Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

At age 5, testing concluded my oldest did not have ADHD. At age 8 in a different school, a teacher suggested we "put him on Ritalin" so he would sit still in her class. Yeah, let's skip diagnosing the kid and go straight to drugging him for your convenience. Nothing wrong in the slightest with that thought process.

I ultimately homeschooled and I spent a lot of time on various parenting lists. Nutritional supplements actually have a good track record of calming down wild kids, but that isn't a standard recommendation and gets dismissed as woo if you talk about it.

If you are interested in that angle, there's interesting research and discussion related to nutrition and prison populations here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867

Over the years, I have seen other articles that suggest that ADHD makes one a better soldier or whatever. I'm not really surprised by the research cited here concerning ADHD genes and things like migration and occupational outcomes.

Once upon a time, we talked about personality differences, saying some people were shy and others gregarious. Now, we diagnose shy people with conditions like selective mutism and we say gregarious people have no filter and diagnose them with conditions like ADHD. I realize some people really suffer. But I think it makes vastly more sense to take a nutritional approach and also consider what people are well suited for and help them find their niche instead of medicalizing and medicating everything under the sun.

I think it's important to distinguish between the existence of a diagnosis, the time at which the diagnosis became possible to record and the prevalence of overdiagnosis.

Because if you blur these together, you can hurt people who genuinely need help.

Mental models for the problem determine how we address it. A good demonstration of that idea is in an old joke about a doctor who castrated a guy when larger underwear would have been an equally valid way to cure his headaches.*

If people with ADHD need, for example, better nutrition and are being given drugs instead, they may currently be getting harmed.

* http://jokes4us.com/dirtyjokes/castrationjoke.html

On the whole, I feel your comment assumes that 1) psychiatrists are willfully ignorant of the spectrum of causes and treatments for ADHD and 2) there is some innate advantage to non-medical treatment that is being deliberately overlooked.

Given how much the three psychiatrists I've worked with have tested my health, inquired about my diet, given instructions about alcohol consumption, sent me for extensive blood tests, tracked my weight and blood pressure, I feel perhaps this isn't the case at all.

Maybe the experts have expertise. And maybe your anecdotal experience and my very different anecdotal experience are not medical proof of anything.

Or maybe the experts are talented at extracting money while looking good. That's not a talent I have. I remain quite poor.

I was a mom trying to do right by my kids. That's it. I think I did right by my kids.

I spent a lot of time on parent support groups talking to mostly other moms who often disagreed with the well paid experts writing their kids off and making a pretty penny in the process.

Our entire medical system makes its money off of ongoing treatment, not off of actually fixing anything. And you might pause and wonder for a minute about that inherent conflict of interest before fanboying your experts any further.

I appreciate that you want to do right by your children. I'm glad you wound up with a better situation under conditions of misdiagnosis. When medication is clearly unnecessary, I agree that better not to.

But it is not true to say that every single case is the same.

Making universal statements about the nature of ADHD and universal statements about available treatments can deter people from seeking and receiving help that would work for them.

Experts are more likely to diagnose correctly than layfolk. No single error changes that fact. Insofar as people are deterred from seeking expert attention, the net effect is harmful.

Attributing the differences in our experiences to a uniform medical conspiracy against the public doesn't bear on whether treatments work or not for different cases.

My parents cared too. Nobody told them about ADHD, because it just wasn't a commonly-known thing in that time and place. I was smart enough to stumble forward through school, with their love and heartbreak and the dedication of many frustrated teachers. But I would've done a lot better with just a little treatment. And I find it hard not to take personally the idea that others should be discouraged from seeking help from a professional.

I am sorry you are taking this so extremely personally. I wish you had stated that up front. I regret engaging you. You are wildly misconstruing my remarks in a very hostile fashion.

You seem to be wildly over reacting, I don’t see hostility in his comments.

Among other things, I am being framed as a conspiracy theorist:

Attributing the differences in our experiences to a uniform medical conspiracy against the public doesn't bear on whether treatments work or not for different cases.

Accusing me of wildly overreacting is not a good way to help in such a situation. It just puts out the fire with gasoline.

Well, when you make claims suggesting that large groups like the “entire medical profession” may be acting on motives other than what they claim, or that medical experts may be just scamming money out of people, it does sound like a conspiracy theory.

So, basically, you are accusing me of wildly overreacting not because I am but because you are keen to heap additional attacks on me for some reason.

Criticising an industry as having inherent conflict of interest is not remotely a conspiracy theory.

I think I am done here. This is a really tiresome pattern on HN of late where two or more people gang up on me and use bad faith tactics and then I get downvoted etc. It's a no win situation for me and seems entirely unrelated to whatever point I have tried to make.

Based off of your comment history, I might be different than your kid. The teachers always thought I was funny, it was the other kids that thought I was annoying.

But I'm as prototypical of a case as it comes. I went straight from college dropout to an A-grade distinguished student with medication.

1) If medication doesn't work, don't berate me with conspiracy theories.

2) Several companies offer free medication programs for ADHD. Did you try that? Or are you just projecting your anti-medication decision onto others?

3) Or your kid doesn't have ADHD, see #1

In my very first comment, I indicated that ADHD was ruled out at age 5.

It isn't a conspiracy theory and I am not anti medication. I was being attacked by someone taking my remarks very personally and twisting them out of shape, which appears to also be what you are doing.

My point is that some kids benefit more from a nutritional approach than from medication. That doesn't mean medication does nothing. But it does mean that it is possible that some people would benefit more from other approaches and may not get the opportunity to learn that if the first thing done is medication.

It isn't saying drugs do nothing. It isn't saying you should never take drugs or you are bad or wrong for taking drugs. It is saying that if a nutritional deficiency is a factor, drugs won't fix that. Nutrition will. In fact, many drugs are known to deplete nutrients and thereby can make things worse over the long run.

Whoops forgot the source: Belsky 2011

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