Medicating Kids

I work in a clinic, and I see SO MANY kids being prescribed medication for ADHD.  A lot of these kids are very little, 3, 4, 5, 6....  Do you think kids should be prescribed and diagnosed at such a young age?  Do you think these diagnoses are legit?  Would you medicate your own child if you received this diagnosis?

I'm going to have to disagree with you and say that some parents DO take that route because it's easier.  Maybe you haven't met them, but I see it every day at work. Not everyone, but some.

Just because you personally don't feel like you do it, it doesn't mean that everyone is the same as you. 

There is absolutely nothing wrong with questioning the status quo.  We NEED to ask these questions of each other and ourselves and really THINK about it. 

I also wonder what your thoughts are on why so many kids have ADHD now, where that came from, what you think causes it.  Yeah, I know that kids in the past probably had ADHD and we just didn't know, but I've never seen/heard of the number of kids supposedly with ADHD.

Original Post by pteresa19:

alibsam, I know that those comments are not intended to be offensive, but the comments are offensive none the less. And I don't think that I am being defensive, I'm just trying to spread some understanding, and maybe stop some judging and generalizations. 

 

If you really think that it is just a parenting issue, instead of shunning and judging, jump in and help.  Many moms and dads are overwhelmed by being parents, and if you think that a few hours with you will improve the child life then do it. I bet that mom would enjoy a much needed break. 

Apparently you didn't read all of the posts before your initial post. I worked at a charter school and 99% of my kids had ADHD and the diagnoses were legitimate. I didn't say ADHD wasn't real and meds weren't needed. Read again. I said ADHD MEDS ARE WAY OVER PRESCRIBED and many of the kids carrying the ADHD diagnosis do NOT have ADHD.

And it's not my job to help some random parent on the street. Perhaps people should learn how to parent. End of story. Before you get defensive again, I'm not talking about your parenting. From your posts you seem to be involved in the whole process. But being a parent or not, you are incredibly naive if you don't think these meds are overprescribed. Teachers aren't able to control their classrooms and many parents can't control their kids.  

Original Post by alibsam:

But being a parent or not, you are incredibly naive if you don't think these meds are overprescribed. Teachers aren't able to control their classrooms and many parents can't control their kids.  

I thought the point of this post was to ask about people's opinions?  Seems as though people who disagree (pteresa19) with your opinion are wrong/naive in your eyes.  That sort of defeats the purpose of asking for an opinion on the subject/having an open forum, no?

Newspapers and magazines talk about ADHD medications being over-perscribed, so ignorant people on these forums echo it.  I am not hearing very many stories about kids anyone knows being incorrectly prescribed, just people talking about a perception.  No doubt some kids are misdiagnosed.  People are misdiagnosed with many illnesses.  This does not excuse the assumption that I am hearing here that kids diagnosed with ADHD just need stricter parents.  Then we get the BS about sugar and food dyes which actually have no effect in most cases.  Actual scientific studies have not found any of these correlations, just anecdotal evidence.

Yes, I have heard about the steady increase in the number of kids diagnosed with ADD/ADHD.  That is largely because there were so many undiagnosed cases before.  When I was a child, you had to be a badly behaved boy to be diagnosed.  Quiet girls like myself were just daydreamers or space cadets.  If we didn't do well is school, it was because we didn't try hard enough.  God, I am so sick of hearing that I just need to pay attention.  You people have NO idea what you are condemning a child to by refusing to medicate a child who needs it. 

I was not diagnosed with ADD until I was over 40.  By that time I had managed to get a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and was reasonably successful, but I wonder what I could have done if medication had been available to me.  I remember the nightmare of trying to learn my times tables.  I never did.  Even in college, I was taking calculus tests and having to add to figure out what 7*8 was.  Naturally I often ran out of time.  What would high school have been like if I could have completed homework assignments?  If I could have listened to teachers instead of daydreaming?  What kinds of grades would I have gotten?  I barely passed.  Maybe I could have gotten scholarships to a prestigious school instead of going to a community college?  I will never know.

Refusing to medicate a child with ADD/ADHD is forcing that child to needlessly live with a handicap.  Yet that seems to be what popular media wants.  What many of the people here are advocating.  Why?

I do believe there is a problem with over prescribing medication. My son's 1st grade teacher tried to tell me that I should have my son evaluated for ADD. This was in 1993. The problem was the teacher. She told almost all of the parents of boys in her class the same thing.

I almost laughed in her face. My son didn't have any of the symptoms of ADD or ADHD. He had no problems concentrating and he had one of the longest attention spans of boys his age I'd ever seen. The problem was partly because she didn't like boys and she picked at everything they did.

My son was diagnosed with a specific reading disability that he got help for. The reading problem was exaccerbated by this teacher's methods and once he was out from under her he greatly improved.

No one here is saying that ADHD kids are over medicated. There is a tendency to push kids into an ADHD diagnosis at the first sign of difficulty in school. The schools love the medicated kids because it makes life easier for them.

Original Post by clharr:

Refusing to medicate a child with ADD/ADHD is forcing that child to needlessly live with a handicap.  Yet that seems to be what popular media wants.  What many of the people here are advocating.  Why?

