OT: A.D.D.

[Will]

I'm not saying that there aren't some situations where medication is not needed (father is on medication for diabetes + insulin; mother has to take imuno-suppresants, steroids, and a few other things, just to function; sister on albuterol; I have no idea what my grandparents are on; I am pretty much the only one in the family not dependant on medication at all). However, it goes too far. The ad I saw claimed that twenty million people in the US have "adult ADD". I would say that maybe twenty thousand adults have symptoms of it that truly require medication, and that's a high estimate. The rest would usually be due to another mental condition, unhealthy lifestyle (ranging from always running around and overloading of tasks to drug abuse), or plain old hypochondria. This is for the adults, mind you...

Now, for children... a case like your daughter's looks like one where drugs help. That is not the normal situation. There are schools in this country that will recommend a psychologist for the parents of children who "misbehave" only a few times, and it is not uncommon to walk into classrooms with a large fraction the students on Ritalin (or some other "behaviour modification" drug). It's very much a "let's let the drugs deal with them, so we don't have to" situation.

And to make things worse, doctors don't even know HOW these drugs work, just that they seem to work. It seems a bit unwise to be tinkering with the brain chemistries of millions of kids who really could do just fine without a pill.