It is my ardent belief that there are far too many children on ADHD medication. Whilst I am clearly no expert, it bothers me when children are prescribed Ritalin and the like, when other factors such as diet, learning difficulties and personal issues have not been properly looked at.
It also bothers me that the amount of children taking prescription medication seems to be escalating markedly. Even the experts are starting to raise doubts about the over prescribing that seems to be taking place.
I sincerely don’t want to end up with the kind of numbers being reported in the US:
One-in-four U.S. teens has misused or abused a prescription drug at least once — a 33 percent increase in the past five years, experts say.
A survey by The Partnership at Drugfree.org and MetLife Foundation also found 1-in-8 U.S. teens reported taking the stimulants Ritalin or Adderall not prescribed for them at least once.
Parent permissiveness and lax attitudes toward abuse and misuse of prescription medicines, coupled with teens’ ease of access to prescription medicines in the home — often from unused medications in medicine cabinets — are key factors linked to teen medicine misuse and abuse.
Nearly a third of U.S. parents said they believe prescription stimulants such as Ritalin or Adderall, normally prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, could improve a teen’s academic performance even if the teen did not have ADHD.
Of the children who said they abused prescription medications, 20 percent said they had done so before the age of 14.
More 27 percent mistakenly believe “misusing and abusing prescription drugs to get high is safer than using street drugs,” and a third agreed “it’s OK to use prescription drugs not prescribed to them to deal with an injury, illness or physical pain.”
The 24th annual Partnership Attitude Tracking Study of 3,884 U.S. teens in grades 9-12 and 817 parents has a margin of error for the teen sample of 2.1 percentage points while the margin in the parents’ sample was 3.4 percentage points.
Click here to read my post, The Rampant Misuse of ADHD Pills
Click here to read my post, Who Needs Quality Teaching or Parenting When You Have Medications?
Click here to read my post, Get Your Kids on Ritalin Before Their Grades Suffer
Click here to read my post, It is Doctors Not Teachers Who Are Helping Children Get Good Grades
Click here to read my post, Doctors Create a New Normal by Over-Prescribing Drugs
Tags: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Children and Medication, Drugfree.org, Education, MetLife Foundation, Over prescribing medication to children, Over prescribing ritalin to children, Parenting, Partnership Attitude Tracking Study, prescription drug abuse among children, prescription drug statistics among children, Ritalin, Ritalin or Adderall among children
Topical Teaching 
May 7, 2013 at 1:05 am |
This reminded me of a story by Ken Robinson. I’m going to paraphrase it here. He says: “Jilian Lin is a choreographer and everyone knows her work – she did Cats and Phantom of the Opera.
I asked ‘how did you get to be a dancer?’ She responded that the school she was in thought she was hopeless. They thought she had a learning disorder.
So they had a conference to lecture her and her mother. After listening to the teachers point of view, the doctor came up to both of them said ‘I need to speak to your mother privately. We will just be in the next room’.
As he left, he left the radio on. Jilian stated to dance. After the doctor and mother watched the show for about 5 minutes, he said to the mother ‘your child is not sick. She is a dancer.’
She graduated from the Royal Ballet school, founded her own company, was responsible for some of the best performances in history, she has given pleasure to millions and she’s a multimillionaire.
Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down”.
I think the story’s point is self-explanatory. Sorry for the long comment. Check his video out: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Thanks for sharing your thoughts 🙂