So, a couple years back I had to write a creative response to American Beauty. If you've seen the movie you might recall the video clip that show's a plastic bag being blown about by the wind. Oddly enough, that was the scene I was required to write about.
I found that essay today, tucked back into files from 2007/2008 school work, and thought I'd share it with you. I surprised myself with what I'd written and the way I went about it.
Note: It's to be read from Ricky's point of view.
Creative Response to Text
By Marissa Holmberg
A plastic bag blows in the wind, its fate sealed by the wind as it floats down the street past on coming traffic and people in the distance. The cold day makes people scurry across streets and hide in buildings and cars. They are amusing to watch, but my camera isn’t focused on the people; it isn’t focused on the traffic or the weather. It’s focused on the plastic bag, fluttering in the wind, blown about with no regard and no control.
It reminds me of my life. Forced from one house to the other, to follow the rules without argument and to live the way my dear and loving father tells me too. Am I any different then the bag? I pause to consider why I am filming something as simple as a plastic bag in the wind. I think about why it matters to me, what draws me into this scene instead of another.
The air feels stiff with static, and you can almost hear it, the little sparks of electricity in atmosphere. It’s beautiful. So simple and so complicated, like the bag is a person, a child maybe, and the wind is all the circumstances we are compelled to fight.
But why do we fight? Why don’t we give ourselves up to these circumstances and just let ourselves be blown about by the winds of fate? After all, it works so well for the plastic bag. It has given up and stopped fighting. Maybe, so have I. After all, when was the last time I told my father I wouldn’t do something just because he told me to?
The drugs. I still deal them, still do them, despite the fact that he’s threatened to ship me off to the reserves if he catches me. I guess it just means I have to make sure not to get caught. Is that fighting the circumstance? Or just being rebelliously ignorant?
Beauty. Can we give up on beauty? People don’t see beauty in anything anymore. They walk by me, and I know they think I’m crazy, standing here with my camera focused on a plastic bag. They don’t see the bag as beautiful, and I worry that if I don’t catch it now, I too will lose the belief that there is beauty in everything. There is some force in the world telling me that this is beautiful, that I need to film this and that I never need to be afraid again.
This bag represents the beauty of life. Of a little kid that wants to play in the fresh falling snow, catching snow flakes on his tongue. I can see it, as it jumps upwards and falls back to the ground, catching the wind. Am I crazy for seeing it; for seeing in it the beauty of two lovers dancing on a crowded street with no regard for the people watching them. They hear the music in their heads and the laugh and dance and sing. They don’t care that nobody else can hear the music, that everyone thinks they’re crazy. The bag is dancing with me, like the woman unaware of everyone else’s eyes. She doesn’t care that nobody else sees the beauty of her movements, they are just for me.
We are compelled to fight. This bag is compelled to try and escape the wind and I am compelled to respond to the violence shown to me by seeing the beauty in the world around me. I try and look at the bag as having a mind, because then we can connect on a different level. Personification. I stop thinking that the bag is a victim of the wind’s power, that it has no choice but to be blown about. I think that maybe it isn’t just being pushed around, but that it’s fighting to get out. And it’s telling me, as the voice of the same force that told me not to be afraid, that I can fight too.
In fifteen minutes my life changes. The bag floats up too high and gets caught in a tree. I want to climb up and get it, release it from the tree’s grasp, but that would be imposing my will on something else. This is the end of the dance, the part in the music where the girl realizes that she is being watched and carefully returns to her seat, not because she is ashamed but because she is done dancing.
I turn off my camera and zip up my coat. It feels like it should be snowing and as I look up to the sky and see if I can see the snowflakes that the bag was trying to catch I am caught myself.
Circumstances. The moment in time when we realize or don’t realize that we need to fight for something. My life seems to be a slow downward cycle of hell until I reach the very bottom and am sucked into the whirlpool or the black hole that appears when we refuse to fight. But what am I fighting? Death? I am not afraid of death, at some points I would gladly welcome it to take me away from this world. My father? Who is brave enough to fight my father? Perhaps that is who I’m fighting then. Fighting to be my own person, and not let him push me around. Fighting to recognize the despair that threatens to overcome me and drag me to the eye of the storm that is my own hatred and fear.
Fear. I am fighting fear. That is my circumstance and I fight it with beauty. If I can remember that I am not alone. Even though I feel alone I’m not. I walk back towards my house, and I am that much wiser. If you know who you’re fighting then you can fight back. I laugh, realizing that is something my father would say. Know who you’re fighting and you are more likely to win. Fear has glittering eyes, hypnotic and forceful, how else would it be able to draw you in. You cannot see it until it is too late and you are trapped by your own fear, and you don’t know how to escape.
