Adhd Pros And Cons

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, mental illness is defined by “a condition that impacts a person’s thinking, feeling or mood and may affect his or her ability to relate to others and function on a daily basis” (Mental Health Conditions n.d.). Going by that definition, which seems to be the consensus amongst medical journals, ADHD falls in line with mental disorders. Though researchers may not have found a definite underlining cause for ADHD, the effects of it have an immediate impact on the person’s brain and studies have shown that people with ADHD are almost three times as likely to be afflicted with depression (Sherman, n.d.). Since ADHD first starts showing signs when a child is three to seven (National Institute of

Derek Summerfield argues that defining the mental trauma that comes with being in war (post-traumatic stress disorder) was a necessary step and a positive use of medicalization, but fears that the now “liberal” diagnoses of PTSD and subsequent prescriptions for things such as, “sexual harrassment, accidents and [other relatively common events]” diminshes the original definition; he believes that the overmedicalization is leading people to replace “survivorhood” with “victimhood” (Summerfield, 2001). Medicalization can lead to people in power or control defining what normal behavior is and exposing those that behave outside of the norm to medication that can potentially have worse side effects than the aforementioned behavior and the rise of pharamceutical companies advertising directly to customers leads to people asking for medication that they may not need. A child’s upbringing and environment outside of the classroom can play an important factor on their behavior in school, not only that, studies have shown that preconceived biases can lead to certain races being underprescribed or overdiagnosed (NBC News,

ADHD diagnoses have rose fourty one percent in the last decade and two-thirds of those diagnosed have been prescribed psychoactive medicines such as Adderall (Cohen & Schwarz, 2013). As Derek Summerfield wrote about, the list of behaviors that can be seen as symptoms of ADHD are growing which leads to medicine being prescribed to children that may not need it (Summerfield, 2001), which places more importance on those that have the ability to see changes in a child’s behavior while also having the ability to pry more into external causes, such as teachers and parents. With ADHD being seen in children at such a young age, an effort should be made to see if a child is actually afflicted with ADHD, mimicking peers, having issues with peers or simply being a child; although the critera for the diagnosis does not allow an extended look into the growth and development of children and instead sets a timeframe. Even looking into external factors widens the critera a substantial amount because simply because a child is acting up for an extended period of time does not mean they have a mental illness nor does not doing well in school for a set period mean the behavior should be controlled with medicine that has shown to negatively effect a portion of the ones that