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Trendy Use Of Stimulants to
Improve Classroom Focus and Homework Completion Rates
 Let's start with a brief outline of what got me into this.
When my son was younger, there was an incident
that led to an attention deficit disorder assessment.
I was cajoled into accepting a medication
treatment for him, using a form of stimulant - one of the newer
designer versions of Ritalin. After I did the research on the
effects of use of these stimulants in children, I saw enough
troubling indications that I ended up fighting a pitched battle with
pretty much everybody, teachers and school administration, medical
professionals, the wife. Now let's scooch back
another 5 years. My son, at a much younger age, had a slight,
but noticeable speech impediment - the common "th" . . . problem.
During the activities involved with getting him speech therapy, I
first encountered the surreal realm of educator sponsored,
government assisted, doctor approved, programs. At the time
I was very concerned about the stigma of "special" help being needed
for a borderline issue. I was already working with him with a fair amount of success.
Frequent recitation of "I think it's thunder" was a part of this.
Clearly, I'm not a professional.
Eventually I was swayed for a surprising reason. Once someone
evaluated him and identified some learning challenges, the expense
was then approved and covered by the state resulting in a dramatic
improvement of his average daily teacher/student ratio. Having
that direct kind of interaction with an educator and with the cost
picked up by the state, I had to admit, was an opportunity with the potential to benefit his overall
education. So, I accepted the plan. After a couple of
years of this assistance, all vestiges of trouble with speech were
hammered out. To this day, he remains the most careful speaker
of "T" related consonants you'll ever meet. I mention this to
point out the way that parents are highly encouraged financially and
as a perceived extra benefit to their child, to engage and follow
these sorts of standardized, state-supported remedies.
Fast forward about 5 years to the aforementioned incident and
the ensuing ADD shenanigans. The lad was
starting to have challenges dealing with a few kids he didn't
get along with. This led to an incident where he threatened to
hurt a kid who was pestering him and wouldn't desist. At the
time, he was also having some challenges remembering to turn in
homework and staying focused in class and while doing homework.
The school's response to the threatening incident was a carefully detailed and in some ways
legally ordained plan with few opportunities for parental dissent
without unacceptable consequences, i.e. do the plan or your kid will
be expelled or otherwise sanctioned. This defined path led
inexorably down the road to stimulant central.
 Evaluators of the sort that identify a tremendously large portion of
their charges to have forms of ADD / ADHD or other types of
disorders stayed true to
form and declared that he had a minor version of this kind of
problem. In the latest stats from the CDC updated in 2018, 64%
of children are found to have a form of mental disorder at some
point along the way.
Data And Statistics About ADHD by CDC. It might be worth
considering that if we are evaluating more than half of all kids as
being mentally defective, perhaps the thing that is really defective
is how we are evaluating them and/or how we are trying to raise and
teach them.
The doc said without much ado at all, the best way to
help was to put the boy on a form of Ritalin, or as I've come to
call it, "Kid Crack". I understand that chemically
crack is very different from meth derivatives. The reason I
call it kid crack is because from my point of view, this substance
is having the same effect on children that crack had on poor inner
city communities. In any case, it was this questionable
diagnosis and apparent auto-response to shove stimulants into the
child that led me to research
this subject and then into the ensuing arguments with nearly everybody
involved to try to
avoid letting them use my kid's brain as a chemistry set. I didn't keep
careful notes during that episode, so I don't have source links for
the things that I found available at the time, but
there was quite a lot of material out there even then suggesting that ADD/ADHD
was massively over-diagnosed and that the over-diagnosis was of obvious
financial and professional benefit for those tasked with making
these determinations.
Perhaps most worrisome, the long term effect
of using these things on kids is not really known. Bear in mind that the
chemistry being messed with here is the critical and still not
completely understood dopamine system which regulates behavioral motivation. Side effects of use of these
drugs like the rebound addiction/craving were a part of my concerns
along with general questions about long term health implications.
