“’When people don’t fit in, we react by giving their behavior a label, either medicalizing it, criminalizing it, or moralizing it,’ Nigg says,” (Koerth-Baker n.p.). Professor Joel Nigg, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, made this statement in reference to the growing amount of people diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed medicine for it. The amount of people with prescriptions has increased immensely over the past several years, and will continue to grow over the next several years. In this statement, Nigg is saying that society simply names something seen as a problem, rather than trying to find a solution or a reason for whatever the issue may be.
ADHD was a little known disorder until the 1990’s, when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1991 included ADHD as a disability. It started to become more and more known to parents that there could be an explanation to why their child was hyperactive. The Food and Drug Administration also played a part by making the drugs used to treat ADHD more known to the public. What was once seen as a simple fact of childhood was now being seen more as a hyperactive disorder. Companies that made the medications, such as Adderall and Ritalin, would advertise to parents that the medicines would make the child smarter or more inclined to do choirs around the house. The companies would hype up the product to make parents feel like their child needed the medication in order to succeed in schooling at all or just to be a normal child. An Irish company once printed 50,000 copies of a comic book showing superheroes promoting the medication to children, saying it helped them to do their job as superheroes. As interest in ADHD as an answer to childhoo...
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Cooper, Charlie. “Hyperactivity or Just Hype?.” The Independent. 20 Aug. 2013: 34. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.
Fured, Frank. ”Kids Don’t Need Pills, They Need Parenting.” The Independent. 14 Aug. 2013: 16 SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 Feb. 2014.
Koerth-Baker, Maggie. “No Diagnosis Left Behind.” New York Times Magazine. 20 Oct. 2013: 24-26. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 Feb. 2014.
Perry, Susan. “ADHD Is Overdiagnosed, Leading To Needless and Harmful Treatment…” MinnPost.com. 07 Nov. 2013: n.p. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 12 Feb. 2014.
Schwarz, Alan. “Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill.” New York Times. 10 Jun. 2012: A.1. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.
Schwarz, Alan. “The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder.” New York Times. 15 Dec. 2013: A.1. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.
Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder, otherwise known as ADHD, is the most common psychiatric condition effecting 9.5% of school-aged children in the United States (intuniv, 2013). If the disorder goes untreated, it will cause more long-term side effects and difficulties for the individual as an adult. Adults who have this condition face several adversities in every day life, such as impulsive behavior, low self-esteem and poor work performance. People are not aware of the complications that come with ADHD in adults. Not knowing the symptoms of the disease can cause people to not be sympathetic when they are interacting with someone with disorder.
Johnny will not pay attention in class. He is constantly interrupting the teacher when she
Paradox Of The Pill. (Cover Story)." Time 175.17 (2010): 40-47. Military & Government Collection. Web. 9 Apr. 2014.
At least one in four families in the U.S. is affected by mental illnesses. Unfortunately there is no cure for this range of illnesses, which have been around for thousands of years. Of the American adult population, 5.4 percent have a serious mental illness. These health conditions are characterized by alterations in thinking, mood, behavior, or some combination of these. They are also associated with distress and sometimes impaired functioning. In 1990 the total cost of mental health services in the U.S. was $148 billion. According to a new report by the Mental Health Foundation, one in five children suffer from a mental health problem. Attention deficit hyperactive disorder is a mental illness that is diagnosed mainly in young children and doesn’t always disappear in adulthood.” All we know is that this genetic, inherited condition [ADHD] is not due to brain damage at all but rather a variation in how the brain functions.” Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) includes symptoms and characteristics that can be placed in one of three categories: inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. These characteristics commonly leave a person with ADHD with lack of attention span, easily distracted, fidgety, struggling to stay seated, having trouble engaging in calm activities, impatient, and talking excessively or out of turn. A new study by researchers says that hyperactive children have behavioral differences due to under active parts of their brain, a biological malfunction, rather than due to way they were brought up. This was revealed by a magnetic scanning device that allowed researchers to look at the brains of children diagnosed with ADHD. These studies and statistics reinforce the claim that mental illnesses are not invented simply to justify drugging of children and a disease that needs be educated to the public for better understanding. Rather, ADHD is an illness that affects many people throughout their lives. This topic is often misunderstood by the public. The media and medical community need to educate the positive side of this controversy and not just show the opposing view, which often times misrepresented by the media.
