ADHD: Not a Diagnosis but a Warning Label

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From Medscape: “The title of a recent article in The New York Times asks, “Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?” How would you answer this question? My response would be a robust “You’re darn right we have!”

I am a member of a shrinking cohort of primary care pediatricians who practiced before the phenomenon of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) appeared on the landscape. I have always been troubled by how the handful of hyperactive grade schoolers I was seeing in the 1970s could mushroom into something that prompted the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention to report last year more than 11% of American children had been diagnosed with ADHD.

View ADHD not as a diagnosis but rather a collection of observations of a patient’s behavior that should serve as a warning label. This doesn’t mean we should completely rule out stimulants as a therapeutic option. However, medication should be considered a temporary step while more definitive steps are being taken to narrow the discrepancy between children’s own resources and the environment in which they find themselves.”

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6 COMMENTS

  1. Or perhaps they ought to simply change the environment. Good research shows that so-called “ADHD” kids do way better in open classroom settings. Why aren’t we creating settings that work for these kids? Maybe they are a warning sign that the adults are not meeting the children’s need!!!

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      • Absolutely. They go into withdrawals, which means they are MORE hyperactive than they were to start with often. But like I said, “professionals” often use this to convince parents that “see, when he stops using it, he gets so much worse!” without bothering to mention that they might get a whole lot BETTER once they actually got through the withdrawal period.

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  2. How can calling someone a concept like ADHD be real? It is real as a socially conditioned concept and a label, but saying someone is this concept or label is true, true insanity. And it’s the insanity you still haven’t worked your way out of. People are actualities beyond all words and concepts, obviously, and the actual terrain is their actual conscious life, obviously. That conscious existence is the fact – how can a ‘diagnosis’ of it ever be a fact? It’s an assertion, part of a functional process that is not about illuminating but rather managing reality according to an ideological schema. The ideological schema is a false smokescreen obscuring reality, and you need to clear out that smokescreen from your own brains before you can have anything useful to say on the matter. Alas there is maybe one or two authors for MIA who ever seemed to grasp this, and then probably only partially. The whole field of psychiatry, antipsychiatry, mental health treatment and psychopharmacology is authoritarian – you might by now a socially enabled corporate totalitarianism. They have your children just as vampires take their victims, and they achieve this by telling you tall tails. Everything on this website is the mere sugar coating of this poison fact.

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