Ask yourself this, how long can you watch network TV and not see a class
action lawyer commercial about a harmful drug a decade or
more after it was in common use generating a lawsuit for wrongful death and
injury? I was convinced that the potential downsides of these
questionable drugs were being woefully under-considered.
A compromise was reached whereby my son took one
of the smallest standard doses of this drug for a few months with a
set date to evaluate and take him off of it if at all possible.
This plan was carried through, and at the first evaluation mark, we
took him off the drug without any obvious or major problems either
during or after the treatment. There's no way to know if he
achieved any benefit from the drug or if he just matured some more
and learned better how to handle challenging social situations and
paying attention in class. Luckily, moneys did change hands
betwixt state, education system, medical providers, and of course
pharmaceutical companies just as they'd planned so I'm sure this
evolution went into the positive outcome column in their ledgers.
This class of medication is broken into these categories, in case you
want to see if your kid's using one. Though remember, there are
constant slightly adjusted formulas coming along to help the
pharmaceutical companies to keep making a profit once the older
formulas go generic or brand names are tarnished by negative
outcomes.
- Methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta), a norepinephrine-dopamine
reuptake inhibitor
- Dexmethylphenidate (Focalin), the active dextro-enantiomer
of methylphenidate
- Mixed amphetamine salts (Adderall), a 3:1 mix of dextro/levo-enantiomers
of amphetamine
- Dextroamphetamine (Dexedrine), the dextro-enantiomer of
amphetamine
- Lisdexamfetamine (Vyvanse), a prodrug containing the
dextro-enantiomer of amphetamine
- Methamphetamine (Desoxyn), a potent but infrequently
prescribed amphetamine
So now for some detail on the potential harm. All crack for
kids essentially works the same way. The main side effects
with these drugs are:
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Sleep problems
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Decreased appetite
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Delayed growth
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Headaches and stomachaches
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Rebound (irritability when the medication wears
off)
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Tics
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Moodiness and irritability
Source:
childmind.org
If you take a close look at these
side effects, it should cause at least a raised eyebrow.
Delayed growth is a potential permanent impediment to the proper
knitting together of your kids body. While studies have
reported that there appears to be no long term effect on eventual
width and height for those using these drugs, the concern is really
with the hidden problems due to the way growth changes during
nutritional deficits brought on by one of the most pervasive side
effects of this class of drugs - lack of appetite. This is one
of those sorts of serious problems that may only reveal itself
decades down the road when these kids get in their 40's and we start
identifying statistical raised risks of things like cardio-vascular
problems, neurological problems, gastro intestinal problems, cancers
etc. An increase in tics isn't something that should be
ignored either, as this effect has mechanisms that are still not
understood involving the nervous system - i.e. the brain of your
kid. The symptom of rebound means the stuff is addictive.
Really, meth addictive? Who knew. The
primary symptoms of rebound when kids stop taking these drugs are irritability and aggressive feelings
- the very behaviors often involved with putting the kid on the drug
in the first place. A problematic situation when trying to
determine if taking a kid off the drug might be the way to go.
In the end, these stimulants arguably
interfere with a child's maturation to a level of development where they can
effectively harness and direct their own will power to control things
like irritability and aggressive feelings. Here is a larger
scope list of what meth and mini-meth can do for ya:
What finally sparked me to work up this page today was an article sharing
findings about negative long term health affects of these drugs on
bone density. So guess what. That broken arm your
daughter got skiing might have been your fault for giving her bone
density decreasing drugs while she was growing up. One
wonders how brittle this generation of crack kids will be when they
hit middle age and beyond?
If your concern levels have
been notched up to the point where you're going to dig deeper,
beware as you go looking for info on this topic. For every
actual study showing the real downsides of using these drugs, you
will find a huge amount of meta studies and/or propaganda pieces
disguised as authoritative science. Example:
What We Know About the Long-Term Effects of ADHD Medications -
by Caroline Miller / Childmind.org living doc.
