Is ADHD real, or just 'Bad Parenting'?

Its just bored kids

 

I'd say real.

I have one friend who's a middle child, he's very extroverted, so much so that he's unable to have one conversation, instead engaged in multiple conversations at once. He has the ability to be successful, but I think his ADHD combined with various alcohol, marijuana, and drug use prevents him from staying at a job (because he gets bored). He'll move in with friends, burn them on rent, and continuously refer to him being an event promoter, so once the money comes in he'll pay back the 3 months rent he owes before jumping ship to whoever else will take him in. He can't even be in a relationship, lusting after women, pumping and dumping them.

His older sister and younger brother? College graduates, good jobs, both speak Spanish & English fluently, stable relationships.

 

I'd say real. I was Diagnosed when I was around 12. Maybe I was just a typical bored kid but I got in a Lotta trouble at school for doing dumb shit.

Thankfully my mum had saw kids pumped full of drugs turned into zombies to combat ADD and ADHD and decided to not drug me. I can thank her for that.

I guess I would say I'm not nearly as bad as jizzledfreq's story. Instead of jumping around at jobs and girlfriends I hyper focus on hobby's and it can cause me to change friend groups but I don't really find it to be negitive. Through highschool and college I had friends in all the cliques. Think it helped open my mind as a person.

I take it all with a grain of salt. I was a child what kid isn't all over the place. And how much do you trust these doctors who claim to know how the wonderious mind works.

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It's real but likely abused as a diagnoses.

I have a brother who literally cannot focus on anything. You can be talking to him amd 3 seconds in he's already on something else.

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Totally agree like i said most kids are energetic at the ages theyre being diagnosed its easier for some parents to drug them down to handle them. Sad but happens.

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I used to think it was bullshit. But I eventually learned a lot more about it, the physiological brain structure and neuroimaging in people with and without it, treatment, etc., and I'm now convinced that I was wrong before. That said, I don't think treatment of the condition with drugs should be taken lightly, and when it is administered, it should be routinely reassessed for effectiveness and side effects. ADHD medications have a higher success rate than basically any other medication used for a psychiatric condition.

That said, I do think it is significantly over-diagnosed, and some kids who are simply impatient, who misbehave intentionally for whatever reason, or who get bad grades due to a learning disability or just being a dumbass end being misdiagnosed with ADHD. These stimulant medications, while useful, are not harmless. They increase dopamine levels in the brain, which is useful for people with ADHD who have suboptimal levels. They typically have more of stimulating effect in those without the condition though, hence why they are often abused.

 

Coming from someone who was diagnosed with it, it is very much real. There are 2 main types, ADHD (hyperactive) and ADHD (inattentive, sometimes just called ADD). I struggled through school so much yet I tried harder than anyone possibly could. Once it was tested for and i was put on meds, I went from d's and f's to a's and B's, too bad it wasn't until the last few years before graduation.

 

ADHD is not a disorder, but a consequence of the instant gratification type life style we are all engaged in today. Interestingly enough, people in France do not believe in ADHD at all and rarely use medications for it, which is surprising considering the amount of people that are medicated for it in our countries. This is just another grab from the pharmaceutical sector to push more medication out their doors that we do not really need.

 

Its not bad parenting its a bad system. When a child is born he is taught to walk, talk and move around then gets sent to school and is told to sit down and shut up. No wonder why they get confused and cant pay attention, they wanna be free but since they possess these non-obedient ways they get fed drugs by some made up mental condition.

Even the founder claimed it wasn't a real illness.

 

I used to be a driving instructor. Had a student whose mother told us was "extremely" ADHD. She said he would need to be told things over and over and might have to stop driving if he got too hyper.

When I got to his house for the first lesson she presented me with a bag of pills. "Please hold these for him or he'll lose them". Then she goes into a list of what he needs to take, "Don't forget to take this one in 10 minutes and this one in a half hour", etc, etc. All this time the father was just sitting there saying "Honey, let them go do their lesson. He'll be fine". So finally she lets us go and the father comes out with us to the car. As soon as we were out of the door, the father asked me for the bag of pills and tells me that his wife is kinda over protective and she's convinced all of the kids doctors that he's ADHD so they all prescribe all of these pills and they make the mother think that he' taking them, but he hasn't taken them for months and he's just fine. I asked why they don't tell her he doesn't need them. He laughed a little and said "Believe me. It's easier this way".

The kid turned out to be a great driver. Hardly had to teach him anything. We usually just drove around and talked sports.

As other's have said, and I agree, ADHD is real but entirely over diagnosed. I remember hearing about a study years ago that said that with the way the guidelines are written for diagnosis of ADHD something like 80% of all people could be diagnosed with it.

By the way, a few weeks after I started teaching (lets call him "Bobby"), I started teaching another kid. I was waiting for him and sitting talking to his mother when she saw "Bobby's" name on my clip board. She said "Oh, are you teaching "Bobby" too? He and my son are best friends!" Then she pauses and says "How about the mother?!?"

