It has a huge and powerful lobby which
turns with fury on its critics so I know
this question will get me into loads of
trouble but… does ADHD even exist?
Daily Mail (UK),
by
Peter Hitchens
Original Article
Posted By: AltaD,
5/18/2023 8:01:28 AM
Does ADHD in fact exist? This week the BBC’s Panorama programme quite rightly exposed some very worrying private clinics. (Snip) One of the problems with the diagnosis of ‘ADHD’ is that it covers such an extraordinarily broad range of behaviours, including children who may actually suffer from birth trauma or brain damage, and children who are merely wilful and obstinate, or are driven to distraction by dull schools and bad teachers. Worse, it closes the subject. If all these millions truly are suffering from a treatable physical disorder, then we need not worry about our debased family life, dominated by
Reply 1 - Posted by:
Strike3 5/18/2023 8:13:30 AM (No. 1472066)
Thou shalt not question an accepted disease that guarantees billions of dollars for Big Pharma and keeps the government thumb on our public schools and our children. In my days of education, the school psychologist hung on the wall behind the principal's desk on a nail, was about two and a half feet long and was used frequently because it worked.
27 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
voxpopuli 5/18/2023 8:14:29 AM (No. 1472068)
probably..
for 0.5% of the population.. most of it indiscernible
but according to the communists
in the edyoukayshun gulags, it's
definitely about 50%.. all white BOYS..
19 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
sunshinehorses 5/18/2023 8:22:43 AM (No. 1472075)
It "might" exist but way too many kids are shoved into this diagnosis because they don't follow the robot behavior expected of kids today. 30 years ago a teacher tried to get that diagnosis for my youngest daughter. Hubby and I went to the school and met with a 30 something 5th grade teacher that had NO kids of her own and had no idea what to do with a child that said "no" when asked to do something. All of my kids were independent, intelligent, and strong-willed (the kids swore it was a requirement to be in my family) and this was the youngest of 5 so she had learned a lot from the older kids. We flat out told this teacher that our daughter was yanking her chain and she needed to learn better methods of teaching. We also told our daughter that her behavior was not acceptable and she would be punished if it continued.
24 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
Calamity Kate 5/18/2023 8:32:29 AM (No. 1472084)
READ this book! "Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences" by Dr Leonard Sax (PhD, MD). He kept getting referrals to rubber stamp ADHD diagnosis and meds for school aged children, being sent along via concerned parents from schools that had already made a 'diagnosis'. His biggest question was WHY ARE THE VAST MAJORITY BOYS????
He began digging into research on the differences in physiology of the sexes and came up with some eye-opening discoveries in the differences in the way the ears and eyes of boys and girls function. It's been a while since I've read, so forgive the sweeping summaries.
Eyes: Differences in the ratio of rods/cones in eyes of M & F, . Female will naturally focus on still objects, Male on whatever is moving in the room because they have more rods - which work to capture movement.
Teacher when trying to get attention: Suzy is focused on teacher's face; Billy on the movement outside the window. When drawing a picture - Suzy draws Daddy, Mommy, sissy, kitty in a row, Billy scribbling and trying to capture the movement of a dinosaur eating a penguin. Or even as newborns, the girls are focused on mom's face, and the boy is avoiding eye contact to focus on the ceiling fan behind her - prompting the mom to think there's something wrong.
Ears: Girls hear higher registers, Boys don't. 23 year old sweet kinder teacher in her sweet high-octave voice is politely asking everyone to return to their seats, or get in line - Suzy complies, Billy is still running around BECAUSE HE CAN'T HEAR HER.
Sax tested the hearing issue out in a classroom and asked the teachers to drop their voices a couple octaves and presto-chango, the boys suddenly could hear the teacher.
Other researchers have documented the feminization of education and parenting (see The War on Boys by Hoff-Summers). Boys are not defective girls. We need to start treating boyhood as the treasure that it is.
51 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
rikkitikki 5/18/2023 8:36:44 AM (No. 1472090)
IMO, the misdiagnosis of ADHD offers yet another example of a human condition that is misdiagnosed because of the extreme compartmentalization of medical science. For example, in this case, neurologists who've necessarily spent their entire professional lives learning about their specialties, but therefore have no working knowledge of the real, behavioral cause of ADHD. I'm no doctor, but IMO, ADHD is likely an induced mental state caused by too much time in front of television, which trains adolescents into short and fitful attention spans.
