Sometimes, ADHD is real

A lot of people seem to have the idea that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is something less than a real condition. Many have claimed that the diagnosis of ADHD pathologizes what’s actually normal childhood behavior, or that it’s presented as a problem in order to sell a solution in the form of unnecessary medication with unknown long-term effects. Others say that ADHD is real but overdiagnosed, and medication is used where changes to the child’s environment would be more appropriate. Most recently, the New York Times reported on a doctor who prescribed ADHD medication to children who are struggling in school, regardless of whether they actually have ADHD. He believes that the school system is poorly suited to children, but that people are unwilling to make changes on a systemic level, and so they resort to medicating their children.

The problem is that many of these folk theories about the reality, causes and proper treatment of ADHD are mostly nonsense, perpetuated by people who think they’ve uncovered some grand conspiracy but have very little understanding of what they’re talking about.

Our 9-year-old son has ADHD, and he takes medication for it. His mother has ADHD, his father has ADHD, and his younger brother sometimes appears to have symptoms of ADHD – although this can be largely indistinguishable from the typical range of toddler behavior. And anyone who believes that ADHD is a hoax or can be addressed solely by environmental changes should really try spending some time with our son when he’s unmedicated.

While it’s certainly possible that children have been inappropriately diagnosed with ADHD in some circumstances, this does nothing to show that ADHD does not exist in other children. This also isn’t a matter of making an exclusive choice between either medication, or alternative means of support. There’s no reason why we can’t use everything at our disposal to treat this. And while the side effects of medication always need to be taken into account, it’s also crucial to consider the effects of withholding treatment that works.

We waited for as long as possible before looking into medication for our son. We explored every other option that was available to us. He had a specialized plan at school and extra tutoring, and he still does. We worked closely with him every day to help him understand his work, and we gave him extra practice in every subject. And it wasn’t enough.

This was not just an instance of a child chafing against the unreasonable constraints of standardized education. His environment was not the problem, and shaping his environment around him would have meant letting him flounder. This was a second-grader who would often spend three hours trying to complete a single sheet of simple addition, with the help of two adults. This was a child who had to be reminded a dozen times before he would even remember how to complete a basic task like setting the table – let alone actually getting it done. This was a kid who could not stop himself from talking, yelling, and running wildly around the house. His insomnia would keep him up all night, doing nothing but talking to himself in bed, until he was so tired that he fell asleep almost every day in school. His teachers would make him sit through 40 minutes of reading class, 15 minutes of recess, and 50 more minutes of science class just trying to get him to write a single sentence.

His eyes would glaze over halfway through trying his best to add 5 and 4, when he lost track of what he was doing and had to start over for the third time. He would stumble through trying to read short sentences, and couldn’t tell us what they actually meant even after we read them back to him. He continually failed to be influenced by incentives or even understand their purpose. He forgot to bring home his work, and he didn’t turn it in when it was finished. He would burst into tears every day when trying to do his homework. He told us he was “the worst kid ever” and that he wanted to kill himself. This was a child who was going to be held back a grade, again. And he knew that he had a serious problem. He did not like how he was, and he did not want to be like this. He just wanted to be good, and he couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried.

His instructors and evaluators refused to believe that he could have ADHD, because they thought it was “overdiagnosed”. They laughed at my partner when she suggested it, even when she told them that his father had been successfully treated for ADHD. Instead, they claimed he was mentally handicapped, and that was why he was consistently performing more slowly than the other children. We knew that couldn’t be the case, because in those brief moments when we could get him to focus, he could understand his work. Something was just getting in the way. Only after intelligence tests found him to be above average did his teachers admit that ADHD was a possibility.

We had already figured this out, and we still didn’t want to have to medicate him. We were worried about the long-term effects, too. We didn’t want him to have to rely on medication instead of developing coping strategies. But we were wrong. Eventually, we had to recognize that this constant pain was not encouraging him to develop coping strategies. It was only making him miserable. This wasn’t helping him to grow – it was destroying him. Those who criticize parents for supposedly “taking the easy way out” when they have their children treated for ADHD have made the mistake of thinking that struggle must always be virtuous. They want to believe there must be some great payoff in proportion to all the trouble. But sometimes there’s not. In reality, his ongoing struggles weren’t good for any of us. We had to accept that when it came to the well-being of our son, it wasn’t our principles that mattered – it was the results.

