who were offended by my first post. I AM curious, though, do you refuse to consult with a psychologist or psychiatrist who does not have kids with ASD or ADHD? Is that the only way that any level of expertise may be gained?
Actually, I am saying that my position will not change even if these events occur. It is not necessary to me that you believe me.
You are misunderstanding what I mean by training. I know how to play a piano, I just lack the musical “ear” to be able to clearly distinguish musical notes. Also, you are rejecting the possibility that “holding focus long enough to complete a task” may be described as a behavior.
Please don’t assume that I have implied that the same training techniques will work exactly the same with different children. Or that I am implying that the fact that you do not know a training technique that works with one of your children means that you are somehow inadequate as a person or a parent. Please believe me when I say that I am not judging you, and if it sounds like I am, then it is inadvertent.
I don’t presume to allow or disallow parents to do anything, and you should be able to see this. That is not the same as arguing the validity of the label in question (or how it is being used).
Why, how very defensive of you to assume that I am implying you are a failure as a parent. However, if you jump to conclusions (and assume you have been insulted) in the same way when dealing with your kids as you do with me, I would not be suriprised if it makes communication difficult at your house.
This is not surprising at all. A lot of the behaviors that people called “hyperactive” in me were actually displays of boredom. It is hard for me to “pay attention” to a teacher who is teaching something I have already learned.
I’d be willing to do this, but I’m not sure that we could ever agree on definitions closely enough to even know if this has happened.
You’re probably right. Generalizations of any sort in this area are dangerous and untrustworthy. The more important point is the amount of mystery involved in taking and administering brain-affecting drugs.
Not to pick on you, but did you read entire books, or did you read a paragraph here and a page there? If you did read entire books, did it not require a certain amount of “paying attention”? Would you say that you were incapable of paying attention, or that you had difficulty appearing attentive in situations where someone wanted you to?
Note: These are fairly personal questions I’m asking. If they make you uncomfortable, just ignore them. This is a painful subject for a lot of people, and I don’t want you to feel like I’m attacking you. That is not my intention at all.
The only comment I feel a need to make here is that you are an adult and your brain development is pretty much complete. If you were one of my loved ones, I would feel a lot more comfortable about this than I would about you taking it as a child.
Also, Hunter Hawk, your comment is extremely relevant to this discussion. Most human behaviors have their good uses and bad ones, and when you start talking about dysfunction, the key issue is whether the behavior is helping the person or hurting him/her. Many things that are defined as disorders, like OCD, are not “bad” behaviors, they are exaggerated behaviors. Regular hand-washing is good. Washing until the skin comes off is dysfunctional.
That said, the presence of dysfunctional behavior does not necessarily imply an organic (brain) problem–or the lack of one. In the case of OCD, it is clear that there is an organic problem and medication is definitely called for.
The case for an organic basis to the constellation of issues referred to as ADHD is not as strong, and there is evidence for the success of other approaches. I am sorry if, by pointing this out, parents here feel that I am attacking them. That is not my intention.
And just in case it’s not clear, Hunter Hawk, I am agreeing with you.
Not only read, but in several cases completely memorized. And herein lies MY problem with the particular phrase “attention deficit.” A person with ADD can often pay an incredible amount of attention to something. I’m an artist and I can work on a project for hours on end, often to the point of forgetting to eat or visit the potty (and it’s a little frightening when it takes something as extreme as physical PAIN to divert your attention.) The difference between me and a “normal” person is that all stimulus is equal stimulus - I am unable to tune out the background music in a restaurant, for example, and was frankly amazed when someone described their ability to do that. I can hear and understand the person sitting with me, I can eat my meal, I can notice what cologne the waitress is wearing and I can still hear the background music - and later recite to you the entire playlist we heard during our meal. A pretty neat quality to have, one would think, but the fact is it’s hell trying to get it all sorted in my mind.
What Ritalin does for me is enable me to “sort” long enough to determine that the background is the background, and therefore dismiss its stimulus during a restaurant meal.
