Fortunately, when I was a child back in India, ADHD was virtually unknown (probably the case today as well). Most of the time, my parents chalked off my inattention to "lack of discipline" and were happy as long as my grades were good. I found the coursework very easy (despite studying for only 1-1:30 hrs a day) and topped most of my classes.
University here in he U.S wasn't hard either. My problems started once I started working. Couldn't code continuously for more than 15-20 mins at a time. Things got boring very quickly once I got the "aha". I couldn't hold a lot of program state in my head. I was always searching for that "flow" people often talked about.
Adderall really helped me. I use it very sparingly these days (especially on days that I have to code some important pieces) though.
Bottomline, looks like this is purely genetic and fixing the dopamine pathways isn't exactly like curing malaria, you can juice things up but the brain will want more. Parents can choose to give it to their children but they'll suffer some time down the road. I'd rather let the kid enjoy childhood and help him in other ways (exercise, note-taking, engaging activities etc) and put him in a reasonably good path to success. Let them take drugs if necessary once they've wised up as adults.
http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=ADHD&Template=/Cont... T
1. Thirty two percent of students living with ADHD drop out of high school compared to 15 percent of teens with no mental health diagnosis (UC Davis Health System, 2010)
2.Three times as many adolescents living with ADHD as those living without ADHD have failed a grade, been suspended or been expelled from school. (Barkley, 2000).
You're right though, let them exercise and make them note-take, that will work(while you ignore that this simply is not effective, as studied in the current literature)
"Fixing dopamine pathways isn't exactly like curing malaria", profound.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/115/6/e749.lon... (Treatment of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Overview of the Evidence)
Conclusion: "Other evidence documents the long-term nature of ADHD in children and its classification as a chronic condition, meriting the application of general concepts of chronic-condition management, including an individual treatment plan with a focus on ongoing parent and child education, management, and monitoring. The evidence strongly supports the use of stimulant medications for treating the core symptoms of children with ADHD and, to a lesser degree, for improving functioning. Behavior therapy alone has only limited effect on symptoms or functioning of children with ADHD, although combining behavior therapy with medication seems to improve functioning and may decrease the amount of (stimulant) medication needed. Comparison among stimulants (mainly methylphenidate and amphetamines) did not indicate that 1 class outperformed the other."
I've only taken Vyvanse offhandedly (without Rx) and it worked miracles for me. I quickly learned to ration it and use it sparingly as you do, partly because of the negative effects on my appetite and general well-being. I'm still debating going to see a doctor but I think they might write me off as an addict since I'm in my 20s but still quite young and a lot of kids come out of college abusing the stuff to get through exams and maybe never really drop the habit.
See a doctor. Be honest. Let them do their job and then trust their diagnosis.
"The kids with polio abused vaccines to get by" "The kids with hunger abused food to get by"
What does "abusing to get by" even mean? You mean, USING it to get by, and thus preventing failure of the negative kind? You mean ... the desire-able outcome?
I don't doubt there are people in this world for who ADHD is a real thing. But I think we are too quick in the modern age to drug without thinking. Parents demand antibiotics for illnesses which are just small bugs... guess what, now we are having problems with drug resistant bacteria. Lawmakers, administrators, and teachers (in that order) want to turn classrooms in to machines which churn out educated people like clockwork. Turns out, humans are animals, not machines, so we load everybody with some stimulants to make children just sit still.
I'm not anti-medicine in any way. I have personally seen Ritalin work on a friend who actually had ADHD growing up. And I have also seen another friend buy Vyvanse illegally so he could study for 15 hours a day. I believe in prescription drugs. I just don't always believe in the prescription.
Why didn't they mention how many more times you are likely to die in a vehicular accident than non-adhd users?
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=adhd&hl=en&as_s...
Google scholar for ADHD, why don't you realize that these ADHD articles are more akin to anti-vaccination articles?
In fact, the only number it suggests as being inaccurate (based on an old study) is 25% of cases - that 1 in 4 cases is misdiagnosed. However, given the number of total cases, that means something like 5% of boys are being given serious drugs for potentially no reason.
I think that deserves serious consideration, and not your knee-jerk, strawman response.
You are wrong to think that these people deserve "serious consideration", when the article is written itself to produce knee-jerk reactions "The drugging of the american boy....", as if we had IV Heroin plugged to these kids. Article allows for the opposition, most people who have random opinions about ADHD for no apparent reason other than to have an opinion.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23382575 (Is ADHD a Risk Factor for High School Dropout? A Controlled Study.) tells us that " Conclusion: Participants with ADHD were significantly more likely to repeat a grade"
Do you know the cost of high school drop outs or grade repeats to society? What about to the kid, who suffers massive self-esteem loss and under-values himself? Why is the author not more responsible? The modern era brings us new journalism-contrarian-chic, stylstic articles that irresponsibly lend fuel to very harmful world-views(such asADHD is not serious)
What drugs, exactly, and to which boy? Is the cost of not-treating much greater than the cost of treating? The article is merely an appeal to pop-trash trendy world-views, and does not deserve much of a response at all
It's saying we're over diagnosing, and giving drugs to kids who don't need them.
