Do you think ADHD is real?

Or is it the way public schools deal with kids they cant deal with otherwise? Acitve, energetic, hands on kinestiec learner? Oh hell no, give that kid some ritlin so he'll sit down and shut up and ....learn?

Ok, now I realize some kids probally DO have it but its waaaaaaay over used and diagnosised. Just thinking becuase whenI describe my sons behavior to others, thats what I get, "oh no...he may be add"..."better watch him, he's probally got add" etc and so on...but......

ok, its not fun for me when he throws all the clothes out of the dresser drawers then empties a small toy box and uses it to import water to pour on the bedroom floor...still, he IS learning from that, he experimental. Seriously.

He took my vaccum apart, inserted stuffed dog, the reassembled correctly, plugged it in and turned it on. I came running when I heard the vaccum and there he was crouced down watching through the clear plastic to see what would happen to the dog. He wasnt being "bad", his face was full of wonder and curiosity and even though I dont want him plugging things in, still, that he even thought to do something like that is ingenius to me!

Hes going to be one of those kids who takes everything apart to learn how it works, reading how it works in a book will never do for him. Never. School would label him, he's three and I can see it already, "ADHD" , "A behavior problem", "troubledchild", "troublemaker", "hyperactive", "uncooperative", "doesnt follow directions", "doesnt listen", "Learning disabled" (because he cant sit still and learn from a book or overhead projector) I see detention and angry teachers in his future if we were to do school, public or private. Dont you? Not to mention the possibility of special ed because he doesnt fit the mold. My mother once had a teacher tell her she didnt like my brother becuase he didnt conform and she didnt like nonconformist. He was seven.

My point is, are most ADHD kids really just high energy/high intelligence kids who learn diffrently? But since the shcool cant/wont deal with thier diffrences, medicate. Its easeir than changing the school to fit the child, right? My nepehw is ADHD, very smart child, always in trouble at school. Always. I just wonder how diffrent his life would be if he were unschooled. HIs "education" is destroying his self esteem, his creativity, his desire to learn and his relationship with is parents. I suppose the argument could be made that ps does that to ALL kids, but it seems more pronounced here.

Just my musings.......I watched my son bouncing on the trampoline...he just turned three...and I am amazed at the way his body moves and balances so easily and naturally. I fall all over the place on the thing, not him though, its like he was made to do it. He reminds me so much of a rabbit, seriously, I did not know a human body could move with such grace and agility and balance, not at age three!! He is amazing, it would be so, so wrong to coop him up in a classroom and make him sit still. It would defy nature, his nature and I wont do it, I cant.

 

Thats how I feel. I think there is ADD / ADHD. It is also used as a 'catch-all' for when there is nothing wrong with the kid, but parents / doctors / schools still want to drug him to get him to conform to how they think a child should act, instead of letting the child be themselves.

 

I think a lot of kids who are diagnosed with ADHD are in actuality just exhibiting symptoms of the result of a sugar-rich diet and a lack of enough exercise. Instead of going outside to play, so many kids stay cooped up inside playing the latest video game and snacking on refined junk--no wonder they can't sit still in school.

 

this looks like the true diagnosis to me too. i saw kids on ritalin while substitute teaching and it was appaling. one young man sat there staring ahead with his mouth agape but he didn't cause any trouble! class size and management are inversely related and all it takes is one or two disruptive kids to make teaching difficult. obviously small class size will help but as everyone knows there are different learning styles that need to be addressed too.

 

BOOM! There it is. We load kids up with sugar and then they have no opportunity to let that energy out during the day if they're in a classroom. We gave it a name: ADD or ADHD, but really some people are just hyper. It's not some kind of mythical disease, they should just be outside more tooling around. Occassionally applying some discipline. A lot of this has gone out the window as of late.


As for poor school performance, the sad fact is that not everyone is a straight A student, not everyone can be the best in the class. That's just the way it goes. It's not always because a kid doesn't have the ability, or is "stupid" they just are better at different things.

 

a

 

I feel that it is highly overdiagnosed also. Sure it exists, and sure SOME children really do require medication. But when 20 of the 90 kids in our church's wednesday-night programs are medicated... I think there's something terribly wrong.

I do feel that the shocking amount of refined sugar in kids' diets these days is at least partly to blame, but I've seen literally DOZENS of firsthand cases where removing Red #40 (and NO other ingredients) from a childs diet has completely "tamed" an otherwise uncontrollable wild-child... including myself! Honestly, it's the first thing I suspect when I see kids like this. No, this isn't a cure-all anymore than Ritalin is... but it's certainly healthier & easier on the body to remove an artificial color than it is to introduce a chemical!
love,
mom

 

I agree somewhat.. but I have to be on a constant dose of caffeine or I'll practically fall asleep and learn nothing in class

but I do know a few kids in my school that need SOMETHING to calm them down.. otherwise they're bouncing off the walls and disrupting/annoying to anyone and everyone around them.. and ritalin does seem to do the job at curing that

 

Yes, ADD is real. Was it overdiagnosed? Probably. But it's also misunderstood. 99% of the time people who deny it's existence don't even know what it really is.

 

And how do you explain someone with an above average IQ (like the majority of those diagnosed) and good reading skills who takes three hours every night to do 20 minute assignments in a subject he\she likes because this person keeps reading the same paragraph over and over again without the information sinking in? And don't tell me that doesn't happen, because it does happen to a lot of people with ADD, including myself.