Has his medication been a cure-all? Of course not, and this was by no means an excuse to stop helping him. He still gets all the support he needs from his family and from his school. The difference is that now, it’s actually working. Instead of running just to stay in place and still falling behind, this makes progress possible. He remembers to bring his work home and turn it in. He can finish his homework on his own without requiring constant attention, and he gets it right. He doesn’t fall asleep in school, and when he stays up late, he actually chooses to read books. He can focus and tell us what the sentences mean. He listens to us, he can control himself, and he can behave himself. And he smiles so much more! He’s happy now, he’s less anxious, and his attitude toward school has improved remarkably considering how difficult it had been for him. He’s passing instead of failing, because he finally has the basic abilities that are required to learn and succeed.

The inertia of the status quo often gives it a certain privilege in people’s minds. They set higher standards of justification for switching to an alternative than they would for simply staying on the present course. But when we put our options on an equal footing and considered them fairly, we could not justify depriving him of the treatment that would actually help. This isn’t just a matter of how it’s affecting him now. When ADHD isn’t properly treated, it can lead to higher rates of substance abuse, anxiety, depression, dropping out, car accidents, unwanted pregnancies, STDs, unemployment, and everything else you might expect to result from being chronically unable to think clearly. And we’re not willing to stand by and watch him fail over and over while we try to find alternative treatments, when we already have one that works.

This was not our first choice, and if other means were sufficient to control his symptoms, we wouldn’t have chosen to medicate him. But as of right now, this is not possible. Do we enjoy paying for expensive medication? No, but there is absolutely no way I can regard it as some kind of scam. The value to our entire family has been incalculable. ADHD had made our above-average child seem like someone who was mentally challenged. This is what finally worked to undo that, and I could never expect other parents to forgo a treatment that’s had such a transformative effect.

Regardless of what anyone else may think, this is a personal decision to be made by the family based on their situation and their needs, and I don’t find it at all appropriate to issue blanket condemnations of medication for ADHD when this may be exactly what someone’s child needs. Everyone wants what’s best for kids, and certainly nobody wants what’s worse for them. But when people are unclear on how to achieve this, their ignorance can lead them to conclusions that fail to respect the reality of what these children are dealing with. We would know – we’ve been there.

Sometimes, ADHD is real
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Coming out all over the place!

Well, it’s National Coming Out Day once again, and I think I’ve finally run out of things to come out as. It seems like every year since I’ve been on YouTube, there’s been some serious coming out going on. First, I came out as gay to my family, which is probably the simplest and most basic form of coming out. The next year, my best friend came out as lesbian to her family, including her husband at the time. The year after that, it turned out that we were much more than best friends, so I had to tell my family that I wasn’t so much “gay” as “whatever”, and that I’d be moving across the country to stay with her and her kids. And most recently, I came out as trans – as in stepmom, not stepdad.

At this point, I’m pretty sure I have the most understanding and supportive family in the world, or at least the most polite. And having run through pretty much the entire gauntlet of coming out, I can say it doesn’t necessarily get any easier. Sure, I have more experience with it now, and I don’t think my family can really be all that surprised anymore, but it’s still just as difficult as it’s always been. There’s that lengthy period of dread in the back of your mind as you keep putting it off, the point where you finally get sick of this and commit to getting it over with, the adrenaline-fueled anxiety leading up to it, and the heart-pounding moment of uncertainty when you actually tell them and hope that they won’t freak out. And, if you’re lucky, there’s the most extraordinary relief when it turns out not to be a big deal at all, and you wonder why you waited so long to get it done.

I’ve usually come out incrementally instead of to everyone at once, because it feels like less of a single, enormous step, and it kind of snowballs in a way that makes it seem a little less scary as you come out to more and more people. It’s always helped to start with one person I trust, like a sibling, so that when I come out to more people, I can tell them about everyone else who already knows, and hopefully it won’t seem like such a big “thing” to them either.

I still haven’t come out to most of my extended family, but that’s because I don’t always know them very well and we haven’t seen each other in years, and I generally save the stress and anxiety of personally coming out for people who are really, really important to me. At the same time, I realize this information is no longer fully within my control once I start telling people, and everyone else could find out at any time if they go asking around or if someone decides to tell them. For me, being out is about being comfortable with that reality – after all, why out yourself if you don’t want to be out?

Of course, coming out will be different for everyone depending on their circumstances. Even for me, every time I’ve come out has been a unique experience. When I first came out as gay, there was the uncertainty of not knowing how my family would react to anything that had to do with the general LGBT cluster. And let’s just say that moving to Florida to live with a married woman and her kids can sound a lot more ominous than it actually is. But that really had nothing on coming out as trans, which actually required some explanation. Most people don’t fully understand what it means, and I had to gauge their knowledge and tailor the message accordingly. People know what it means to be gay or in love, but wanting to live as another gender? They might not even realize that this is possible, or real, or not like something you’d see on Jerry Springer.

