Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional ADD/ADHD at private school

Which is still mostly relative.





And how many of the 297 disorders require actual blood, MRI, bone, Xray, cardiogram, gentic, ect, ect testing to reach a diagnosis?





The scale is man made, groups of people proclaiming what ADHD ought to look like, how it ought to be perceived. The pharmaceutical industry in itself makes billions, and as such how can this be assure that said scales are not tilted toward bias?




FWIW I to have been diagnosed with ADHD, and in my case it has done far more harm then good. Medication aside, I for a long time believed I was defective, which fueled my depression. I repressed myself and my talents. It was not until I started researching psychiatry (and having seen it first hand) that lead me to reverse this notion about myself.


I myself think like a scientist and always have. Engineering, physics, biology, and the like all have nuance to me. They all follow scientific reasoning and scientific integrity. All can be quantified, explicitly measured, predicted and such predictions be verified by the outcome of a controlled experiment. Psychiatry on the other hand does not hold all these rigors relying on speculation and un-measurable observation. Thats not to say I do not believe in mental disorders, but in the case of ADHD where does it stand?


And Ok, say EMRI validates ADHD. How do we know said ADHD is not a gift in of itself? How do we know its not a normal reaction to a restricted environment? Before the ADHD label came along kids existed for centuries with similar brains, yet as of late the diagnosis is sky rocketing in schools.

Edward, respectfully, your posts today have contained a lot of generalizations and statements that are demonstrably wrong. This approach does more harm than good because it spreads misinformation ("Einstein was a poor student") or creates new misinformation ("any person who is truly gifted will score low in processing speed"; "ADD/ADHD is pure psuedo science [sic]"). These statements, plus those that tar quick thinkers as being quick and sloppy were, well...evidence opposing your claims that you think like a scientist.

I'm a scientist. You're correct about the need for seeing nuance in STEM, but your statements don't show it. At all.

And now this thread has been hijacked, in part because some of us feel obliged to point out your demonstrably wrong statements.

ADHD, like many disorders involving the CNS, suffers from lack of lab tests that can make a definitive diagnosis. Biomarkers for depression are only now being developed for use in the clinic, and yet you claim to have had depression. Why is it okay to call ADHD pseudoscience because a test is lacking, yet your depression is real in spite of the same? There's also no blood test for ALS. Did Lou Gehrig die of a pseudoscientific made-up condition? Or is that different because it was "obvious"?

Clinical diagnoses are a least-worst option, but they're the best we have for many conditions. Most of us here accept that ADHD is one of those conditions, and we're just trying to help the OP understand her child. Is it ADHD? Is it normal fidgetiness? Something else?

OP: does the school have heavy academic requirements in areas your child has already mastered or nearly mastered? Having to re-learn material can get very wearing. I remember this myself from the early grades.

How strict is the school? Do the kids get a lot of recess time? Is there homework? All of these factors can affect a child's ability to sit quietly during the day. It's very hard for little kids to sit still consistently on demand, because most of them just don't have that level of executive function.

My son can't get dressed or have a conversation without medication. Pretty sure that is not any sort of gift. I'm sorry if you were incorrectly diagnosed and medicated. That's not the fault of the DSM or the existence of the diagnosis of ADHD. Psychiatry has allowed many people who would have once been institutionalized to lead normal lives.

There are kids who can't be educated or access life without medication. Kids who have severe anger/emotional issues and hurt others or depression and are at risk for suicide. There are kids who have severe psychotic symptoms and research shows that these kids, when started early on meds, seem to have better outcomes. These medications save lives and these diagnostic categories allow us to help treat specific problems and choose appropriate therapies and/or medications.

No one made me put my son on medication. I see every day medicated ds and unmedicated ds and I know which way he wants to be. He asks to take his meds and says that he likes his medication because he doesn't get yelled at or get in trouble when he takes it and he can do the things that he likes to do. He can also attend school for the first time in his life. This has nothing to do with expectations or a poor fit, this is a child who neurologically cannot succeed at being a 6 year old. He cannot sit still, be quiet, follow directions, or follow the rules of a classroom, not even for 10 seconds. The medication that treats ADHD relieves the symptoms so well he functions like a typical 6 year old. Explain to me how his brain is within the normal range but he was kicked out of every school/preschool we ever tried and even got in trouble and had to leave within a few minutes every time I took him to the playground but a simple little pill fixes everything for 3.5 hours.

Your opinions on psychiatry are outdated. We don't need precise and exact measurements to have something be an actual science. All fields of science had problems at some point with lack of ability to 100% mathematically prove various theories. It's the unknowns that make science truly interesting and the brain is still largely an unknown. We may not have a test for ADHD, but we know what it looks like, we measure it using scales, and brain scans show remarkable similarities in ADHD brains vs. typical brains. Maybe someday we will have a definitive test, but until then we will continue to do what other parents do, use the treatment that works. I for one am happy to live in a world where my son is able to attend an excellent private gifted school and live at home with a loving family rather than be institutionalized.

