The Over-diagnosis of ADHD

As a parent, when your child is acting up, it's easy to send them to a doctor who will tell you they have ADHD and prescribe them something to calm them down. Nowadays, this solution is used by many parents as a means of controlling their children in contrast to real discipline. ADHD is a serious issue but I think people who have not been faced with true ADHD attribute the short attention spans of children to the condition.

ADHD is by nature very vague. It is described in medicine as a condition that makes it hard for children suffering from it to control their behavior and pay attention. If this isn't every child you've ever met, you can stop reading this article now. News flash! Children are hard to control! Children are easily distracted by a lot of things. I can think of quite a few adults who are just as air headed.

So why is it so overdiagnosed? As a child, it's hard to determine whether or not the condition exists because a lot of normal children exhibit signs of ADHD without actually having the condition. ADHD diagnoses vary directly with the number of parents that think their child's behavior is severe enough to visit a doctor. And in our hypochondriac culture, if parents are having some trouble disciplining their kids, well then it must be ADHD.

Unlike other medical conditions, ADHD isn't something you can scientifically test for. You can't take some blood and know for sure. You just document the amount of symptoms your child exhibits and the doctor essentially makes an educated guess. Since it is not the type of condition you can conclusively determine is or isn't present, the easy answer is to diagnose with ADHD. It all comes down to laziness, on the part of the parents and also the doctor. You can't control your child. Your doctor isn't going to be the one to tell you you're a bad parent, so the child gets medicated. That can only help, right?

Wrong! First of all, medication for any condition should be avoided unless really needed, especially at such a young age. You shouldn't mess with a child's chemical imbalances, when there's nothing wrong with them. Another long term effect is that if you artificially control your child, he never really learns how to behave. Long after he has stopped taking medication, he might still have behavior problems in school and in life.

If you've ever known someone with true ADHD, you know the symptoms are hard to miss. A person with ADHD when unmedicated, can't watch movies because they can't follow the plot. They speak oddly and out of order because their mind is thinking faster than they can talk. You can definitely tell there is something a little off. If you are maybe questioning whether your child might have ADHD, they probably don't.

At the risk of sounding like a grandmother, back in the day before ADHD was first diagnosed, a misbehaved child was dealt with the old fashioned way, with strict parenting and lots of discipline. We didn't have Ritalin and Adderall and we turned out just fine.