Mr. Griggs bought a small pharmaceutical company that produced a weight-loss pill named Obetrol. Suspecting that it might treat a relatively unappreciated condition then called attention deficit disorder, and found in about 3 to 5 percent of children, he took “A.D.D.” and fiddled with snappy suffixes. He cast a word with the widest net.And what's to stop the trend toward prescribing it for everyone… to take for the rest of their life?
All.
For A.D.D.
A.D.D. for All.
Adderall.
“It was meant to be kind of an inclusive thing,” Mr. Griggs recalled.
Lots more at the link, including the 6 question test used to see if you're likely to have A.D.H.D. I scored 14, which put me in the "likely" category, even though on a daily basis, I lock into the work I need and want to do and continue with great concentration for many hours, often to great excess. But there was no question about that, and no questions that subtracted points, so I got 4 points for saying I "very often" "fidget or squirm" when I "have to sit down for a long time." Now, I don't fidget when I'm working on my own reading or writing, but I didn't think about that, because the question said "when you have to sit down," and when I'm doing my own work, I don't have to sit down. I can get up whenever I want, and I often motorize my desk into the standing position. I only have to sit down at a meeting or when stuck in a vehicle on a long trip, so in those situations I do rebel against the constraint.
But obviously, I could get this drug prescribed easily. And anyone can. Is it still a weight-loss pill? Is that part of what's going on with Adderall?
Posts
49 comments:
I used Dektol for developing black and white prints, and D-76 for film, until I found Accufine did a better job on Tri-x.
They must have a D-77 by now.
I Couldn't Get Through this Post Because I was Uncontrollably Fidgeting and Squirming, Fidgeting and Squirming, I am Tapping My Foot Relentlessly and Twitching My Shoulder (the Left One). It is Like their are Eels of Anxiety Traversing My Body, They Wrap around my Chest and Arms and it Feels Good to Shake Them Off, Them and the Tiny Spiders. I Want to Finish the Post But QWERTY, I Just Want to Type QWERTY Over and Over and say it In My Head: QWERTY. I Find Myself Saying it Aloud, I Can't Help it, I Must, and The Phrase Repeats and Circles So I Stand Up and Walk in Small Circles, Small Circles-QWERTY-Small-Circles-Eels.
I Mean, QWERTY Must Mean Something, It Cannot be Just a Matter of Proximity, If I Say it Enough it Becomes Meaningfull, then Nothing, Then Meaningful Again. Jazz Hands.
Question 7. When you have a task to do, how often do you find yourself reading althouse and taking pointless quizzes?
(Add and additional 4 points if that is the case now)
I Find That When I Tap My Fingertips Together it Feels Good to Continue Tapping Then Together. Am I Feeling My Right Hand Tapping My Left or My Left Hand Tapping My Right, I Can't Tell, I Try to Concentrate to Tell and I Am Sending Myself Morse Code That I Could No Doubt Decipher if I Wasn't Distracted By the Tiny Spiders.
I hear they're coming out with a new form of the drug called Puffadderall, an inhalant version, for people who keep forgetting to breathe.
I Attempt to Distract Myself From Being Distracted: Maybe There's a New Post, Maybe there's a New Post NOW, I Will Check Again and Again. Maybe It Will Be There after I Unlock and Lock the Door, Unlock and Lock the Door, Wiggle the Knob: Locked But I Have to Unlock it Again to Prove that itwas Locked and There I am, Locking and Unocking the Door But it is Now in the Wrong Order and I Cannot Sttop Midway, That Wouldn't Be Acceptable.
Remember the questions are written by doctors and not by lawyers.
I would even go so far as to say the pharma companies have a hand in writing the questions so they would naturally skew towards inclusion.
There IS a New Post! If I Think It It Happens, I Am Overwhelmed By the Sensation, I Stand Up and Sit Down and Stand Up and Sit Down. Dowd. Dowd-Dowd-Dowd: It is Fun To Say. I Findy I Can Say "Dowd-Dowd-Dowd-da-da-Dowd-Dowd" to the Rhythm of "Ice Ice baby". Maybe I Will Look Up Vanilla Ice, Later, I Will Do it Later, I Will Remind Myself But After Dowd QWERY Comes Back and if I Say QWERTY in a Robotic Voice I Am an Astronaut.
There is Yet Another New Post and I am Making it Happen, All the Fidgeting and squirming and Twitching Has a Reason, It is Felt By the Universe, But the New Post is On Surveillance and Now I Can't Stop Thinking About How They Are All Watching Me, They Don't Stop, They Watch Me When I Read and They Watch the Shoes I But, Three pairs the Same, Three pairs the Same Always.
ADD - ADHD is out of "Brave New World." The underlying idea is to make docile pupils - and later docile citizens - that will not get restless and upset the established order of the bureaucracy - first the school administration, later the government.
I Mean, Why Wouldn't You Buy Three Pairs of Shoes in the Same Style? If You Really Really Like Them You Have a back-Up Pair, and if You Have a back-Up Pair a Back=up Pair for the Back-Up Pair Would Just Be Prudent. You Step Out the Door and Step Into Dog Poop with Your Rigt Shoe: You Have Another Right Shoe Ready to Go. I Mean, You Can't Wear a Shoe That Has Had Dog Poop on it Ever Again, Even if You Clean it Off the Surface It Is Still There, You CanSense It. But You Can't Wear the Left Shoe of the First Pair with the Right Shoe of the Second Pair -- That is Just Wrong. They Are Not the Pair as the Pair Was Intended, So You Are Already Wearing the Second Pair. And If You Step in Dog Poop Again -- Either Shoe, it Doesnt't Matter -- Well, There is Still Dog Poop Out There, or Cat Poop, or Dirty Leaves with Worms and Rotting Food. In fact, it Might Be a Good Idea to Wrap Tour Shoes in Saran Wrap When You Are Not Indoors.
