ADD and ADHD

This is a response to several students' comments on a blog post of my teacher's about education.



More kids are under-diagnosed than over-diagnosed with ADD and ADHD. The woman who couldn’t sit still as a kid and went on to become a great dancer and had a hugely successful life, who’s to say that if she had been made to concentrate and learn in school she wouldn’t have gone on to discover the cure for cancer? And who knows if she has never been on medication in her life. Medications for ADD and ADHD have been around for the past 30 years. An adult with ADHD, who only started taking meds when he was an adult, once came into a Harvard child development class to say that he had only felt like himself after he started taking meds because until then he was never fully able to express himself. And a lot of these kids who aren’t on meds or aren’t given a real thought to what might be wrong with them, “problem children,” turn to self-medication with marijuana and other illegal, possibly harmful drugs. My great uncle was a brilliant man, he had something like a 4.9 GPA and he could have done so much with his life, but he never did anything because he just smoked pot.

A regular high school with core subjects, like ours, actually teaches kids about the real world, the world that they will be living in some day. They have everyday conflicts that people need to learn how to deal with because those are things that are never going to go away or change. Regular high schools have diversity, a mixture of cultures, they have mean teachers, they have people you don’t like and who don’t like you. These life skills developed in high school are necessary to succeed. Specialized schools don’t teach you that there will be some people who really don’t care about your ideas and that you might be forced to do things you don’t enjoy or find interesting from time to time. They don’t teach kids that they have to watch what they say to whom, how to stand on their own two feet and defend themselves if they want to be defended. Specialized schools create an incredibly sheltered environment where kids actually have the opportunity to not grow up.

Judith Warner set out to find kids who were over-diagnosed but ended up finding the opposite; that not enough kids were on medication for ADD or ADHD. She researched this for a year trying to prove her thesis of over-diagnosed kids and ended up changing her mind and writing her book about under-diagnosed kids.