Another example of this problem are dental cavitations, which comprise a sort of "cross-over" dysfunction that are the likely cause of many human disorders. These cavitations are overlooked by most dentists (they're looking at the teeth, not the jawbones, and their X-rays are focused and tuned accordingly), whereas cardiologists/immunologists/rheumatologists/cancer specialists/etc. are completely unaware of their potential causative impact on their specialties.
See the book, "Hidden Epidemic," by Thomas Levy, MD, JD.
4 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
Cindiana 5/18/2023 8:37:50 AM (No. 1472093)
LOVE x 100 for #4's post. What a tremendous contribution to this thread!
17 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
EVRgreen4058 5/18/2023 8:40:24 AM (No. 1472098)
Good for you #3 as the trend became popular with parents to follow "the science" and drug their kids under the guise of being ADHD and then if that didn't fly it morphed into being "bi-polar". School nurses became small pharmacies expected to dole out drugs to students on schedule! Who really knows what harm has been done to the minds of elementary age youngsters who were never allowed to learn lessons from unruly behavior other than popping pills for their everlasting anxiety and depression! Another issue was pushing kids into the next grade when they could use an extra year of maturity - now so many are lost because they simply can't learn and have been allowed to care less because they are shoved into a "spectrum" that's trendy and worthless-except to big pharma.
10 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
felixcat 5/18/2023 8:51:20 AM (No. 1472107)
Too much money in Big Pharma, "research" grants, etc. And I am making a guess but are most of the children diagnosed with ADHD while boys? Cause it sure seems that black kids acting out get a pass.
6 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
DVC 5/18/2023 8:51:49 AM (No. 1472110)
I have one nephew who was "diagnosed" with this, and I have never believed it. The young man has just been very immature and amazingly lazy, even though not stupid. Not my child, I wasn't there every day, but I was around him a lot and I never believed the diagnosis.
10 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
smokincol 5/18/2023 8:52:50 AM (No. 1472113)
ADHD is an excuse for people who don't want to take the responsibility of being "parents" because they are too self absorbed and vainglorious to commit the time and effort in raising children to become, through the growth process, responsible adults
- being a parent is a 24/7/365 proposition and those who wish to complete the cycle of reproduction of the human race should do so with this in mind, it's not as simple as an act of copulation but a contract with a yet to become human being, that there will be a promise that their future that will be much to their liking so they can live out their dreams of what God has promised us.
10 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
smcchk 5/18/2023 9:01:35 AM (No. 1472122)
#4 - thank you for the information! I remember then I wanted to get my young son’s attention, I would hold his face with both hands to have him focus on what I was saying. Perhaps I should have talked lower too. Yet another reason why boys need fathers - and some male teachers.
23 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
Flyball Dogs 5/18/2023 9:05:50 AM (No. 1472127)
#4, you’ve earned your community service award for the year.
I just sent your comments to my niece (pregnant with her 2d baby — a girl — who will join her 19 mo old brother. She wants to order the book you mentioned.
THANK YOU
16 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
nuclearnavymom 5/18/2023 9:08:02 AM (No. 1472131)
I'm 64, was diagnosed in my 40's and have never used it as an excuse. Started working at 14, never been without a job, been married for 45 years, raised two great sons. Had great parents and a great childhood, but explained a lot about me in my childhood, if that makes sense. Looking back I can see my Daddy and brother had it. Just my 2 cents.
9 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
LesUNo 5/18/2023 9:18:46 AM (No. 1472144)
Having raised three boys I was always dismayed by the utter feminization of education. The guys were bored. At their school, years ago a person was hired to dispense Ritalin at noon to a long line of little boys. There were that many. I was appalled.
14 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
red1066 5/18/2023 9:20:15 AM (No. 1472147)
ADHD is a teacher's union disease. It was developed as an excuse to reduce class size. Today's teachers have smaller class sizes of perhaps no more than 25. Those of us who went to school in the late fifties recall every elementary school class size of 45 or more kids, and the teachers didn't have teacher assistants like they have today. It was one teacher and 45+ kids. My third grade and fourth grade class were split into two classes each had over 45 kids in each class. If one kid acted up, he was put in the corner or even worse, sent to the principal's office. The problem of the past thirty+ years is that adults want to make and be friends with the kids, instead of discipling them. The adults aren't allowed to discipline the kids anymore for fear of lawsuits. The acting up by kids isn't a medical problem, it's a lack of instilling socially accepted behavior and accepting the fact that kids under the age of 12 have a lot of pent-up energy and many just aren't going to sit still for six or seven hours a day.