I don't read much from the media about ADHD. I've worked with ADHD kids. I think most people want parents to go through the appropriate channels for the getting their kids on ADHD meds if they think they have it. Take the kid to a psychologist, have the evaluation done properly, etc. A pediatrician is not the right person to be prescribing ADHD meds. However, pediatricians are prescribing it more than anyone. Why would a parent want their children to needlessly be on meds? If the kid needs it, great. Put them on the meds. I had to teach a class of 14 kids that had severe ADHD combined with other behavior problems. I KNOW that ADHD meds work but they only work appropriately when the kid actually has ADHD meds. 

90% of the over medicating IS due to schools telling parents that the kids have ADHD rather than taking the time to properly test. 

Case in point:

the Special Ed Teacher told me that they would not look at other reasons for my sons attention problems, no matter how many times the teacher told her he had a writing problem that looked like dyslexia.  Her comment was "I can not wait until they can put my Grandson on medication, but he is only 2.  All he does is run and play and make noise.  He never sits down"  Kind of describes a 2 year old to me.

Also look at the kids in that are ADHD and 90% are boys.

I was also told that my son's IQ was too high for him to be dyslexic.  That was not addressed until i moved out of the school district we were in when he was in 4th grade.  That school did not think he had ADHD when they first observed him.

However i do agree that there are kids where medication is needed, but the schools do tend to push parents.

Original Post by clharr:

Refusing to medicate a child with ADD/ADHD is forcing that child to needlessly live with a handicap.  Yet that seems to be what popular media wants.  What many of the people here are advocating.  Why?

Okay, I respect your opinion, but at the same time we kind of need to ask ourselves why we feel like kids aren't "good enough" with their ability level/handicaps that they need to be "fixed" with a pill.  People are not all meant to be super achievers.  People have different strengths.  I have always been terrible at sports.  Should I be given steroids so I might have become a world class athlete even though I got Bs in gym? 

Now I know there are some kids out there who need medication.  I am not refering to those kids.  I am referring to those kids whose diagnoses are questionable.  If you functioned well enough to get through school, get a bachelor's in math and be successful, then you were not functionally impaired.  Functional impairment is the level they should be treating at.

A kid that is failing a class is "not good enough" no matter what the reason.  Worse, the child knows it.  We keep talking about teachers wanting hyperactive childred medicated so they can keep the classroom under control.  Very few have asked what it is like to be the kid who is constantly in trouble because they cannot sit still.  You haven't considered what the child is going through when they are trying to complete an assignment they really want to do and know it is important to do, but their mind keeps skipping out to other things.  These children learn they are not good enough.  They learn that they are "bad".  They learn that they are stupid.  They learn to hate school.  The sad thing is, that these are usually very bright kids.  If a pill can prevent this needless damage to the childs self esteem, why not? 

What is so wrong about giving a kid medication?  If he had a fever, wouldn't you give him asprin?  The fever probably wouldn't render him non-functional.  While we have this hysteria going on about giving kids medication they don't need, we fail to realize that the result is that a lot of kids that could be helped aren't getting it because of the stigma that is attached to it.

Doesn't look like anyone is disputing that meds are useful for treating the disorder, looks like people are offering anectdotal evidence that suggests that there are kids out there that are being medicated needlessly.

But I am wondering: if the child doesn't actually have a behaviorial disorder, what happens when they take the meds?

The medications for ADHD are like speed (in fact, some parents steal their children's meds).  They help kids that truly have the disorder, in which their brain needs a jumpstart (this is why they act up - they are typically trying to get that jumpstart, though later it can just become a result of "failure").  Most kids who don't have the disorder but are prescribed meds actually behave worse - like they are on speed.  The difficulty is that it is rarely a simple problem - there are so many factors to take into account with most kids that it can take quite some time to really figure out how to help the kid, or whether the medication is helping or not.  And the side effects really bother some kids - it takes a while to fine tune.  Kinda like depression medicine...

Wow, good question!  Well, I do not personally believe in this crap AT ALL!  Kids have always been kids.  They are hyper, active and want to go go go.  Doctors perscribe this crap to make money.  It is ALL for money!!  It is sad.  And I know many people don't agree with me, but MOST people (adults and kids included) probably do not need to take HALF the crap they are taking.

My kid was diagnosed with ADD and prescribed medicine.  He was only on it for a short while, and I didn't think the benefits outweighed the possible long term effects the medication may have had so I took him off it.  He definitely has a learning disability(as did his father & grandfather) however, I wasn't convinced it was ADD since those terms seem like such a catch all category these days. 

If medicine works for some children i guess that it is okay however, I was too concerned about possible long term effects to continue to medicate my son.  I definitely think ADD and ADHD is over diagnosed in this country.  Just because it has a label doesn't mean medication is the only method for helping a child.

I do beleive that kids need to learn to cope with their ADHD.  I don't know how many adults are on medication vs just trying to cope with it, but my husband worked with a man who had ADHD and had simply learned how to deal with it.  I mean, these kids are going to grow up and be adults - what will they do?  Are they on this medication for life?  I don't know.

ADHD is not the same as being hyperactive, though sometimes they do run hand in hand and look similar.  A child with ADHD often acts hyper because they are trying to get their brain to "wake up".  A hyperactive child may just need more exercise.

I also don't know anything about the side effects.  I never dealt with it personally.  I worked in the schools for a couple of years, and there were kids that had a definite difference in behavior between being on medication and off medication, so it might just be a case of severity, whether the effects are worth it.