One thing you need to understand though - I appreciate your reluctance to tamper with the brain chemistry of a child whose brain is still developing (even though I have yet to see anyone produce evidence of harm there). But. While I functioned well enough - even succeeded and exceeded - as a child, there has always been Something Wrong With Me. Living in my head pre-treatment was a scary thing, and caused me a huge amount of terror and misery. I was a good girl who followed all the rules and made my parents proud while I slowly went mad inside. Had anyone had an inkling of what was going on, 25 years of grief would have been avoided.
we are discussing a subject in which I have 11 years of direct experience (well if I add the sums of my kids lives together it’s 18+ years). For me that far outweighs four years of colleges. I’ve read extensively in this field. What you’re reporting as fact comes across to me as opinion.
I sure as hell would not use a professional who told me unattributed opinion about ritalin affecting brain development. Can you find me a cite for that? I’m not aware of whether my developmental paed has kids with ASD or ADHD – I am aware that he works with my kids professionally and with a degree of expertise. The decision to medicate is made jointly between him, me and my kids. I’ve never had to listen to him tell me that he would never medicate his kids ever. If he did, well, I’d be looking for another doctor. The one psychiatrist who did refuse to follow through on a neuropsych 's recommendation to do a trial of stim meds didn’t last long.
And let’s get clear – I’m not even remotely defensive. I’m very comfortable with the decisions we’ve made for our kids. You might want to check out your opinion about OCD definitely having a physical cause if you get time. PANDAS is one cause but not all OCD is PANDAS. And it is possible to treat OCD with CBT – medication is not always indicated.
Our 10yo son has ADHD, but he is on the hyperactive/impulsive side, with virtually no problems paying attention. His first grade teacher caught on very quickly that he always knew exactly what she was saying (and could repeat it verbatim) even while he was climbing on the classroom tables during classtime.
Ritalin has been in general use for decades now, and my own assumption is that, with all the studies that have been done with it, something would have come out of those studies if this were a serious problem.
It’s also useful to point out that the standard ADHD meds are stimulants. I think it’s very interesting that my son is calmer and more likely to take a nap when he’s taken his Concerta than he is without it. That alone is enough to prove to me that his brain is not wired the way a typical person’s brain is.
I work with someone who has ADD. The guy is brilliant, but unless he watches the medication levels, he just can not concentrate. The fact that our work situation is a series of interruptions and constant policy changes does not help him. When he has his meds, this person can do anything asked of him, better than most people. Without them, his mind just won’t stay focused. The fact that medicines do help, seems to mean there is some physical/chemical basis for the condition and that it is real.
The full name of diabetes in Greek means “honey pee.” I guess that makes it a “metaphorical disease,” but it’s still a real disease. Otherwise I don’t know what the hell a “metaphorical” disease is supposed to mean. If you mean that the label only describes a set of symptoms, then so what? Many diseases are merely descriptive labels of symptoms until they understand the cause, including diabetes.
It seems that these threads pop up every three months or so, with generally the same progression. I have participated in them more extensively in the past, but it does seem that they end up repeating themselves. To help move things forward, I strongly encourage posters to read DSeid’s post and frame their responses around specific questions.
My answers are 1) Yes, and 2) No.
A few bits I will add: As a clinical psychologist, I can say that after four years of undergraduate psychology courses, I knew exactly dick about child psychopathology. This may very well be a function of my undergraduate program, but my experience suggests otherwise. (Side note: don’t expect to get much work in psychology with a bachelor’s level degree in psychology that you couldn’t get without it).
These disorders, including ADHD, are a constellation of behaviors. They have been refined from a collected set of clinical observations in early diagnostic frameworks to a present set of behaviors that show improved reliability and validity, yet do leave much room for improvement. They do hang together statistically in ways that suggest a distinct condition from other psychopathology. They relate to other disorders and outcomes in ways that suggest that it is useful to consider them a distinct group with prognostic utility.
