Word: adhd
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...Sheila Matthews' view, it was a heartening event for the back-to-school season: the signing of a law in Connecticut that she and others hope will relieve the growing pressure on parents to put their kids on drugs to control attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The New Canaan homemaker helped gather support for the bill and was understandably proud to be in the Governor's office last week for the ceremony. But she and her fellow lobbyists for the legislation, most of them parents, also got a surprise kick in the teeth...
...leading theory is that the women now seeking treatment in unprecedented numbers have actually had ADHD since childhood--they just went unnoticed. Now that those girls are women with jobs, children and dinner to worry about, they tell doctors they're overwhelmed. They can't finish what they start. They're incapable of organizing their daily lives. Those are classic ADHD symptoms. They're also the prototypical laments of the modern-day working mother, which sometimes makes it hard for doctors to distinguish the dysfunction from the lifestyle...
...Girls have really been underdiagnosed for years," says Timothy Wilens, a veteran ADHD researcher at Harvard Medical School. That's because girls are less apt to be disruptive--and thus less likely to get sent to a psychiatrist by adults. "If you have a boy with a big mouth, teachers walk in and nail him," says Wilens...
...grownups, however, females are generally more likely than men to accept mental-health treatment. Julie Bloch learned she had ADHD the same way many other women do: she took her young son for treatment, and the psychiatrist suggested she consider a twofer. "I had never thought about it before," says Bloch, 47, a sales executive in the San Francisco area. "I was always different. I didn't have a lot of focus. But I didn't really think adults could have ADHD...
...word about adults with ADHD continues to spread, some researchers fear that doctors may overdiagnose women with ADHD just as they have allegedly done with boys. And that could delegitimize what is, for many, a serious impairment. In college, Peggy Clover couldn't even finish Cliffs Notes. At age 49, she went on medication for ADHD. In the five years since, she has read more books than she had ever done before. Eventually, Clover told her friends about her disorder. She had kept it a secret, she says, afraid it sounded absurd: a grown woman with an attention-deficit problem...