Its good to hear this has been of help for your son. Sounds like its been a life saver for you and DS which I am genuinely pleased to hear. It does restore my faith in psychiatry.


However, there are those (and to many if you ask me) who are misdiagnosed and parents convinced to medicate by an overly zealous system.

Val, I agree with most of your post except the statement that "clinical diagnoses are a least-worst option." I don't think this is always true or even usually true. I can understand this view if you are a non-clinician and wish to see a true/false dichotomy but most diagnoses aren't like that and I'll trust a good clinician over a blood test any day.

In other news, to the OP, I've only been at this a short while but I'll share what I've learned and hopefully that helps. We all have hopes and dreams for our kids and want the best for them. Sometimes we have to take a deeper look because what is actually best for them may not be what we originally planned. I don't know if that's your situation or not, but I hear from you very strongly that you want your daughter to stay at this school. That's great if it's what's best for her. But if it's not, for whatever reason (too boring, won't accommodate, etc), then that's ok too. I'd talk with the teacher and try to find out what's really going on here and try to help her from that standpoint. If the school is with you on that, great. If not, then you needed to learn that too because your daughter may need something different.

FWIW, I'm replying to the OP and not replying to any of the post-OP discussion re ADHD and whether or not it's a valid diagnosis - I believe it's a valid diagnosis


I mentioned above that I believe in ADHD as a diagnosis. I also believe, and have experienced, that the symptoms typical of ADHD can occur due to other diagnoses. When we see something that doesn't make sense, we may naturally categorize it in with what we have personal experience with, and teachers have most likely seen children in their classroom dealing with ADHD. It's possible that the behaviors the teachers are seeing in class aren't due to ADHD at all, but to some other issue that results in similar behaviors and symptoms. I'm not mentioning this to discount the possibility that it might be ADHD, but because this has happened to two of my children.


I am not a professional psychiatrist, so take my advice here with a grain of salt - but fwiw, I thought that to diagnosis ADHD behavior scale forms are given to teachers and parents for a reason - to see if the behaviors are similar between home and school. That's what helps tease out if ADHD is a possibility or if the environment is somehow resulting in what looks like ADHD - ADHD wouldn't be diagnosed based one only a parents' input.

This also points out that we, as parents, are subject to the same limitations as teachers - we can only compare what we see to what we know. A comprehensive eval, otoh, doesn't start with a diagnosis and move to prove it, instead it starts by looking globally at how the child is functioning, and narrows down toward a diagnosis.


Finger-tapping isn't *only* an ADHD test, it's a test that is routinely used in diagnosing fine motor dysgraphia. You've mentioned challenges with writing - you might want to google dysgraphia symptoms and see if anything sounds familiar re your dd. I mention this because one of my 2e kids is dysgraphic, and the way we discovered his dysgraphia diagnosis was by landing in a neuropsych evaluation after 6 months of total frustration in a classroom where his behaviors had his teacher (2nd grade) convinced he had ADHD.


You can still access public school sources for evaluation and some services when a child is enrolled in private school - you can ask your school district for an evaluation, and if you can't find the info you need to do this, it would be worth looking for a local parent advocate group to help you determine what you can/can't do in your area and who you need to be in touch with. If you're looking for a parent advocate group, try the yellow pages listing at wrightslaw.org


They might, or they might not. It's more likely that the school will either be willing to accommodate her challenges or not accommodate them - regardless of diagnosis. Avoiding a diagnosis because you're worried about how the school you love will react is not going to help your dd in the long run. There are clear benefits to seeking a correct diagnosis if there is a challenge: you'll be able to understand what your dd's needs now and in the future will be, you can seek therapy or accommodations or whatever your dd does need to be able to show her knowledge without bumping head-on into a wall due to her challenge, and her teachers will be able to better understand how to work with her.

Our 2e ds started out in public school - for all the options available to us in terms of testing / id'ing his needs / getting him help that worked etc - public school just didn't work. Some school districts are pro-acvtive and wonderful re working to identify and then help students who have a challenge. Our school district was *not* helpful or willing to work with our ds. We switched to private school and were very happy there - because the school culture included teachers communicating frequently and working closely with parents. Whether it happened because we were paying tuition or out of the true kindness of their hearts, the teachers were willing to listen to our ds' challenges, respect that they truly were significant challenges for him, and allowed him to have the accommodations he needed to be successful - all without a fight. When he was in public school I spent soooo many precious hours just fighting to get him less than 25% of what he needed.

Not every private or HG school etc will be like that - but your dd will most likely be happy and successful if you can find a school (private or public) that is willing to accommodate/remediate as needed, but that also allows your dd to participate in a classroom that matches her intellectual abilities.