It pains me to say this, as a clinical psychologist, but this is a condition for which pharmacotherapy has proven to be a superior treatment. There are behavioral interventions for individuals that are helpful to a lesser degree. There are parenting interventions that can make a big difference in how parents manage and respond to undesirable behaviors in children with ADHD. There are classroom techniques that are very useful as well. But in terms of direct intervention in the behaviors that are problematic, particularly as the severity of symptoms increases, it is very difficult to make meaningful changes for someone outside of the use of medications.
I am not a father and perhaps have no right to comment, but one of my concerns is that ADD is too quickly and easily diagnosed. A close friend of mine has a son who was “diagnosed” with ADD while in public school. It was recommended that he start medical treatment. She, thank god, had the good sense to take him out of public school and put him in a private school where he had teachers who could take the time to give him the attention he needed. He went from C and C minuses to nearly straight As. He still had some behavioral problems, but they continued to improve as the years past. I do not mean to imply that ADD does not exist, but I worry that it has become an easy crutch.
LOL. I suppose it seems like I meant that. No, it was not a teacher who made the diagnoses, but of course a teacher instigated the action that led to the “diagnosis”.
The data for an organic and genetic basis for the constellation of signs and symptoms called ADD is quite strong. For example this review -
The British Journal of Psychiatry 174: 105-111 (1999)
Genetic basis of attention deficit and hyperactivity
To flesh out that summary - identical twins adopted into different families have a high concordance for ADD symptoms - identical twins have a much higher concordance for ADD symptoms than do fraternal twins. As close to gold standard as you can get.
Again that does not mean that it is per se “a disease” or “a disorder” … such is a judgement based on degree function or dysfunction within society. Blue eyes are genetic but not a disorder. But these behavioral characteristics are generally not the result of ineffectual pareting or lazy teachers or unmotivated kids - they are mostly organic in origin.
Now as to your discomfort with the medication of developing brains … I am certainly not proposing wily nily prescription writing, but we have many decades of experience with stimulant usage. There have so far been no significant adverse outcomes reported on brain development. This does not rule out the possibility that such may exist, and certainly the younger patient would need to have more dysfunction to justify taking that possible risk, but the available evidence is that long term use from school age on at least is safe for developing brains. The benefit, at least short term, is clear (at least for those kids not near the fuzzy edges) - read some of the vingettes posted here to get a flavor of those benefits. Weighing those benefits against the known risks (short term appetite suppression, headaches, etc); considering the possible long term benefits against the theoretical long term risks - these are the factors for parents to consider with professional guidance before coming up with a choice that is right for their child and their family.
I have to tell you in all honesty that ADD is NOT an easy diagnosis, and if your friend’s child does not exhibit a clear majority of a large number of ADD indicators on a regular basis, it would be unlikely for any medical doctor to prescribe, no matter how much trouble the teacher is having. I will concede that ADD is an easy SUPPOSITION to make and I’ve been guilty of that - I once watched a kid bounce around like a lunatic and wondered aloud “why doesn’t someone drug that kid, ferchrissakes??”
But teachers have a lot of contact with kids on a regular basis and are often able to observe things that parents don’t. Thus, when a question comes up about the disorder, a doctor will generally speak to the teacher or ask the teacher to fill out a questionnaire detailing those observations.
Your experience with Doctors differs drastically with my personal experience with Doctors. Although I have come across some amazingly good and professional Doctors, I have also come across some amazingly incompetent, lazy and uncaring Doctors. The good and professional doctors took some major searching on my part. This is personal experience that has nothing to do with ADD. In a perfect world, all Doctors would be experienced, caring professionals and behave as you have said. Perhaps in the world of pediatrics that is the case. Perhaps the son of my friend is a unique isolated case.
No, however, they can make “recommendations.” My mom is an elementary school teacher, and she is often given forms by the psychologists of various students, asking about their patients’ conduct in class in order to make an ADD diagnosis. Her input definitely has some bearing on the process of identifying students with ADD. In addition, she says there is a lot of pressure to just green-light the diagnosis, since if a kid is not diagnosed as ADD and the teacher is part of the reason for that, and it turns out later on that the kid does have ADD, the school could have a lawsuit on its hands. So yeah, teachers can’t diagnose ADD on their own but they do have a hand in it.
