Most Human

Category: ADHD

Case Stories / Dave Keith

Helping A Child Diagnosed With ADHD: A Powerful Alternative to Medication

It is virtually routine to give kids medications for ADHD. There is an industry organized around ADHD, well orchestrated, with abundant research to create the illusion of scientific certainty. But what happens when you look at the child’s behavior in the context of the family? What happens when parents, rather than being bystanders, are integral to the child’s treatment? What if the family becomes the patient? Check out this feel-good story.

Amy Begel / Case Stories

De-Coding A Child’s Temper Tantrums: It’s A Message For The Family

Parenting advice often describes ways to “manage” a child’s temper tantrums. But temper tantrums, or defiant behavior in kids contain important messages for the parents. Often, without meaning to, kids are responding to underlying tensions in the family. They react in the only way they know how: through their behavior. The message: HELP!

Arts/Healing / Medical Culture/Politics

ADHD Medications: Good For Big Pharma, Not For Kids

We’re revisiting a past article by Dr. Allen Frances, a prominent psychiatric “insider” who now spends his time railing against the overprescribing of psychiatric medications. Here he talks about the New York Times article which connected the proliferation of “ADHD” in kids to the profiteering by the drug companies. This is a wake up call to parents and professionals alike. Frances says, “as it stands now, we are doing an uncontrolled experiment on our kids with no clue about the long term effects of the meds on their brains and behavior.”

Case Stories / Dave Keith / Medical Culture/Politics

ADHD Diagnosis Conceals the Family Story

Good physicians take a clinical history in the interest of arriving at a diagnosis. While the clinical history is a review of ‘facts’, there are in fact, few ‘facts’ about human experience. Different examiners will get different histories depending upon what they ask about. Different family members give different reports of the same set of events. In my view clinical histories are a form of fiction pretending to be ‘objective’.

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