"ADHD is a fictitious disease"

Submitted by el cid on Fri, 2013-05-17 22:44

Story here. Apparently the "father" of ADHD admitted in the last year of his life that it was a "fictitious disease." And which sex is diagnosed with it most often? Boys, of course. Excerpt:

'That amounted to interference in the child’s freedom and personal rights, because pharmacological agents induced behavioral changes but failed to educate the child on how to achieve these behavioral changes independently. The child was thus deprived of an essential learning experience to act autonomously and emphatically which “considerably curtails children’s freedom and impairs their personality development”, the NEK criticized.

"The alarmed critics of the Ritalin disaster are now getting support from an entirely different side. The German weekly Der Spiegel quoted in its cover story on 2 February 2012 the US American psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg, born in 1922 as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who was the “scientific father of ADHD” and who said at the age of 87, seven months before his death in his last interview: “ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease”

Since 1968, however, some 40 years, Leon Eisenberg’s “disease” haunted the diagnostic and statistical manuals, first as “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood”, now called “ADHD”. The use of ADHD medications in Germany rose in only eighteen years from 34 kg (in 1993) to a record of no less than 1760 kg (in 2011) – which is a 51-fold increase in sales! In the United States every tenth boy among ten year-olds already swallows an ADHD medication on a daily basis. With an increasing tendency.'

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Hmm, the quotation doesn't seem to be a confession, but more an observation. Eisenberg may simply have identified a cognitive-behavioral phenomenon with certain consistent traits, like identifying depression as a category of cognitive-behavioral phenomena. There's a leap from going from that to categorizing different types of depression and then categorizing them as mental illnesses, with the attendant use of drugs, etc., to try to treat them.

If Eisenberg willfully saw a "market opportunity" to sell behavior-regulating psychoactive drugs to parents who just wanted to side-step their sons' running-around-a-lot phase, then that was a bad thing he shouldn't've done. But if others simply took his clinical observations and decided to cash in... bad on them. In any case though, it would have been on him to denounce the mis-use of his research to clinicalize what is otherwise a typical developmental phase in many boys and more than a few girls.

I'm not entirely convinced even so that some ppl regardless of age don't have a real problem with what Zen students call "monkey-mind". It jumps from place to place and even they can't seem to stop it w/out serious effort. In today's world where multi-tasking and being able to handle technical tasks even if we're not technically-inclined is a virtual necessity, the need for being able to focus and learn is more important than ever. From a practical POV, just to get along in life today, they may need something to keep them focused and improve their learning. Undoubtedly the preferred approach doesn't include use of drugs. Alas though, the premium is on fast results and expediency. Long story short: I don't see diagnosises of ADHD going away any time soon. I just think handing them out to children under a certain age is just plain wrong.

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Submitted by Matt on Sun, 2013-05-19 02:43

I'm on the fence about ADD/ADHD. My brother has it - or at least he was diagnosed with it as a child, and I believe I have it as well. When my brother was young, my mom went along with the diagnoses and reluctantly put him on meds at the schools insistence. My mom did not like the effects of drugs and took him off and dealt with his behavior in other ways. However now as an adult my brother has sought out his own treatment and takes ADD meds daily and he swears they help him. I have taken Adderall as well and it does keep me more focused, but I don't see any need for daily dosages.

Here is an interesting article I came across the other day:

Why French kids don't have ADHD

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the-children/201203/why-french-kids-dont-have-adhd

My "on the fence" is about wether ADHD is real or not, perhaps it is just boys acting naturally. There is also the opinion, like the article I linked, that suggests it is real but it is caused by nurture and not nature. Wether it is nuture or nature, I think it is definately over diagnosed.

Whatever it is, it is an area of concern to me espcially if there is an environmental cause. I also don't want anyone to think I condone medicating children because I don't. if children truly have it I think it should be dealt with naturally. Boys can decide when they are adults if they want to be medicated. I also dont want anyone to think my parents were flawed parents who might have possibly contributed to our ADHD/ADD. We were adopted and came with a lot of issues related to our early years with out birthmother.

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Submitted by Kris on Sat, 2013-05-18 20:37

I also suspect food additives, etc., have something to do w/ it. We have so much junk in our foods these days and kids eating everything they can with HFCS and cane sugar in it is def not helping keep them from becoming amped up-- just the opposite. It also sets them up for diabetes and more or less permanently maladjusted internal physiological mechanisms for self-regulating blood sugar. Aside even from the sugars there's the artificial and still legal "energy drinks" for sale everywhere, plus preservatives and additives in any foods most ppl can afford much less get to.

It may not be enough to send the typical kid into ADD mode but what abt the ones who wouldn't otherwise be that way? For example, allergies are a threshhold thing. A person w/ a low threshhold raised in, say, Tucson, AZ, may never have allergy symptoms. But after moving to a place w/ lots of, say, ragweed (eg: Washington, DC area), they suddenly start sneezing and coughing non-stop each spring and maybe develop asthma. They were fine in the desert because few allergens were there. Once in DC, their problem emerged. Possibly same thing's happening w/ ADD. 100 yrs. ago before we had additives in everything, little ADD problems since in most potential ADD'ers, it wasn't being triggered. Now we have loads of crap in our foods, and the susceptible are showing symptoms. Possibly more boys are getting the dx because add to emergent symptoms the energy levels young boys have and you get what we see now in our schools: do anything to docile-ify our sons and make them compliant.

I'd like to suggest this: making a world where males are rendered docile and compliant is just the kind of world where tyranny flourishes. Does anyone think our Founding Fathers would have been quite as effective at what they did had they been on docilifying medications? Tyranny *loves* docile and compliant male populations. In fact, it needs them to survive and grow its efforts to dictate the lives of its subjects.

Last thing history needs at this juncture is docile, compliant males. Indeed, we have enough of those.

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2013-05-18 21:31

http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2013/05/18/cdc-1-in-5-us-children-may-have-mental-disorder/

'Nearly 1 in 5 children in the U.S. suffers from a mental disorder, and this number has been rising for more than a decade.

According to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up to 20 percent of American children are suffering from mental disorders such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, depression and autism.'

Not so expectedly:

'The study also found that girls were more prone to depression and alcohol abuse than boys, and that 6.8 percent of U.S. children are affected by attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.'

Article says the report doesn't discuss possible causes, just diagnosis rates.

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Submitted by Matt on Sun, 2013-05-19 14:24