I don’t think the important question is whether or not ADD exists or if medications work; I think the important question is whether we should be giving any kind of medical intervention to children who often don’t know what they’re taking and don’t know whether or not they want to take it. I know I wouldn’t give any pills to a kid (excepting life or death stuff like cancer meds) until they were of an age where they could realize what their “disorder” entailed and make their own decision about whether or not they wanted to take medication for it. IMO, giving Ritalin and Paxil to four-year-olds (my mom has seen this happen first hand, there are kids in freakin’ kindergarten taking antidepressants) is really sick. The brains of four-year-olds are still actively growing. You can talk all you want about how safe psych meds are, but the fact is that they do change the chemical composition of the brain and to give something like that to someone whose brain isn’t fully formed–that just seems so wrong. How can a toddler be clinically depressed anyway? And of course, a four-year-old has no idea what they’re taking, and no clue about anything dealing with psychology. They can’t possibly give consent. How is it medically ethical to give them non-life or death medicines?
I have no doubt that if I were to go to elementary school today, that I would be labeled with ADD and possibly other things, and I feel thankful every day that my parents never went down the medical route. I think I would have felt very violated if they had done that–forced me to take pills without my consent. I wonder, how many of the parents of ADD kids in this thread have asked their children if they even want to take medication, and how many of you would allow them to discontinue it if they didn’t want to take it anymore?
I think it’s absurd to ask kids whether they want to take medications or not. So, if your child had an ear infection, you’d consult with them on whether they should take antibiotics? After all, an ear infection is not a life-or-death matter. Nope, I’m in charge of my children, they are not in charge of themselves.
Why are some people so distrustful of medications that have been used with great success for many years with no evidence of long-term damaging side effects?
Have you actually lived with a kid who is severely behaviourally disordered? Do you understand what it means to raise a child who sleeps 5-6 hours a night on a good night? Do you understand what it is like to be permanently sleep deprived and when you are awake you’re dealing with a child with no sense of personal safety, with limited attention span and who throws tantrums? Tantrums which can go on for hours? Have you dealt with a kid so anxious they cannot leave the house and who melts down with fear when asked to do anything outside their very limited safety zone?
I have got two kids, both with very high intelligence, both on the autistic spectrum, one who is also ADHD. M started on zoloft when he was just 5 years old and when he was washing his hands for 6+ hours a day. The rest of his day he spent checking that the other family members had washed their hands. IIRC he was sleeping about 5 hours a night at that point in time. I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about the effects on meds on his developing brain because if I hadn’t used meds, he would not have survived to adulthood. We deal with suicidal ideation – he spent 6 weeks in a locked psych unit this year after he began rapid cycling. He’s now on dexamphetamine, an atypical antipsychotic and a tricyclic. That’s a combo which quite frankly sucks and scares me witless but it’s the only combo we’ve found where his mood swings, his attention issues and his anxiety are even partially controlled.
His younger brother is on a microdose of prozac which is making a huge difference for him in terms of anxiety. His anxiety is exacerbated hugely by his brother’s issues but I don’t know how to fix that. IME if an antidepressant is used with a kindergartner, it’s tended to be for anxiety, not clinical depression.
Both my kids are actively involved in the decisions to medicate and have been since they were of an age they could be. When M was in the psych unit and they were holding off on restarting dex, he was asking for it because he could not tolerate how he could not read an entire novel and was restricted to reading poetry and New Scientist. He’s also not thrilled when he gets into the mood swing cycle again and when his anxiety swings out of control. He’s chosen to go medfree and I’ve taken him medfree at times but it’s rapidly a nightmare for all of us and we don’t go there anymore.
And it’s all fine and dandy to speculate that if you were a child now, you’d be dx’ed with ::insert dx of your choice:: but you got by just fiiiiiiiiine and are ever-so-grateful to your parents because they were so wonderful. Fabulous stuff. Get back to me if you are unlucky enough in the genetic lottery to score kids like mine. I love my kids, my whole life is taken up by my kids but I wouldn’t wish my life or their lives on anyone. We’re between a rock and a hard place – the meds are not riskfree but leaving them unmedicated is also not riskfree.
Completing a questionnaire is not “making a recommendation.” We presume that teachers complete questionnaires honestly, with some degree of error. They could shade their responses, sure, if they wanted to, by answering at the most severe levels for all items that they perceived to be related to the disorder they were trying to have diagnosed. However, there are no questions that ask “Do you think this child has ADHD?” I would never make a diagnosis solely based on the teacher as well - too often teachers bring poor child management skills to the picture, and if there report were at odds with my other sources of information, I would discard it, or weight it appropriately.
Again, teachers cannot “green light” a diagnosis - their opinion as to the validity of the diagnosis has no bearing on the diagnosis. Their opinion as to the frequency and severity of behavioral critieria are solicited. I’m sure anyone can be sued for anything, but because they are not clinicians, they cannot make diagnoses, so it is hard to fathom how they could be held responsible for a diagnosis not being made. Do you have any supportive information regarding the risk for teachers in this regard?
It is exceptionally rare for a four year old to be given stimulant medications. In fact, I cannot recall any instances of it in my experience. It seems that your complaint relies on the potential risk of medications and the ethics of legal consent for minors. As to the former, I would suggest two things: 1). It should concern us that there have been so few clinical studies of medications for children, but the available information regarding medications for ADHD has suggested no significant risks. 2). Waiting until a child is of legal age to consent for medical treatment would cause significant problems for treatment of all manner of disorders, regardless of your opinion regarding “life or death” circumstances. (But for that matter, given your concerns regarding children’s ability to consent, why would you remove that right from them in certain “life or death/cancer” cases?) A child with ADHD, particularly one causing significant academic and social impairment, would be markedly impacted by their difficulties by the age of 16. Do you think that they could easily make up the academic development that they would have missed to that point?
Typically, in my experience, the parents are the ones who express the greatest qualms about the medications their children are given. I don’t hear about much resistance to pharmacotherapy from children until adolescence, and then it is still the minority of circumstances. However, as a psychologist, I am not the one prescribing meds and having the broad discussions about it with families. To the degree that they are aware of it, children seem to prefer the alleviation of deficits that they experience. I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but my own research and that of others illustrates a greater risk for tobacco use among those with ADHD, and suggests the possibility of self-medication through nicotine. This suggests that children with these problems would rather be without them.
I can’t answer as to why people are so distrustful of meds. I’m wary of strattera and abilify and the like – I’d rather see a body of research before I use those with my kids.
However trublmaker my kids are involved in the decisions about meds because ,unlike abx, they’re on these meds longterm. I don’t frame the question as whether or not they want to take the meds but I am interested in hearing how they feel on the meds and ultimately they’re in charge of telling me if the side effects are so bad they won’t keep on taking them. Then we would trial something else.
You can lie to me if you like. But you really should be careful about lying to yourself. Take a look back at how many times you have said something that equates to “You don’t know what it’s like.” You keep telling yourself that my opinion cannot be valuable because I have not had my children labeled with the same diagnosis as yours. You refuse to accept the possiblity that I might, in fact, know what it is like and still hold the opinions that I hold.
Treatment of any “condition” or “dysfunction” that is predominantly psychological carries a lot of emotional baggage. Making decisions that affect the future of your children is fraught with potential peril and the resulting insecurities. It is impossible to make these kinds of choices without doing a fair amount of internal rationalizing. I would say that you are better off if you are aware of this.
