Posted on 04/01/2013 11:51:57 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
One in five high school boys and 11% of schoolkids overall have received an ADHD diagnosis, according to new data from the CDC. The data also shows two-thirds of children diagnosed with ADHD are prescribed stimulants like Adderall (above) and Ritalin. About 6.4 million children have received an ADHD diagnosis at some point an increase of 16% since 2007 and 53% in the past decade.
One in five high school boys and 11% of all schoolkids in the U.S. have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Two-thirds of kids who are diagnosed are prescribed stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, the data also showed.
The findings come from a cellphone and landline survey of more than 76,000 parents between February 2011 and June 2012.
ADHD is characterized by difficulty paying attention, maintaining focus on tasks and controlling impulsive behaviors. Other symptoms include frequent daydreaming, squirming or fidgeting, and talking out of turn. It is usually diagnosed in childhood, though it can continue into adulthood, and boys are more frequently diagnosed than girls.
The American Psychiatric Association estimates in its current diagnostic manual that 3 to 7% of children have ADHD, though other studies have calculated higher rates. Children's health experts reacted to the new CDC data with surprise and concern.
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
It’s a manufactured reason for not working at raising boys.
They tried this with my youngest son. I endured one day of him on that pill and threw them down the toilet. He was a bright, active, happy kid who required a lot of action to “wear him out”. I refused to make him a zombie. His teachers were not happy and he spent most of his elementary school years sitting in the hall. Fortunately, I homeschooled him before it was legal and he is extremely smart and successful, with his own little hyper child to “wear out” and make tired enough to sit sill. Exercise is survival for boys.
I think you've unwittingly hit upon why boys today have a hard time focusing.... they're used to the quick, short attention span gaming that they've grown up on. How can a classroom even hope to capture their attention?
I don't game but my business is on the computer. And I've noticed that I have a much harder time focusing on reading a book now than I used to, which I could do for hours. My mind just keeps jumping away from it. Is it because on the computer you can jump from website to website and the brain "learns" to be impatient?
I don't know. But at 49 I notice a difference in myself. I wonder what it's doing to brains that are still growing and developing.
My son is ADHD, which is a diagnosis his school will never know about. We did not go through the diagnostic process for an IEP, crazy check (SSI check), or drugs. We work on his issues with positive reinforcement, eliminating his rituals, punishing misbehavior not due to his ADHD, and greatly altering his/our diets. We saw a great improvement when we eliminated dairy from his diet, for example. We also work closely with our chiropractor and naturopath specialist. Our son takes a high amount of a product called Neuromax (since ADHD is a neurological disorder), digestive enzymes, and probiotics. While he ate a pretty healthy diet to begin with, the occasional trips tp McD’s are over. We eat no processed foods or foods with HFCS, MSG, or artificial colors and flavorings. This means I make and can our stocks, roast meats to make sandwiches, and even make all of our tortillas! We eat much more like my grandparents did.
Also, my husband and I are married and he is the rock of our family. I gave birth to our son naturally and he never had a drop of formula. I also made all of his baby food. Our son receives different forms of discipline as needed, including corporal punishment. Both sets of his grandparents are married to their first spouses as well, and are a positive and loving presence on their grandson’s life. Not all ADHD cases are the same, so please don’t lump all situations into baby mama just doesn’t want to deal with it scenarios. To be honest, I used to think the same thing. Now with our experience with this precious guy, my feelings are quite different.
At issue back then was that he got bored easily with 3rd grade work and just wouldn’t fill out the stupid worksheets. So we used adrenaline instead of ritilin.
He got a BS in geology but is now a professional musician. Go figure.
Bingo. I see it in my son. He can tell you every permutation of a game he is playing but “struggles” to remember to write down his homework or memorize multiplication tables or simple formulas like area or a circle.
When we were kids it was called “not paying attention” and were acted upon accordingly - not some new age moniker for drugging kids. If you got out of line you were put back in line swiftly.
My father was a school administrator and retired early (35 yr ago). He said at the time that changes were coming and they were NOT good ones so he opted out.
Discipline has been removed from the classroom - parents as well as teachers have been taken out of the authority loop.
There is hardly any local control concerning curriculum nowadays -
Does an ADD diagnosis result in SSI benefits for the child?
Maybe it’s the school that’s the disease...
Yep.
Just like the major league ball players who routinely took ‘greenies’, or amphetamines, in order to improve their performance a few decades ago. Except then, nobody went by the charade that if they improved their concentration and performance that meant they were ADHD, or that only those with ADHD were helped by them.
