Reply to Is there anyone whose male child doesn't have ADHD or ADD?

Forum Index » Tweens and Teens

Reply to "Is there anyone whose male child doesn't have ADHD or ADD?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]It's weird to me that so many uninformed people have such an investment in insisting that ADHD isn't a thing.  It's also weird to me that so many people claim to know how many of their friend's kids have a diagnosis and use meds.  DS is mortified when people talk about his diagnosis and hates taking meds.  He's an athlete and they suppress his appetite and make it really hard for him to maintain his weight.  This notion that "all boys are diagnosed with ADHD" is crazy to me, and I think mostly something that exists in the minds of ignorant adults rather than in objective reality.  DS is the only one in his current friend group of more than 20 boys that I know of with a diagnosis and one of two boys among all of our friends kids (>30 kids).

DS was always the kid that dramatically, overwhelmingly stood out from his peer group. Not in being an active boy or spacing out occasionally as all kids do.  He was the kid who became so distressed trying to sit still through a school day in second grade that he started hurting himself in order to try to stay focused and had to go to the ER.  He was one one kid from the entire school in school assemblies who was absolutely incapable of sitting in a chair for 90 minutes, and being constantly corrected by teachers was a frequent humiliation to him.  He was the kid who became so anxious about having to go to school and try to sit still that he couldn't sleep until 4 in the morning on school nights in second grade.  This was not at a magnet school or some high pressure environment --- this was second grade at the neighborhood elementary.

He wasn't "handed meds by a pediatrician."  He was evaluated by a team that included a psychiatrist, a neurologist, a PhD clinical psychologist and a PhD social worker.  He spent an entire day being interviewed and doing a large battery of tests, and has done similar annual followup testing every year since.  The tests found that he was extremely intelligent but had substantial executive function deficits as well as ADHD.

This notion of kids "walking through life drugged" is so stupid and obviously being spouted by people who have no idea what they are talking about.  DS was put on a very low dose of extended release meds (the lowest they make, actually), and his experience of school changed dramatically. He was able to engage in normal second grade school work.  He was able to sit still long enough to read a book.  He took an interest in a sport because suddenly he was no longer losing the thread of what was going in on the middle of each and every play.  He was suddenly not terrified to go to school so he could go to sleep on school nights.  This idea that kids go through life in some kind of fog because of ADHD meds is so stupid and harmful -- for DS they suddenly allowed him to engage with people in a way that he never had before --- for the first couple of weeks he spent a huge amount of time asking questions of me, his mom and his grandparents almost like he had had tons of things to ask us previously but was too distracted to ask them.  He read books.  He wrote stories.  Basically, his life improved dramatically for the better.

The notion that if a kid grows out of ADHD then they never had it is also idiotic.  Over time, DS's unmedicated behavior went from being several standard deviations outside the norm of his classmates to being more within the range of normal.  He refused to increase the dosage of his meds as he grew, and he experimented with not taking them at all.  Now he takes them when he needs to but can get by without them.  This is totally normal and happens for some kids since ADHD is about brain development, and for some kids it takes longer but they catch up.  That doesn't mean that they never had an issue, it means that they had a developmental delay but caught up.  Denying them life-changing care while the delay exists is not smart.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics