Reply to New York Times Magazine article questioning adhd commonplaces (including meds)

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Reply to "New York Times Magazine article questioning adhd commonplaces (including meds)"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I just read the article and have a fairly mixed response to it. For context I have 2 girls who were diagnosed with ADHD at age 6 with anger issues, so not the later age diagnosis the article highlights.

I felt overall the article did not fully talk about the negative impacts of not medicating for kids with severe ADHd. They did talk to the one person at the end who ended up thriving in college after being put in remedial classes (which was a great perspective), but the baseball player who took need to help study for SAT should never have been given medication. That’s a diagnosis issue - which they talk about a lot - not a medication issue.

My DH was never medicated for ADHD (and still isn’t) but had a really turbulent childhood - comes from an UMC family, and his poor impulse control and anger issues led to serious drug and alcohol issues before age 14. He almost flunked his 8th grade year. He kicked out of his symptoms by 10 th grade, did well enough then to go to a good college and is now a successful adult - he has found a career he can hyperfocus on.

Since he had such a turbulent childhood, my fear for my children and ADHD is not learning, it’s impulse control and poor decision making. The article was very reductive in mostly talking about the lack of impact on learning. I did like that they talked about how meds can improve relationships with parents (not sure they mentioned peers?) - my relationship with my oldest child has been completely transformed with stimulants - even after doing parent training, it felt like I spent a lot of time correcting or managing her - she got so much more positive feedback from me and from teachers.

This article did make me think about how much longer we should medicate our girls - I want to pull the study and see if any populations continues to benefit after taking the meds 3 years. We may do a medication-free trial this summer to see if they feel like there is any impact.

I also wanted to mention (sorry this is so scattered - there is a lot covered in the article) that the people they interviewed hated their med side effects, but that’s not everyone’s experience. I think the side effects are real, and I know a lot of people do quit do to side effects, but my girls don’t report feeling different on the meds - they still feel like themselves - they do have appetite suppression for lunch and they don’t like the feeling when they are coming off it in the afternoons, but they aren’t mentioning the type of things the article mentions - and yes, I am asking and so is the psychiatrist.

Finally, I completely agreed with the vision that people with ADHD need to seek and environment where they can thrive as adults, hopefully not medicated. I see DH as a great example - he has a career he loves and is super successful, and that’s what I want for my girls. I think of it as the skills needed for being good at “school” are not the same as th pose for being good at “life” and the goal is to.m be good at life. All that being said, I am not sure how good DH would be at managing the minutiae of dealing with our kids - I took over paying bills when our water almost got turned off. So they also need to find a partner who is understanding.

I did appreciate the article overall - it has definitely made me think again about why we are medicating our girls, and I think we will trial a break this year which we otherwise would not have done. [/quote]

Interesting to hear your perspective. You’re right the article did not talk about severe ADHD or about medication helping with impulse control [/quote]

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