One poster has noted how pleased he, as an adult, is with the affects of Ritalin in his life. My guess is that he is happy to take his medicine. I wonder if your kids are as eager to be medicated. Of all the hard-to-manage kids I have ever seen, I have yet to see one who was bothered by his/her “condition” or one that wanted to take medicine like Ritalin. In practice, the behaviors that we call ADHD cause a great deal of distress to the parents but not so much to the children. While you will probably always be able to find research supporting what you are doing, and mental health professionals to encourage you, you wil also always have to deal with the fact that you are giving your child a pill to treat your discomfort. This simple fact is what makes you defensive.
Disclaimer: All of our mental health science is very young, particularly when compared to things like math and physics. There are many schools of thought, and various practitioners tend to adopt a school of thought as if it were a religion. I was raised by a clinical psychologist who was a dyed-in-the-wool behaviorist. I also attended a school that was dominated by behaviorists. Not surprisingly, I do have behaviorist leanings, though I am not as religious as some about it. You are free to think of me as a lone nut, but there are quite a few Ph.D. behaviorists who are as suspicious of giving drugs like Ritalin to children as I am. I have stopped shy of saying that no child should ever be given it, but the number of children being casually handed this drug every day like a vitamin, at least in the US, is outrageous. It has become a parenting fad and has caught the attention of the government agencies and family courts. Daytime TV viewers may know Judge Judy, who spent years in the family courts in New York before becoming a celebrity. She claims that if you walk into a random classroom in the US and ask all the kids on Ritalin to raise their hands, about half the hands in the room will go up. I assume and hope that this is an exaggeration, but I suspect that it is not much of one.
Also, it is worth noting that there are, at least in the U.S., two big classes of therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists. A psychologist has a Ph.D. in the field of psychology, which focuses on human behavior. A psychiatrist has gone to medical school like any physician and then completed a two or three year internship to “learn” about mental health treatments. Psychiatrists can prescribe medicine. Psychologists cannot. Hentor has implied that, in the area of psychology, my four years of study may only amount to my not knowing dick about psychology. Draw your own conclusions, but based on this statement, I submit to you that almost all of the prescriptions for Ritalin in this country are being made either by pediatricians or by psychiatrists. If what I know is dick, for most of them, what they know is less than dick.
Further disclosure. I did not get a degree in psychology in an effort to get a career in the field. I just kept taking the courses because I found them interesting. I read all of the textbooks front to back. I have read a great many boooks “outside” of these courses. At the time, the DSM III-R was the current diagnostic manual, and I read it cover to cover (parts were like reading the phone book or a dictionary). During my senior year, I had the good fortune to take a seminar with a professor from the Oregon-originated school of Direct Instruction. I learned more in this semester than I did any other two semesters combined. During this time, I spent several hours a week working with a severely autistic child using Direct Instruction techniques. At the beginning, the child was completely noncommunicative. When I graduated, he had learned to request items that he wanted and was beginning work on comprehending verbal stories. When I visited 6 months later, he was engaging in spontaneous speech to others. Amazing progress.
This type of work is different from reading about behavioral techniques. It was being trained to use them. It involved learning the importance, when speaking to this autistic child, of saying “Tell me what you want” rather than saying “What do you want?” It involved requiring the child to make simple choices in a structured way, not once or twice, but literally hundreds of times. As one of his trainers, a mistake on my part would mean the difference between a productive session and an hour-long tantrum. Anyone who was there for the first month would have concluded that the techniques being used just didn’t work. Anyone who was there the whole time would have learned something astonishingly different. As someone who was raised in the knowledge that, for the most part, we have little in the way of real help to offer those with mental problems, witnessing the real progress achieved using a technique that no journalist has apparently ever written an article about was a revelation to me. It caused me to actually consider going further in the field (I already reported about when I changed my mind). The instructor of this seminar tried very hard to recruit me into the Master’s program.
The point is this: If it comforts you to imagine me as someone who wandered into this forum after bouncing off of a passing turnip truck, you are free to do so. But intellectual honesty would require that you admit the possibility that I have some clue what I am talking about.
