Are drugs for treating attention deficit disorder being over-prescribed to children today?

by Jeffrey Wright

Created on: September 21, 2009   Last Updated: September 22, 2009

Children are definitely not being over prescribed for children with ADD or Attention Deficit Disorder. To understand why this can be said, one has to understand what ADD actually is, and conversely, is not.

ADD is NOT a behavioral disorder. Some make that mistake in describing ADD. In fact, it has nothing to do with behavior in any way shape or form. I was diagnosed with ADHD, a more severe form of ADD that includes hyperactivity, at the age of three (which I will get back to in a bit) and my mother telling me that that the medication that I was prescribed that the doctor that prescribed it stated under no uncertain terms that this was not to make a bad child good. All it does is expand the child's attention span so they can learn.

ADD is a condition that affects the attention span. Granted, each individual child has their own attention span, affected by age and environment. However, ADD is very different from this. ADD is, in actuality, a chemical imbalance in the brain that makes the attention span far shorter than it should be, regardless of the environment that the child finds himself in, either at home, in school or any other situation for that matter.

The before-mentioned doctor that diagnosed me almost 27 years ago now described the effect this way: it's like a television that the child has no control of, and the channel keeps changing, and changing fast. From experience, I can tell you that description is one hundred percent correct! And I still have trouble with it from time to time.

ADD is also not caused by watching TV or any such thing. Laziness is caused by watching too much TV. Loss of time better spent is caused by watching TV. And though some argue with this point, violent behavior is caused by television shows that feature violent content that teach our children that its ok to be violent like the people they see on the television. That's external stimuli that have an end result. ADD has no external stimuli. It's a completely internal problem.

This again brings me back to the doctor that diagnosed me. She was a specialist that deals with ADD specifically. You see, regular pediatricians are not making these diagnoses. They are specialists trained to recognize it through a battery of tests specifically designed to reveal ADD in children and adults alike. So when a doctor diagnoses ADD in a child, it's a fair bet that you should believe that they have it because the doctor, knows how to diagnose it properly because they are trained to.

ADD is a chemical imbalance that can't be treated by use of better parenting. No matter how good a parent is, no matter how much success they may have had with their other unaffected children, the fact still remains that the problem is chemical. Doctors know this and that's why they, when the diagnosis is made, prescribe drugs such as Ritalin, Stratara and other such substances, not to simply drug the children into not being a problem child, but to even out the chemical imbalance that's affecting their ability to learn. So if a doctor thinks that prescribing such a medication to a child is going to be beneficial after the consultation with a specialist in the field, then he knows what he's talking about!

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