22 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
chillijilli 5/18/2023 9:20:20 AM (No. 1472149)
This is still a very murky area, with plenty of confusion. In this country, we can't even settle on whether ADHD is a behavioral or executive function disorder.
We do know that ADHD is largely an American disorder, perhaps stemming from social and cultural factors which are more common in American society. Rates in China are rockbottom. Many countries such as Russia do not acknowledge or treat ADHD at all. But...does that mean ADHD doesn't exist in other countries... or is it just grossly under-diagnosed?
6 people like this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
Shells 5/18/2023 10:05:02 AM (No. 1472211)
#4’s comment, ‘boys are not defective girls,’ hit the bullseye.
Today’s young (mostly female) teachers have been raised to believe that there are no differences between the sexes. So when faced with boys who behave, and learn, differently than girls, they immediately think there is something wrong with them.
I’ve seen it first hand, and I feel so sorry for boys these days.
16 people like this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
stablemoney 5/18/2023 10:06:03 AM (No. 1472215)
No, it does not exist. This is a leftist shield that has neutered fathers, most of whom are absent from the family. ADHD really means no discipline, which culturally has come from the father. Schools have time outs, another leftist invention. Leftist mayors have give them space policies, including let them take what they want. Leftists do not believe in the individual, responsibility, or discipline, which is why we now have chaos and mayhem.
3 people like this.
Reply 19 - Posted by:
FLCracker 5/18/2023 10:15:44 AM (No. 1472229)
One of my high school teachers was on a rant about us not doing our homework. Somewhere in there, she called me out by name and said that I didn't do my homework either, but I always paid attention in class.
When she said my name, my brain had to make the 1000-mile journey in from whatever fantasyland I was visiting, review what she had been saying to see if I was in trouble or needed to answer a question, and take appropriate action. That action was to say nothing and put a suitably-chastised look on my face.
I spend the next couple of days trying to figure out why she thought I was paying attention, as the above was my normal state in class, school assemblies, Sunday school, church and lectures by my step-father. I had developed it after getting trouble a lot for mumbling a running commentary in elementary school.
I finally figured out that I had developed the very useful trait of keeping my eyes on the speaking figure and tracking that person's movements, even while zoned out. I was "attention deficient" all right; I just found an appropriate coping mechanism.
BTW, this was a class of honor students.
7 people like this.
Reply 20 - Posted by:
MickTurn 5/18/2023 11:18:55 AM (No. 1472290)
ADHD = Too Much Junk Food/Sugar. Then the kid is put on horrible drugs and it only goes downhill from there. The Screwels think they are doing good, NOT, and Big Pharma gets rich selling horrible drugs. There I fixed it for you.
5 people like this.
Reply 21 - Posted by:
zoidberg 5/18/2023 11:47:54 AM (No. 1472316)
tl;dr /s
0 people like this.
Reply 22 - Posted by:
texaspast 5/18/2023 12:00:02 PM (No. 1472331)
Nobody wants to REALLY discover why boys didn't have ADHD years ago. I'm 67. Some of my classmates and I were sitting around talking about this a couple of months ago and tried to imagine what would have happened if we had backtalked a teacher when we were in elementary or, for that matter, high school. Maybe a warning once, then the second time a rapid application of the board of education. It definitely worked. If the teacher didn't want to do it, the principal would. If you were in sports, the coach was informed and he practiced his tennis forehand on your posterior. When parents found out, you got it again at home. I know it isn't popular in today's climate of 'fragile little children' - up to age 23 - but fear is a great motivator and focuses the attention (or as someone above said, makes you at least act like you are paying attention). I took each of my two boys to school the first day and met with their respective teachers, with the boys standing there told the teacher she had my permission to do whatever it takes to make my son behave. Just don't leave permanent marks (yes, I said that). Then I gave her my card and said if the boy is a problem and you don't or can't handle it, call me. I will be here in 10 minutes and I will take care of it. Then I turned to the boy and said 'Did you hear me [fill in the name]? I mean it!' Seemed to work. My daughter was never a problem, of course. Perfect child - had dad wrapped around her little finger. :)
3 people like this.
Reply 23 - Posted by:
Ditto1958 5/18/2023 12:05:32 PM (No. 1472338)
I’m not a doctor, but I have eyes and ears and can think for myself. I went to elementary school in the 1960’s and saw public school teachers handle classrooms with 30+ kids and nuns in parochial schools handle 50-60 kids. Discipline problems were rare and were quickly dealt with.
