I’m not a psychiatrist, chemist, or psychotherapist. I’m just the big-mouth, opinionated guy in your path. I know there are a lot of people doing dumb things lately, though, and I know this; Adderall, or amphetamine and dextroamphetamine, is a medication used to treat ADHD in children, but it’s just a cleaner version of meth. In fact, it is probably more addictive than meth. And it is being prescribed frequently to children as young as five.
We’re an attention deficit world
ADHD is often misdiagnosed and certainly over-diagnosed because it is a catch-all for any number of symptoms.
Most of the listed symptoms of ADHD may be found mentioned in the criterion of several other disorders. Many of the subsequent disorders are treated with a very different pharmaceutical methodology. Not to mention, many of the listed criteria for ADHD can be explained as simply a bored child.
- Difficulty paying/maintaining attention
- Doesn’t seem to listen when spoken to
- Doesn’t finish school work
- Fidgets/squirms when doing school work
Every one of the symptoms of ADHD has been observed in thousands of children that grow up and go on to live happy, productive lives having never taken Amphetamines. On the other hand, it would be perfectly understandable to me if those same individuals took Adderall instead and grew up to be convicts or meth heads.
There is no single test with which to diagnose ADHD, and no scientific test at all exists, to my knowledge. It’s practically diagnosed anecdotally. And yet, a drug that has destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives is prescribed to children and it is done on, for all intents and purposes, hunches!
The brain needs time
Often these children do not yet have fully matured brain matter.
The rational, thinking part of a teen's brain is not fully formed until the age of 25. Between the ages of seven and 22, the brain is still being "wired." The fatty tissues or "white" matter surrounding neurons is still working to speed up electrical impulses and stabilize connections. The prefrontal cortex, involved in impulse control and decision making, is the last to develop.
Which is why it is recommended that teenagers control their irrational behavior like smoking, drinking, etc. And this is when psychiatrists are prescribing amphetamines to children -- and have been for decades.
First, do no harm? Who’s complicit?
Do people really think they can show disgust and/or pity for the methamphetamine addict and yet allow a psychiatrist to give their own child amphetamines? Are we giving that much credit to a degree in psychiatry? Where is the disconnect here?
Psychiatrists go to medical school to achieve their status as psychiatrists. So, what I want to know is, what is wrong with our current medical thinking, that, knowing something is highly addictive and dangerous, doctors still see fit to give it to parents to give to their children?
Parents that give amphetamines to children for symptoms so mundane as to be untestable scientifically? Is it a wonder that more than 60 million people voted for what appears to be a sexist, racist, bumbling, arrogant simpleton in Donald Trump?! These voters were from rural parts of America. Education in these parts is often influenced by the cognitive dissonance that arises when education meets fundamentalist religion. So that is going against them right out of the gate.
Now, consider that the illicit form of methamphetamine is "cooked" out in rural areas where its godawful stench won’t as easily be discovered and reported to authorities. So, imagine these children growing up, probably poor, maybe under-nourished, sent to underpaid psychiatrists who primarily accept Medicaid insurance by parents who lazily seek a fix for their child.
It’s too much work to raise a child with coping skills when you are told through your television that you can do it with a pill.
I’m not writing here to say I think psychiatry is bad or unnecessary. I don’t, and it’s not. We do need to consider this, though. I’m just thinking out loud here, but it sounds to me as if the problem could lie in bored or intellectually lazy psychiatrists feeding pills to children of lazy, challenged parents.
Dumb and dumber
These children usually have a theocratically influenced education and the resulting cognitive dissonance that it gives rise to. They also may not be getting the nutrition their brain needs to form adequate connections. And you give them a pill that is going to practically ensure they will lack the coping skills to ever go without it?
Should any of us be surprised that we are living in a reality that has Donald Trump as President of The United States of America?
Stanford genetics researcher Gerald Crabtree found in a study that appeared in Trends and Genetics that the world has become too comfortable and we have subsequently grown less intelligent and more emotional. He said that were someone from ancient Athens to appear today, “he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions,” In a "comfortable world" we are subject to evolutionary pressures that are much less intense. Do we have it too easy? Are we unconsciously devolving into chaos? I think it’s time to consider the implications.