Ironically, coming out as trans was more of a formality than anything. Almost nothing had actually changed about me at all, except for how I identified. I’d been slowly coming out for the past few years without even realizing it. No one could really claim to be shocked, and everything went better than expected. I had already gotten there, and now it was just official. At the end of the day, I was still me, and everyone knew that.

It’s easy to say this because it hasn’t ever gone poorly for me, but I’ve never regretted coming out. Not only was it a huge relief, but this is the truth of my life, and I believe it deserves to be shared with the people I care about. They’ve earned it. And I only hope that all of us can have someone in our lives who’s earned this invaluable trust: the trust that they’ll listen even if they don’t always understand, that they’ll see you as a human being first, and that they’ll love you just the same.

Coming out all over the place!

With God, everything is permitted

Like killing children. Charlie Fuqua, candidate for the Arkansas House of Representatives, recommended child execution in his book, “God’s Law: The Only Political Solution”:

The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. … This passage does not give parents blanket authority to kill their children. They must follow the proper procedure in order to have the death penalty executed against their children. I cannot think of one instance in the Scripture where parents had their child put to death. Why is this so? Other than the love Christ has for us, there is no greater love then that of a parent for their child. The last people who would want to see a child put to death would be the parents of the child. Even so, the Scrpture provides a safe guard to protect children from parents who would wrongly exercise the death penalty against them. Parents are required to bring their children to the gate of the city. The gate of the city was the place where the elders of the city met and made judicial pronouncements. In other words, the parents were required to take their children to a court of law and lay out their case before the proper judicial authority, and let the judicial authority determine if the child should be put to death. I know of many cases of rebellious children, however, I cannot think of one case where I believe that a parent had given up on their child to the point that they would have taken their child to a court of law and asked the court to rule that the child be put to death. Even though this procedure would rarely be used, if it were the law of land, it would give parents authority. Children would know that their parents had authority and it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents.

I can think of at least 3 problems with this plan. First, in order for a threat to be effective, it has to be credible. The target of the threat must believe there is a possibility that it will be carried out. That’s what makes it so ridiculous for Fuqua to try and walk the line of “we need this as a disincentive to bad behavior, but I’m sure no one will ever actually execute their kids!” If it never happens, it starts to lose its power to influence anyone, as it becomes difficult for people to believe it could actually happen. If he really finds child executions so dreadful that he seeks to downplay how likely this is, maybe he shouldn’t want to make explicit legal allowances for it. And if he does believe that the goal of discouraging disobedience is so overwhelmingly important that it warrants the execution of children, then it makes no sense within his own value system that he would want to get in the way of doing what he believes is necessary to achieve the very objective he considers so crucial. It’s almost like the guy who supports child execution is being irrational or something.

Second, people have killed their children for religious reasons on plenty of occasions, both intentionally and unintentionally. People also kill children for reasons other than religion. What grounds does he have to be so certain that parents have never, ever wanted their children dead? And how can he possibly believe that the world he envisions, with a religious community that has a social norm of executing children for parental disobedience, would be at all averse to doing just that?

Third, you seriously want to make mere disobedience a capital crime for children when there’s already substantial debate over whether the death penalty, an irrevocable act which allows for no reevaluation or correction or pardon after the fact, is appropriate even for morally culpable and mentally sound adults? What is wrong with you? Knock it off!

With God, everything is permitted

Live show tonight at 9:30 PM!

Heather and I will be hosting a live show on BlogTV tonight at 9:30 PM Eastern time. If you haven’t been to BlogTV before, it’s basically a live stream with a chatroom attached where people can talk with us. It’s usually a lot of fun. If you’d like to stop by, just go to http://www.blogtv.com/people/zjemptv at 9:30 PM. See you there!

Update: The show is now concluded. Thanks to everyone who came by!

Live show tonight at 9:30 PM!

Sally Quinn's hollow faith

At the Washington Post, Sally Quinn said something that’s probably much more true than she thought:

This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian.. We’ve got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We’ve got “In God We Trust” on our coins. We’ve got “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.

Claiming a belief in God. Even if you are not Christian. It really shows just how much religion matters to Sally Quinn: enough for her to cite America’s unfortunate habit of plastering pointless professions of piety onto our pledges and currency, but not enough for her to care about whether anyone truly believes in this god. The only thing that’s important to her is that we keep on saying it, even as it’s separated from all meaning by her notion that people’s actual beliefs are irrelevant, and her demand that they say the words anyway. Quinn is simply representing the religious America of today: a nation of faithful who have so prioritized devout appearances over walking the walk, they don’t even bother to hide this anymore. They plainly state their expectation that we all do the same, saying the magic words no matter what we believe. It’s so out in the open, it’s right there in the Washington Post for anyone to see.

