Drugging Our Kids
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All of a sudden the use of Ritalin among our children is getting some press. But it's not the type of press I had envisioned when I taught high school.
It seems that Connecticut has just passed a law that prohibits teachers and administrators from mentioning the use of prescription drugs to control students. This new legislation puzzled me. I did further investigation and discovered that the common belief among the medical profession and mental health officials is that teachers are guilty of putting the idea of medication into the heads of parents. Maybe this is the case at the elementary level in order to control classes of 35 or more students. But whose fault is that? Reducing class sizes would be a healthier solution. My experiences have shown that parents and doctors are much too eager to prescribe the medication for students to give them the extra edge needed to compete with the top students in the school. One year, I taught an advanced class of twenty students, six of whom were taking Ritalin. Phenomenal numbers, I thought. But this percentage is close to the national average. At my school's parent night, a mother of one of my students approached me. "How's my son doing? You know his ADHD diagnosis is impulse control problems." "Well, we're doing fine. When he gets ready to make one of his impulsive comments, I give him one of my looks, and then he stops. We've developed a strategy that seems to be working." "That's great. You just let me know and if that stops working, I'll. . ." Let me stop here. At this precise moment the thought went through my head: "Great a parent who will support me and help me work through the behavioral part of her son's problem." No, such luck, I found, as she continued. ". . .make sure he starts taking another Ritalin right before your class." Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), whose symptoms include distractibility, short attention span, hyperactivity, and implusivity, is often treated by the stimulant Ritalin. It is not quite understood why giving an anphetimine to a hyperactive child has the opposite effect, but it does in some cases. Part of the problem comes when ADHD is misdiagnosed. Many doctors caution that Ritalin should not be prescribed if other sytmptoms of behavioral disorders are present in the child. If prescribed incorrectly, the symptoms from the drugs can be far worse than the original symptoms.
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