Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)

Attention Deficit Disorder: What's Happening to Our Children?

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is the fastest growing diagnosis given to children and adolescents in the United States. We all know about it - the problem-child label placed on children who display difficulties learning or paying attention, or who may be judged as being overactive with behavioral problems. Parents and teachers perceive these children as unmanageable or hard to control.

Is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) an Actual Disease?

What may be happening in a child's brain to cause them to be affixed with this label? First of all, let's eliminate any misperceptions that ADD or ADHD is an actual disease. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder has never been proven as a disease, even after 25 years of research. No abnormality or dysfunction has ever been found in the brain, and there is no concrete medical disorder or disease. According to Rita Kirsch Debroitner, R-CSW and Avery Hart, MA in the book Moving Beyond ADD/ADHD - An Effective Holistic Mind/Body Approach, saying that someone has ADD, with or without hyperactivity, is like saying a person has RND, Runny Nose Disorder, with or without fever.

ADD or ADHD are labels that mental health and primary care physicians have used to describe a situation that they see frequently. The labels give them a way to talk about it and provide a simplistic explanation for an extensive array of "problem" behaviors that are likely to have an equally wide range of different and complex causes.

Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD, adult and child neurologist and author of The ADHD Fraud-How Psychiatry Make "Patients" of Normal Children, (www.adhdfraud.org) states with absolute certainty is that ADHD is not a disorder/disease. Referring to psychiatry, he says: "They made a list of the most common symptoms of emotional discomfiture of children; those which bother teachers and parents most, and in a stroke that could not be more devoid of science or Hippocratic motive--termed them a 'disease.' Twenty five years of research, not deserving of the term 'research', has failed to validate ADD/ADHD as a disease. Tragically--the "epidemic" having grown from 500 thousand in 1985 to between 5 and 7 million today--this remains the state of the 'science' of ADHD."

Then what is really going on? I don't want to minimize what is happening with children who really do have a problem. I just want to point out that most children given this false "diagnosis" of ADD/ADHD are perfectly normal, but misunderstood. They are simply healthy, highly active, distractible, exuberant, strong-willed kids who can be very irritating to teachers trying to teach within a rigid system. However, many parents are at their wits end with trying to find help for their children who really are out of control. Some children do have serious learning and behavior problems that need to be addressed. However, placing a label on them, telling them they have a brain disorder and giving them dangerous drugs is harming rather than helping them.