| My Child has an "Imaginary" Disorder by Krista Jensen-Short Summers tend to be quiet for ADD bashers. Most ADHD diagnoses occur during the school year when the demands of academic work make symptoms more noticeable and problematic. However, with school just around the corner, headlines are starting to scream about the evils of ADHD medication and the "fake" disorders that we're using to label "normal" kids. And pretty soon, I'll have people approaching me trying to convince me that I have a perfectly normal child who I'm feeding mind-altering, zombie creating drugs to, and that I need to be deprogrammed from my belief that any of these psychological conditions which are made up by pharmaceutical companies are actually real. And that they're doing this because they actually care about my child. This year, I'd like for things to be just a little bit different. I want everyone who comes in contact with me and tries to tell me that they're doing this because they care about my child or all the children out there to take the time to actually learn something about her before they start telling me what she does or doesn't have. I want them to take the time to learn why we put her on medications. I want them to ask what else we're doing, what we've done, how much money we've spent, and how much money is currently being spent on helping her. No. I'm not going to give you the answers here. I think that if you're actually really concerned about my child, you'll ask. You see, I just have a difficult time believing that anyone can be really concerned about my daughter without knowing anything about her. I have an even harder time figuring out how someone who doesn't know anything about her can determine that she doesn't have a problem. And my disbelief reaches incredible proportions when I'm told that I shouldn't give her a medication which has made an amazing difference in her ability to function from someone who hasn't taken the time to learn the slightest bit of information about her. If you care about my child, stop and take the time to ask those questions. If you care about other children, stop and take the time to ask their parents those questions before you try and sell them that their child has some imaginary condition. Maybe you'll learn something - like just how real these fake diseases are. Why, when there's so much scientific evidence that ADHD and other psychological disorders are real, do we encounter so many people that try and convince us otherwise? First of all, there's the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights. They advertise themselves as an advocacy group to end abuse in psychiatry. Although that sounds like an worthy goal, if you read a little past that, you discover that their mandate is to get rid of the whole field of psychiatry. To show just how evil psychiatry is, they use such strategies as taking extremely rare events and making them sound like they're every day occurances, taking things out of context and twisting them to give them a whole new meaning, ignoring massive amounts of facts that don't suit their cause, making up non-existent research and other such honorable tactics. As a section of Scientology, they have a lot of money to back them in spreading the misinformation around. And they manage to present it in a totally convincing way. With ADHD, they hit paydirt. Here's a disorder which is primarily diagnosed in children. Many myths already existed among the general population. A greater knowledge base and better diagnostic tools have led to an increase in diagnosis. What better way to raise sympathy than using innocent children being given those evil mind-altering drugs which turn them into pyschopathic killers? And, yes. The CCHR does use innocent children. Other people also use children with ADHD to further their own political or financial agendas. After a school shooting, for example, you'll find a lot of ADD bashers from gun lobby groups coming out of the woodwork. By using misinformation about ADHD, they're hoping to deflect attention away from the fact that readily accessible guns were a factor and avoid more restrictive gun regulations. Alternative medication companies use it to attempt people to buy their products. A few are parents who had a child who was misdiagnosed and had a bad reaction to stimulants. Unfortunately, that does happen. Just like a doctor might misdiagnose a child as having an infection and prescribing them an antibiotic which they had an allergic reaction to. However, we wouldn't expect in the latter case to believe that the antibiotic was bad for everyone or that all infections weren't real. Most of them, however, are simply misinformed. The misinformation that is spread is very believable and plentiful, while we struggle to get up-to-date information out to the pros who work with it, let alone the general public. These are people who are actually genuinely concerned. They simply haven't taken the time to dig for more information before reacting. Please care enough about the children to ask for it. Back |