A lot of kids have ADD. Plenty of kids don't, and there are probably kids who have been misdiagnosed. Modern society isn't very good at actually providing kids with the equipment to be able to sit still and focus on one thing at a time. But we also have no way of telling whether the sudden increase in mental illnesses is due to better early identification, a sudden societal desire to explain different mental functionings as "illness," or an actual increase in problems due to environmental factors like pollution.
The way to tell whether someone is being falsely medicated or not is simple - how they respond to Ritalin. Ritalin is a stimulant, and if you give a stimulant to someone who actually has ADD, they calm down. I wasn't actually diagnosed until I was an adult, and one of the flags that got me looking into it in the first place was the fact that caffeine relaxes me. I never get the too-much-coffee jitters; the more coffee I drink, the easier it is to sit down and focus. But I have the quiet version of ADD - when I couldn't focus in class, I snuck books into my lap or wrote fic or stared out the window.
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Date: 2008-02-22 09:19 pm (UTC)The way to tell whether someone is being falsely medicated or not is simple - how they respond to Ritalin. Ritalin is a stimulant, and if you give a stimulant to someone who actually has ADD, they calm down. I wasn't actually diagnosed until I was an adult, and one of the flags that got me looking into it in the first place was the fact that caffeine relaxes me. I never get the too-much-coffee jitters; the more coffee I drink, the easier it is to sit down and focus. But I have the quiet version of ADD - when I couldn't focus in class, I snuck books into my lap or wrote fic or stared out the window.