Skyrocketing numbers of children diagnosed with ADHD or ADD...

[truedelphi]

My comments, taken off another poster's Facebook comments going viral:

Did you know that public school officials have financial incentive to diagnose yr children with AHDH and ADD?

In 1991, eligilbility rules for federal education were changed to provide schools with $ 400 in annual grant money.

Four hundred dollars for each and every child diagnosed with these developmental difficulties!

As a result the number of ADHD and ADD cases have soared.

Today more than 7,000 children have been labelled and registered as permanenet patients (My comment - big win win for pharmaceutical industies)

Ten to twelve percent of all boys between the ages of 6 and 14 in the US have been diagnosed with ADHD.

And from a Time Magazine article that you can find at this link:

http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/02/understanding-the-rise-in-adhd-diagnoses-11-of-u-s-children-are-affected/

"records-based data suggests that ADHD rates among children may be somewhere between 7.5% and 9.5%, with boys at the higher end of the range, not 11%. In its previous round of analysis, CDC found that ADHD diagnoses rose by 22% between 2003 and ’07, based on the same telephone surveys of 76,000 families in the U.S., climbing by an average of 3% to 6% each year between 2000 and ’10. But the latest figures, which included responses collected between 2011 and ’12, show a far higher prevalence that hints at classrooms full of hyperactive and impulsive kids. “By definition, ADHD requires that symptoms have to have a significant effect on life,” says Barbaresi. “To say that a tenth of all children have a biologic condition that affects their life enough to call it a disorder just does not make sense.”

If that’s the case, then a significant proportion of these children may also be mistreated with medications that they don’t need. “This report and others raises questions about whether we may not be overdiagnosing ADHD and overusing medications,” says Thomas Power, director of the center for management of ADHD at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
SNIP

“Symptoms are not and should not be sufficient,” says Ruth Hughes, CEO of Children and Adults With Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. “The symptoms have to occur every day for a long period of time, and, more importantly, these symptoms have to lead to major disruption or impairment in at least two areas of a person’s life, such as at school or in relationships.”

[LynneSin]

1. I truly believe this increase in the number of kids with ADD/ADHD is food related

We are feeding our children garbage. I'm not saying that ADHD/ADD are fake diseases; I know there are people out there that truly have this. But I have watched perfectly well behaved children go off their rockers soon after eating a meal filled with processed, sugary foods. The studies are out there yet we do nothing about it.

We are poisoning our children with processed foods and then solving that problem by not by feeding them better food but my medicating them with some seriously hardcore meds.

[abelenkpe]

3. Preprocessed foods should be avoided

Think it's a worthy but separate issue. Deserves it's own OP for sure.

Processed food is often cheaper and less time consuming for parents feeding children. Need to pay workers enough to raise a family on one salary or with decent working hours that allow families to have the time to cook.

Anyway, pretty twisted that schools have financial motivation to diagnose kids with ADHD.

[truedelphi]

4. I totally agree. The food situation in this nation is perilous.

Of course, in a poorer family,the meds might be covered by insurance, while finding cheap good food at decent prices is so outrageously expensive. (I just paid $ 5.29 for 12 ounces of blueberries. (Up from $ 3.79 for 14 ounces fifteen months ago.)

But bread and crackers are cheap, and the wheat grown in this nation is mold and fungal contaminated.

Also many more kids have allergies than in previous generations.

And parents don't pay attention. When I babysit for the kids across the street, I clearly can see that the youngest child is normal til she has milk. So when I am there all day, I offer her apple or orange juice and she stays fine. But her mom loves giving her milk, and 30 minutes later, G is having a tantrum.

[Maedhros]

2. I think that the increase in ADD/ADHD diagnoses

is correlative to the increase in class sizes owing to budget cuts, and school administrators desire to drug children into compliance.

[srican69]

5. I read an excellent article on Nytimes on how this is the most misdiagnosed illness ever

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/opinion/sunday/a-natural-fix-for-adhd.html?

They say having ADHD is not a disorder but actually an evolutionary vestige .. see below. The whole diagnosis/prescription thing is a gigantic scam.

