Posted on 04/20/2005 8:47:11 PM PDT by tonto_was_right
Three times in the last two weeks Sean Hannity has featured Kelly Preston as the spokesperson for fightforkids.com This group is funded by The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHRI) which in turn is itself funded by the Church of Scientology. Fightforkids.com promotes the anti-psychiatric position that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is non-existent and that psychiatrists are “hooking kids on drugs” at the behest of drug companies. This conspiracy theory mentality is a long time tenet of the Church of Scientology which believes that they alone have the answers to mental illness.
Here is the link to Fightforkids.com as it appears on Sean Hannity’s website: http://www.hannity.com/index/news-app/story.59/menu./sec./home.
Here is a link from Fightforkids.com that establishes the link to the Church of Scientology: http://www.fightforkids.com/press/030520.htm Read the last paragraph for the connection with the C of S.
Sean Hannity is either ignorant of this connection between Fightforkids.com and the Church of Scientology or he does not care. Just thought everyone would like to know.
CofS whackos ping.
I would wager Hannity does not know.
I would say the cause is just though, having been one of those drugged children myself :(
hmmmmm.........
maybe?
Someone's got to tell Hannity what Scientology is and means. He might not know.
as it turns out, I think I almost can agree with them on this issue. Kids are forced into some type of category these days and then given drugs and stimulants to control their minds. It happens all the time. If the CoS is on the right side, oh well it doesnt necessarily mean there is anything to Hannity doing anything.
a real question is, how are you liking your stay at FR?
I agree that ADHD is a bogus "disease" and definitely think that drugs are not the answer. It is not just the shrinks and the drug companies, it's mainly LAZY TEACHERS who don't want to deal with gifted children asking questions in class that they can't answer.
Most diagnoses are crap. Some kids need it but not the level that it is now. Also, many teachers have sealed a child's fate by fancing themselves to be psychiatrists when the truth is they need one.
Agreed, I have a son who was very active and there were no shortage of teachers who thought he was ADD. We had one Dr. who offered to give him a low does of Ridalin to get the teachers of our back even though she did not think he needed it.
Boys just being boys... boys are being pathologized right out of school.
half an hour, yet no reply from you?
Are you there?
Hello!!?!??!?
So? I don't believe in catholicism, but that doesn't mean I don't nod approvingly when a Catholic takes a pro-life stance.
I'm not going to pretend that some children have difficulties that can be treated by medication. I not going to say they do, because I am not a doctor. I presume they do, but only because of what I am told by others.
I probably have ADHD, but I have not been diagnosed recently. My mother says I was diagnosed with something like ADHD, before it was "cool" (this was back in the 70s). I was put on medication for a week, but my mom didn't like what it did to me and she took me off. Rather have me drawing outside the lines than not drawing at all.
Anyway, that's just anecdotal. I do NOT believe that there has been a chance in the human population in the last 40 years that has precipitated an explosion of ADHD cases. Maybe there has been, I'm not saying I'm right, I am saying that until I see proof I simply don't believe it.
That leaves me with two possibilities: One, there have always been millions of ADHD kids, but they ended up doing just fine without medication. Or two, there have always been a few cases of real ADHD, but today a lot of children are incorrectly or ignorantly diagnosed and medicated because it is easier than coping with normal child behavior.
I'm guessing the answer is a combination of the two -- most ADHD kids, like I presume I was, managed to cope and maybe even prosper without medication, and a lot of doctors pressured by parents who are pressured by schools simply prescribe the drugs to "see how they do" and if it "helps" they presume the diagnosis was correct.
Before you call me an ignorant fool, I will say that I have direct knowledge (meaning I know it is true but you would have to take my word)of doctors treating patient complaints of depression and other "problems" of the mind by prescribing a series of medications such as zoloft, wellbutrin, and others, and observing patient reaction to decide to continue the medication. If one drug doesn't work, they move on to the next. If a drug works, the patient is left on the drug whether the effect is real or just imagined.
It would be like one day you have a headache, so you take an aspirin and your headache goes away, so you decide to keep taking aspirin every day, and you don't get headaches so often, so you decide you must have had a migrane condition which is treatable. Except in fact your head hurt because someone hit you in the head with a baseball but you didn't remember, and now you don't get headaches because nobody is hitting you anymore. How can you tell which one is correct?
Anyway, when I was young they dealt with problem children. And we had as many kids in classes as they do today. And we had to learn stuff, and if anything you would think that teaching would have increased productivity in the past 30 years, but today there is tremendous pressure in SOME schools, districts, and states to medicate children at the first sign of boisterousness. This goes right along with the zero-intelligence (zero-tolerance) policies put in place to make schools much less disruptive, only all these great things haven't really made kids learn any better, and do harm to their socialization and coping skills.
On the merits, I find it hard to imagine Sean doesn't know Preston's link to Scientology, he probably just doesn't care because he agrees with her on this particular subject.
I think in general, as hard as it is, it is best to deal with the truth or falsehood of an idea as it stands, rather than to judge it based on the character or belief of a person advocating it (you definitely should take into account character and belief if the person is making an argument based on their own expertise or experience).
Back in my day they called it being hyperactive. I was. I remember when I was in third grade (around 1965), I was summoned to the school psychologist's office. I didn't know why at the time, but he tried to give me a few simple relational tests. He had a stopwatch to time me.
Well, wouldn't you know that I was more interested in his stopwatch than taking the silly tests. I had never seen a stopwatch before.
So - if that's what was considered having an attention defecit, then I did. But I was never given any drugs. No one was back then. I think these tests were more to make the parents and teachers aware of which students were hyperactive.
I still maintain however, that it's just kids being kids........
Isn't Kelly Preston John Travolta's wife?
He's HUGE into Scientology.
Thanks for the ping, bourbon.
Good to see you. ;o)
There has been an awful lot of articles lately about the bad effects of amphetamines on kids. The one that comes to mind was in the Wall Street Journal, about the fact that amphetamines are in the same class of drugs as cocaine and have the same depressant affect on endorphin levels as cocaine. The article said that ritalin and adderall depress the endorphins and cause an inability to feel pleasure, which in turn leads to the need for anti-anxiety drugs or anti-depressants. It's a vicious cycle. It also explains a lot of the school shootings since most of the kids had been drugged.
The day he had Kelly Preston on, he confessed to not even knowing John Travolta's politics. Let's see, the man who met with Bill Clinton and got Scientology recognized as a genuine religion in America (with all of the tax protection that includes).
He may be ign'ant. Don't worry. If he is to believed, he stopped reading FR so chat about him as you wish.
Commercials, music videos (which ARE commercials), and television in general have many many more edits per minute now. Add to that programming geared to keeping an audience for "a few more minutes than the competitor", drives a market of people with short attention spans.
Some of it would appear to be conditional but this is just my own speculation.
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