I fight back with beauty; beauty I film in the strange places people would not think to look for it. I think of the woman, frozen to death on the sidewalk, as people walked past her. I didn’t. There was death there, and people fled from it. Not knowingly, but they did. I didn’t. I filmed it, because it was beautiful. Where others would see only the horror of loss I saw beauty. I saw God, looking at me through her dead eyes, and I looked right back, because He wanted me to. He wanted me to see the beauty; he wanted me to know that I was not alone and that I didn’t have to be afraid anymore.
When the day comes, and I know it will come, when my father realizes that he has not ‘cured’ me I will need to fight there too. Circumstances will arise and I will face them, because through everything I’ve seen in my life, I will be prepared to tell him what ever I have to, to escape. I will remember the plastic bag, and that which it represented. The child unafraid to play in the snow, who will tell me that I need to be free and see the world as he does; as a beautiful whole. I will tell my father what he wants to hear, so he will let me go, and I will be free.
I will see the bag as the lady dancing, calling me to dance with her. Maybe there will be a real woman who I can go to when that happens. But the dancer will tell me that it doesn’t matter what people think of me. She will tell me that I need to fight, because I need to escape. She will help me understand that sometimes the circumstances do call for a lie, that I can dance around the truth with her if it means I can be free with her. Circumstances will arise one day and I will need to raise up to face them, take them and analyse them so that I can fight back.
How did I learn all this from a plastic bag floating in the wind? I lock the door of my room, knowing my father will be angry, but not caring. I learned all this from the bag in the wind, because I was not afraid to look, not afraid to think. People are compelled to respond to everything, the simple, the complex, the important and the mundane. There is no one kind of problem that warrants us fighting back; it is every problem, every moment, every day.
A plastic bag taught me the most important thing I ever learned, that we may appear to be blown away by the wind, lifeless and careless, but there is a life behind everything. A benevolent force took the time to tell me not to be afraid, so that I would know that I can fight fear with beauty, and pain with wonder.
I watch the video on my TV, watching the events unfold again. A plastic bag blows in the wind, its fate sealed by the wind as it floats down the street past on coming traffic and people in the distance. But now I see that its fate isn’t sealed, it is still fighting for its freedom, just like I am. And I watch the fifteen minutes again, until the bag again becomes entangled in the branches of the tree. And I know that when I escape it will be hard, and that every day I am fighting to get there, but it will eventually happen for me too.
I will be caught in the branches of some tree, seen as trapped, limited by some people, but I will be free. No longer will I be misunderstood, scrutinized and suspected. I will not be pushed around. For now I will let the wind control my life, silently fighting back by being myself, but when the chance presents its self, when circumstances require me to fight back, I will fight. I will win. I will be free.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
ADOS - Attention Deficit Oooh Shiney!
Last semester in psychology we stopped to have a full class discussion on ADD and ADHD. We were studying psychological disorders and had watched a movie about medicating children who are diagnosed with having either Attention Deficit, or Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorders. It's one of those disorders that seem to be more and more common in the last couple years. Psychologists are getting worried about the increase in these disorders, and people are saying that television and video games are giving our kids ADD, and that the excess amounts of sugar in everything we eat is giving the ADHD. They blame society for an increase mental health problems. They do the same with depression, bipolar and other mood disorders, blaming career and money driven worlds that push us to strive for standard of living instead of quality of life. Surely this is the reason that so many more people suffer from depression.
But is it really a case of more people suffering? Or just more people coming forward with their problems and in turn being diagnosed. There is a difference after all.
Three hundred years ago a person with bipolar or schizophrenic would be told that they were possessed. This was the common diagnosis for hundreds of years, where exorcisms would be attempted and if that didn't work, they could be killed. As little as seventy years ago, the only treatment for depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia was electroshock therapy (ECT). An electrode was attached to your head and you were zapped with a very powerful current. The patient suffered muscle spasms, memory loss, broken bones, and sometimes even death. If that didn't work, lobotomies were common. These weren't the types of focused biopsies we do today to check for brain diseases. Doctors went through your eye with an icepick and removed brain tissue. This was post WW1, and today would be deemed completely barbaric. But we didn't understand psychological problems back then the way we do now.
