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To: thoughtomator
"ADD is an excuse for massively widespread child abuse, nothing more."

Well in my case I'm an adult who is not really being abused by anyone. But I agree with your sentiment, though "nothing more" precludes ADD as a viable option in even one case.

There are real disorders that affect children and are diagnosed as ADD, but I would estimate that those are less than 5% of all such cases.

I actually agree with this statement. But is there a psychologist in our community who can step forward and say what they think? I get tired of "experts" who haven't been there acting like they know it all.

67 posted on 07/18/2004 1:12:07 PM PDT by paulsy
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To: paulsy

The problem with getting a professional psychologist's opinion is that psychologists have a vested interest in saying that it does exist. ADD = money for them.

I have no such interest. All I have to say for myself is that I did have problems as a child, that if I were born a decade or two later I would have certainly been diagnosed as ADD/ADHD and drugged out with Ritalin; that those problems were the direct result of the absence of parental guidance, too much TV, and schools which did not have the tools to provide for an intelligent child; and that later in life, when I was able to sort out these problems without outside interference, the elimination of television, self-education, and religious study were more than sufficient to cure all the legacy problems that I did have.

Thus, I believe it is nothing more than child abuse to give psychoactive drugs to children in place of taking these other, commonsense steps. In the extremely rare case where that is not sufficient, I would say a real disorder exists. The fact that, after all this time, there is still no hard-and-fast definition of ADD that can be put to an objective test, despite enormous resources from the psychology and pharmaceutical industries, is as close to proof of the non-existence of ADD/ADHD as one can get.

On a very basic level, if a child is raised by a television in a family where both parents work, and taught by government schools, one would expect an otherwise healthy child to develop all the symptoms associated with ADD/ADHD.


71 posted on 07/18/2004 1:25:58 PM PDT by thoughtomator (End the imperialist moo slime colonization of the West!)
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