Word: adhd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...parents took Erin to a psychiatrist just before her fifth birthday. "He saw us for 45 minutes," Charlene says. "He read the teacher's report. He saw Erin for 15 minutes. He said, 'Your daughter is ADHD, and here's a prescription for Ritalin.' I sobbed." Charlene had a lot of friends who did not believe in ADHD and thought maybe she and Tim were just being hard on Erin. "I thought, 'Maybe there is something else we can do,'" Charlene says. "I knew that medicine can mask things. So I tore up the prescription." Tim thought that...
...requires that schools provide appropriate education for each child, the parents met with school officials. After evaluating Erin, they said she was not a "special needs" child and could be treated in the classroom. "The only ones who did not believe that were us and the teacher," says Tim. "ADHD does not mean you are missing a limb. She looked normal, but she was slightly...
Given the explosion in ADHD diagnoses and Ritalin use over the past decade, the disorder is surprisingly ill defined. No one is sure that it's a neurochemical imbalance that can be corrected with medicine, much the way daily insulin shots help diabetics. There is no blood test, no PET scan, no physical exam that can determine who has it and who does not. For many children, Ritalin is the answer simply because it works. "It's a fixed, stable, low-dose drug," says Dr. Philip Berent, consulting psychiatrist at the Arlington Center for Attention Deficit Disorder in Arlington Heights...
Last spring Erin's parents took her off Ritalin and enrolled her at UC Irvine's Child Development Center, a model program that specializes in ADD and ADHD. She attended the school's summer program. "It was a horrid summer," Tim recalls. "Behavior modification was controlling a lot of things, but the impulsivity would snowball. She would be told not to touch something--whether a car's gearshift or a radio or a computer. You'd say 'Don't touch,' and she would look at you and you could see she heard, but you'd see her hand slowly moving...
Even doctors who think ADHD may be underdiagnosed and are convinced of Ritalin's broad benefits emphasize the need to integrate drugs and behavior therapy. But it doesn't matter that children benefit from a multifaceted response if their health insurance won't pay for it. The trend over the past few years has been clear: the percentage of children with an ADHD diagnosis walking out of a doctor's office with a prescription jumped from 55% in 1989 to 75% in 1996. The number receiving psychotherapy fell from 40% in 1989 to 25% in 1996. "The reason Ritalin...