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A lot of people don’t believe in it,” she says. I think that’s because they’ve never experienced it firsthand.”To those naysayers, C. Keith Connors, professor emeritus of medical psychology at Duke University and creator of the Connors Rating Scales for diagnosing ADHD, says he always offers the same challenge: “Take one of these kids on a car trip for a day and see how you feel about it then.”It’s easy to see why some dismiss ADHD as simply an artifact of modern life. After all, we’re all on the information Autobahn. Most Americans are exposed to an average of 1. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—very little of which we’re able to absorb, according to a 2. America’s information consumption from the University of California, San Diego.

We’re also asked from a very young age to be still, nearly motionless, except for the tapping of our fingers on the computer keys. Ours is not a society tolerant of perpetual motion or daydreaming.

At some point, we’re all like the dog in the Pixar movie, Up, doing one thing and then responding to the real- life equivalent of “Squirrel!”But ADHD isn’t a disorder of the modern age. It may have been first described in the medical literature in 1. Scottish physician Sir Arthur Crichton, who observed patients so unable to focus that “the barking of dogs, an ill- tuned organ, or the scolding of women, are sufficient to distract patients of this description to such a degree, as almost approaches to the nature of delirium.” Those patients, he noted, referred to their own symptoms, including anger “bordering on insanity,” as “the fidgets.”The argument doesn’t hold up either when ADHD’s worldwide prevalence is factored in. It’s found in developing countries, where the information speed limit is slower and the requirement to be sedentary 2. Yet there’s an undeniable backlash against the diagnosis. Earlier this year, Chicago neurologist and ADHD specialist Dr.

Richard Saul published a provocatively titled book, ADHD Does Not Exist, in which he proposes that ADHD is not an entity in itself but a cluster of symptoms that stem from more than 2. Many of those, along with dysfunctional behavior conditions such as oppositional defiant disorder, characterized by aggression, tantrums and a propensity to argue with adults, and learning disabilities such as dyslexia, are often diagnosed as co- illnesses with ADHD. Saul criticizes the catchall- nature of an ADHD diagnosis, which he believes corrals a lot of real conditions into one. Saul’s theories hit home with a lot of people who are worried about statistics showing an increase in the number of ADHD diagnoses in the U. S. and the number of prescriptions filled every year for relatively powerful stimulant drugs such as Ritalin, Adderall and a host of new medications.

Though these drugs are generally considered safe, they do have side effects, including anxiety—sometimes even paranoia—weight loss, insomnia, and growth retardation (about half an inch, which doesn’t appear to be permanent). In some rare cases they can damage the heart. Since many of the drugs are appetite killers, some parents have to entice their children with small meals all day long. The side effects are why many children like Saorla take medication holidays during summer months or even on the weekends. They’re also why doctors and parents have to carefully weigh whether the problems a child has if he or she goes unmedicated are worth the risk. How prevalent has an ADHD diagnosis become? A survey of 7. 6,0.

Centers for Disease Control (CDC) every four years estimates that one in 1. ADHD by a health care professional, an increase of 4. That number] is preposterous,” says Connors, who studied and treated ADHD for 5. That would make it an epidemic.” (See a map of ADHD prescriptions in the U. S.: What’s With ADHD in the South)One possible explanation for the frequency of the diagnosis is that the data collection method is imperfect. The National Survey of Children’s Health is a phone survey and the figures on ADHD are collected on the basis of the answers to one question: “Has a doctor or other health care provider ever told you that [your child] had attention deficit disorder or attention- deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, that is, ADD or ADHD?” The type of “other health care provider” isn’t established. Showtime Full Just Like A Woman Online Free on this page.

ADHD experts say it is often a pediatrician who does not spend the kind of time it takes to make an accurate diagnosis. The gold standard of ADHD diagnosis is an analysis of questionnaires, like those Connors developed, filled out by parents, teachers and other people who interact with the child and observe classroom behavior. Each child can take hours to analyze.“That’s a luxury a pediatrician doesn’t have,” says Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz, MD, who founded the NYU Study Center and is founding president of the nonprofit Child Mind Institute in New York City. They get seven minutes face to face, [the doctor gives] them a prescription, and then 3. The CDC, however, defends its figures.