So you can imagine how many people would confess to having a depressive mood disorder. How many people do you think would seek help if they knew there was a chance of being electrocuted, or something even worse.
Then the first anti depressants came out. Medications altered brain chemistry, changing the way that our hormones were released and absorbed. Trust in the psychological community who seemed to have been experimenting on our brains without truly understanding what was wrong. The first antidepressants and antipsychotics had the side effects of being "mentally numbing" and people said "killed their soul". Mood stabilizers like Lithium made people feel like zombies, and the side effects were brutal. And for what? To feel a little more happy? It didn't seem worth it.
So chemists and biologists and psychologists got together and started looking at better ways of dealing with depression. They figured out possible reasons for what was causing these disorders, and learned about serotonin and norepinephrine and dopamine, the hormones that make us happy. They started to figure out how the brain worked, how it made these chemicals and how to make sure the brain was making enough of them.
Once we figured out it wasn't the patients fault that they were unhappy and that they couldn't just "snap out of it" we were a lot more sympathetic. there was less of a social stigma to step forward and say "I have a mental illness and I am not going to let it control me."
The problem changed. Now if you were unhappy there was a drug for that. It did become widely over diagnosed and people have became completely over medicated. The number of depressed people rose drastically and the reason was two fold. First, more people who were actually depressed felt they could come forward and seek help without fear of harsh treatments or social isolation. The number of people who suffered from depression didn't increase, but the number of people willing to admit they had this disorder did. Secondly, the availability of a "quick fix" for life's problems was so great that people who may not be clinically depressed started telling their doctors they were. With the widespread use of the Internet as a tool for self-diagnosis and you have an abuse of antidepressant drugs.
What people didn't realize was that the side effects hadn't vanished. People with depression would deal with the side effects of an upset stomach, nausea, and even the thoughts of suicide if it meant not feeling like you'd been hit by a truck every morning, and that you were beyond worthless in society. People with major depressive disorder (MDD) would take the risk if it meant a normal day, waking up happy, and the potential to live a normal life. Normal people taking these drugs probably don't like that too much, but I can't speculate there.
The fact that you can log onto google, list your symptoms and get a list of diseases and disorders you might have is a problem. The fact that if you present this list to a doctor, the doctor gives you medicine is just as big. Which brings us to someone else diagnosing a disorder.
Teachers.
Sixty years ago a kid who was hyperactive, unfocused, unable to pay attention, disobedient, easily bored, or overly talkative was a brat or a bad kid. Then psychologists and psychiatrists figured out that dopamine, one of the hormones that make us happy, was all off in some of these bratty kids. While increases in sugar consumption and TV watching in today's society does play a huge role in the energy level in today's children, this chemical unbalance is also important. Together you have the prevalence of ADD and ADHD.
So now there was a disorder that could explain bad behaviour and there was a cure of sorts. Put them on Ritalin, or some other drug, and they'll behave, learn better and be overall better kids, right? Wrong.
A quick psych lesson here, kids with ADD and ADHD are not mentally over stimulated, but rather under stimulated. They act out because their brains are seeking stimulation on an emotional and physical level. Ritalin has occasionally been dubbed "kiddie Cocaine" and it's in effect similar. It's a stimulant that gives stimulates the brain so that they can focusing instead of seeking out stimulation in their environment.
So teachers were informed that not all the bad kids in their classes were just bad kids, but some of them had a genuine disorder and could be treated. So teachers started diagnosing ADD/ADHD in their classrooms. You can imagine that giving a stimulant to a kid who doesn't have a chemical imbalance would be very counter intuitive, and you'd be right. The same way giving cocaine to someone does not fix their behaviour.
So is it worth it? Does medicating anyone help these people or does the availability of a drug to "cure" psychological disorders simply lead to over diagnosis and medication of "normal" people and kids. Surely not every sad person has depression, and not every bratty kid has ADD/ADHD.
Here's another quick psych lesson which is based on the definition of a disorder. According to the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) mental condition becomes a disorder when it causes significant interference with daily life. So depression is only a disorder if it is causing you significant problems in your daily life. You stop going out because you think people hate you, you stop working because you think "what's the point?" and you stop living your life because of the depression.
A bratty kid is just a bratty kid unless it's a significant disruption and nothing can be done to change the behaviour. If a kid is acting out to get attention that's one thing, but if the child honestly cannot focus no matter how hard they try, and cannot sit still no matter how much they might want to, that's a disorder.
