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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The drugs are poison.
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