How many boys suffered because of this twit?
Thousands of boys have been forced to take Ritalin because of this idiot doctor.
The psychiatrist who identified attention deficit disorder - the condition blamed for the bad behaviour of hundreds of thousands of children - has admitted that many may not really be ill.
Dr Robert Spitzer said that up to 30 per cent of youngsters classified as suffering from disruptive and hyperactive conditions could have been misdiagnosed.
They may simply be showing perfectly normal signs of being happy or sad, he said.
'Many of these conditions might be normal reactions which are not really disorders,' he continued.
Dr Spitzer developed the bible of mental disorder classification in the 1970s and 1980s, which identified dozens of new conditions including ADD and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Since then hundreds of thousands of children have been diagnosed with ADD, a behavioural disorder linked to poor attention span, and ADHD, which adds an element of hyperactivity.
The disorders describe disruptive and restless behaviour that results in children having difficulty focusing their attention on specific tasks. ADHD is most commonly noticed at the age of five, and as many as one in 30 British children is said to have it.
It is often treated with drugs, with Ritalin being the most commonly prescribed.
posted by GayandRight @ 10:06 PM
4 Comments:
Well, that's just sick, I swear people believe that because it's a PHD, they must be right. Luckily my kids school understands that boys, will be boys!
For REAL ADD/ADHD, Ritalin works wonders. The sad and sick part is that too often Ritalin is given to perfectly normal boys, simply because they are boys. Given current guidelines it is unlikely that Ritalin is overprescribed for girls, but for boys, there can be no doubt.
Many, many children who have ADD and ODD (oppositional-defiance-disorder) are really suffering from LPP (lack of proper parenting).
Too often parents are looking for an excuse for their kids' bad behaviour, and they refuse take responsibility or blame, so they look beyond themselves.
Did kids 100 years ago have ADD? ODD? ADHD? If these conditions really exist as brain mis-firings, the numbers should be about the same. As it stands, we know that 100 years ago bad behaviour on the scale we see it today would just not be tolerated.
By giving the excuse of a disorder, rather than demanding parents discipline their kids, we have created a generation of kids who've never been expected to put limits on themselves because they are not responsible for their actions -- some disorder is.
It's sad. There are kids who really need this kind of help, and then there are others who are just exuberant. Too bad that this guy and others chose not to see the difference and have medicate instead of cultivated.
I know a person quite well with ADHD. In an effort to see if Ritalin was really helping, his mom put him on placebos for a while, not wanting to see her son on medicine that he did not need.
The results were not good.
I believe that ADHD is a diagnosis of a genetic behaviour, not necessarily that something is going "wrong." In some situations, I'm sure that ADHD can be beneficial to the person who has it. In this case, however, ADHD caused a stress on his family.
Not only do we have a tendency to label every type of behaviour, but we also have a tendency to believe that every type of behaviour is some kinda bad or mistake.
@Canadi-anna: Not "brain mis-firings," but brain firing differently.
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