Watkins, E. (2012). How the pill became a lifestyle drug: the pharmaceutical industry and birth
A diagnosis found that out of the 15 percent of high-school age children who take ADHD pills, the true rate of children needing to be medicated is closer to 5 percent. This over-diagnosis and prescription is a direct result of intense, multi-million dollar marketing campaigns of ADHD medication by the drug makers, through celebrity ads as well print and television ads that prompt patients and their families to ask doctors about those specific drugs. And the tactic has paid off, with a quintupling of stimulant sales since 2002, to over $8 billion in revenues.
Many children exhibit such behaviors as energetic, running, jumping, playing, and excitement in their daily learning activities. But at what point is a child’s exuberant behavior considered to be hyperactive? All children are supposed to be full of life, wonder, and questions. Today, though, it seems that these qualities are not appreciated; they are seen as compulsions that need to be controlled. While it is true that hyperactivity, compulsivity, and inattention are symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyper Activity Disorder, these can also be symptoms of other issues.
Watkins, Elizabeth Siegel. Genesis Of The Pill. On the Pill: A Social History of Oral
Sharpe, Katherine. “Medication: The Smart-pill Oversell.” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science. Nature Publishing Group. 12 Feb. 2014. Web. 7 March 2014.
Reid, Robert, John W. Maag, and Stanley F. Vasa, "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder as a Disability Category: A Critique," Exceptional Children, Vol. 60, No. 3, pp. 198-214.
As a college student, the amount of students on powerful meds for ADHD and ADD is shocking. It is a topic seen in every classroom and heard in many dialogues. Conversations can be overheard frequently about how easy meds are to get and how effortless it is to receive a diagnosis. However, while I know that a vast number of students are taking prescription drugs for ADHD, I don’t think that I ever realized the full extent to which this disorder was effecting America’s youth. It wasn’t until I spent my time volunteering as a paraprofessional in a fourth grade classroom that I felt I truly understood the weight that the number of ADHD diagnosis’s were having on our nation’s children. The supervising teacher I was working with told me that in her classroom of 22 children, six of them were on some sort of prescription medication for ADHD, and many parents that I spoke to tended to blow off the risk factors involved, remarking that the drugs improved their school performance. I was shocked at this figure, especially because after working with the children, even on the days that they forgot to take their medicine, I found that by using different methods of instruction, many of the children didn’t seem to have much less trouble focusing than the children who did not have ADHD. So when we were assigned this paper, I set out to disprove the myth that children who act out in school have must ADHD and need to be put on prescription drugs in order to do well in school.
Works Cited Castellblanch, Ramon “Selling Out Seniors to Protect Drug Industry Profits” Hartford. Courant. The.. Goozner, Merrill. The 800$ Million Pill. Berkley: University of California, 2004.
Mooney embarks on this trip, starting in LA to his first destination at Arizona, to go beyond what is normal. Starting from his own personal history at Penny Camp Elementary. As Mooney travels he meets extraordinary people labeled abnormal, whom he soon felt weren’t that abnormal at all and were only suffering labels invented by man. During these meetings with people, Mooney explains that many terms society uses today were invented around the 1950s. This is especially odd because it is used so prominently and it was not discovered too long ago. The idea behind diagnosing ADHD is lack of attention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness; these characteristics alone to base diagnosis on is vague and leaves room for many mistakes, which have been evidently made countless of times. Mooney in his explanation of these labels shows that characteristics deemed inappropriate in society leads to the belief of mental incapabilities, which can only give those diagnosing the belief that anyone with these symptoms is broken. What is eventually understood is that, alth...
ADHD is an exceedingly real diagnosis for many children in the United States. Are we over diagnosing our little ones just to keep from dealing with unpleasant behavior? “ On average 1 of every 10 to 15 children in the United States has been diagnosed with the disorder, and 1 in every 20 to 25 uses a stimulant medication” (Mayes, Bagwell, & Erkulwater, 2008). Several believe that virtually all ADHD diagnoses are retractable with appropriate discipline of children instead of being so hasty in medicating them. The material found on the CDC website describes facts about ADHD, it clarifies the signs, symptoms, types, causes, diagnosis tools, and treatment forms of ADHD. What the article neglects to go into is the reality that there is a considerable amount of controversy surrounding ADHD. The CDCs usage of ethos, pathos, and logos and by what method the website manipulates them to affect the reader will be the basis of this paper.
National Institute of Mental Health (1999). Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Retrieved April 2, 2003 from www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/adhd.cfm#adhd3