In a new study, researchers found that preschoolers are not receiving appropriate guideline-directed care for ADHD.
Clinical practice guidelines for this age group recommend beginning with family/behavioral therapy. Drugs are recommended by the guidelines only after therapy has failed to improve the situation or in very severe cases. But the researchers found that 42.2% of these 3- to 5-year-olds were given stimulant drugs before therapy could even be attempted.
“Clinical practice guidelines recommend medications as second-line treatment in cases with substantial dysfunction or lack of response to behavioral treatment,” the researchers write. Yet, they add, “more than one-third of patients lacked sufficient time for an evidence-based behavioral treatment before starting medications.”
The study was led by Yair Bannett at Stanford University and published in JAMA Network Open.
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I don’t understand how anyone who knows anything about child development can even diagnose a 3-5 year old with ADHD. Kids that age are naturally busy, very active, and impulsive. How tragic that we as a society are so willing to give serious drugs to our wee folk.
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Especially when there is literally no evidence that it helps them out in the long term. Kids are kids – why don’t we expect them to act like kids? Why don’t we adjust our expectations instead of trying to adjust their brains?
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This is the real point, yet the study doesn’t address this at all. It is very limited in its scope. People can do studies like this to the end of time and never really get to the bottom of what is wrong with the system. The actual implication – even in this study – is that we have a bunch of child haters running our “mental health” system. We don’t want our children to have anything to do with these people, even if our kids are running into problems that we don’t know how to handle. We need a real alternative that is humane, sane and effective. Very few are even reaching for this goal.
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I don’t see what could be wrong with giving speed to children.
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The ultimate message that comes through to me from a study like this is that we have a “mental health” system full of practitioners who don’t care about their patients – and children in particular.
This is a very cynical look; and many individual practitioners would assert that they care very much. But if this care were really present, why would their results be so poor?
My argument is that these practitioners have been prevented from learning about more effective approaches. And that those with more effective approaches are being completely ignored – even by most people who are critical of the current system. Some simply want to wish away mental illness – seeing it as some sort of Western colonial con game against alternative cultures and political enemies. But this ignores too many real difficulties faced by real people everywhere. Of course any human frailty will be taken advantage of by political players. This has always been the case. But the general ignorance about what is really going on must come to an end if we are going to survive as a species and a planet. I don’t see any way around that.
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“This is a very cynical look; and many individual practitioners would assert that they care very much.”
It isn’t cynical. It’s human nature. People simply don’t care particularly much about others and if they do, they don’t necessarily care in a positive way. It used to be told that a doctor would kill more patients than he would save and, according to some medical analysis that I’ve come across years ago, this seems to have hold true well into the 20th century. Although largely buried and forgotten, it was medical doctors who promoted medications laced with radium, arsenium, cocaine or heroine.
Obviously, the responsible parties will claim the opposite, but, ignoring that, they are additionally constrainted by what effectively amounts to questionable or meaningless diagnostic guidelines where a diagnosis can be given at will, clinic-specific policies which, especially in a health care system regulated by the free market, favor both overdiagnosis and false diagnosis, and other guidelines enacted by pharma-captured agencies which largely promote ultimately ineffective treatments (usually a combination of medication and intervention therapy.) which is easy because effective treatments simply don’t exist. It is true that anti-psychotics can suppress psychosis but it is fairly well known that the associated disability in terms of cognition and motor skills caused by anti-psychotics is vastly more severe than the disability caused by usually temporary psychosis. Elsewhere, anti-psychotics and SSRIs cause a “chronification” of a disability by introducing metabolical distress in the brain which ultimately ends up with the patient developing an actual neurological disease. Is this deliberate? Originally, probably not. But since a chronification of a temporary problem allows private healthcare providers to earn more money that way and the agencies originally responsible for preventing such a scenario have been captured by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex (likewise responsible for the mass production of the aforementioned substances), nothing will change. This isn’t much different from the Soviet Union or North Korea clinging to Leninist/Juche’ist ideology despite its near total failure. This is how political systems work. It is failing but current mental healthcare treatment upholds core aspects of late stage capitalist reasoning; Individualization of social problems, commercialization of disease, an atheistic or even explicitly anti-theistic conceptualization of what it means to be human (and modern-day neocons are in spiritual terms just as empty as many of the hardcore atheists.) And it won’t go away as long as the current Western order exists because curretn mental health programs are a product of an underlying omnipresent Western ideology.
“But this ignores too many real difficulties faced by real people everywhere. Of course any human frailty will be taken advantage of by political players.”
The mental healthcare system, more generally, is unable to come up with any actual explanation for why mental problems exist. They are unable to do so even in cases where the mental “illness” or “disorder” has a clearly identifiable cause, e.g. “intellectual disability” due to encephalitis or “schizophrenia” due to copper poisoning. The system cannot realistically help such people except by referring them to specialists who are engaged in actual medicine.
