Ritalin: An Escape Route for Lazy Parents or a miracle drug?

Try to think back to the days of sitting in elementary school for hours on end. Now try to imagine yourself fidgeting and unable to concentrate. You hear everything that is being said to you, but none of it seems to make sense. Your legs start to bounce up and down and your eyes wander around the room in search of something more fun and exciting. You continue to fidget and daze off and you are often told you are unmotivated. You become very frustrated and nervous all the time. These are just a few things people with ADHD have to deal with on a daily basis.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or better known as ADHD, is the most common psychiatric disorder among children. It can be defined as a pattern of thought and behavior associated with distress and impairment of functioning resulting from some dysfunction within the individual (Livingston 3). Yet, it is mishandled in every conceivable way, with thousands of children, adolescents, and adults incorrectly diagnosed and thus denied the benefits of correct treatment (Taylor 9). Although this is a hard disorder to diagnose, the number of diagnoses has actually risen throughout the past decade. The reason for thi

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Even though hundreds of studies have proven Ritalin’s lack of effectiveness, the results of these studies have not been accepted by doctors, teachers and parents.

David, a foster brother, was living with my family a few years ago and although he was living in our home, his psychiatrist made all of the decisions regarding medication and other medical issues. , most of them well below the legal drinking or smoking age, now consume over 90 percent of the 8. Ask yourself why all of a sudden the number of ADHD has risen so drastically? Do you honestly believe it has anything to with the decade we live in? No. There was no clinical evidence to believe David had ADHD or that he should be put on Ritalin. This only has to do with the fact that ADHD is now more widely known about and therefore people are beginning to find they can use it as a cop-out and an easy answer to their problems. Even the cases in which it is partially effective should not be taken as proof it is a “miracle drug. Following is a personal observation with the use of Ritalin. He was becoming increasingly more violent and anti-social. (10)

Obviously Ritalin is not the only solution to this problem of controlling ADHD. Parents and teachers need to step up to plate and take responsibility instead of looking for the easy way out by drugging our children. When it is given to older kids, sometimes it is given to their peers and is taken as a type of amphetamine. We continued to try to deal with and help him until finally we acknowledged we were not making any progress with David. By these statistics, it seems that because ADHD is becoming more well-known, therefore making it an “easy answer”, it is almost becoming a way-out, or an escape route for teachers and parents who are not willing to deal with the normal tendencies of young children.

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Approximate Word count = 2110
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)

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