For example:
A young boy is starved for attention at home. His parents both work and don't seem to have time for him, don't help him with his homework, don't even notice he has any. He is allowed free run of the house and is not under any significant rules at home. In school he continues to act out, reveling in the attention of teachers and peers. He doesn't understand the work because nobody takes the time to teach it to him, and so he doesn't do the work, falling further and further behind in school until he eventually gives up entirely. The teachers can't deal with his acting out and suggests to the parents he has ADD or ADHD.
The teacher here is probably wrong. With some attention and help he could probably begin to put school as a priority again. With time he might catch up on what he has missed and integrate into middle and high school with few problems. Without help from parents and teachers, he will continue to struggle. I wouldn't say it's bad parenting, in today's world it's common for both parents to work just to make ends meet. But someone needs to lay down the law, set rules, help with homework and make sure that education is important. Seven year old boys would rather play in the sandbox or ride their bikes then do math.
Example 2:
A young girl with older siblings and a single mom struggles with school. She hides her homework, but each night is required to sit down with someone and do the work. Her mom tries to get her interested in reading, talks to the teacher about her poor grades and attends parent teacher interviews. Despite the parent and the teacher's best efforts the girl is unable to focus in class, struggles with her work and has problems with friends. By grade four she struggles with reading and writing, basic math and science, and has been told she has a learning disability.
A teacher finally suggests to the girl's mom that the girl has ADD and should see a psychologist. The psychologist prescribes her medication and after a few weeks she is able to not only focus, but understand her work.
The difference? The second child actually has ADD. She also happens to be my sister. She struggled with school for years; teachers refusing to say she had ADD because it has become over diagnosed and teachers get in trouble for suggesting it. No matter how hard her teacher, my mom, my brother and I tried, we could not get her to focus. She was always high energy and never seemed to be able to focus on anything for any length of time. She would come home in tears because she wasn't doing well in school, but just could not seem to understand it, and more than once told us she thought she was stupid.
After she started taking Concerta, a once a day medication for ADD, her behaviour changed rapidly. Within weeks she was sitting down to do math and science of her own accord. She still hated homework because she still didn't understand it, but she could focus better and actually wanted to learn. The day she got 100% on a math test her teacher called my mom in tears to tell her. That year she got an award for most improved student of the year. In fact, after she started taking the Concerta it was discovered that my wonderful little sister is actually a Gifted student. She's incredibly smart when she puts her mind to it.
With a lot of students it's diet. The fact that we live on pop, candy and other goodies that are bad for our health does lead to 'sugar highs' and difficulty focusing. Over stimulation can be just as dangerous as under stimulation. The school system is not designed for children. Hours a day in a desk does not make it easy for kids who would rather be playing. But sometimes there is a deeper issue.
My last example is a name you might recognize. Ty Pennington, the carpenter from TVs Trading Spaces and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition grew up with undiagnosed ADHD. It was undiagnosed because the diagnosis didn't exist when he was seven. But he was able to apply his energy to something that made him happy; carpentry. He built, created, designed and drove his mother nuts. Now when you see him, you can tell he's got lots of energy but is in control of it.
While disorders do exist, it is important to understand their causes and effects. They are usually caused by a chemical imbalance, and they affect the way we live our lives. Medication corrects these imbalances, so when given to someone without the chemical problems, they don't have the same effect and can actually do more harm then good. You can't just disregard their existence and tell people to "get better", but you can't generalize either.
There is an increase in how many people are diagnosed each year with these disorders, but it could be because the stigma is decreasing and people are able to seek help without fear of being deemed "Crazy". There is also an increase in misdiagnosis because we want a quick fix for all our problems. Before medication, cognitive behaviour must be considered. Medication shouldn't be a first response, or even a last resort, but a tool with which real problems are dealt with. And that's my psych lesson for the day. Closing thoughts:
Disorders are real, and help for them is available.
Just because a disorder exists doesn't mean every person with a single symptom of it, has it. Sometimes attention, and a little bit of help are all it takes to help a person out.
Normal is just as much a spectrum as a disorder is. People are different, and we need to be accepting of that.
Somethings we cannot change, but until we try we'll never know.
But is it really a case of more people suffering? Or just more people coming forward with their problems and in turn being diagnosed. There is a difference after all.
