I think this is a very good article i like how she thinks about all the ritalin that is put into the kids nowadays i see kids who have to take ritalin because their parents think they are "bad kids" but i blame it on the parent why cant they just put some discipline into the kid instead of making it into a walking vegetable
Drugging our Kids by Patricia C. Behnke
All of a sudden the use of Ritalin among our children is getting some press. But it’s not the type of press I had envisioned when I taught high school.
It seems that Connecticut has just passed a law that prohibits teachers and administrators from mentioning the use of prescription drugs to control students. This new legislation puzzled me. I did further investigation and discovered that the common belief among the medical profession and mental health officials is that teachers are guilty of putting the idea of medication into the heads of parents. Maybe this is the case at the elementary level in order to control classes of 35 or more students. But whose fault is that? Reducing class sizes would be a healthier solution. My experiences have shown that parents and doctors are much too eager to prescribe the medication for students to give them the extra edge needed to compete with the top students in the school. One year, I taught an advanced class of twenty students, six of whom were taking Ritalin. Phenomenal numbers, I thought. But this percentage is close to the national average. At my school’s parent night, a mother of one of my students approached me. “How’s my son doing? You know his ADHD diagnosis is impulse control problems.” “Well, we’re doing fine. When he gets ready to make one of his impulsive comments, I give him one of my looks, and then he stops. We’ve developed a strategy that seems to be working.” “That’s great. You just let me know and if that stops working, I’ll. . .” Let me stop here. At this precise moment the thought went through my head: “Great a parent who will support me and help me work through the behavioral part of her son’s problem.” No, such luck, I found, as she continued. “. . .make sure he starts taking another Ritalin right before your class.” Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), whose symptoms include distractibility, short attention span, hyperactivity, and implusivity, is often treated by the stimulant Ritalin. It is not quite understood why giving an anphetimine to a hyperactive child has the opposite effect, but it does in some cases. Part of the problem comes when ADHD is misdiagnosed. Many doctors caution that Ritalin should not be prescribed if other sytmptoms of behavioral disorders are present in the child. If prescribed incorrectly, the symptoms from the drugs can be far worse than the original symptoms. And according to Dr. Peter R. Breggin, Director of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, many of our children are taking three to five different psychiatric drugs as a result of their diagnosis of being ADHD. This over medication of our youth can cause psychotic episodes which in turn get blamed on many other factors besides the medication. Has anyone done a study yet on how many of the school shooters were on psychiatric medications? It might be worth the exploration. But most of all, the ones getting blamed are the children themselves. Responsibility for their actions are placed on their heads, but blame for the state they have found themselves in seems to have been neglected. In 1998, 11.4 million prescriptions for Ritalin were written in the United States. According to IMS America, a health care information company, our country now uses five times as much Ritalin as the rest of the world. One time I had a student who was having problems at both home and school, not an unusual situation for a sixteen year old. I had tried working with both parents and child as had other teachers. One factor that I felt contributed to this student’s problems was her placement in a class too advanced for her abilities and motivations. Her parents were insulted that I even suggested that possibility. After all they were professionals themselves, and a child of theirs would never be in any class but an advanced one. Yet the student kept telling me that she didn’t understand concepts, couldn’t concentrate on the vast amounts of reading material, and didn’t enjoy the writing required of an advanced English class. This particular course must be rigorous because successful completion of a test at the end of the year can earn students college English credit. Ten days before the test the parent came to me worried about her child’s ability to take the advanced placement exam. “Do you think I should put her on Ritalin?” “Has she been on Ritalin before?” “No, but her brother is, and it’s done wonders for him. I know our doctor would give it to her just to get her through the test.” “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I responded. “Oh, why? It might make her tired?” “No, you don’t even know if she needs it or not. She could have an adverse reaction.” “Well, I’m going to talk to the doctor anyway.” Yes, it’s about time that we started making legislation against those terrible teachers who want to drug our children. After all we need someone to blame when things go wrong. Nancy Reagan, how do we tell them to just SAY NO?
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