Until you know what's really behind the behaviors, this line of reasoning just doesn't work. Many 2e challenges aren't things that children "grow out of". Even if a challenge becomes less so with maturity, the years spent compensating and missing opportunities because of having to compensate aren't worth the faint hope that someday in the future a child will "grow out" of a challenge. If they do - great! But even so, is it worth the risk of your child having to compensate, possibly be very frustrated with having to compensate, and the cumulative impact of knowing internally that something about you is "different" than your nt peers, yet not knowing what that "something" is?


This again sounds like it *might* be dysgraphia.


And that's the thing - left undiagnosed, improperly diagnosed, or simply not understood - challenges can have a huge impact on a child's self-esteem. Back to ADHD, somewhere up above in the replies someone mentioned that people have been living with ADHD for years (maybe centuries) without being diagnosed. That doesn't mean that everyone who had undiagnosed ADHD led happy lives unfettered by challenges, chances are good there were people with undiagnosed ADHD who never realized their potential and may, in fact, have been very frustrated. This holds true for other diagnoses too, such as LDs, dysgraphia etc.


My suggestion is that you need to step away from worrying about the specific diagnosis and worrying about school choice for the future. The first priority is understanding what is actually going on. For that, you don't want to look for ruling in/out a specific diagnosis, you instead want an evaluation which looks at a wide range of possibilities. You might find that your hunch of a diagnosis was correct, or you might be completely surprised - but whichever the outcome, you don't want to risk missing something now that your dd will still have to deal with in the future - it's better to diagnose an LD or whatever early so that accommodation and remediation are taking place as early as possible.

Re the school situation, get your diagnosis, then try to work with the school. If that works, then you never have to worry about finding another school. OTOH, if you're not satisfied this school can meet your dd's needs (both sides - intellectual and disability)... then try not to over-worry about leaving friends behind. You can arrange playdates to stay in touch with friends from the first school, and at the same time your dd will be meeting new friends at her new school.

Best wishes,

polarbear

Great advice from polarbear. Here's a few more thoughts from the BTDT files.

With apologies for repetition from a couple of other recent threads, I would tread very carefully around concerns being expressed about attention and writing issues in 6 year olds. If the school issues mirror challenges you see in other settings, then something may well be going on there. But if it's classroom specific, take a hard look at the classroom expectations and how well they match your child's need. Gifted kids often look ADHD when they are not challenged. So, however, do kids who are experiencing learning issues. So as polarbear says, its really, really important to understand what underlies the behaviour.

Keep in mind a class can easily be both too hard and too easy at the same time, too. For instance, expecting large amounts of sitting still and compliance plus neat written output from six-year-olds, but on content they mastered ages ago. Nothing sets off the ADHD in my kids more than that combo.

While ADHD is typically associated with low working memory and processing speed, they aren't absolute. I definitely have a kid who is off the charts on both working memory and inattentive ADHD.

And finally, if your daughter does have any actual learning challenges beyond a mismatched classroom, then our experience is that these things really, really don't get better with age. The opposite, in fact. Kids can compensate for a long time - gifted kids even longer - but as the school work gets more complex and demanding, they have to work ever-increasingly harder than every one else in the class to keep their head above water. Anxiety grows, misery grows, self-esteem plummets - but the marks might still be OK. Until finally the work takes that one extra leap in complexity, and they can't fake it anymore, and they're drowning. Trust me, you don't want to go there if you can avoid it.

So - if all that is going on is developmentally-inappropriate expectations for 6 year-old compliance and written output, then yes, as your child ages they will "grow out of it". If your child is tuning out because they are bored and frustrated, that tends to keep growing until they are appropriately challenged. And if there are actual real challenges with writing or attention, these will likely only grow over time if ignored.

If there is one things we all repeat on this forum like a mantra, it's "one day at a time". You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out if your child can stay put until middle school, or what they will need in high school (I do it all the time ). But for these kids, their needs change so much, so often, all you can really do is find the best place for them right now, and accept that next year, the answer may be something completely different, and the year after that, veer again. Very tough on us linear-thinking planner types!

You mentioned symptoms of Tourette Syndrome (TS), which is our BTD(oing)T experience. You may want to keep the TS piece in mind as you seek to better understand what is going on for your DD. Children with TS frequently experience other neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric conditions, including ADHD http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/tourette/data.html and handwriting difficulties https://www.tourette.org/resource/handwriting-issues/. In our experience, management of TS included a neuropsychological evaluation to explore questions related to co-occuring conditions, including attention deficit. I�m NOT saying that your DD has TS but given the constellation of concerns you raised it may be a question to at least frame and explore with your pedi and/or specialists.

Reminder to please stay on topic and be respectful of other posters and their opinions. We will lock this thread if this type of discussion continues.

It seems to be back on track now.