Three hundred years ago a person with bipolar or schizophrenic would be told that they were possessed. This was the common diagnosis for hundreds of years, where exorcisms would be attempted and if that didn't work, they could be killed. As little as seventy years ago, the only treatment for depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia was electroshock therapy (ECT). An electrode was attached to your head and you were zapped with a very powerful current. The patient suffered muscle spasms, memory loss, broken bones, and sometimes even death. If that didn't work, lobotomies were common. These weren't the types of focused biopsies we do today to check for brain diseases. Doctors went through your eye with an icepick and removed brain tissue. This was post WW1, and today would be deemed completely barbaric. But we didn't understand psychological problems back then the way we do now.
So you can imagine how many people would confess to having a depressive mood disorder. How many people do you think would seek help if they knew there was a chance of being electrocuted, or something even worse.
Then the first anti depressants came out. Medications altered brain chemistry, changing the way that our hormones were released and absorbed. Trust in the psychological community who seemed to have been experimenting on our brains without truly understanding what was wrong. The first antidepressants and antipsychotics had the side effects of being "mentally numbing" and people said "killed their soul". Mood stabilizers like Lithium made people feel like zombies, and the side effects were brutal. And for what? To feel a little more happy? It didn't seem worth it.
So chemists and biologists and psychologists got together and started looking at better ways of dealing with depression. They figured out possible reasons for what was causing these disorders, and learned about serotonin and norepinephrine and dopamine, the hormones that make us happy. They started to figure out how the brain worked, how it made these chemicals and how to make sure the brain was making enough of them.
Once we figured out it wasn't the patients fault that they were unhappy and that they couldn't just "snap out of it" we were a lot more sympathetic. there was less of a social stigma to step forward and say "I have a mental illness and I am not going to let it control me."
The problem changed. Now if you were unhappy there was a drug for that. It did become widely over diagnosed and people have became completely over medicated. The number of depressed people rose drastically and the reason was two fold. First, more people who were actually depressed felt they could come forward and seek help without fear of harsh treatments or social isolation. The number of people who suffered from depression didn't increase, but the number of people willing to admit they had this disorder did. Secondly, the availability of a "quick fix" for life's problems was so great that people who may not be clinically depressed started telling their doctors they were. With the widespread use of the Internet as a tool for self-diagnosis and you have an abuse of antidepressant drugs.
What people didn't realize was that the side effects hadn't vanished. People with depression would deal with the side effects of an upset stomach, nausea, and even the thoughts of suicide if it meant not feeling like you'd been hit by a truck every morning, and that you were beyond worthless in society. People with major depressive disorder (MDD) would take the risk if it meant a normal day, waking up happy, and the potential to live a normal life. Normal people taking these drugs probably don't like that too much, but I can't speculate there.
The fact that you can log onto google, list your symptoms and get a list of diseases and disorders you might have is a problem. The fact that if you present this list to a doctor, the doctor gives you medicine is just as big. Which brings us to someone else diagnosing a disorder.
Teachers.
Sixty years ago a kid who was hyperactive, unfocused, unable to pay attention, disobedient, easily bored, or overly talkative was a brat or a bad kid. Then psychologists and psychiatrists figured out that dopamine, one of the hormones that make us happy, was all off in some of these bratty kids. While increases in sugar consumption and TV watching in today's society does play a huge role in the energy level in today's children, this chemical unbalance is also important. Together you have the prevalence of ADD and ADHD.
So now there was a disorder that could explain bad behaviour and there was a cure of sorts. Put them on Ritalin, or some other drug, and they'll behave, learn better and be overall better kids, right? Wrong.
A quick psych lesson here, kids with ADD and ADHD are not mentally over stimulated, but rather under stimulated. They act out because their brains are seeking stimulation on an emotional and physical level. Ritalin has occasionally been dubbed "kiddie Cocaine" and it's in effect similar. It's a stimulant that gives stimulates the brain so that they can focusing instead of seeking out stimulation in their environment.
So teachers were informed that not all the bad kids in their classes were just bad kids, but some of them had a genuine disorder and could be treated. So teachers started diagnosing ADD/ADHD in their classrooms. You can imagine that giving a stimulant to a kid who doesn't have a chemical imbalance would be very counter intuitive, and you'd be right. The same way giving cocaine to someone does not fix their behaviour.
So is it worth it? Does medicating anyone help these people or does the availability of a drug to "cure" psychological disorders simply lead to over diagnosis and medication of "normal" people and kids. Surely not every sad person has depression, and not every bratty kid has ADD/ADHD.
Here's another quick psych lesson which is based on the definition of a disorder. According to the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) mental condition becomes a disorder when it causes significant interference with daily life. So depression is only a disorder if it is causing you significant problems in your daily life. You stop going out because you think people hate you, you stop working because you think "what's the point?" and you stop living your life because of the depression.