“but struggles to remember to write down his homework or memorize multiplication tables or simple formulas like area or a circle.”
Might I suggest you introduce him to computer programming? If he likes games, he might think it’s fun to design his own, and then he would need to learn the math in order to do that. Trick him into learning what he needs to learn, in order to learn what he wants to learn :)
Yuck I am a software engineer by trade and hate every minute of it.
We have never seen any benefits from such a diagnosis. Maybe we should look into it! Hah
Prescription: Make the kid cut their own hickory switch, and hand it over to the parent, who then applies it to the kids' rear end until it's a blushing pink.
And 99% of these cases can be treated by a strong male role-model, a few butt-whoopings, and non-feminists who actually understand boys have a lot of energy.
I weep for the males of America.
The rush you get from playing music is a whole other animal compared to other things. I have friends that will attest to that, and I get plenty of pride myself when I nail a solo pretty good while playing guitar.
Is ADHD real?
Ask Tom Edison.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison
“In school, the young Edison’s mind often wandered, and his teacher, the Reverend Engle, was overheard calling him “addled”. This ended Edison’s three months of official schooling.”
Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.”
The Quacks pasting these kids with ADHD are eating SSDI alive, and everybody is getting the bill.
Robert Whitaker spent 25 years covering the Psych beat as a science reporter.
from his book Anatomy of an Epidemic
http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing/dp/0307452425/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364847430&sr=1-1&keywords=anatomy+of+an+epidemic+by+robert+whitaker
Pg 245
The Disability Numbers
There are no good studies yet on the percentage of early onset bipolar patients when they reach adulthood, end up on the SSI and SSDI disability rolls. However, the astonishing jump in the number of severely mentally ill children receiving SSI speaks volumes about the havoc that is being wreaked. There were 16,200 Psychiatrically disabled youth under 18 years old on the SSI rolls in 1987, and they comprised less than 6 percent of the total number of disabled children. Twenty years later, there were 561,569 disabled mentally ill children on the SSI rolls, and they comprised 50 percent of the total. This epidemic is even hitting preschool children. The prescribing of psychotropic drugs to two-year-olds and three-year-olds began to become more commonplace about a decade ago, and sure enough, the number of severely mentally ill children under 6 years of age receiving SSI has tripled since then, rising from 22,453 in 2000 to 65,928 in 2007 (98)
Moreover, the SSI numbers only begin to hint at the scope of the harm being done. Everywhere there is evidence of a worsening of the mental health of children and teenagers. From 1995 to 1999, psychiatric-related Emergency Room visits by children increased 59 percent. (99)
The deteriorating mental health of the nations children, declared U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher in 2001, constituted a health crisis. (100) Next, colleges were suddenly wondering why so many of their students were suffering manic episodes or behaving in disturbed ways; a 2007 survey discovered that one in six college students had deliberately cut or burned self in the prior year. (101) All of this led the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate what was going on, and it reported in 2008 that one in every fifteen young adults, eighteen to twenty-six years old, is now seriously mentally ill. There are 680,000 in that age group with bipolar disorder and another 800,000 ill with major depression, and, the GAO noted, this was in fact an undercount of the problem, as it didnt include young adults who were homeless, incarcerated, or institutionalized.
That is where we stand as a nation today. Twenty years ago our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a serious mental illness. That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and already it has put millions onto a path of lifelong illness.
98: Social Security Administration, annual statistical reports on the SSI program, 1996-2008, Social Security Bulletin, Annual Statistical Supplement, 1988-1992
99: Pediatric Academic Societies, Pediatric Psychiatric admissions on the rise, May 16, 2000 press release
100: D. Satcher, Report of Surgeon Generals Conference on Childrens Mental Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2001).
101: B. Whitford: Depression, eating disorders and other mental illnesses are on the rise, Newsweek, August 27, 2008
ADHD Diagnosis and drugging is making kids sick, crippled, and dead.
Amen... we are in the same boat.
They have a huge amount of education and not one lick of common sense.
I do not have ONE, not ONE of my friends who does not claim that any of their children DO NOT have ADD and ADHD.
As far as I am concerned it’s an excuse for their children doing poorly in school.
It make me sick.
Look up what these ADHD drugs are. Put Ritalin, Concerta, and Adderall (and just about any other psych drug too) in the search box.
http://lamplightersoftware.com/dsm.php
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