I have met the diagnostic criteria for ADHD for 36 years, without doing any adding of any kind. See if any of these examples resonate for you. At 6 months, I refused to be fed by an adult. At 12 months, I was removed from my crib because I found a way to literally flip myself over the bar. At 18 months, I used a butter knife to remove the weather stripping from our kitchen door in under 10 minutes. When I was two, my mother left me in the kitchen for a 5-minute bathroom trip and returned to find me sitting on top of the refrigerator (where the cookies were). When I was three, my grandfather (old school) decided I was old enough that a few whacks with his belt would be a good way to get me to stop jumping on the bed. He stopped swinging when he realized that he was crying and I was not. After slapping my hands and arms until they were completely red, my mother concluded that any items she didn’t want me to break had to be kept out of my reach. Punishment of any kind has never worked on me. I have a brother who is six year older than me–he won most of the fights. But he still has the mark where I shot him with a BB gun (accidentally, dammit) and can show you the chipped bone in his cheek where I gave him a black eye with my head. My uncle, when he is sober, can still show you the windows that I kicked out at his camphouse, and the hole in the door that I made while pretending a broomstick was a spear. My stepfather can recount to you broken mirrors, doors, and furniture.
In grade school, one of my teachers complained to my mother that, while I knew everything that she said, none of the students around me were able to learn a thing. My eighth grade teacher had me continually working on bulletin boards so that I would be quiet enough for her to teach the rest of the class. My science teacher just adopted a habit of sending me to a wing of the library just to avoid disruptions (the entire school knew that punishing me was pointless). I spent more time there than I did in her class, reading about half of the books stored in that section. I still made A’s on all of the tests, though. As an undergraduate, when a teacher handed out a syllabus, I noted the days when tests were scheduled and they were the only days I attended. I never failed a class.
Anyone who has ever met me can tell you within a few minutes that I am unique and different in ways both good and bad. I am practically famous for saying whatever I think to be true, and being surprised if someone’s feelings are hurt. When it comes to academic material, I can learn it faster and easier than anyone I have ever met. When it comes to social interactions, I am awkward and uncomfortable. My wife reports that the rest of her family believes that I don’t care anything about her or any of them.
If I seem to be dealing with you harshly, it is not so much a result of any opinion I might have of you as the fact that I identify and sympathize with your child.
Both the books you read and a lot of the things that I am saying are dominated by opinion. Every professional who has ever suggested a diagnosis for your child was giving an opinion. My mother, a secretary, worked for years in a mental hopsital transcribing notes by psychologists and psychiatrists. She concluded that, by reading these notes, you couldn’t learn much about the patients, but you could learn a lot about the doctors. I have a personal theory that about 80% of the people in the mental health field originally pursued it while trying to figure out what was wrong with themselves.
I once attended a seminar at a mental health facility where a clinical psychologist spent over an hour explaining to a non-clinical audience that most of the children she had treated did not have any mental problems but were, in fact, possessed by demons.
Yes. The possiblity is being suggested by me. Right here, right now. Let’s be clear, though, what I am talking about. Do I think that, by medicating your child in this way, you are going to make him retarded? No. Autistic? Schizophrenic? Obsessive-Compulsive? Sociopathic? No, no, no, and no. I also am not suggesting that you will cause him to paralyzed, color-blind, or psychic. Based on the way you describe your child, there is a chance that he is more like me than he is like you. If so, we are, in fact, different from the rest of you “normal” folks. There are areas of life where we do not perform well. There are others where we can do astonishing things. Mozart was a problem to everyone in his family. Einstein had a hard time with high school. My question for you to think about is this: What do you think would have been the result if Mozart or Einstein had been given Ritalin?
I am not claiming to have the answer. And while we do know that there are no obvious long-term disastrous consequences of Ritalin use, we do not have the kind of comparative studies that could tell you of less obvious consequences. And anyone who claims to know that use of this drug during brain development is completely harmless is just plain lying to you. The workings of the human brain are mysterious and subtle. Being able to say that Ritalin won’t make your brain rot and die is not the same as being able to say that it does no harm of any kind. To some extent, the question may just be one of how noticeable the harm would have to be before it would concern you to force your child to risk it.
