Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion B

I think ADHD is overdiagnosed, mismanaged and mistreated, but I hate that freaking Psychology Today article. What a bunch of ignorant, parent-blaming claptrap. ADHD is real, even if some doctors diagnose it at the drop of a hat, even if there are real and serious problems with how it's currently being treated, and even if the educational system has some very real culpability in its overdiagnosis. I shudder when I think of parents of kids who have ADHD reading that piece. France is all kinds of messed up in terms of how it deals with neurodiversity. Let's not take it as a model.

And the behavioral/cognitive therapy that works is hard to obtain for many (most) people. This is a serious failing of the medical establishment. I will not editorialize further, but ugh.

Important to note that behavioral/cognitive therapy alone doesn't necessarily work that well for most children with ADHD. In many cases, the child cannot really access the therapy without medication, which is why the combination is often the strongest choice for moderately to severely affected children (for people who actually have ADHD, not talking about misdiagnoses here).

The choice to medicate is not IME usually taken lightly; nobody's a huge fan of giving medications to kids in principle. In our community, I see it operating as a last-ditch thing that people try after having tried a number of other ways to make life workable for their children, and I see that it is typically associated with unjustly shaming the parents first for having an uncontrollable or out-to-lunch kid, and then for drugging the kid.

Unmedicated ADHD is associated with some other really undesirable things in young adults, like alcohol and drug abuse; if you let a person's frustration level climb sky-high over years by letting them feel like a failure for how their brain works, lots of really bad things can happen. This ought to be factored into decisions. I think families mostly try to do right by their kids; I do not think most families are trying to drug their children into submission and so on.

I would like so much of this public shouting and judgment to stop: the shaming, the overdiagnosis, the pressure to medicate or not medicate. I suppose that's unrealistic of me.

DeeDee

I can't type more now, ill come back later, when i have time to type and to think about how much to share, but really I could have written that article. The passages that don't make sense to moomin make perfect sense to me...

And I think some of it comes down to having a fairly decently bahaved, very gifted girl child. She does not look like most people's idea of ADHD (including not looking in attentive because in a group scenario she's gifted enough not to need to have heard the teacher and well enough behaved to have looked like she was listening). But medication is quite literally a magic pill for her, with difference obvious to everyone. She herself was absolutely clear from the first day that she felt better, liked feeling better, wanted it to last.

But the judgement we face from school, teachers, family is constant and very very hard.

I was that girl. And I can say that I felt *more* myself on medication. I'm sorry you are being judged.

Thank you for telling me that, it means a lot. She IS more herself, more productive, more creative, more engaged. Medication is not perfect, it has issues, but we've tried taking her off (because it's so freaking hard to have your little girl on medication) and she asked every day for her medicine and it was so obvious all the ways she was better off.