Dr. Crippen blogs about something that I wonder about. I’m sure that part of it is a sense of "in my day, you were grateful to live in a cardboard box", but somehow I don’t think that’s all it is.
Fashionable Disorders?
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2 responses to “Fashionable Disorders?”
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Ah yes, a subject near and dear to me.I do agree that ADD and ADHD have become something of an in-vogue diagnosis. However, I also know that twenty-odd years ago I was diagnosed as having a mild form of ADD and was put on Ritalin from 2nd grade until junior high. It was one of the best things that could have happened for me back then. The medication helped me focus and combat boredom while I learned mental coping skills that eventually enabled me to come off the medication.I do believe that there is a real disorder behind ADD and ADHD. As such, I can’t fully back solutions that purely put the dunce cap on a kid and put him in the corner – that’s like punishing a paraplegic because he can’t walk. However, I believe that any medication treatment should be accompanied by psychiatric (or psychological?) "coaching" in order to learn to cope. Some people will be severe enough that they may never come off medication, and that’s fine, but overmedicating isn’t the solution either.I do think adult ADD is a reality as well, and I am glad to see people who truly need it get treatment. Again, this shouldn’t be abused, but I don’t know how much we see is abuse and how much we see simply wasn’t diagnosed before. Same with youth ADD. I didn’t have the awareness twenty years ago (I was seven!) to know if the same attention was given to the disorder, but before we declare increases to be abuse of a diagnosis, let’s look at how much of that is due to previously-undiagnosed conditions.
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Thanks, Mike, for your insights. I agree that there are such things as ADD and ADHD, it’s just that I feel that they are becoming knee-jerk labels in some cases. It’s rather like the "he’s a sexual athlete, she’s a nymphomanic" labelling, which often speaks as much about the labeller as about the person being labelled. I reckon I was overexposed to the ideas of Thomas Szasz ("The Manufacture of Madness") and R. D. Laing ("Sanity, Madness and the Family") when younger. Both authors over-egged things, but nonetheless I think there was/is a grain of truth in their claims.
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