Ritalin Gone Wrong
By L. ALAN SROUFE
NYT
THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning.
But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?
In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.
As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.
(More here.)
NYT
THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning.
But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?
In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.
As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
THere is an alphabet soup of initializations for every childhood disorder under the sun - ADD, ADHD, ODD, PTSD, ASD, and so on. It's hard to believe there is anything such as a 'normal' kid anymore who doesn't have some 'disorder'. And, with all this alphabet soup of disorders, what are we calling 'normal' to compare all these disorders to?
In the end, it's just easier on parents and teachers to drug kids than to put in the hard work it takes to raise them and teach them.
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