ADHD in childhood may be linked to obesity in adults

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1. The children for whom the drugs work are far from zombies. Some do need other kinds of answers.

For some children, and adults, the drugs available help to a degree. Some people have found combinations of drugs are helpful. There are also many for whom this is not a useful answer, just as with other medications and other conditions.

Drugs alone are not and never were thought to be the only or best answer for everyone. Although there are those who administer schools and health systems who will insist that everyone is actually only entitled to one solution to any problem. These minds also seem to see children like cattle to be herded, rather than as people with ideas, imaginations, doubts and questions.

That said we are indeed a long way from the perfect balance between function and excess in medical application for ADHD. Each person is a unique and complex genetic assembly which makes the issues of accurate ADHD diagnosis and medication more complicated than for instance a general diagnosis of depression. ADHD is often found along with other conditions which can make a single drug or common therapy almost impossible. More often an integrated approach is called for. ADHD can also interfere with accurate perception and reaction to a degree that good common sense parenting and support alone cannot cope with.

ADHD is also too often seen as a personality disorder rather than a physical condition in which the nervous system is operating without all the needed chemistry. In some ways it is like having an allergy: when you can add the right chemistry the condition is manageable but never really gone, it can interfere with nearly everything you do in ways not easily managed, and you will have to cope with whatever it does to you all your life. It can also make you appear less functional and more vulnerable than you necessarily are.

When you are dealing with conditions which are essentially invisible like ADHD or Learning Disabilities behavioral clues which "seem" obvious to others are too frequently misleading as to cause. I was told more often that I care to remember to "straighten up", "deal with it", "act my age", and many other less salubrious instructions in an effort to get me to focus on my "problems". What is often not seen as the real difficulty is that you are overwhelmed by what is going on around you and cannot process it effectively or efficiently enough, and that you lack more than the proper attitude: you are actually missing some of the tools needed for the job. Sometimes it seems as if you are always one step behind the information or instructions so your actions and decisions are out of sync with events and emotions.

There is also the question of how many types of ADHD exist as a useful diagnosis. It used to be we were classified by whether we sat still or ran around the walls leaving dents.