(September 19, 2015 at 8:03 pm)Lemonvariable72 Wrote: As someone that was misdiagnosed, yes over diagnosis is horrid and rampant. Especially because treatment usually means Ritalin is Dexatrin. I would argue that these treatments are hardly treatments at all and are really just a pathetic attempt to make kids behave "normally". What's more is that a number of other neurological differences can manifest similar symptoms at a young age.
I will use anecdotal evidence here, but I am a person with high functioning autism that was misdiagnosed as adhd at the age of 5 in 1996. I am still recovering from the detrimental effects of Ritalin treatment that ended when I was 16. I was lucky enough that I was allowed to be normal for the summers but while in school my head was a cloud that led to horrible emotional ups and downs as the drug left my system. Every summer the withdrawal would begin about a few days after school and would last at a week. During this I was would go into a total meltdown and at one point even locked myself in the bathroom at my aunts cabin, screaming, and drew apocalypic symbols on the windows. But after that week I got to be a normal kid.
What people need to understand is that ritalin loses most of it effectiveness on adults with adhd where it often affects adults in way much worse than it does kids. Also people with ADHD tend to statistically skew towards higher intelligence levels. So instead of "treating" them, they need environments where they use their own abilities and flourish.
That's how I've attempted to treat mine over the years. I do like to think of it as having a gift of sorts, rather than a disability, but it's hard to think of it that way when you can't accomplish things "normal" people do every day. Just riding a bus or train is difficult, for example, because I have to hyper-focus, which saps me mentally, or I'll more often than not miss my stop.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
