Cover story | TREATING ADHD in-chief of the Journal of Attention Disorders, believes much of the current backlash against ADHD diagnosis and treatment has stemmed from an anti-psychiatry movement that enlisted celebrities to promote their crusade against mental health issues. “They started their anti-mental health campaign with ADHD. They made the rounds of the afternoon talk shows, because they couldn’t get their voice heard in the bigger media that was going to do a little more fact-checking,” Goldstein said. “When that happened in the ’90s, there’s research to show that there was a drop, not in people who were already using medicine at the time but in new starts. When the researchers looked at the demographics of that, the drop in new starts were in the demographics of the people who you would expect would be watching those afternoon talk shows.” Goldstein, who at first tried to combat the anti-medication spin with scientific evidence, said he eventually stopped trying to debate the issue in the media because talk shows and news programs seemed to give equal credence to both sides regardless of credentials. Increasingly, attention was being paid to individuals who claimed, whether legitimately or not, that the medication had harmed them, and not to the overwhelming number of children being helped. The anti-medication campaign was so effective that it soon became conventional wisdom that kids were being overdiag-
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“I assumed that children were being grossly overdiagnosed and overmedicated. I assumed that society’s neuroses were being turned into pathologies in children. ... How I knew this, I don’t know.” Judith Warner, author of “We Have Issues”
nosed with ADHD and overmedicated by lazy parents pressured by overwhelmed teachers. Several years ago, journalistturned-author Judith Warner set out to write a book about that very notion: how medicating kids for ADHD reflected the worst of America’s “me first” culture. “I assumed that children were being grossly overdiagnosed and overmedicated. I assumed that society’s neuroses were being turned into pathologies in children, that what was being diagnosed as disorders in them was everything that was wrong in the competitive high-performance, driven, anxiety-filled world of childhood and family life in American today,” Warner said. “How I knew this, I don’t know.” She had gone into the project accepting as fact that ADHD medications didn’t work, that they were more for the parents’ benefit than the kids’, a way that parents could convince themselves it wasn’t their fault they couldn’t control their kids. But a funny thing happened while she was researching her book, “We Have Issues,” published earlier this year. The more she
talked to parents of children with ADHD and other behavioral disorders, the more she realized the evidence was pointing in the opposite direction. “Something was wrong. I just couldn’t find answers to prove that I knew what I thought I knew,” Warner said. “Once I listened to parents’ stories, the intellectual construct fell apart.” She found the negative aura surrounding the diagnosis and treatment of children with mental disorders was only adding to the parents’ burden. “These parents not only have to struggle with understanding their children’s disorders and finding the right treatments, but they also have to contend with enormous self-doubt and, often, skepticism and even condemnation from people around them who believe they’re exaggerating their children’s problems and pathologizing them,” she said. “Nobody was rushing to have their kids diagnosed. They all hated giving their children medication.” Far from being overmedicated, Warner found many kids are getting no help at all.
SUMMER / FALL 2010 • HIGH DESERT PULSE