They put me on all kinds of drugs that ended up doing nothing but making me physically ill. No one would believe me that the reason I wasn't paying attention in class all the time was because I found some stuff to be BORING. I always paid close attention to the stuff I loved.
Finally I told my parents there was nothing they could do that would make me take the damn pills again. I was fed up with feeling sick all the time. Thankfully they let me stop taking them and my health immediately got better.
Now I don't know if ADD/ADHD really exists or not. I suspect in a few cases it is a symptom of some other as yet undiscovered condition. In most cases I think it is just kids being kids and parents preferring to shove a pill down their throat so they don't have to deal with their children.
A friend of mine was a teaching assistant in our local high school for a couple years, and one of his jobs was to administer a "diagnosis questionnaire" to students in order to gauge whether they were ADD or ADHD. The questions were things like "Are you moody at home?" and "do you have trouble paying attention in class" and "do you have trouble with your parents" and when he objected to this job, they got rid of him. He didn't think that someone untrained like him should be doing this, and he also thought that the qeustions were true of ANY kid.
Of course the reason schools do this is because they have a financial interest in diagnosing kids because they get EXTRA DOLLARS! It's a racket. In some districts, the schools get DOUBLE the money for "special needs" kids so they want as many as possible to have ADD and ADHD.
What a scam...
DHF
GOOD for you!
bump!
Could you repeat that, I wasn't paying attention. Seriously, good post with first-hand knowledge.
What were you interested in? I think your story is interesting.
ditto. Thank God they didn't drug kids back then or I would have been a walking zombie. Like MOST!! kids, I was profoundly bored with much of school. The only thing I really liked, other than recess, was reading in the school library. I used to calculate the number of minutes and seconds left in the school day. I was amazed to find out, many years later, that one of my co-workers used to do the same thing to help pass the time.
The fact is that school is very tedious for most kids. So they daydream. They don't have a condition...they're bored witless.