It’s worse than profiting from a fictitious disease. He’s responsible for drugging millions of children. He’s also responsible for causing millions of kids and their parents to make excuses rather than fix the problem.
I’m not willing to say that there are zero kids who need some sort of intervention. But I have seen dozens whose attention deficit is a deficit of attention from their parents. So they act up to get attention.
I’ve seen dozens of parents who can’t accept that their kid is a B student or a C student, so they will grasp at any excuse to explain it away.
I’ve seen dozens of kids who are bright and high energy but have been drugged because it’s too much work for the teacher to deal with them and the parents have been suckered into it by “experts.” It might remove some of the rough edges a kid has, but it also removes all of the best things about the kid, his/her passion and drive.
Many lives have been ruined because of this and the drugs it spawned. A lot of these kids are so stigmatized, put into ‘sped’ classes, or into classes with some really bad kids and it never wears off.
A superb Family Practice Doc, who retired this week after 35 years of practice was in total agreement with you. He refused to make the diagnosis or rx drugs for this non disease.
He said that his brothers, his sister, he and two sons would have had this terrible pseudo diagnosis if not for his parents and his refusal to recognize a diagnosis to excuse lazy teachers.
Word got around the educational community not to try and force him to make this vile diagnosis. Some of the teachers trying to push this pseudo diagnosis were or ended up as patients of him. He told them if they tried to push this stuff with him, they needed to find a new doctor.
About a year after Prop 13 became the law of California, schools in our areas dropped the gifted classrooms and put all of the kids in the same class. So we had gifted children in with not very bright and the beginning of the gang bangers and students not able to read/speak English.
That is still being done in the local mid and high schools.
One of our sons got very bored and irritated with this bs, was labled as ADHD. We refused to have the drugs and ADHD label pushed on him. He later dropped out of hs, took his GED course and finished it, passed the test in a few months and went to work and has done well.
Some friend s of mine have a kid who was brilliant well beyond his age. I taught him in Sunday School and he was always correcting me because I was dumbing down the lessons for the rest of the 5 year olds. His parents home educated him otherwise he would have been drugged badly.
At the age of 12, he was awarded a full ride to John’s Hopkins Med School. He’s 15 now and holding off the med school till he’s a bit older.
Mostly, it’s all about lazy parents. A string of fancy letters and some Ritalin clears them of having to take any responsibility and actually having to work at being parents. It’s the easiest marketing campaign there is, with the exception of a pill that lets you drop 50 pounds of ugly fat.