One last thing, I'm glad Cornflower noted the high proportion of boys diagnosed with ADHD. I agree with Linda that it's important not to 'gender' the issue, and it would be downright hypocritical of me to do so given my mini-essays on other threads. But I would argue that education policies designed to socially engineer changes to certain aspects of masculinity do more harm than good.

The interesting thing is that even though methylphenidate (Ritalin) has been in use for over 50 years, there are no reliable studies of the effects of long term use or long-term effects of using stimulant medication. Worringly, a US study described as the 'most comprehensive scientific analysis of the drugs to date has found little evidence that they are safe, that one drug is more effective than another or that they help school performance’. There is concern that kids who are given stimulants are more inclined to take street drugs but serious research has not been conducted in the area yet. Certainly there are reports on the ground that there is a lot of black market activity going on, kids (and apparently some parents) on-selling stimulant meds. Also many research studies in the area of medication have been sponsored by drug companies - the results of those have to be treated with caution.

I have never met a parent yet who did not agonise over the decision to give their child medication - sometimes on a daily basis! One of the reasons for that was the side effects that their children were experiencing. The important thing for the public to know is that stimulant medication has to be allowed to wear off with enough time for children to eat a decent dinner and sleep at night. Also parents have to deal with the rebound effects of that medication, which can often produce behaviour far more extreme than that which the child was originally medicated for. The claim that parents medicate children for their own benefit is way off-base. What we do need to know more about is why parents make that decision and what alternative to drugs and labels we can come up with.

The first thing that should be done is that ADHD should be properly defined and parents, educators and governments should be familiar with the definition. Is the problem considered to be behavioural, medical, psychological, environmental or what?
In my experience, if a child exhibits any form of 'disruptive' behaviour, the suggestion is that they have ADHD. My own impression is that ADHD behaviour cannot be controlled by the child, parent or teacher for most of the day and night. Are there any statistics that identify the number of children exhibiting this kind of extreme behaviour?
I would hazard a guess that the figures would be relatively small in comparison to the number of medicated children.

Another aspect of this issue is the crossover with other "conditions" all of which come in differing degrees and which people can often have trait's of a number of.

(ignore spelling please)
Things like ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder), Aspergers, CD (Conduct Disorder), Autisim and a variety of others seem to have some overlaps.

I'm left wondering how often kids are diagnosed with one or more of these because someone has suggested to a parent that their child may have one of them. The parent has done some research on the web and convinced themself that their kid has the condition then either deliberately or otherwise provided information to the treating doctor which supports the diagnosis.

If you are a parent with concerns about your parenting skills which you don't wish to face then there is a strong emotional motivator to find your childs behaviour is the result of a medical condition rather than a predisposition to one or more conditions combined with a lack of boundaries for the child.

All of which has to make things harder for those people who actually have the conditions, the ones who need medication to help them manage day to day issues. These things come in various strengths, we need to keep that in mind when looking at the issue so that we don't ignore the needs of those who do need the medications.

R0bert

I'm 72, so I went to school a long time ago. My mother taught me to read and write simple sentences, times tables up to 12X and how to do simple outline drawings, before I started school. I jumped classes and got a scholarship when I was ten to an expensive school , which my family could not have otherwise afforded. And I was very small for my age. Plenty of stress, with bullying, blatant snobbery from staff and other pupils and the old fashioned English religious private school system with its entrenched distorted values.

I was generally unhappy with the school system and, with the exception of a few subjects, I was often bored stiff. I was not overtly disruptive [I didn't want to get a flogging], but constantly fidgetted and dreamed. I dreamed up academic ways of disrupting lessons, like when I worked out how to trisect an angle with compasses [something which has never been done] and challenged the gullible maths master to prove me wrong. Yes, there were SOME happy times!

I think that today I would probably be diagnosed with some emotional/mental disfunction. But back then, I was just a kid with some difficult personality characteristics. I had bags of energy and worked it off by long distance and cross-country running and rugby union, all of which I enjoyed.

So what has happened since then? Is ADHD overdiagnosed and/or wrongly diagnosed now and/or was it just not understood then?

Like so many prevalent current health problems, I believe it has a lot to do with poor nutrition and inactivity. We see the obvious results of this with the obesity epidemic, but mind altering effects are more subtle. Even much of the supposedly "good" food today is grown/raised on impoverished soils, often over-processed, lacking in adequate levels of essential minerals and vitamins, picked unripe and gassed or cold-stored, sprayed and treated with goodness-knows-what. So if that's the good stuff, what does that say for the known junk?

I'm with you Rex. I'm not 72, not even close, but I did go to school, public schools, when kids didn't have excuses to fall back on, didn't eat so poorly and in general terms behaved themselves. Seems there was no need for someone to come up with the term ADHD, and the drugs to treat it, until not all that long ago.