Have you ever wanted to scream so loud, the whole world can hear you?
I have, and it's a pretty long story, so get ya a cuppa joe and sit down.
If it's after 12:00 noon where you live, I won't tell anybody if you grab a beer...
BUT, be ready to be deeply, deeply offended if you look to psychiatry to "save" your children. If you do, remember...it ain't about you. Allow me to re-iterate...IT AIN'T ABOUT YOU...don't make me have to slap some sense into you.
By God, I will....
I'm NOT cynical...I'm angry! Mostly at myself. Learn from my mistakes, and save yourself the heartache
My neice is on Facebook. She's kinda bent out of shape, talking obliquely about her son and a mysterious "label". I send her a note.
"It's bi-polar, isn't it?"
"How did you know?"
"Because you're strong enough that I knew it had to be something scary to throw you off your game."
ADHD is for sissies. Autism, it's overdone...
Now bi-polar, there, ya got something. Numbers have gone up 4000% for children. Next thing ya know, it's gonna be "Bi-polar Speaks". Instead of a puzzle piece, it'll be a bicycle, or a bow-tie, or something. Two eyeballs going cross eyed.
And when that gets old, it will be something new. But, miraculously, there will be a drug for it.
Oh, no you didn' go there....
LISTEN; I KNOW THESE ARE SERIOUS DISEASES. There are people affected with them that probably belong in institutions, because at the present time we just don't have a clue of how to deal with serious mental diseases. Thorazine was supposed to clear out the mental wards as evidenced by this advertisement from a psychiatry magazine in the 1950's. In hindsight, we all know how that worked...
We can drug them into a stupor, but it doesn't change the crossed connections in their brains. My son's birth father was killed by a man undergoing a bi-polar episode. Don't YOU even go there. He may have even been on medication at the time, I don't know.
But we are placing these labels on a generation of children. For some sick bastards, "early intervention" means catching children early and bombing them with dangerous drugs. Professor Patrick D. McGorry, the "Australian of the year" is bought and paid for by the drug industry in Austrailia, and is fighting for early interventions so that kids can be drugged at younger and younger ages. If we don't wake up, that's where this is going.
What the hell is that going to do to baby brain cells? We don't know, because there are no long term studies. There are barely studies on children, whose make-up may be totally different from that of an adult, because it is in growth mode. It is unethical to blindly give children treatment in studies before the work has been done on animals, and it is very regulated. Yet, post acceptance by the FDA, drugs are giving indiscriminately (off label) and a LONG TERM study is one year, although the children may be given a drug for a lifetime for a non-life threatening condition.
It could be a tremendous mistake, you know? We don't know what we are doing.
The greatest "overcomer" of brain anomolies is inherit in the brains ability to change, it's plasticity Most of these kids are going to grow up and become contributing, possibly in outstanding ways, of society. Thomas Edison's mother was told he was "too scattered to learn" by a teacher, so she took him home and schooled him there.
Today? No doubt. Ritalin for Tommy.
There are no long term or studies of anti-psychotics, and none will be done because it is unethical to treat a child with something so serious in a study...but they will be given to children off label all over the world . Science, in all it's glory, doesn't have a clue as to why ritalin works. The "gold standard" of treatment for ADHD was a serendipitous finding in the 1930's. (Link to BMJ doesn't seem to be available at this time. Guttmann, E. & Sargant, W. (1937) Observations on Benzedrine. BMJ, 1, 1013 -1015). The safety studies usually consist of weeks, not months or God help us, life time use.
When my son was diagnosed with autism, I thought he was going to be severely retarded. I didn't know he would be gifted. I thought his behavior was so anomalous that he needed drugs to go to school. In the last 3 years of homeschool....NO RITALIN. In fact, he NEVER took it in the evening, weekends, holidays or summer vacation. He took it for 2 years before we ever saw him on it. We hated it that much.
And you thought Dr. Spock messed up us oldsters.
Pfffftttt....children's play.
LISTEN UP,PEOPLE....some kids are hard to raise. Really, really, really hard. You CAN drug them into compliance, and drug the creativity right out of them. (Listen to the TED talk below, you'll never see education the same way). You can turn them into zombies who will never know their gifts.
Ask my sister Sandy, who raised 3 ornery boys, before her easy daughter came. Nearly drove her up the wall. MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, it's the parents who need medication. She'd have enjoyed parenting a lot more, I'm sure. When I started medicating my son, in the ninety's, she told me that she could have chosen to medicate her children, but she chose not to. Today, they are all successful college graduates, living in fear that their own children will be just like them (every parent's effective curse upon their children).
When I graduated from college with a degree in the early '80's, a total of 6% of children were considered "special needs"--the Dyslexias, Minimal Brain Damage (the ADHD of it's day), Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Mental Retardation, Blindness, deafness...everything.
Now, it's 18% or more.They tend to skew the numbers for "No Child's Behind Left"...and thus bear the brunt of schools failure. Children who don't learn typically bear the brunt of schools failures...Do you hear what I'm saying? No wonder we drug 'em. Ben's teacher saw this coming in the beginning of NCLB 10 years ago. Why is it when a "school" fails to teach a child it is the childs fault, and not the schools. Sure it's hard...but we gotta blame somebody, so why not the kids? (the blame game, good reading! Second most important link here.) So parents/schools/administrators scramble to make "them", our tender-hearted kids, fit the mark. Therapy, special schooling, tutoring, research, quack medicine...it is a tremendously big business, and getting bigger. Everybody and their dog is making money off of "special needs" children in one way or another, or making money for Autism Speaks. Every time I go to a store and see that puzzle piece I want to puke. That's what good marketing will do for you. I'd put it here...but the Wrights tend to threaten to sue people who use their brand. So I'll use a stand in.
