I wrote this email to send to a person who a story at the connecting like. I have however had a great of difficulty finding an email adress to send this letter to. I've decided to post this article here. Whether or not he reads it, I think with all the mythology out there about ADHD right now, it's appropriate to put it up.
It's actually been substantially altered over the last few weeks. Originally he said giving kids medication for ADHD was a form of child abuse, and ADHD was something which had been made up by pharmaceutical companies.
Regarding the article at:
http://www.naturalnews.com/...
When I was 41-years-old, I'd been disabled for years. I knew from experience that I could hold no job which involved being around people, so I went to an online trade school to teach myself to be a medical transcriptionist, a job which can be done entirely from home.
Officially my diagnosis was bipolar, but it never quite made sense. I'd been disabled for years, and had tried more than two dozen medications, none of which worked as advertised. Sleep medications tend to wake me up, and mood stabilizers make me unstable. They did however, have many unpleasant side effects.
One day I was listening to a recording of a doctor talking about a patient for school. Although the patient's confidential information was blanked out, we only listened to real records from real doctor's so we'd experience what the job was really like. It was about 2 a.m. in the morning. The doctor described a child with terrible explosive, violent rages which had occurred over many years despite many attempts at discipline. He hoarded food and had many other strange behaviors, most of which I remembered. It sounded like my childhood.
I went to my doctor who was almost as frustrated at I was at the inability to find a medication that helped me in any way, and asked for the medication that this child got. The very next day, my life changed. I never knew how angry I was, until I stopped being angry for a whole day.
Before I avoided the bus and would walk to places for an hour, and an hour to come back, rather then take it. Once I had the medication, I could get on the bus and actually talk to people, and it worked out well.
Where before I constantly lost everything despite my best efforts, including things like my house keys and wallet, during the day I began to find them. Where before school had been a nightmare, I found that I could finally learn enough to at least have a hope of being able to earn a living. I began to have some small social life. I started to draw, and write, and I taught myself how to program in order to think.
This sounds like a pretty happy story so far, but it really isn't. When I was preparing to take my final test, I was abruptly denied my medication. I had a prescription in my pocket, and my doctor and every other doctor who had conferred on the case had agreed that it was obviously working for me. Unfortunately, an arbitrary limitation was placed on the production of the drug to prevent the drug from being prescribed too much. I walked all over town and nobody had any.
I was allowed three tries at the final test, failing it twice and then passing it barely on the last try. That's pretty unfortunate, because it made it nearly impossible to get a job for a long time, and when I finally did get one, it wasn't for much money.
Today the whole medical transcription industry has been nearly destroyed by voice recognition, and by India taking more then a hundred thousand jobs as they are willing to do the work for far less money, though their accuracy is questionable.
As an independent contractor, I am not covered by the minimum wage. I made about $100 last month from work, and I made $4.00 an hour working from a qeue which gives me a limited number of reports. If I felt that I could hold it down, I'd get a job at fast food, because as I fry cook I would get a raise. I already know from experience that I would be fired from that job, just like I've been fired a long string of jobs that I've had in my life.
You can say that my symptoms are really extreme; they are. I'm a pretty unusual guy; but there are more people like me. I know, because I've spoken to them. It's a humiliating, terrible disability, and the thing that makes it worse is because everybody thinks its a myth. Telling someone you have ADHD is one of the worst things you can ever do. They will treat you like garbage for it.
Generally speaking, adults with ADHD have ruined lives, though most not quite as bad as mine. Many of them still have family to talk too, but all mine went away long ago. Even with my temper under control because of the medication, I have few social skills. I expect to die alone.
As of now, I've been on my medication for two and a half years. Before I had never held a job for more than three months before getting fired. I couldn't remember basic things, people's names, now I can. Now I can draw, before I drew stick figures. I'm learning to program in Python and write HTML, and writing a book in my spare time. I have lots of it, because I'm trapped into working the one particular job I know I'm capable of, and I'm praying to god that nobody takes my medication from me.