 

Keith Conners didn't claim that it wasn't real, he says that people who don't have it are often misdiagnosed with it due to poor evaluation, parental or self-reporting, pressures from the public school system to diagnose and treat, etc. Most children who take stimulants for ADHD have never been properly evaluated by a psychiatrist. Conners has referenced studies with more complete history taking and evaluation that put the prevalence rate in kids around 3%, as opposed to the nearly 15% now who have at some point received the diagnosis.

People with ADHD have consistently been found to have numerous different neurological dysfunctions on functional MRI. If ADHD is not a condition that is causing this, what is? Do you think it's just a normal variant that happens to be linked with these issues? Do you think something external is causing it? Something is accounting for this neurological changes.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): a systematic literature review
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/1485446
Pediatric Research - Neurobiology of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (an article on the neurobiology of ADHD, from France)

 

You don't think there could be a level or tier of strength of it where it can effect someone's functioning?

 

If anything buy a high quality vape, 2-3 small puffs will smooth your moods. Not enough to get you high but just enough to ease your symptoms. Power of Micro-dosing.

Completely normal (especially for a child) not wanting to pay attention, they are either too intelligent, bored or have no passion in the activity. Find what works for them.

Disorders create customers for profit. I was smart to hide the pills away, i was classed with them all later to find out its all nonsense and most of these cases are in the mind created by the subconscious belief that there is actually something wrong with you.

 

So is this answer to my question about neurobiological differences in those with and without ADHD in this book? Can't say I've read this one, though I've heard some of Saul's opinions that ADHD symptoms are actually caused by another undiagnosed condition, which I actually believed myself before reading more. It does hold some validity and I'm sure accounts for many of the ADHD misdiagnoses. There's still a big leap between that and "it doesn't exist". ADHD and psychiatric disorders in general should only be diagnosed after a thorough history and evaluation by at least one physician, preferably a psychiatrist or a neurologist who specializes in neuropsychology (which I don't think Saul does, correct me if I'm wrong), not just a standard PCP or family doc, IMO. I also think imaging such as fMRI and SPECT might give some unbiased evidence on whether or not ADHD diagnosis is legitimate, though this type of imaging is not as reliable in individuals regarding psychiatric conditions.

Richard Saul is neurologist, so I find it rather odd that he seems to dismiss the physical evidence we have today on the neurological differences between those with and without the symptoms of the disorder. While fMRI findings in mood disorders are still not thoroughly studied, and show a lot of variance between disorders and patients, they are still typically different from those present in ADHD, which is what he attributes most ADHD symptoms to, no? And there's the kid who needed glasses he mentioned in one article, though certainly that is not the cause of most people's symptoms. He has also claimed that stimulant medications will not help and likely harm someone without ADHD, which he claims is everybody. Why have so many people found these meds beneficial?

 

Look no further than the shift in lifestyles; we have shifted from a slightly more delayed gratification to a very instant gratification over the course of like, what.. 30 years? Its just been getting worse and worse and there are going to be consequences to it, I think people just want to dismiss the system of gratification they use because it is such a basic thing to manage for quite a few of us, while others continually struggle with addiction n shit. Maybe i'm wrong about that, but you cannot deny the shift in gratification and it is going to have some responses, psychologically, but whether this is the response, I think is still a little bit of a leap.

 

I can certainly see the abundance of instant gratification, social media and the addictiveness of the constant mini dopamine highs it produces, etc. Though a primal desire for instant gratification from things like food, drugs, and sex has always existed, we now have other methods of supplying it too. Still don't believe that this accounts for ADHD though, since it has been described under one name or another a lot longer than thirty years, or any of us have had a Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, etc. People with ADHD like those many psychiatric disorders are more prone to addiction and to risk-taking behaviors for instant gratification like drug use, promiscuous sex, gambling, etc., and I'm sure psychological addiction to social media, texting, or video games is no exception.

ADHD or at least a similar syndrome has been described for over a hundred years. George Frederic Still (the Still's disease doctor) wrote about it in 1902 in healthy children with normal intellect. Inability to delay gratification was one of the things he described.

(1) passionateness; (2) spitefulness – cruelty; (3) jealousy; (4) lawlessness; (5) dishonesty; (6) wanton mischievousness – destructiveness; (7) shamelessness – immodesty; (8) sexual immorality; and (9) viciousness. The keynote of these qualities is self-gratification, the immediate gratification of self without regard either to the good of others or to the larger and more remote good of self. (Still, 1902, p. 1009).

The second DSM also described 'hyperkinetic syndrome' in 1968. Here's a link with some history on the condition. The history of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

 

Obviously it's real.

ADHD causes anxiety in people who *try* to focus but *can't*. It isn't an unwillingness but an inability.

Though I don't have it myself, I've known others who do and it really causes them a lot of misery. A few of the guys I went to school with were borderline geniuses, but they all said that before the medication they were just off-the-walls obnoxious.

Usually the people who think ADHD is a hoax think the same about vaccines and global warming. It's really not worth arguing.

 

I think just as important as the diagnoses is what they did to treat it or even if they felt they needed to