"autism squeaks, tee-hee." SCARY, huh?
And you know that study sponsored by Autism Speaks in Korea that assumed 1 out of 38 kids should be labled autistic. They went into the God-blessed schools, found suckers to take a test, and then "postulated" the assumed number who should be labeled, and then wondered why the parents fought them. Yeah...Wright!
By the way, when I first started medicating my son at age 5 to go to school and stay out of special ed classrooms...babies as young as 6 months were being given medication for behavior. Why the hell would a 6 month old baby need to focus???? That was 12 years ago. I can't imagine what it is now. And this is not for serious, life-threatening disease, but to control "behavior", as defined by psychiatrists. They hold the power of labels over your children. Which is better, to be called a brat, or to be called an aspergerian and be considered mentally ill and be medicated or trained like an animal in "social behavior" ? (Do you know any of the stories of successful autists? Not one would give up their autism for 'social awareness' . Their autism is what made them successful. The word they used to be called was "gifted". You know, "scary smart"?)
Psychotic drugs for children, as dangerous as they are, are the new "ice pick surgery". Do you know the inventor of the lobotomy got a Nobel Peace Prize for his work? Are we any smarter now??
And you know what the killer is? The DSM % (DSM 5, diagnostic and statistical manual of mental diseases,working on upping the numbers, replacing the DSM $, or DSM 4, self explanatory) is removing the truly autistic, kids with mental retardation, self-injury, movement disorders......and placing the moniker of autism solely on the backs of kids who have been making it for generations in the regular classroom. The geeks, the nerds, the dummies, the rummies...are now "mentally ill". Like they needed insult added to injury. What was once considered a learning difference, dyslexia, is now "caught early" as autism, in my son's case. I'm so pissed I can't see straight. (Maybe I'm bipolar...)
Yeah, I know, it's a serious mental disorder...but when 15% of boys are on medication, with numbers increasing every year, it's beginning to feel a lot like a witch hunt.
I AM NOT A SCIENTOLOGIST. FIRST IDIOT THAT PUTS THAT IN THE COMMENTS GETS IT RIGHT UP THE SIDE OF THE HEAD...Nimnuts!!!
Sure, I'm being emotional. But lookie (or listen) here to one of the doctors (Dr. Allen Frances, God bless 'em) responsible for the diagnosis of bi-polar in the DSM 4. Also, listen to how the mother totally ignores his plea that too many kids are being medicated for being difficult to raise. He's being very, very reasonable in my book. I don't see that much among scientists (cough, cough, BC, cough). Fear of mental illness does not lead to good parenting.
Look here, at a scientologists son who was labeled with "undiagnosed autism" after his death, John Tavolta's son Jett. Notice, he did not die of autism. He died of a SEIZURE. Although autism and seizures are frequently intertwined, autism is diagnosed by BEHAVIORS. Other than genetic maladaptions of the brain that cause those behaviors like Fragile X, Neurofibramatosis, Tuberous Sclerosis, or poisoning in utero by the drug used for epilepsy known as valproic acid , or by a virus, the mother's contraction of Rubella while pregnant....there is a whole lot of diagnosis going on that is "shadow syndromes" that make a lot of people a lot of money.
Shadow Syndromes ~Delusion paranoid schizophrenic with an attendant persecution complex = Jesus of Nazareth
America's schools, these great bastians of learning, insist on things being made easier for them to not teach our children by drugging greater and greater numbers, instead of doing the hard work of teaching that was done in the past, that kept us up at #1. You have to wonder if we aren't drugging some of our greatest minds. Genius and "mental disorders" go hand in hand. Seems you can't have one without the other. In the past, some parents created special schools for their children who learned differently. Now, many, many parents pull their kids out of public education and HOMESCHOOL to avoid a lifetime label or drugging.
Karma is a bitch for the schools, isn't it?
The most important link you could hit today is right above you. Forget all the rest of this crap!
Look at this. This is where I started to wake up. What do you think causes Autism? Doesn't it look like CAPITALISM???
I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist. You can't make this shit up. My son was labeled autistic when he was 3 years old. The ONLY expert I listened to was Temple Grandin. She led me much more lovingly through trecherous waters than the psychiatrists Ben had. Except for the one who was ADHD himself. He used to tell my son he was the hardest worker he knew. And school is very, very hard for our kids who think differently, who think right-brained, visuallly, as some describe it. These Hunters in a Farmers world.
[[Temple Grandin (famous autist) says that the rocket science division at NASA is a "sheltered workshop for the socially impaired".]]
Anybody that doesn't recommend this shall be cursed (or "blessed" :))with a difficult child. I ain't messing around here, people.
I know y'all hate Dr. what's his butt of Focus on the Family. But he said one thing that I've never forgotten. I guess even fools can speak great wisdom.
"If your kid is driving you crazy, that's their job. Some kids are just really, really good at their jobs"
Get a life, get a sense of humor, give your kid a break.
If things don't work out at school, as seems to be the case for more and more children...homeschool. Or suck it up until age 16 and get a GED or go to Tech...my son is doing that without a GED or high school diploma. We don't teach to kids who learn hands on. We teach to the science/math majors and fail the rest. Look at these 15 successful people who were labelled "learning disabled". Seems they may have been "school disabled" because they did pretty damn well for themselves. They made the cut because of who they are, not in spite of it.
Who, when his child asks for a fish, would give him a stone?
Who, when his child asks for unconditional love, would give him a pill, or a label of mental illness? Maybe I'm being irrational. Call it mother's intuition. *%##$@!! rationality...
1:46 PM PT: Correct TED talk now a part of diary. Really if you haven't taken a peeik, do so. The time will go quickly, as he's quite funny.