Word: adhd
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...pills alone are the ideal answer to mental illness. Most experts believe that drugs are most effective when combined with talk therapy or other counseling. Nonetheless, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry now lists dozens of medications available for troubled kids, from the comparatively familiar Ritalin (for ADHD) to Zoloft and Celexa (for depression) to less familiar ones like Seroquel, Tegretol, Depakote (for bipolar disorder), and more are coming along all the time. There are stimulants, mood stabilizers, sleep medications, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, antipsychotics, antianxieties and narrowcast drugs to deal with impulsiveness and post-traumatic flashbacks...
...suicidal, is it fair not to turn to the prescription pad in conjunction with therapy? Is it even safe? Untreated depression has a lifetime suicide rate of 15%--with still more deaths caused by related behaviors like self-medicating with alcohol and drugs. Kids with severe and untreated ADHD have been linked, according to some studies, to higher rates of substance abuse, dropping out of school and trouble with the law. Bipolar kids have a tendency to injure and kill themselves and others with uncontrolled behavior like brawling or reckless driving. They are also more prone to suicide...
...kids have no emotional disorders and are simply being used as a baseline to establish the look of a healthy brain. Getting good scans from kids who have diagnosable conditions isn't easy, as any radiologist who has ever tried to conduct a lengthy MRI on a child with ADHD can attest. "Holding still is not exactly what they do well," says Elliott...
MRIs had already shown that the brain volumes of kids with ADHD are 3% smaller than those of unafflicted kids. That concerned researchers since nearly all those scans had been taken of children already being medicated for the disorder. Were the anatomical differences there to begin with, or were they caused by the drugs? Attempting to answer that, Dr. F. Xavier Castellanos of the New York University Child Studies Center took other scans, this time using only kids with ADHD and comparing those who were taking medication with those who were not. Reassuringly, he discovered that they all shared...
...Steven Pliszka, chief of child psychiatry at the University of Texas Health Center in San Antonio, went further. He conducted scans that picked up not just the structure but the activity of the brains of untreated ADHD children, and compared these images with those from children who had been medicated for a year or more. The treated group showed no signs of any deficits in brain function as measured in blood flow. In fact, he says, "we saw hints of improvement toward normal...