The world of people made my head buzz and hum. The longer I was around people, the worse it got. When people interrupt me, I forget what I'm doing. I don't mean it's a momentary irritation; I mean I completely forget what I was going to do, and it never gets done. I'd get fired no matter how hard I tried. Being homeless and eating out of trash dumpsters really isn't fun. I wanted to keep those jobs. I couldn't.
There are a lot of things you wrote about that I strongly agree with. Too many children are given drugs when they don't actually need them. Many people have ADHD but can be given therapy to help them, without actually needing the medication. I'd actually like to get some therapy. Unfortunately, I live in a small town, and nobody around here believes ADHD is real. They think I'm just a loser.
Just because you have a problem which sounds similar to the symptoms given for ADHD, and you found a way to solve it without medication, doesn't mean that I can. I tend to think that the category of ADHD is applied to a list of conditions, some of which are caused by entirely different causes; someone may have some of the symptoms because of a chemical in the environment, and someone else might have some of the symptoms because of childhood abuse, and others may have it for reasons having to do with genetics.
In short, you really have no way of knowing whether a given person needs the medication or not. The only way you could know that is if you had a medical degree, and you examined them.
I tried those homeopathic remedies you list on your page. They have utterly no effect on me. Incidentally, I'm a vegetarian now, and I don't consume much sugar.
It may interest you to know, that unlike some people with the diagnosis of ADHD, my brain really doesn't look like yours on MRI at all. My personal diagnosis is referred to as "the wheel of fire," type 6 ADHD by some. It's called that because a part of my brain looks like its on fire. Before I was on medication, I could sleep only 4 hours a night for at least 20 years, and every noise woke me up. I used to drink caffeine to sleep, because it would help me drift off. On meds, I can finally sleep 6 hours at a stretch. I never take painkillers, because they don't work very well on me.
So keep in mind when you write these sort of articles, that I'd willingly give up a foot of height to have been treated when I was 14, instead of 41. Maybe then I could have had a family, or a life. Who knows what my drawings would look like now, or what my life could have been.
Today, I sit in my little apartment, and I spend twelve hours a day in front of a computer screen. First I work my shift so someday maybe I'll be able to make the mininum wage, and then after a brief break I come back, and I read, and write, and I program. I do these things now, because I could never do them before.
The ability to think is something that most people take for granted, but I do not. I'm just waiting for the day I lose access to my medication again. When that happens I expect to eventually be fired because I will no longer be able to do my job. When that happens, I have a gun in the drawer of my desk, and I have one bullet next to it.
I partly keep it because I'm not willing to become the creature that I was again, and when I can no longer learn there will be nothing good in my life left. And it's also there, because I don't want to hurt anyone else.
When I become angry, the world becomes a very quiet place as all the noise goes away. I feel heat in my face. I am told that my face becomes very red. I can only see the person or object I am angry at. I feel no pain, even to the point that I will not notice my own broken bones. I drove everyone who loved me away with that rage at a very young age. None of them speak to me now; and that is an appropriate reaction.
Since I've been on medication I've never gotten angry, but when I was forced off my meds I could feel my rage simmering below the surface, and I avoided being around people to control it. Every time I have allowed my rage to resurface, I felt a little less human afterwards, so I decided that I would never let it happen again.
I hope that you never have a child with a mind like mine, but if you do, I hope you'll treat him responsibly. Try to help him with discipline, but if problems are extreme enough, accept the possibility that he or she might need medication.
Some of us do.
Incidentally, you assume that all ADHD medication is based on "speed," or an amphetamine and this is not the case. There is an entire new generation of medications which are not stimulants. Strattera is intended to improve dopamine reuptake. Harvard recently did a study which indicated that Namenda, originally intended to help Alzheimer's patients with anger problems, can work similarly for anger problems in people with severe ADHD.
Other people in my position, with my extreme symptoms, live quiet lives and usually tell nobody about who they are. They feel frightened when they read articles like yours, but say nothing because they are trying not to be noticed. I've decided that I'm not going to go hide because every time somebody suggests that ADHD doesn't exist, or that giving ADHD medication to children is equal to child abuse, I think about my own life, and what could have been. Witholding medication to a child who needs it is the worst crime you can imagine.
Michael Webb
Pueblo, Colorado