Assignment 16: Claire Telfer

Claire Telfer

We are in the pill culture era. Everything can be fixed with a pill without a second thought. Going to a music festival? Take some Molly or LSD. Nervous for a speech? Pop a Xanax. As a modern society, we avoid our problems by taking medication. In the same way, we medicate children who are diagnosed with ADHD. We categorize children with learning differences such as ADHD as having a “disorder”, and rather than catering to their needs, we medicate them so they are a carbon copy of every other child. We have always been taught that every single person is different and we should embrace our uniqueness, but when it come to school and learning, teachers treat each child the same, regardless of how they learn. Kids are supposed to explore their creativity and abilities during childhood, but as a society, we emphasize book smarts and only one category of our intelligence. Instead of adjusting the education standards and system, the United States has relied too heavily on diagnosing and medicating children with ADHD. 

First of all, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a misnomer; it’s not necessarily a deficit of attention, but an abundance, directed at a million places at once. Children with ADHD have a difficult time focusing their attention at mundane tasks like schoolwork when there’s a whole world out there full of exciting activities and stimuli. It’s hard in the age of technology to focus on monotonous textbooks. Yet teachers expect young kids to sit still for hours to learn, and punish them if they deviate from the norm. Many parents learn about ADHD from teachers who feel overwhelmed by a child’s energy and their inability to complete schoolwork. As shown in the documentary, The Drugging of our Children, principals and teachers refused to allow children with ADHD to return to school without first being medicated for their hyperactivity. One issue with medicating and diagnosing ADHD is its inconsistency across regions and decades. Kentucky has the highest diagnosis rate of ADHD at 18.9% while Nevada has the lowest at 5.6%. This regional discrepancy is due to the No Child Left Behind Initiate that changed school funding from school population to school performance. According to the American Psychological Association, The South has historically performed poorly on standardized testing and to boost funding, schools diagnosed more kids with ADHD to have special tutors designated for those “trouble” kids. The number of children being medicated increased from 600,000 in 1990 to 3.5 million today. According to the CDC, 69% of children diagnosed with ADHD in the U.S. are on medication, where only about 10% of those children have ADHD severe enough to be medicated. What does this really mean? It means that we are diagnosing and medicating children as young as 3 and 4 years old with a hyperactivity disorder without truly separating the characteristics of being a kid from a true learning disability. 

Medicating for ADHD is like giving an ice cream cone to a crying child. You’re not addressing why that child is crying, but the goal is to make them stop. This is like ADHD because the school system doesn’t cater to kids’ different way of learning, but they eliminate their hyperactive tendencies. However, medicating children at such a young age can have unforeseen consequences. According to the New York Times, children who are diagnosed with ADHD are put on medications such as Adderall,  Concerta, and Ritalin drugs that “are regulated in the same class as morphine and oxycodone because of their potential for abuse and addiction.” The side effects of Adderall can lead to depression, bipolar disorder, aggressive behavior, hallucinations and delusions. Corey Baadsgaard, shown in the Drugging of our Children, took medicine for his ADHD and one day woke up in a juvenile detention center after holding his class hostage at gunpoint earlier that day. He had no memory of what he’d done and he couldn’t distinguish reality from the hallucinations due to the drug. These drugs are bad enough alone, but when children experience the severe side effects, doctors prescribe a cocktail of drugs to fix their problems. Especially for children who are falsely diagnosed with ADHD, this is appalling that they are put on four or five medications before the age of 10. 

In conclusion, diagnosing and medicating too many young children with ADHD only shows how inflexible the school system is in helping kids that are different. Although some children benefit significantly from ADHD medication, we label the majority of “trouble” kids that can’t sit still as ADHD. ADHD is a real disease, but the United States uses it too much as cop out rather than helping kids channel their energy positively. The medications prescribed for ADHD have serious side effects and change a child’s brain chemistry. Also, diagnosing ADHD has largely been inconsistent and is a generalization for energetic children. The pill culture we live in today is a lie; we can’t fix everything with drugs, we have to find the root of the problem to come .