Posted on 04/18/2003 12:38:09 PM PDT by FreeRadical
Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - The debate over attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the drugging of children diagnosed with it has been rekindled in Australia, one of several countries to have followed the U.S. trend over recent decades.
A youth conference in the eastern city of Brisbane this week was told that no proof has been found that ADHD exists at all.
U.S. psychologist Dr. Bob Jacobs told the Youth Affairs Network Queensland conference that doctors and pharmaceutical companies had turned behavioral problems in children into a disorder.
He voiced concern that misdiagnoses resulted in youngsters being prescribed powerful drugs like Ritalin, which may affect their long-term mental and physical development.
In a radio interview afterwards, Jacobs - who is on the advisory board of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology - said his conclusions had been made as a result of his own observations during many years in practice, working with children and families.
He cited cases where parents reported that their ADHD-diagnosed children could not pay attention - but then those same children could play video games for hours without being distracted.
Sometimes where parents made changes in the way they were doing things, the symptoms would go away.
"A real disease doesn't go away when somebody else does something," he argued.
Jacobs said experts had put labels on different behaviors and called them a disease.
"There's no proof. Nobody has ever presented any evidence of a condition called ADHD, except to say all these children are hyperactive; all these children are inattentive, and therefore they all have the disease. It's the 'and therefore' that I'm concerned about."
Jacobs acknowledged that many parents would disagree with him. Parents tend to believe what has become the mainstream view, in part because the drugs prescribed for ADHD do work in that they make the child more docile and more compliant.
"The child's not getting into trouble at school any more. The child's easier to manage at home, so we say, well this is great, it works."
Also, parents struggling with a behavior problem were made to feel better. Instead of feeling inadequate as parents, they felt they were now struggling with a sick child and doing the best they could.
Money trail
In the United States in 2001, pharmaceutical companies made more than $600 million in profits just on stimulant drugs used for attention deficit disorders.
"If ADHD doesn't exist, those hundreds of millions of dollars in profits go away."
"You have to follow the money," agreed Peyton Knight, legislative director at the American Policy Center, a Virginia-based think tank.
"It's big money," he said by phone late Thursday. "The more diagnoses there are every year the more Ritalin and other mind-altering drugs they are going to be able to market and sell."
Many would vehemently disagree with the arguments against the existence of ADHD, he said.
"But it's never been validated as a disease," Knight said. "It's arbitrary."
"The number of diagnoses has risen exponentially over the past decade. It's not like some epidemic is sweeping the nation like a flu virus. It's just a matter of diagnoses going up because of the popularity of diagnosing children with ADHD," he said.
"In today's society, parents look for the easy way out. If their kids are unruly, we give them a pill and it sedates them. That becomes a very easy thing to do and if a doctor tells them to do this, they feel good about it."
Knight said there was a fairly sizeable grassroots citizens' movement in the United States questioning these issues, and more parents and teachers were becoming aware of the problems.
Unfortunately a similar movement had yet to take hold in the scientific community, although there were some bold specialists who disagreed with the wider-held views.
One of them is neurologist Dr. Fred Baughman Jr., who in a 1998 letter to the then Attorney General Janet Reno, called the representation of ADHD as a disease and the drugging of millions of normal children "the single, biggest heath care fraud in U.S. history."
Massive increase in drug use
According to Baughman, 500,000 children were diagnosed ADHD in 1985 and between 5 and 7 million were today.
Substantial growth has also been reported in Australia, a country of just 19 million people, where it's estimated that at least 50,000 children are now on drugs prescribed for ADHD.
A report in the Medical Journal of Australia last November said Australia and New Zealand have the third-highest rate in the world of the drug use, after the United States and Canada.
Unlike the United States, where Ritalin (methylphenidate) is most often prescribed, in Australia dexamphetamine is more widely used.
University of Queensland figures show that legal use of dexamphetamine in Australia has risen from 8.3 million tablets prescribed in 1984 to 38.4 million tablets in 2001. Over the same period Ritalin prescriptions rose from 1.5 million tablets to 19.3 million.
