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.
Yeah. My screen name is REAL imaginative! ;-)
Did it ever occur to you that this behavior is normal for a child, especially a boy? It's a sign of immaturity, but also a male, lazer-beam focus that would make him a wonderful hunter, builder, warrior. I've seen boys climb into danger to achieve a small goal (see the bird's nest) without even thinking about the potential for disaster. It's a struggle for most male children to learn caution, but that's the male brain. It's something they have to develop into and be taught all at the same time.
Another thing that irritates the h#ll out of me are the mothers who tell me, "My little Johney's problems can't be food issues. I've tried eliminating everything I can think of and nothing works. My son's pediatric GI told me that it takes SIX MONTHS for the brain to BEGIN recovering from a food intollerance. He also told me that he has CURED EVERY CHILD WHO HAS COME TO HIM OF ADD, ODD, ADHD, etc by changing their diet for a period of one year. But one year is way to long for most parents and schools to wait, so they just medicate the kids and sigh and say that there's nothing else to do. ("I took my son off everything; sugar, red dyes, gluten, milk for a MONTH and he didn't improve..." It takes 6 months! That's like saying, "I've been pregnant for a whole month and the baby didn't come. I guess I need surgury to have it removed." These things take time, for the love of Pete!)
ADD symptoms are also the same symptoms a child will show when they are sick. When they are tired. When they are in chronic pain and can't even pinpoint, verbalize or understand what they are feeling they will act out. When they are hard of hearing or have a tummy ache. When their body chemestry is wrong or they are missing a vital mineral or vitamin. It's too darn easy to drug 'em into behaving and ignore the fact that there is a very high probablity that something else is wrong. We expect all kids to fit into this nice neat little package and get very upset with them when they won't comply. We insist that something must be wrong with their brains then pour medications into these same brains and say that we're treating their illness.
And it's the public schools that insist we fall in line.
That argument was absurd. Video games have such a high level of sensory output that it satisfies the ADD's need for a high level of sensory input.
I raised this with my son's teacher, and she gave the same stock reply you just did.
I then changed it to "plays chess" for over four hours without loss of concentration and maintaining an ability to sit quietly still, and the teacher's argument failed flat. Where's the sensory input in chess? ;)
You should have seen the look on her face. She clearly wasn't ready for THAT. She was dumbfounded, and her expression revealed it. (I still derive satisfaction from that memory.)
In most cases, it appears to be an internal discipline issue.
In fact, I always refer to ADD as "Adult Deficiency Disorder"--not enough adult supervision in the young kid's life.
Curiously, I, too, played a lot of chess. I have a particularly vicious case of ADD, to this very day. This might be something that ADD people do. We do a lot of mental gymnastics when playing chess. We're constantly analyzing patterns. Maybe that's the sensory input?
If you don't believe in ADD, ask my ex-wife. She'll tell ya. When I got on ritalin, as an adult, I became much easier to live with.
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