And I seldom ate sugar, my parents did discipline me, and I was outside all the time.

 

I was lucky enough to sit in on a talk given by a behavioral specialist last fall, and he said that there's a really easy way to tell if a kiddo really has ADHD or if they just have "hyperactive problems" from one sort or another.

He said that when the attention problems start getting out of hand, to had the child 8 ounces of a highly caffeinated soda or a cup of espresso, and wait 20 minutes. With someone with genuine ADHD it will actually help calm them down, where in a "normal" kid you'll just be wiring them up worse. Oddly enough, we have tried this with a few kids we were pretty sure had genuine ADHD... and it WORKS!!! Who'd have thunk, huh? I'm not crazy about handing a 10 year old a can full of sugar - but after seeing this I may think differently about it in the future... under special circumstances.
love,
mom

 

a

 

I saw a thing with Bill Cosby really opened my eyes, ya see Kids dont get the beatins anymore, all in all people are healthy when the kids are in trouble, moms yelling pokin at him with a broom under the couch, jumpin everywhere. No more ADD no more dislexia.. everyone is healthy

Lol i dont know how scientifically accurate it is, but its funny.

 

Is it real? Yes. Is it a huge deal? Not enough to put your kid on ritalin and turn them into a zombie. Come on this is lazy parenting and lazy teaching. There's better ways. I remember growing up when I had one thing to focus on, it was great. When I had like fifty things going on, I couldn't pick which one to do first. I never, ever, finish anything.
Except when I'm taking fish oil capsules. Then I finish everything.

I remember there was one kid at my school with MAJOR ADHD. This kid would bark and freak out in the middle of class. But he had the ability to draw the most amazing things at the age of 12. Something artists that have been drawing for ten twenty years couldn't do. Think: Brian Froud.

Every curse has a blessing.

 

adhd is crap. Wow your sick because you cant stop and focus on a system of learning that is repetitive and BORING...turn on a video game and tell me if a kid with adhd will not sit for hours doing one thing

 

Throw in a bunch of sugar, soda, candy, fat, and caffiene in with endless entertainment and you've got a good ADHD mix going. However, this being said, I do believe that there may be some "real" ADHD cases, and that some people might really suffer from such a disease with no prevocative action.

 

Why is it that people always try to "cure" things, why would you want to cure the behaviour of someone? What's wrong if someone is a bit different then the mainstream, i mean, let everyone be unique in his own ways, let him develop his own personality, why put him on drugs so that he fits in our image of a normal person. Besides, what is a normal person? that crap is all relative. If people would just learn to be a bit tolerant and flexibel this world could be such a great place, where everyone can developed at his own likings.
If you think of all this stuff, how people want to control others, how they want to forge people to their image of a normal person.. i mean.. humans are really fucked up.

I'm really sure that people with adhd that take relatine and stuff only do it so that they can deliver the prestations and attitude that is being expected from our intolerant society, i'm pretty sure that no-one with adhd has any problems with himself, it is the society that has problems with them. We should learn to respect the individu of how they are, not blame them or try to forge them.. we would be like the society described in "brave new world" , if every person would be shaped to the image of one individu, how fucked up would the world be?

In my personal experience, people in general with concentration problems are more freeminded and have the ability to forge themselves more then mainstream people.
i don't know much people with adhd, but i know alot that are diagnosed for add, and they are the type of person with who you can talk extensively about philosophy and other things that are beyond the individu and ego. Maybe the whole things about concentration problems is a counter reaction to our prestation society, maybe it is just a way of making room for otherthings besides of prestations.

I don't know, what i'm telling is probably bullshit, but this is all so fucked up, just think a moment about the human mind, how our instincts still lead or lifes, how fucked up all this intolerance is, all this irrationality.. all this people that believe in their own little messed up reality, and there fucked up ways of pushing people to fit in their stupid perfect society.

 

I honestly think sugar doesn't do anything.. it seems to dull me down and make me tired actually, whereas caffeine makes me extremely hyper and attentive - which is why i drink energy drinks almost every day in school, otherwise i can't think for shit and i'm basically how Stillravenmad said earlier, i read the same thing repeatedly but have no comprehension, but caffeine pretty much solves that problem

 

why is it we look at animals and no matter what they do, we admire it as a part of nature and there natural instincts or behavioral pattern changes based on environmental variables. But when it comes to a human, there is only one way of being and everything else is a disease. My nephew (5 yrs old) could be considered to have adhd (so was i when younger). Yet when we visited my country of the dominican republic this lil kid would trun into a man. he would wake up leave the house with the neighborhood kids and we wouldnt see him until he wanted something. he would even go to the store by himself and shop (for those of you retarded hippies who are thinking this is irresponsible, shove your american stupidity in your ass). he would be so happy, and none of us ever had a reason to yell or see anything he did as a problem. Fast forward a month and were back to the united states and bam, his problems begin again. What you call a disease i call boredom, anxiety and an extreme misconception in medicine and psychology. the obsession with perfection and complacent uni lateral thinking is the only psychological disease that exist.

As an example id like you to think of addiction. Are we really addicted to drugs, sex, alcohol, tv etc etc, or are we simple addicted to happiness, freedom, transcendence, purpose and escaping boredom. I claim the latter. a pitty we understand dog psychology better then human psychology wich i can assure you is not much more different then a dogs except at a higher level and more diverse, but essentially simplifies it is the same.

 

its not real its just another label with certain ingrediants to define a frustrated thwarted child living in the madness of the world