Whoever thinks ADHD doesn't exist should spend five minutes alone with a kid not on his meds!  Or with my husband for that matter.  

Silliness.  The problem is, as was mentioned, overdiagnosis.  I think we expect too much of children, particularly little boys.  They're not made to sit still.  There's a difference between a boy who needs a lot of physical activity and ADHD.  Also, a great deal of sensory integrative dysfunction has been misdiagnosed as ADHD in the past.  It looks a lot like ADHD sometimes.

I think I have inattentive ADHD even tho Ritalin didn't work on me. I daydreamed, I wanted disasters to happen because it would be exciting, I couldn't focus on math especially or anything at all, I started forgetting more, I needed lots of stimulation and my understimulation got me clinically depressed, I can't take criticism, I loved pranks and the only reason I don't have a criminal record is that I had no friends to do illegal "exciting" stuff with.

Interesting Ana, I guess ADHD or something similar would make sense if you're operating at a lower level of alertness.  Do you exercise?  I think some extreme exercise would be really good for you, like those crazy spinning classes or running or something.  It will stimulate you all over, and the effect lasts for some time.  I wonder if your insurance would pay for a gym membership if your doctor said it was medically necessary?  Some will.

I could I suppose... well, not in here, but I should just walk around outside all day... back then, I needed human contact, the highest form for me of stimulation... hard to explain...

just to let you know i am a christian i know for a fact that ADHD is real...and so do my christian friends who have it.

My son has both AD/HD and Aspergers. He also has another disability called periodic fever syndrome. Makes it hard for me when people look at him in a store and think he is being bad and give us looks. I have 4 children and he is my youngest.My oldest is 24 a boy a boy 23 in college who has AD/HD and a daughter 18. I have AD/HD but have never been diagnosed. I did however know as a child I was different and could have aspergers also?

I was always daydreaming and struggled through math, english and science but got A's in Art .My son was seemingly normal until around three when I was told I had to get him immunized in order to be in a daycare. He then regressed in potty training and doing odd things. Not looking at me or listening. I knew there was something wrong with him but the Dr.s would not listen to me.

just like they would send me home with his fevers telling me it was the flu I pushed and asked a million questions and finally at four in a half someone listened to me and referred me to a psychologist who finally diagnosed him. His preshool teacher told me that AD/HD was not real and his issues of not paying attention and being violent was poor parenting.

She would put him in timeout repeatedly for not coloring with the other children or being able to sit still He had major melt downs and would beg me not to take him to school. She even turned me in to CPS. Since then he has been in kindergarten and is doing ok. I give him Concerta to help him concentrate.

He takes resperitol for his mood swings and Cholchicine for his fever syndrome. I however don't think meds are always an answer I tried it without them and life is really rough on him. So yes it does exist.

This post was last modified: 02-21-2011 05:43 AM by Genesis.

My son has both AD/HD and Aspergers. He also has another disability called periodic fever syndrome. Makes it hard for me when people look at him in a store and think he is being bad and give us looks. I have 4 children and he is my youngest.My oldest is 24 a boy a boy 23 in college who has AD/HD and a daughter 18. I have AD/HD but have never been diagnosed. I did however know as a child I was different and could have aspergers also? I was always daydreaming and struggled through math, english and science but got A's in Art .My son was seemingly normal until around three when I was told I had to get him immunized in order to be in a daycare. He then regressed in potty training and doing odd things. Not looking at me or listening. I knew there was something wrong with him but the Dr.s would not listen to me. just like they would send me home with his fevers telling me it was the flu I pushed and asked a million questions and finally at four in a half someone listened to me and referred me to a psychologist who finally diagnosed him. His preshool teacher told me that AD/HD was not real and his issues of not paying attention and being violent was poor parenting. She would put him in timeout repeatedly for not coloring with the other children or being able to sit still He had major melt downs and would beg me not to take him to school. She even turned me in to CPS. Since then he has been in kindergarten and is doing ok. I give him Concerta to help him concentrate.He takes resperitol for his mood swings and Cholchicine for his fever syndrome. I however don't think meds are always an answer I tried it without them and life is really rough on him. So yes it does exist.

Welcome to AFF

So do I!

I immediately came to this thread after reading the comments on this article.

Just for those opinions, I might consider changing my autism rights group into an ADHD group!

This post was last modified: 01-27-2012 09:07 AM by tintinophile691.