I want to be clear about my position here. As an adult, I have doused my brain with caffeine and nicotine for years. I have almost drowned it with alcohol, and given it a taste or two of marijuana. On occasion, I have soothed it with opiates. If someone offered me Ritalin and I thought it might be fun, I’d probly give it a try. I’m not on any kind of anti-chemical crusade, but I don’t give these things to my kids. Just caffeine for a child under 8 is a little troublesome to me.
Don’t portray me as some kind of religious freak. When one of my girls has a fever, she will get Tylenol or Motrin. If she has an infection, she will get an antibiotic. If she has a cough, she will get Robitussin. Both have had all of their vaccinations. Both have regular checkups with their pediatrician. BUT–and this is the key point–if one misbehaves, be it a lot or a little, as God is my witness, she will NOT get Ritalin. Does that mean I am a good person and you are a bad one? Not as far as I can tell, but it does mean that we disagree strongly on this subject.
This is not something that came to me in a dream one day. Based on my childhood, I have been acutely aware of the likelihood that I might have children that are hard to manage. Before we ever had a child, my wife and I discused this possibility, the potential pain and anguish involved, and my absolute adamance that we would not medicate our children because of anything remotely similar to ADHD. I warned her what we might be signing up for, describing in detail the behavior of hard-to-manage kids, and the walk through hell that dealing with them can be. This decision was made deliberately and with a great deal of thought about the potential consequences. I did not just happen by this thread and jump at the opportunity to pass judgment on another parent. This issue is one that has been close to me personally for my whole life.
Jesus, Mary, and a fucking goat. One of the weaknesses of current psychology is that our diagnostic criteria are almost entirely symptom-based. There are many ways to have a sore throat, but if we did not know how to grow a culture and check for strep, it would be pretty difficult to distinguish between them. Even so, if I pointed out that a sore throat can be really dangerous for people with heart trouble, would you rush to correct me in the same way?
One of the problems of trying to discuss this kind of topic in this way is the difference between the ways different citizens and professionals think about the topic. One example that I have noticed in this thread is a tendency to make unwarranted assumptions about the “inside” of a child based on the “outside”. For instance, I have noticed several posters commenting on whether a child “pays attention” when they actually are talking about whether the child “appears attentive”. When I read to my daughter, she has a tendency to look all over the room and play with toys at the same time. She does not appear attentive. Nonetheless, careful questioning reveals that she is, in fact, listening to every word.
One that really bothers me is when parents make the amazing leap from “the child is not focusing on this task” to “the child is not capable of focusing on a task”. This was the reason why I asked the one poster the questions I did about reading books.
When all the dust has cleared, I have no authority (or desire) to dictate to other parents how they raise their children. I do believe that a LARGE number of the cases where Ritalin is being administered in this country are nothing more than child abuse. Does that mean that any particular reader or poster is inappropriately medicating their child? I have no fucking clue.
Primaflora, you have both the right and the responsibility to raise your child in the way that seems best to you as a parent. I do not think it is unreasonable at all for you to be skeptical of what I have to say (but being dismissive is a little rude). Regardless of any other opinions I might have formed about you, I have heard enough to be convinced that you love your children. The fact that you are medicating one of them for ADHD does not mean to me that you are evil, stupid, lazy, or uncaring. I don’t think that it means you are a bad parent or a bad person. Still, as someone who is extremely thankful to have had the mother that I did instead of someone more like you, based purely on my empathy for you child, I really, really wish that you would not.
Bravo, Smartass. As someone with some issues that has tried medication and chosen not to do it, I often find myself being condemned for my choices. Many do not see that there are options other than medication and that sometimes for some people those options might be better. I think there is a certain amount of defensiveness in it. Western medicine presents itself as the only answer, and if one thing is blurry it brings too much in question to be comfortable with.
This is a young science. But it’s an important one. We are messing with our very selves, our very own identities. I’m happy for everyone that has found something that works for them, but let us consider that one method is not right for everyone.