Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) exists mostly here. Children not sitting obediently still with hands folded are invariably diagnosed with another cultural construct to sell drugs and treatment. I admit it IS hard to concentrate with 22 things to do at once. Not to mention if you're tired, cold, hungry, sick or otherwise not comfortable or safe. Prioretizing a situation is a survival mechanism.
ADD, an overused label for unruly kids, "symptoms" are easily invented in what famed criminologist George Kelling calls Testa-lie. Symptoms include attention and concentration problems, overactivity, impulsivity, distractivity - symptoms of a boring or hostile environment beyond the patient's control.
Effectiveness of drugs to make children "calm down and pay attention" isn't proven to improve schoolwork or offer other long-term benefits. Widespread citizen complaint about external situations e g poor library service City Hall can but won't rectify prove such problems are external. Ritalin overdose, life-threatening, can cause heart attacks.
Ritalin use in preteen children may lead to later depression, rat studies suggest. Does what passes for depression in lab rats have anything to do with human depression? Early use of Ritalin and other stimulant drugs permanently alters animals' brains, raising concerns of the same thing happening in children who take these drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) Rats exposed to Ritalin as juveniles showed large increases in learned-helplessness behavior during adulthood, suggesting a tendency toward depression. These rats also showed abnormally high levels of activity in familiar environments, reflecting basic alterations in how rats pay attention to their surroundings.
Ritalin, Cocaine, and the Brain
Early exposure to Ritalin makes rats less responsive to the rewarding effects of cocaine. Cocaine short-circuits the brain's reward system, making it difficult to experience pleasure - a hallmark symptom of depression. Early exposure to Ritalin increases rats' depressive-like responses in a stress test. These experiments suggest that preadolescent exposure to Ritalin in rats causes numerous complex behavioral adaptations, each of which endures into adulthood. This work highlights the importance of a more thorough understanding of the enduring neurobiological effects of juvenile exposure to psychotropic drugs.
The study appears in Biological Psychiatry Dec 15, 2003. William A Carlezon Jr, PhD, director of the behavioral genetics lab at McLean Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Boy, 14, on Ritalin 10 years, dies of heart attack. Ritalin affected pathways throughout the nervous system over time, causing gradual, low level damage, difficult if not impossible to diagnose before it kills. More ane more children are given these drugs.