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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (181997)	2/2/2004 1:48:54 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574679

RE: "two years ago they put him on Ritalin and since then about once every two months he goes into a deep depression where he sees little hope for the future. He said today it was worse than normal and that's why he couldn't stop crying." You should report this to the parents, the school, and school nurse, if there is one. His drug situation needs to be reviewed. Ritalin continues to be an overused drug, and will continue to be so until the FDA steps in and tightens this up, like they recently did with antibiotics. From what the teacher told me, the parents know. Like I said to John, I have a suspicion that the boy is smarter than his parents and they don't know what to do with him. The day after his emotional outburst, I asked him how he was feeling and if he had looked up a website I had suggested. He told me he had not done it because he had never gone home the previous day. At that moment, I realized that this situation was very complicated and there was not much I could do to help him with my limited time at the school. I personally think it's better for a child and society to create venues that work for a child's mind & body in a natural way, than to drug up a child so he adheres to society's rigid rules - rules that may be wrong as they are in the case of exercise. I agree but I think there is something more going on than a lack of exercise. With both parents working these days, there's also more pressure for a child to confirm to a system - today's family systems have no buffer for a child that's not confirming to a defined norm. Kids can get drugged up because the parents don't want to lose their job due to calls from school. It wasn't until Clinton got into office, that parents were given the right to visit their kid's school without being fired for taking time off to do so. I suspect like with everything else, we are taking too many drugs. Its easier to medicate than to deal with the problem. When I was diagnosed with asthma, they prescribed three inhalers for me. My cousin is an MD and he agreed with the inhalers that were prescribed so I felt pretty comfortable using them. It turns out the inhalers made my asthma worse. What I learned is that MDs don't know what causes asthma. How can you prescribe something when you don't know what causes the disease? I eventually told my cousin that my asthma was getting worse but he did not think that that was true.......he suggested that it might be all in my head. My local MD would put me on this machine that would cause me to pass out every time I breathed into it. Fortunately, they had me scared enough so that I went on the net and found out that there other approaches to dealing with asthma that are far more effective. Today, I am done to one inhaler and hope to go off it soon. ADHD is the same......they don't really know what causes this condition in kids. Nonetheless, they prescribe Ritalin and derivatives ad nauseum. How do we know if we aren't making it worse? From all appearances, we are turning some of our kids into emotional zombies. RE: "BTW the kids who are being drugged are usually the bright ones." Unfortunately, not all teachers understand the ultra bright child. This is a pretty well known, researched area of Ed. But the bright child appears more at risk today, than in previous years. I wonder why that is? I think because they ask too many questions and challenge adults too often. It may have been okay when people had more time to deal with them but given the current pressure cooker we live in, its become a problem. My Mom always had a struggle with the non-so-bright teachers of my oldest brother. But she never had a problem with the very bright teachers he had, who really liked him a lot. Bright teachers know how to handle bright children. An average teacher might not know how to handle brightness. All three teachers I worked with were bright. The problem is that a 1/5 to 1/4 of the average class is made up of ADHD or special ed. kids and the average class has 30 kids. Its very hard to give the Ritalin kids the attention they deserve. And because you help these kids does not mean they will cooperate. I worked with one ADHD kid for a while. So long as I stayed on top of him, he made good progress but he would resist to some degree and would slack off when I did not pay attention. A complicating matter is that Ritalin doesn't work well so the MDs end up giving several drugs to deal with a variety of symptoms. In most cases, the kids end up like zombies on some days and then overly hyperactive on other days. I don't know whether the MDs vary the drugs from day to day, or on some days, the kids blow them off and don't take them. All I can say is that they seem to have huge mood swings. Its very weird. Maybe in our efforts to focus on the average, the bright kids are getting stampeded over. We'll probably see more Ritalin cases like the one you describe, until this particular generation gets into positions of power to change this. But another way to fix the problem, is to demand quotas. Quotas ensure there are enough white boys entering the various fields, and if the quota isn't met, it forces society to examine what's wrong and to fix it. No way do I think it's these kids fault. It's a faulty system. Bush and the court have pretty much killed any chance for quotas. Nonetheless, I agree we may have to do something drastic to improve the mix and insure more Americans are going into engineering or computers. ted RE: "the guys just are expected to cope. It amazes me but adults expect boys will be okay when they get an emotional body blow or a crisis. That BS is just not true!" I completely agree with some people's extreme bias against men and boys on this issue. It's truly amazing. Yeah, I hope I can change that when I start teaching. ted