ATTENTION deficit hyperactivity disorder is now the most prevalent psychiatric illness of young people in America, affecting 11 percent of them at some point between the ages of 4 and 17. The rates of both diagnosis and treatment have increased so much in the past decade that you may wonder whether something that affects so many people can really be a disease.

And for a good reason.Recent neuroscience research shows that people with A.D.H.D. are actually hard-wired for novelty-seeking — a trait that had, until relatively recently, a distinct evolutionary advantage. Compared with the rest of us, they have sluggish and underfed brain reward circuits, so much of everyday life feels routine and understimulating.

To compensate, they are drawn to new and exciting experiences and get famously impatient and restless with the regimented structure that characterizes our modern world. In short, people with A.D.H.D. may not have a disease, so much as a set of behavioral traits that don’t match the expectations of our contemporary culture.

[MindPilot]

7. That desribes me to a "T" --- I have always been very easily bored.

I try some new thing, but the novelty wears off really fast.
And it's gotten worse as I get older, now nothing is enough fun to justify the work required to do it.

[truedelphi]

8. I very much agree with the info in the NY Times article.

I saw one little film clip with a video explaining ADHD to Michael Moore, and he said after watching it, "Well, I certainly would have been diagnosed with this "illness" if that had been the situation when I was growing up."

In hunting and gthering societies little boys were always outside and basically running around all day long. To not have that constant activity happening, and instead being forced to sit at a desk for long hours seems nuts to me.

[haele]

6. It's also because there's a diagnosis, instead of just calling the kid bad, stupid, or lazy.

Which is what they called children who are now diagnosed and successfully treated for ADHD, higher forms of Autism, and ADD - and Bipolar, depressed, and all the other "over-diagnosed" mental diseases back in my day. It's now recognized as a disease rather than just the child being willful, stubborn or goofy.
In my high school, they gave up on those kids and basically pushed them to the side if they couldn't just kick them out until they were 16 or 17 and could legally "drop out". No one particularly cared what the graduation percentage of a high school was, just the percentage of children who would go on to college or into a good-paying trade once they graduated. Probably 4 - 5% of my high school dropped out between 10th and 12th grade, even when we had a special ed program for children who would not be considered more than mildly functional and had little future at that time. Being an orchestra nerd in high school, I knew a few of the drop-outs in passing because the only classes they would tend to do well in were the music and arts classes - and they would now have been diagnosed ADHD or mildly autistic from the kids I see now in my stepdaughter's IEP generation. Looking back, there were probably about 8 - 10% of the students who might have actually been well within the learning disability spectrum, but were able to gut it through to graduation with a "C". We had more counselors that could intervene if there was a learning issue, and more tactile based learning options for the students who struggled to get enough credits to graduate.
Of course, back when I went to high school, you could get a job and at least support yourself without a high school diploma or a GED. Some even worked their way up to a pretty good living.
Now, there's a diagnosis and treatments that could get most of these drop-outs through high school, so schools have to get them into IEPs and work with them.

While I will admit that there is a financial incentive to abuse the learning disability problem and over-diagnose - because if someone can set themselves up to get easy money, they will - the primary reason that there are more kids being diagnosed is that, for better or worse, there is now a diagnosis and potential treatment to move the children that actually have one of these issues from a "lazy loser who doesn't try hard enough" to someone who can actually focus and enjoy learning .

Haele

[Efilroft Sul]

9. On my street alone, in my block, there are five boys with ADHD, aged 7 through almost 12.

They are all first-born sons, too; the subsequent kids have turned out normal. My boy is one of them, and I think he has the worst case of the five. He's in fifth grade and is also being slammed with PA Core (Common Core on steroids) education requirements. We are up many nights until 10, 11, midnight doing work and studying for tests because of his condition combined the workload. It isn't easy, even with an IEP. Somehow, he's a B student.

There is something seriously wrong with five kids in one block having ADHD, but for the life of me, I don't know what the common cause is. It's not a trend. Something's up here.