Here are some decently reasoned and supported
articles. There are hundreds of others if you go looking:
My 2 cents: This stuff is prescribed to kids way too
often given both the known and uncertain risks. There is also
a good argument that for many kids, cessation of the use of this
drug exacerbates the very problem it is being used to mask the
symptoms of, keeping the child from maturing to a state where they
develop the power of will needed to focus their attention on their
own. Do some kids with very serious conditions benefit from
the use of this class of drugs? It seems pretty clear that for
some, the answer is yes and that this can be an effective
way to manage otherwise uncontrollable conditions.
My
recommendation is to consider the decision to put a kid on this
stuff very carefully, and make sure that you have truly exhausted
less potentially harmful remedies first. Make an effort to dedicate
time to working on steadily more complex and involved projects
encouraging your youngster to harness their natural curiosity and
boisterous energies to motivate rather than interfere with focus.
Take a
close look in the mirror and make sure you're not using kid crack as
a quick fix homework helper instead of taking the time to be an
engaged parent. When was the last time you actually sat down
and did an entire homework assignment with junior?
How was focus level doing during this endeavor - is the stuff too
dull, too confusing, too preachy? Make sure you are taking
this into account when you are making this irrevocable gamble
with your child's development.
If an "authority" is telling you that your kid needs this drug to keep up
in class or finish their homework because they have trouble
focusing, really take a moment to consider your child. In the
case of my son, even during the nadir of his struggles, he would
spend hours at a time building lego landscapes, playing Minecraft,
and engaging in various other high focus immersive activities. If you witness
your child engage in complex, creative activities they enjoy and
display remarkable focus, I'd suggest that the problem may not be
biological or chemical, but rather one of converting motivations to
the "required" activities by promoting the will power to delay
gratification saving the fun stuff until after the required work is
done. Getting drugs for your kid is easy. Being a good
parent isn't. Look in that mirror one last time and make sure
the lack of focus isn't your own.
Last but not least, if you've done all of that and are convinced
stimulants are the way to go. Make sure to establish and abide
by clear parameters starting with lower dosages and only increasing
as needed. Evaluate the overall benefit provided by the
treatment at frequent intervals, ensuring that the off-drug testing
is done for long enough periods to legitimately evaluate, always
with the inclination to conclude the treatment if the benefits no
longer outweigh the considerable and somewhat uncertain risks. 1st Image:
ADHD by Psyc3330w11 (CC2.0)
Link
2nd Image: Fidget Spinner by MichalPL (CC4.0)
Link
3rd Image: Meth Family by American Council On
Science And Health (Fair Use)
Link
4th Image: Effects Of Meth by Mikael Häggström
(Public Domain)
Link
The War On Boys
A closely related question to overprescription of stimulants is
whether one of the reasons for this is a failure of the
education system to effectively educate boys. Almost three
times more boys are diagnosed with ADHD and put on these drugs
than girls. (ADHD
Statistics by Additude updated 18JAN19). Instead of harnessing the rough and tumble
hands-on physically interactive tendency of boys that results in
their attention wandering in the dull safe-space of the classroom, it
appears the entire system is geared to snuff these restless impulses
out. And one of the favorite and most lucrative ways this is
accomplished, is with the use of methylphenidates.
I have come to believe that this mass chemical manipulation of a generation of kids will have long term harmful effects and that some of
those effects are already contributors to things like
increased crime rates, inability for young men in particular to
pursue successful careers, suicide rate increases particularly among
boys and men, and probably all manner of other
socio-economic repercussions.
Society is in a cock
chopping mood with 3rd and 4th wave feminism having established a strangle
hold on academia and government policy using a cherry picked fact
twisting narrative about the supposed harmful effects of toxic
masculinity. What they are accomplishing is wrecking a
generation of boys and walking back social progress which had
already, for the most part, arrived at the fair and logical notion
that a person should be exclusively judged and be given
opportunities on the basis of their capabilities, their track
record, and
the content of their character. Not by their immutable
characteristics such as whether they have a Y chromosome in the
cells of their body.
