for ethnowoman

[abendgules]

The selling of Attention Deficit Disorder, in the NY Times.

It's really hard to know what's true, when so many of the sources of information are comprimised by commercial interests.

I find it hard to believe that an MD researcher who receives millions in speaking fees from a pharam company isn't influenced by their funding. How on earth would your research ever say, 'actually, we've discovered ADD isn't that common, we should reclassify this drug' after you've taken their money?

The marketing to parents is just insidious.

Comments

[ethnowoman.livejournal.com]

My anecdotal evidence for ADHD medication is 2 out of 3. One lady I knew took it as a child, and she said it was horrible--made her all foggy, and she never had ADHD anyway; she is very bitter about her ADHD meds as she feels they robbed her of her childhood. Then I know a 7 year old girl who's on it now by her own choice, and she told her mom that she feels she can be her "most authentic self" on it (she's a child of a prof, which explains the vocab); and a grownup who's flunked in and out of a dozen post-secondaries, who's now finishing school for the first time ever thanks to ADHD medication. So I do believe in its efficacy but not in the widespread marketing which is prone to overdiagnosis.

I think this marketing blitz can have mixed good and bad benefits: the negative, as noted, but the positive benefits is that the marketers are working to de-stigmatize ADHD, not out of altruism, but the result is the same. Even now I hear a lot of fear of stigma from other moms, fear of being their kids being "labelled", etc, and if that could go away then the kids who truly need help could get it easier.

What I find interesting about the ADHD thing is that we ascribe a lot of negative qualities to them when it's actually a disorder (laziness, carelessness, etc), and the medication, in essence, makes them "more virtuous" people.

My personal theory is that, like autism, there's a lot that could be done for the kids in terms of behavioural skills if they can learn them early. My worst ADD/ ADHD kids this year belong to VERY flakey moms who clearly don't have the skills to create a calm, structured environment where their kids could thrive. My brother has a profoundly ADHD kid who does just fine without medication but then he and his wife are both child-care/education professionals and they've instituted major coping strategies for their son at home and at school which are super successful.

Like so many things, I suspect that most kids who are truly ADHD could be treated reasonably well with home intervention and classroom assistance. The major benefit to this would be that they would learn coping strategies that they could carry into adulthood. The problem, for parents who are not education professionals and haven't a clue how to help their child at home, is that it's far easier and cheaper to get pills than to get subsidized home and school intervention, and for this reason I doubt that it will take off in the near future.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I've listened to parents talking about their experience with ADHD children, and they really resent the idea that the kids are "just naughty" and that if they were better parents, they would be able to control them. There is definitely something different about their brain chemistry that prevents these kids from concentrating and learning. If left untreated, that would ruin their chances of normal education, working lives, and often, stable relationships. A high proportion of the young adults in prison are supposedly ADHD sufferers. To leave them untreated is to condemn their lives.

I once chatted to a man who ran adventure courses for kids who had been excluded from school. He said the discipline of daily activity, especially physical activity, helped them a lot. They were not expected to ever go back into school. I asked him what proportion of those children had ADHD, he said "Oh, most of them". I asked if any of them were being treated for it, he said, no.

[suelet.livejournal.com]

My sister had a schoolmate who was, as they termed it then, "hyperactive". The teacher and he had an agreement, if he felt he couldn't manage, he could go out and run around the school as often as he needed to. This was his coping mechanism, and it worked very well for him. These days I doubt it would be considered acceptable, but I think it helps *all* kids to be active, not just children with ADHD.