Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School
Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School
By ALAN SCHWARZ
Published: October 9, 2012
CANTON, Ga. — When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall.
The pills boost focus and impulse control in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools.
“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”
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Dr. Anderson’s instinct, he said, is that of a “social justice thinker” who is “evening the scales a little bit.” He said that the children he sees with academic problems are essentially “mismatched with their environment” — square pegs chafing the round holes of public education. Because their families can rarely afford behavior-based therapies like tutoring and family counseling, he said, medication becomes the most reliable and pragmatic way to redirect the student toward success.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
you are including medical issues. I went my first 35 years undiagnosed as bipolar. For me, life on the meds is better than off.
But yes, it is also very good to adapt to the individual wherever possible. We are not all cookie cutter people. 
In many cases the "disorder" is only a disorder because of the mismatch between the child's need for stimulation and the school environment.
"Classic" ADD is related to excessive boredom, too little activation in the frontal regions of the cortex. The stimulant drugs "wake up" the cortex and decrease the child's tendency to either act out ("bounce off the walls"
to get stim or to "space out," daydream or whatever as the cortex drops into a lowered activation level.
On the other hand, some kids act out due to overstimulation. When they get the stimulants, their behaviro problems cease too, but mostly because of a sort of freeze-up due to massive overstimulation. These are the kids who really don't like their meds.
There are many alternatives to medication, ranging from putting the kids into a Montessori-school environment with lots of opportunity for self-regulated stim, to hooking them up to eeg devices and training them through eeg biofeedback to activate their own cortexes. But these are all expensive, and unavailable to the poor.