Unfortunately facts have had little role to play in this
area. The psychological mechanisms
employed to erect a wall of ignorance around faithful feministas are
astonishing to behold. If your argument is crap, shut down
discussion, it's the only way not to lose the argument. This
report is just one of numerous examples clearly demonstrating a
lack of basic knowledge among the most vocal of feminist
activists seeking to punish the opposite gender for perceived
wrongdoing: (Lauren
Southern Clashes With Feminists At SlutWalk - by Rebel Media
09JUN15).
The Y Chromosome Attention Deficiency Fallacy:
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Mike Rowe - The Skills Gap - by Mike Rowe 16APR17.
Not strictly relevant but here anyway, Mike's take on vocational
craftsmanship and the stupidly low status our society places
upon these skills compared to the vast armies of arrogant white
collar ponces churned out by today's academia who invent,
create, and fix essentially nothing their entire lives.
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Why Schools Are Failing Our Boys - by Jennifer Fink 19FEB15.
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War On Boys - by PragerU 19MAY14.
 The movie
Red Pill is particularly effective at
demonstrating the vindictive nastiness gripping 3rd+
wave feminists. Tucker Carlson has also
bravely done an excellent series of segments on this topic as well.
Some argue that our society has effectively raised a generation of
deranged tweaker beta cuck manlings. I would argue that
there's plenty of manly guys still getting it done outside the
limelight. They don't have time for this erudite nonsense, and wouldn't waste such
time on these cackling hens even if they had it.
Not unlike other historical antinatalist movements, hardcore
feminism appears to have achieved it's climax upon the rigid
pinnacle of their story arc. Graphically speaking of course.
The feministas are finding themselves increasingly under a banner
unable to pass along to their lack of progeny their enthusiastic
opinions about the intrinsic wickedness of all men. They have resorted to
doing so by wresting control of the public education
system, general academia and of course mainstream media. That
is where the fight needs to be taken to inject some healthy world
views back into society.
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Do Men Need To Check Their Privilege? - by Christina Hoff Sommers / American Enterprise Institute 18NOV15.
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Misogynistic Media Twist Male Suicide Rates Into A Women’s Issue
- by Rebel Media 02JUL17 - In Canada men have 3 times the rate of
suicide, feminism isn't to blame right?
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Men Falling Behind As Fathers Disappear - by Tucker 30MAR18.
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Men In America Final Episode - Debunking the narrative that
girl's thrive when boys fail. Finishes with an interview
with Christina Hoff Sommers 28MAR18.
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Suicide Bomb - by soph 23FEB19.
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Don't think there's a real problem and it's all
just whinging? Here's some stats mostly from the
aforementioned Tucker Carlson series:
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Women Are Far Outperforming Men In Education
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Associate's Degrees - 62% Women
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Bachelor's Degrees - 57% Women
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Master's Degrees - 60% Women
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Doctorates - 52% Women
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For every 100 black men achieving a college
degree 230 black women got one.
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For every 100 hispanic men achieving a
college degree 211 hispanic women got one.
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70% of all master's degrees going to a black
person went to women.
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4 times the number of privately funded
scholarships exist for women compared to those for men.
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This year (2018) there are more than 2
million more women than men enrolled in college.
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93% of workplace fatalities are men.
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4/5 of suicides are men.
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Men are sentenced to 63% more prison-time
for the same crime as women.
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Men have 5 years less life expectancy
compared to women.
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75% of American homeless are men
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80% of single fathers in the US do not share
child custody.
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95% of American prisoners are men
1st Image: Third Wave Femmes by Rob Kall (CC2.0)
Link
2nd Image: Manly Carpenter by Alfred T. Palmer
(Public Domain)
Link
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Welcome
to Crack for Kids and the War on Boys - A look at the
tendency to try to achieve better child rearing through
chemistry and the potential harms from the sheltered safe-spaces
being used to protect the immature from hurt feelings.
Do these practices create an environment that fails to challenge
and toughen up a generation of kids and are these problems
particularly harmful to boys?
Sleazy
P. Martini:
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