The federal government early this year approved use in Australia of long-acting Ritalin-LA, which is said to be effective for longer than the usual four-hour period for standard Ritalin.
Rosemary Boon, a child psychologist in Sydney for more than 20 years, acknowledged in a recent article that the drugs were effective in settling the child and this benefited teachers, parents and classmates. But there was little benefit to the afflicted child, she added.
Boon does not argue that ADHD doesn't exist, but says it can be managed with the help of diet, exercise, behavior modification, stress management, identification of "triggers" of the symptoms, and a supportive family environment.
Critics list among the problems with drugs like Ritalin the fact children on them tend not to grow as tall as they might otherwise. There are also concerns that a child's intelligence, creativity and spontaneity may be dampened.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists says medication should not be the first line of intervention for the vast majority of children. Alternatives should be looked into first.
On its website, Novartis, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures Ritalin, describes ADHD as "a physical disorder caused by differences in how the child's brain works."
Novartis has an article in the April-May edition of its journal, Pathways, arguing for the existence of ADHD.
It quotes Prof. Russell Barkley of the Medical University of South Carolina as saying that ADHD is not overdiagnosed in the United States.
"We have more diagnosis now than before due to better public awareness and greater referrals," he said.
There we go. Much better.
LOL
Why do most guys give their "things" a name? Becaue they don't want 99% of their decisions made by a stranger.
'The child's not getting into trouble at school any more. The child's easier to manage at home, so we say, well this is great, it works.'
I only wish medication had solved that. For the record, when he started puberty, it stopped working and we stopped giving it to him. We're still contending with the ADHD issues now that he's heading to high school.
Probably about as much as I appreciate being called a weenie. But the difference is yours was an insult. Ignorant means "lack of knowledge." Sorry if you thought I said you were stupid.
Kudos to you for raising your boy successfully. Dyslexia, broken home and hyperactivity are all issues to be dealt with. They are not ADHD. Thus, the difference being that, since your son was not ADHD, you are ignorant of the parental experience of having an ADHD child.
I live with it every day.
No kidding. The only ones that benefit is the drug companies. Meanwhile we have another generation of kids, at the youngest age ever, addicted to drugs.
I think the problem is that -- with the financial incentives that exist to over-diagnose -- you have a core of actual sufferers from the condition in the middle, and a penumbra of doubtful cases outside that, and outside that the poor kids whose parents don't care, or just want them to shut up, or wish that the ADD meds would easily solve whatever problem their child really has. Wishful thinking, because the effects of the medication on a true ADHD sufferer are so dramatic.
You too? ;)
I just can't focus on things I DON'T like it when someone tells me to control myself. Heck the worst they do to me for punishment is sit me in a chair or send me to my room where I can play games I enjoy.
Psssssssst - hope my parents don't find out that I'm really a spoiled rotten brat who needs some attention and discipline. Not that I'm alittle older I love all the material things they shower on me because they insist on BOTH working full time. Yeah, I'm pissed off at em but with ritalin I'm more relaxed and life goes on as usual for me, Did I mention that I get special treatment because of this "problem"? Like that too.
Does it really matter as we cruise through life showered with material things? I like ritalin. Makes me feel good and allows me to forget about how I despise my parents. Eventually though, I hear the drug becomes less effective when I get older ... people I don't like had better watch out. I hear these junkies, er kids on ritalin become quite violent since their hostility is not longer supressed.
Sarcasm off.
They still do. I was horrified recently when a friend of my husband informed us that he has his daughter get SHOCK TREATMENT for depression. She is ONLY 12 years old! Prozac wasn't working and they scared the crap out of the parents by saying that if we don't "jolt her out of this depression, she will commit suicide ... we've seen this happen too many times ... "
They fell for it. They put them under anesthia and do the old fashioned shock treatment. They have no idea on how this will affect a developing brain. What they DO know is that she will permanently lose some of her memory and only time will tell what memories are gone. Is this irresponsible or what?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.