It's about time there's an admission that drugging generations of children might not have been the best idea.
And then there's the part where these doctors are completely twisted up and using all of the words to say ADHD is a symptom of how awful public schools are because nothing to mentally stimulate kids; meanwhile, the only long term result of giving them stimulants is they're significantly shorter than their peers who weren't medicated.
After three decades of studying stimulants, Swanson differs with many of his colleagues on their value. “I don’t agree with people who say that stimulant treatment is good,” he told me. “It’s not good.” He acknowledges that medication can often produce short-term improvements in children’s behavior. But, he says, “there is no long-term effect. The only long-term effect that I know of has been the suppression of growth. If you’re honest, you should tell kids that, look, if you’re interested in next week or next month or even the next year, this is the right treatment for you. But in the long run, you’re going to be shorter. How many kids would agree to take medication? Probably none.”
...patients’ symptoms tended to improve, rather than worsen, during times of higher “environmental demands” — periods of more responsibility and busier schedules. For many of the young men and women in the “niche” study, the same phenomenon held: Jobs or college courses that were demanding and interesting helped alleviate their symptoms. And as their symptoms lifted, they changed the way they thought about themselves.
“Rather than a static ‘attention deficit’ that appeared under all circumstances,” the M.T.A. researchers wrote, “our subjects described their propensity toward distraction as contextual. … Believing the problem lay in their environments rather than solely in themselves helped individuals allay feelings of inadequacy: Characterizing A.D.H.D. as a personality trait rather than a disorder, they saw themselves as different rather than defective.”
Seen through this lens, the problem for John and Cap and many other adolescents becomes a much more mundane one than a brain disorder. Their problem is the simple fact that high school can be really boring, and without medication, they have a low tolerance for boring stuff. For some children, a different school, or a different kind of school, might produce the same profound shift that the M.T.A. subjects experienced when they enrolled in film school or began studying hair styling. For others, a prescription for Ritalin or Adderall might help make school feel like a better fit. But for them and their parents, the experience of taking medication might feel quite different if it was presented to them not as a medicine to fix their defective brain but as a tool to make an inhospitable environment more tolerable.
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