Giving 1 in 20 boys amphetamines for no reason is not a good thing - it's a dangerous and bad thing.
As I've stated before, either ADHD is real, or psychologists have found the world's best predictive test for auto accidents.
People with untreated ADHD have 3x the likelihood of being in an auto accident. 56% rate of substance abuse. Think about that for a moment.
56%. Holy shit.
These are the people who instead of getting help, were told that they are "lazy" and "needed to get up off their asses." Except that advice didn't work, what it does lead to is depression and dependency issues.
Oh then there is the fact that there are large structural brain differences.
I won't disagree that ADHD is over-diagnosed at times. I am horrified with how easily some people get an ADHD diagnosis, your general MD should not be making that call. There are multitudes of proper psychological tests for ADHD that should be chosen from, a 30 minute patient interview should not be the sole determining factor.
Are these structural differences used in diagnosis?
I'd like to see what the rates are compared to other western countries. If its 5% in Canada and 20% in the US it suggests something is wrong
The most dangerous part of this is that it seems to imply ADHD is over-diagnosed in men (boys), when it's just as possible that ADHD is under-diagnosed in women (girls).
Girls diagnosed with 314.10 (Attention Deficit Disorder, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive) tend to exhibit fewer "traditional" symptoms of hyperactivity than boys with the same diagnosis. This isn't to say that the diagnosis is wrong - it's just that hyperactivity manifests in many ways - physical restlessness, "bouncing off the walls", etc. is only one.
> The interesting thing is I never asked any of these people whether ADHD is real. But their defensiveness is understandable. ADHD isn't strep throat—there's no culture, no test. To find out if you have it, or if your son has it, or if your daughter has it, you just need a human being to say so—a physician or a psychiatrist—and that makes some people skeptical
This describes the entire field of psychiatry. While there are certainly some people who are who would distrust the field, I would be very wary of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
And of all disorders, ADHD is actually significantly easier to test for systematically than most psychological/psychiatric disorders (such as depression). The main problem is that the tests to do so are very expensive (well into the thousands of dollars), and most insurance plans won't cover it.
> Ned Hallowell once famously said that stimulants were "safer than aspirin," a statement he has since backed off of. ("That's almost a preposterous statement for anyone to say," says Saltarelli.)
So, we have a complete lowbrow dismissal of what is actually a very reasonable statement. In the end, it's impossible to compare any two drugs for safety because there are so many factors that come into play, but to the extent that one can make a pairwise comparison, this is actually a very well-supported statement.
This claim needs citation.
The overall point is that the cost of the false positive overweighs the cost of the false negative
I would say the point of the article is here is a list of reasons why it might be over-diagnosed, some people on both sides of that, 50% puffed up with human interest pap about the Boy Whisperer
Is 13% to 27% sufficiently co-morbid for you?
That is just one of the first results for "adhd depression". I've seen studies with cited numbers far higher than that for people who are untreated.
That said, the horrific FUD writing style is insulting. The comments by HN users - I can't even identify with the people here.
Now imagine that he is suffering like this because of a mistake... If you have a son in America, there is an alarming probability that this has happened or will happen to you.
Absolute bullshit. Total and utter crap. That does not happen. I have two ADHD kids and it was (a) my choice to take them to a doctor, (b) my choice of which doctor they went to, and (c) my choice as to whether there was a diagnosis of ADHD. It's farcical for me to read the opening paragraphs of this "article" and its presumption that doctors are evil and really just want to incorrectly diagnose kids. Atrocious.
Wait, what?
"The song was written about a friend of the Loeffler brothers, who was misdiagnosed with ADHD, and developed an addiction to Ritalin. As a result, he would often do crazy and odd things, such as drive around aimlessly for hours, determined to hear a specific song on the radio."
:-(
What do these kids do when they turn 18? I asked on pediatrician I respected what she does for the children. Does she taper them off? Does she transition them to other doctors? Does she transition them to other medicines? Nope. "That's not my problem," she said. Of course not. In a culture where doctors are not responsible, where making hundreds of dollars an hour is "not enough" to have them actually perform their duties in full, duties such as making a full investigation into their patients' cases, and spending more than 10 or 15 minutes before "diagnosing" them with a condition they do not have and putting them on drugs for essentially the rest of their lives, only in such a culture is ADHD real.
When it comes down to it, it's the responsibility of the parents to keep their kids off drugs. The body doesn't care wether you're snorting amphetamine or Adderall because Adderall is amphetamine. Parents who allow their kids to be "diagnosed" with ADHD and allow them to take drugs are encouraging their children to take drugs. They are unconscionable parents. Any child can make a mistake and start doing drugs, but now we have whole classes of drugs that are encouraged. Some drug abuse and addictions have become ingrained in life. Do you think the children will stop because they've now turned 18? Do you think they'll stop at Ritalin or Adderall when those things stop working? Addiction knows no bounds.