Honestly I went to a shrink once and he told me I have ADD or ADHD or whatever and I know that is totally untrue, he spent only a few minutes talking to me there was absolutely nothing scientific about his approach.  It seemed like he really just wanted to hand out some drugs, to push some of that legal cocaine Ritalin because he makes money off of that and there is no drug for Aspergers to sell yet.  Maybe honestly you don't have ADD, I think people with Aspergers have some overlapping symptoms with ADD but for very different reasons.  I am not saying ADD/ADHD don't exist but to be honest I have doubts.  Its the fad diagnosis of this time period, when I was younger Dyslexia was, I used to be told I have dyslexia I don't.  The society we live in today expects us to be so much less physically active, with the notable exception of sports which are highly regimented and full of rules, than we are naturally inclined to be as a species so it doesn't come as a surprise to me that many children and adults have difficulty with staying still and focused on dry academic stuff.  And then of course a lot of people use their ADD/ADHD to do whatever they want and to quite frankly be neurotypical people who are just assholes with a hall pass.  I went to a alternative school for people with learning disabilities my last two years and became quite annoyed at a lot of the kids who were just ADD they took up a lot of the time and the attention from the kids with Autism.  It wasn't always good attention but it was attention nonetheless, they got the teachers to cave into their moods and their personal bickering and likes and dislikes, I'm in a bad mood today was like some kind of legitimate excuse, it doesn't fly anywhere else in the world.  They also completely recreated the petty kind of social relations of high school a lot of kids and their parents hoped to avoid.  Cliques gossip boyfriend girlfriend drama people being picked on excluded all those things students and parents may have wanted to avoid when they chose that school.  The Autistic kids(I didn't know I was one of them at the time) mostly remained above the fray of chaos and drama but I really feel they and their parents did not get what they deserved.  Teachers were ultimately willing to give a mile of leeway for personality issues but didn't have time to really cater to different learning styles.  To sum up my problems with that school it became a school for personality disabilities not learning disabilities. In a way the Autistic kids seemed less disabled than the more closer to neurotypical ADD kids but the ADD kids seemed by and large disabled by their own personality problems run wild.  Frankly a lot of their parents just let them go, let them run wild,and so did most of the teachers there.  Unlike Autistic kids who are always getting put in this and that therapy and forced to "behave". Disclaimer there are a lot of good people who are diagnosed with ADD, hell there are just a lot of people period, it seems like it gets so over diagnosed because its just so easy to do and the solution is just so seductively simple.  The very condition is named by its primary vague symptom has a hard time paying attention/focusing.  The whole condition sounds like a symptom not a cause.  Some of those kids probably do have dyslexia Aspergers or some other condition that makes school hard for them and makes it appear like they can't focus and could use instruction that fits their learning style, others are just antsy kids people with the gift of a lot of energy which is no disability.  Perhaps we have taken way too much of the physical activity out of childhood and adulthood for that matter.  I know I am gonna get some hate mail for this.

*replying to OP*

You most likely are seeing Americans say that.  You have to understand that here they say this now about virtually every child who does anything more than maintain perfect, quiet obedience in school.  It's become terrifying, the rate at which children are drugged here.  As someone who is 40, I see kids now being drugged for behavior everyone accepted as perfectly normal when I was young (even if it were perfectly normal childhood misbehavior that it was assumed they would grow out of). So it can certainly seem to many people that perhaps it is a completely made up disorder.  

I personally have never met a child that has honestly seemed to me to have ADHD, although I know many parents who think their kid does, give them meds for it (they not only hand them out like candy here, they actually bully parents into making their kids take them and become threatening and suspicious if they want your kid to take them and you, as a parent, do not believe it is necessary and decline), and then the parents will apologize every time the kid does the slightest childlike active thing like be loud or misbehave and say they are late for their medication or forgot to take it today, when they aren't behaving half as bad as all the cousins I grew up with. I feel sorry for these kids. It's like they are all growing up in an asylum, or a soviet prison camp where the slightest deviation from protocol gets them drugged into submission.

My son is 16 and a half now and he has not been put on psychiatric medication because I resisted doing this. Of the people in my social circle who have children, as far as I know, he is one of the only kids who has not been put on medication of some kind. Every child I know well enough to know any details of their life has received some sort of psychiatric diagnosis, without fail.

So that would be why you hear people say this. This is what is happening in America.

It's over-diagnosed, sometimes people are misdiagnosed, but it does exist