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“The mental healthcare system, more generally, is unable to come up with any actual explanation for why mental problems exist.”
Our society of capitalism where we are all in completion to even survive creates massive mental problems.
“The pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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Oh my gosh not everything is capitalism! Are you one of those Marxists who is in denial over the Holodomor?
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Lara you can’t be blind to the mess we are in…a little genocide here a trillion dollar war budget and school screenings for mental health and no one is making enough to pay the rent.
“it is easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of capitalism”
A couple more from Mark Fischer
“Capitalism thrives on our exhaustion and alienation, feeding off our insecurities and anxieties.”
“In capitalist society, the self is reduced to a commodity, just as all other aspects of life are commodified.”
“We are trapped in a cycle of work and consumption, constantly chasing after a fulfillment that capitalism promises but never delivers.”
Lets blame a chemical imbalance.
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I would never assert that it is “human nature” to not care for the health and welfare of the people around you. I consider such an attitude considerably psychopathic. And psychopathy is NOT human nature, though it certainly is a human problem.
I don’t know why ‘Western ideology” deserves special criticism. This is a Critical Theory concept that I consider entirely ideological and not based on any real observation. All societies have included elites that seek to run everything while having very little concern for humankind in general. I don’t see it as a problem created by the West, and I see the West as – perhaps – coming the closest to doing something about the problem. Indeed, Hubbard was of “the West” and yet has contributed greatly to solving this.
The “mental health” system is currently in the hands of psychopaths. Were it not, it might do some good – even with no more that it knows now. But of course there is much more to know, and if the suppression from psychopathic personalities were lifted, the system might well learn to do better and start contributing to the solution instead of being the problem.
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Yet more unsubstantiated assertions, which give rise to further questions.
What is your verifiable evidence that the West is coming the closest to doing something about the vague “problem” (which, I surmise, is what you consider to be psychopathology, i.e. behaviors, emotions, and patterns of thinking that can be interpreted quite differently, depending on cultural and social criteria prevailing at a given moment in time).
Isn’t it conceivable that traditional societies have developed ways of dealing with emotional distress that are superior to the methods commonly employed in the West?
How did Hubbard contribute to knowledge and treatment of the “problem” more than Freud, Jung, Rank, Adler, Reich, Skinner, Beck, Ellis, Janov, and many others who have made authoritative judgments on supposedly normal and abnormal psychology? Where did Hubbard acquire his unique insights–through divine inspiration, meticulous decades-long research, clinical practice?
Lastly, what concrete evidence do you have for your argument that the vast mental health industry is currently in the hands of those you regard as psychopaths? That’s a very serious accusation; can you be a little more specific? Who are these nefarious manipulators, and what institutions do they control? How can they be rooted out, and what should take their place?
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Sorry, Joel, but we’re not talking. From my point of view, you’re just baiting me.
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No, Larry, I’m not baiting, just trying to see whatever facts there are behind your assertions and serious accusations. I have posed similar questions to other people commenting on the MIA website who make claims that seem dubious or downright illogical to me–such as your statement that the mental health field is controlled by psychopaths. If you have credible evidence of this, please enlighten us.
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Joel do have any credible evidence that prescribing psych drugs to anyone resolves their mental and emotional problems. Would love to see long term results.
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If you want to know what facts I know, you would have to read what I have read, talk to the people that I have talked to, and be me. Stop seeking “facts” and just let the other commenters be who they are. Are you willing to study Scientology for several years? Watch hundreds of 2-hour-long videos by Farsight Institute? Watch several shorter interview videos by Anthony Chene Productions? Talk to people who have experienced past life recall or delivered therapies that involve past life recall?
If you did all that you would have just scratched the surface of my experiences that relate to the subject of the mind and mental health. Plus, I am an electronics hobbyist and trained technician. So I operate on the basis of correct whys and solutions that work. I don’t care if the information makes sense of not. I care if the information can be used to produce constructive changes in people or groups. I have no simple few-paragraph way to explain what I know. Sorry.
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POSTING AS MODERATOR:
OK, I’m stopping this conversation. It’s off topic and unproductive.
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The drugs are poison.
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I think when this out of control phase of neurocapitalism is finally consigned the dustbin of history it will be considered mass psychiatric child abuse. Sadly by then these self interested systems and incentives will have created some other horror show dressed up as ‘evidence based treatment’ and a new highly profitable method of abuse rolled out.
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When all the children are on psych drugs does anyone think this will end school shootings.
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To Pot-head:
If you seek detailed information on the long-term effects of psychiatric drugs (more properly termed “neurotoxins”), a good place to start would be the online videos of Dr. Peter Breggin as well as his books on this subject, including “Toxic Psychiatry” and “Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry.” Also, then numerous contributions by Phil Hickey, Bruce E. Levine, and Peter Goetzsche on the MIA website are a rich source of relevant material.
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