What has changed since then? Well, home life. Children back then were mostly raised in two parent families. They had consistent home schedules and routines. They played outside a lot and didn’t watch much tv. Most kids were taught from a young age to sit still, be quiet, pay attention and respect teachers.
3 people like this.
Reply 24 - Posted by:
earlybird 5/18/2023 12:11:07 PM (No. 1472340)
My schoolmate became an internationally known expert on child development, heavy on common sense. She said ADHD was a made-up condition. That the boys (and most ADHD is supposedly found in male children) needed more active time, more active play to break up the school day, and fathers to engage them in active pursuits. Not medication
I wonder what doing away with recess and turning elementary school playground areas into teacher parking has done to the ADHD "situation”?
7 people like this.
Reply 25 - Posted by:
AltaD 5/18/2023 1:01:01 PM (No. 1472364)
FTA: The conference eventually issued a statement saying firmly that there is no independent, valid test for ADHD, and there is no data to show that it is due to a brain malfunction.
That was in 1998, then they revised their statement and did their best to hide the original. The power of Big Pharma, teachers unions and parents who prefer to medicate their children rather than spend time with them.
1 person likes this.
Reply 26 - Posted by:
DVC 5/18/2023 2:09:58 PM (No. 1472392)
I'm sure that I would have been diagnosed ADHD if I hadn't grown up in the 50s and 60s.
Thru fifth grade I had two really great teachers who understood that I would complete all class assignments in 1/3rd of the time alotted. Seeing my friends struggling, I'd try to help...getting called down for talking on class.
The best teachers gave me extta assignments, kept me happily learning.
I had been to the principal's office dozens of time for 'misbehaving ' in class by fifth grade. By sixth grade I was figuring out how to deal with it, and 7th grade I had matured enough to do fine.
I finished the eighth grade reader in the first couple of months of third grade, was oten bored to death, had nothing to do when the rest of the class worked on reading.
And as #4 says noys are different, more energetic and just interested in everything goong on. Easily distracted.
1 person likes this.
Reply 27 - Posted by:
DrOstrow 5/18/2023 2:34:31 PM (No. 1472409)
If I were somewhere between 7 and 14 today, doctors would have me on a Ritalin drip !!!!
I still have to have multiple 'projects' going almost all the time and have an infuriating trait of
putting down whatever I have in my hand at the moment I no longer need or want it and can't
remember WHERE I left it 5 minutes later !! BUT, do I have ADHD ? I don't think so. This is just
another 'trait' that most if not all of us have to some degree, especially males !
Ayn Rand once asked and answered - How to you create more criminals ? Answer- create more laws !
I think a variation of this is at work in the pharmaceutical industry today,
How do you make more money ? Answer - create more patients / diseases / maladies etc. Covid anyone ?
The 'behavior' issues that were dealt with when I grew up now have a name and a 'treatment',
supposedly ! I think, in this case it's just another way to get more people taking more drugs FOR EVER !
The school that my son attended at about 8 years old wanted to put him on Ritalin and was told
absolutely not. After that we didn't move him to another school the following year.
My reasoning was that he was a boy - that's the reason for the behavior. Period.
He seems to be doin' just fine now that he is all growed up and I am very proud of him !
4 people like this.
Reply 28 - Posted by:
DrOstrow 5/18/2023 2:36:59 PM (No. 1472411)
Sorry -
................didn't move him to another school UNTIL the following year.
1 person likes this.
Reply 29 - Posted by:
earlybird 5/18/2023 6:01:50 PM (No. 1472510)
I could have written #26’s reoly almost word for word. Except that I was a girl. Report cards noted “lacks self-control” translated “bored so talks in class”… Smart teacher let me complete both semesters of Second Grade in one. One year I spent “spare time” in the office, correcting papers. By Sixth I did the same as in Second and was skipped a half year. I was always too quivk. There is no allowance for quickness in our homogenized schools. Thus those who are quick become bored and “talk too much”...
1 person likes this.
Reply 30 - Posted by:
konocti95 5/18/2023 6:13:36 PM (No. 1472517)
Yeah, what number four said! I read all of Dr Sax's books they were very enlightening and worthwhile. Get them if you have children. Get them for your children if they have children. Get them for anybody who's planning on being a teacher.
4 people like this.