Last night, Andrea and I decided that there is no such thing as attention deficit disorder. It is not a disorder. We have wrongly labeled it as a disorder as a product of lazy parents who think that there is CLEARLY something wrong with their child if they require more stimulus than the television 8 hours a day. There kids are hyper because they don't have anything to do, and so they go to the doctor, and the health care industry sees this as a money making opportunity and doctors give parents scripts for Ritalin and Adderall. Instead, Andrea and I decided that we will refer to the condition where people have a short attention span (mine has been diminishing rather rapidly of late) Severe Attention Deficiency*. I obviously agree that some people have problems focusing; my claim is simply that this does not make them a bad person or imply that there is something wrong with them. It only means that they hate chemistry and would rather blog about SAD instead.
*I don't like the fact that my new acronym spells sad. If you have a better one, please let me know.
Post script:
How many SAD kids does it take to change a light bulb?
Wanna go ride bikes?
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2 comments:
you misspelled "there."
2 things...
SAD is also Seasonal Affective Disorder--aka Seasonal Depression.
Also, I agree that ADD is over-diagnosed, but I do think there IS such a thing as the disorder from a neurological perspective. There are definitely people who suffer from Attention Deficits, but its the lack of assessment and simple diagnoses in schools and pediatrics that are the problem.
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