A bratty kid is just a bratty kid unless it's a significant disruption and nothing can be done to change the behaviour. If a kid is acting out to get attention that's one thing, but if the child honestly cannot focus no matter how hard they try, and cannot sit still no matter how much they might want to, that's a disorder.
For example:
A young boy is starved for attention at home. His parents both work and don't seem to have time for him, don't help him with his homework, don't even notice he has any. He is allowed free run of the house and is not under any significant rules at home. In school he continues to act out, reveling in the attention of teachers and peers. He doesn't understand the work because nobody takes the time to teach it to him, and so he doesn't do the work, falling further and further behind in school until he eventually gives up entirely. The teachers can't deal with his acting out and suggests to the parents he has ADD or ADHD.
The teacher here is probably wrong. With some attention and help he could probably begin to put school as a priority again. With time he might catch up on what he has missed and integrate into middle and high school with few problems. Without help from parents and teachers, he will continue to struggle. I wouldn't say it's bad parenting, in today's world it's common for both parents to work just to make ends meet. But someone needs to lay down the law, set rules, help with homework and make sure that education is important. Seven year old boys would rather play in the sandbox or ride their bikes then do math.
Example 2:
A young girl with older siblings and a single mom struggles with school. She hides her homework, but each night is required to sit down with someone and do the work. Her mom tries to get her interested in reading, talks to the teacher about her poor grades and attends parent teacher interviews. Despite the parent and the teacher's best efforts the girl is unable to focus in class, struggles with her work and has problems with friends. By grade four she struggles with reading and writing, basic math and science, and has been told she has a learning disability.
A teacher finally suggests to the girl's mom that the girl has ADD and should see a psychologist. The psychologist prescribes her medication and after a few weeks she is able to not only focus, but understand her work.
The difference? The second child actually has ADD. She also happens to be my sister. She struggled with school for years; teachers refusing to say she had ADD because it has become over diagnosed and teachers get in trouble for suggesting it. No matter how hard her teacher, my mom, my brother and I tried, we could not get her to focus. She was always high energy and never seemed to be able to focus on anything for any length of time. She would come home in tears because she wasn't doing well in school, but just could not seem to understand it, and more than once told us she thought she was stupid.
After she started taking Concerta, a once a day medication for ADD, her behaviour changed rapidly. Within weeks she was sitting down to do math and science of her own accord. She still hated homework because she still didn't understand it, but she could focus better and actually wanted to learn. The day she got 100% on a math test her teacher called my mom in tears to tell her. That year she got an award for most improved student of the year. In fact, after she started taking the Concerta it was discovered that my wonderful little sister is actually a Gifted student. She's incredibly smart when she puts her mind to it.
With a lot of students it's diet. The fact that we live on pop, candy and other goodies that are bad for our health does lead to 'sugar highs' and difficulty focusing. Over stimulation can be just as dangerous as under stimulation. The school system is not designed for children. Hours a day in a desk does not make it easy for kids who would rather be playing. But sometimes there is a deeper issue.
My last example is a name you might recognize. Ty Pennington, the carpenter from TVs Trading Spaces and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition grew up with undiagnosed ADHD. It was undiagnosed because the diagnosis didn't exist when he was seven. But he was able to apply his energy to something that made him happy; carpentry. He built, created, designed and drove his mother nuts. Now when you see him, you can tell he's got lots of energy but is in control of it.
While disorders do exist, it is important to understand their causes and effects. They are usually caused by a chemical imbalance, and they affect the way we live our lives. Medication corrects these imbalances, so when given to someone without the chemical problems, they don't have the same effect and can actually do more harm then good. You can't just disregard their existence and tell people to "get better", but you can't generalize either.
There is an increase in how many people are diagnosed each year with these disorders, but it could be because the stigma is decreasing and people are able to seek help without fear of being deemed "Crazy". There is also an increase in misdiagnosis because we want a quick fix for all our problems. Before medication, cognitive behaviour must be considered. Medication shouldn't be a first response, or even a last resort, but a tool with which real problems are dealt with. And that's my psych lesson for the day. Closing thoughts:
Disorders are real, and help for them is available.
Just because a disorder exists doesn't mean every person with a single symptom of it, has it. Sometimes attention, and a little bit of help are all it takes to help a person out.
Normal is just as much a spectrum as a disorder is. People are different, and we need to be accepting of that.
Somethings we cannot change, but until we try we'll never know.
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