How many more lives will have to be ruined before people realize the psychiatric industry and the doctors pushing these drugs are only doing it for the money, money they do not need? Talk about about scummy drug dealers. Yeah, we're looking at the multi-billion dollar corporations, the "psychiatrists," the DSM writers, and the rest of the doctors who can't even be bothered to spend ten minutes with a patient before deciding on a horrific fate for them. When will people learn that the medical industry cannot be trusted, that the hippocratic oath is bullshit, and they need to be responsible for their own selves and their own children? Those parents allowing their kids to be put on this should be put in jail next to the child murderers they irresponsibly strive to be.
As much as I love my parents, I occasionally get angry when I think about what could have been compared to what happened because they didn't like the idea of me being on drugs (like I wasn't on other drugs). Not missed opportunities that were impossible to begin with, but a lot of reachable goals and dreams I had that I tried working my ass off towards and it just wasn't happening because I spent just as much time struggling with myself as I did working towards said goals. I'm trying to play catchup still, years later. I suspect there are some goals that I will never be able to do anything about now because there was some age/time component to it.
Speaking of other drugs, there are plenty of them - yes, maybe even "dealt" by "drug dealer" doctors that are actually terrible - that significantly improve quality of life. Drugs are not inherently bad. It's a constant balance of whether or not the tradeoffs are worth it, that's all. Like right now I'm juggling 6-7 different meds and their side effects to fix my bronchitis+asthma right now because I do not want to end up in the ER or worse, dead. Is that so terrible? Am I a drug addict for not wanting to suffer when I have a choice to not suffer? Even if you want to label me as such, what, are you a firm believer in survival of the fittest? Because if we can keep people from suffering and dying, I would do it. Screw that fittest bullshit.
Giving a growing brain a psychoactive drug is serious business.
Also, of course, you are looking back with perfect hindsight. What if you'd had a serious adverse event, psychosis, or otherwise negative outcome? No one could have known, and that was a risk your parents had to weigh. In fact, your brain now is different than then. Perhaps your parents helped you to dodge a devastating bullet by withholding psychoactive drugs at a younger age.
Well, except it did- but our name/diagnosis has changed.
Shell shocked, battle fatigue, combat exhaustion, stress response, hysteria, ...
But yeah, I'm with you, I'm yet to find any convincing evidence ADHD exists and I think the consequences of this unscientific+dogma approach is a damn tragedy. All the pain and suffering that it causes, the pressure and agony parents go through because, obviously, they want the best for their child, this is not quantified(I bet the money is though)
I'm curious to what will history say about this.
I was a problem child and it makes me cringe that I could have been put on this kind of shit since young, it's absurd.
People diagnosed with ADHD are three times more likely to be in a car accident. 56& of people diagnosed with adhd who are untreated have substance abuse problems.
Either ADHD is real, or psychologists have found the world's best car insurance filter.
Then there is evidence of structural brain differences,
http://www.kennedykrieger.org/overview/news/brain-imaging-st...
I've seen multiple adults who grew up in previous generations where ADHD was just "being lazy" who have spent their entire life depressed, knowing that they never lived up to their potential because they quite literally could not focus.
It isn't a lack of willpower, it is a physical lack of ability. The fact that the physical lacking is in a missing neurotransmitter doesn't make it any less real.
There is something in our society wants to redefine normal behavior as pathology. Maybe to get you hooked and build revenue streams, maybe just to make you more pliable.
Fuck that.
Yes there are legitimate cases. But I've only experienced people who want to mis-apply the meds.
That being said, all the research I've done into it on my own shows that the ability of the system to diagnose ADHD is crap. As in huge numbers of both false positives and false negatives. The over-diagnosis is a huge problem, and it results in not only large numbers of children being prescribed stimulant medication mistakenly, but it causes parents of kids who could benefit from such medication to rightfully have second thoughts when a doctor recommends it.
In particular a lot of those who make ADHD referrals kind of have this mapping of "Problem Kid" => "Likely ADHD" when that doesn't seem to be a particularly good mapping.
There are even significant downsides to kids with ADHD taking stimulant medication, but in that case, it appears that the likely benefit does outweigh the likely harm.
Now that I'm a parent, I also wonder if the increased diagnosis of boys is partly due to the differences in the school system. I see more homework and deskwork at a younger age than when I was a kid, but combined with less of a "boys will be boys" tolerance for destructive behavior than when my dad was a kid. Of course I have no numbers on this, so it may merely be nostalgia thinking that that is the trend.
"Something to redefine behavior as pathology... maybe to get you hooked and build revenue streams", ah yes. That's it. Never mind the much higher incident of high school drop out, repeated grades, 1/4th as likely as other kids to pass college, more likely to go to jail, and get in a car crash.
The teachers are not professionals and their opinions do not constitute a diagnosis.
Legalized drugging of culture, is all it is. Utter, literal brainwashing.
(A real solution wouldn't require a prescription.)