Sally Quinn's hollow faith

Sally Quinn’s hollow faith

At the Washington Post, Sally Quinn said something that’s probably much more true than she thought:

This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian.. We’ve got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We’ve got “In God We Trust” on our coins. We’ve got “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.

Claiming a belief in God. Even if you are not Christian. It really shows just how much religion matters to Sally Quinn: enough for her to cite America’s unfortunate habit of plastering pointless professions of piety onto our pledges and currency, but not enough for her to care about whether anyone truly believes in this god. The only thing that’s important to her is that we keep on saying it, even as it’s separated from all meaning by her notion that people’s actual beliefs are irrelevant, and her demand that they say the words anyway. Quinn is simply representing the religious America of today: a nation of faithful who have so prioritized devout appearances over walking the walk, they don’t even bother to hide this anymore. They plainly state their expectation that we all do the same, saying the magic words no matter what we believe. It’s so out in the open, it’s right there in the Washington Post for anyone to see.

Sally Quinn’s hollow faith

Being on the Supreme Court is not supposed to be easy

Justice Scalia offers up some of his usual legal wisdom:

“The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state,” Scalia said at the American Enterprise Institute.

Yes, I’m sure deciding on this sort of thing is a breeze when the extent of your reasoning is “it’s illegal, therefore it should be illegal – QED.” The Supreme Court is the end of the line. It’s where cases go when all of the formalized decision processes at the lower levels of the judiciary have failed to resolve them adequately. These questions are not sent to the highest court in the land just so that they can benefit from the previously unknown perspective of “well, the founders would have meant for it to be illegal, problem solved!” – something which obviously no one else could have come up with, without deferring to the brilliant reasoning of Scalia.

The Supreme Court is not there to fire off “easy”, ill-considered, poorly-thought-out conclusions like this. It’s there to reach carefully developed and well-supported conclusions which are not always readily apparent. So don’t pretend that all nine of you could just as easily be replaced by the average gay-bashin’ clinic-protestin’ yokel, when you really only mean yourself.

 

Being on the Supreme Court is not supposed to be easy

"I want to bury this evil, and never have to talk about it again."

The final swing of the scythe which cuts an already blighted society to the ground.”

None of them lasted past the third generation from the time that they embraced it.” “The devil is moving forward with energy and aggression.” “Something so feebly rooted, so fragilely constructed and imposed cannot last.”

Only more loneliness, desperation, and death.” “True love isn’t able to be found in those types of relationships.” “It’s the kind of sin that defiles the land.”

Absolutely nothing good to contribute to family life”. “What father would want his children exposed to this presence, this behavior?” “Beneath the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures.”

“Trying to put a bullet in the head of one of the greatest traditions that has ever existed and has built our society”. “Enemies of the human body”. “Fundamentally dysfunctional on many levels”.

“Internationally the greatest threat“. “Choosing to perform immoral acts“. “Just like during the times of Hitler“.

They’re intolerant. They’re hateful. They’re vile. They’re spiteful.”

LET THE BIBLE KILL YOU“.

That’s what the religious right has to say about Jill and Nikki:

When it comes to abstract theological histrionics versus the human reality right before our eyes, this is how we’re winning.

"I want to bury this evil, and never have to talk about it again."

“I want to bury this evil, and never have to talk about it again.”

The final swing of the scythe which cuts an already blighted society to the ground.”

None of them lasted past the third generation from the time that they embraced it.” “The devil is moving forward with energy and aggression.” “Something so feebly rooted, so fragilely constructed and imposed cannot last.”

Only more loneliness, desperation, and death.” “True love isn’t able to be found in those types of relationships.” “It’s the kind of sin that defiles the land.”

Absolutely nothing good to contribute to family life”. “What father would want his children exposed to this presence, this behavior?” “Beneath the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures.”

“Trying to put a bullet in the head of one of the greatest traditions that has ever existed and has built our society”. “Enemies of the human body”. “Fundamentally dysfunctional on many levels”.

“Internationally the greatest threat“. “Choosing to perform immoral acts“. “Just like during the times of Hitler“.

They’re intolerant. They’re hateful. They’re vile. They’re spiteful.”

LET THE BIBLE KILL YOU“.

That’s what the religious right has to say about Jill and Nikki:

When it comes to abstract theological histrionics versus the human reality right before our eyes, this is how we’re winning.

“I want to bury this evil, and never have to talk about it again.”