I Need to Count My Shoes Now. It Has to End Up in an Even Number or I Must Count Again. If it Still Ends Up Odd I Will No Doubt Spend the Day Trying to Determinate the Whereabouts of the Missing Shoe. I Mean, I Wouldn't Buy Just One Shoe All By Itself, That Would Be Crazy.
Thirteen Shoes: This Certainly a Bad Omen. I Will Put Them into Piles of Left Shoes and Right Shoes, Then Match Them By Style and Back-Up Status. When I Identify the Thirteenth Shoe I Will Dispose of it Promptly. I Cannot Dispose of it in the House: Just because it Is in the Waste basket Doesn't mean it Isn't Still There, the House of Thirteen Shoes. I Will take it Outside and Bury it With the Others.
Based on my responses to the quiz, the quizmaster tells me I "may or may not have" ADHD. Huh.
I Don't Know What Happened. I Buried the Unlucky Thirteenth Shoe and Came back Inside and Counted the Rest to Find Peace of Mind But Now I Only Have Eleven. I Must Dig Another Hole, Quickly.
After Burying the Eleventh Shoe I Have Come back and Counted My Remaining Shoes. Ten. Relief. Only It Seems I Now Have Four Right Shoes and Six Left Shoes. I Must Dig Two More Holes.
I Have Buried the Extraneous Two Left Shoes But Now -- When I Count the Holes -- I Discover They Are an Uneven Number. How Did This Happen? I Have Been So Careful, but There it is: an Uneven Number of Holes. I Must Go Through My Socks in Hopes of an Odd Number So That I Can Bury back into Balance.
What Hagar said.
In the mid '90's I became concerned about the increased use of Ritalin prescribed primarily for boys in an effort make them more manageable in the classroom.
The school that my niece's oldest (10 years old) daughter attends is recommending med's for ADD.
The 25 year old man down the street has been taking Adderall since his teens.
Will this proliferation of 'mood'(?) drugs, especially among young people, inhibit or destroy natural creativity?
I Cannot Even LOOK at a Shoe Right Now; I Cannot, I Won't, I Refuse. Under the Bed With Them. I am Barefoot and Distraught.
Put shoes by mirror.
There used to be a patent medicine named Hadacol. Some said is was because they hadacol it something.
beta3K, QWERTY is one of the old gods, a friend of Cthulhu and Nyarlethotep. DO NOT invoke him! Uh Oh,too late.
Adderall = Biphetamine = speed = Black Beauties = Black bombers
Back in the 50 I lived on the road for a year as a hippie. NYC, Albany, San Francisco, Laguna Beach.
I did copious amounts of all kinds of drugs. I am probably lucky that I had a high draft number and joined the Navy. I would have been dead long ago otherwise.
I particularly liked speed. Methamphetamine, Benzidrene, Dexadrine but the best was called Biphatamine. Big black pharmaceutical capsules. Take two and fly.
Adderall is what biphetamine is now called.
We rail, correctly, about the meth epidemic and then stuff our kids with its almost exact pharmaceutical equivalent.
Ann, you said you were a fan of Breaking Bad. Bear in mind that all he is doing is making an illicit version of (almost) Adderall.
Parents, if your kid is on Adderall stop them today. You are turning them into a meth head.
John Henry
John Henry
60's not 50
And for your viewing pleasure, a safety message from Canned Heat:
"SPEED KILLS!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjFsXHWM4Ig
"Your mind might think its flying, baby
On those little pills
But you ought to know it's dying, 'cause
Speed kills"
John Henry
Earlier in this century I took a class in Special Education for my MS degree. My research paper was on Ritalin for ADD.
I interviewed a special ed teach in Sweden. There, if ADD is suspected, a social worker has to make an initial diagnosis.
Then a psychiatrist (psychologist?) has to confirm the diagnosis.
Then, a specially licensed psych, of which there are only a few in the whole country (10 or so?) has to see the kid and confirm the diagnosis.
Then, the Secretary of Health has to authorize prescribing Ritalin.
Needless to say, they have a very low rate of medication for ADD in Sweden.
John Henry
As of 2009 A Full List of ADHD Medications
If Althouse were to Post a Photo of a Shoe it Had Better Be of Two Shoes, and Not Two Individual Shoes But the Shoes That Were Meant to Be a Pair. If the Shoes are facing the Viewer the Left Shoe Should Be on the Right Side of the Photo; if We are Looking at the Back of the Shoes, or From Above the Shoes, then the Left Shoe Should Be on the Left. If the Shoes are on a Diagonal Axis Orient the Above Criteria in Accordance with the Angle. That is How You Photograph Shoes.
The Shoes Should Be Parallel to Each Other. It is Only Proper.
If Their are Laces the Laces Should be Tucked in. That is Their Home.
I scored a 23. Does that mean I'm going to die?
Very much like Ann, but not quite as bad - scored 12, which is rated possible. Sometimes when I am not under a time constraint, I have a hard time focusing in. And I do things like reading this blog. But then I do settle down, and can sit still for many hours at a time working on a project (routinely 4+ hours! but have gone up to maybe 16). Realistically, I am not ADD, because I can settle down when I need to, but I would expect a great number of people would run afoul of this test.
Shoes are Meant to Be Parallel. I Cannot Stress This Enough. QWERTY is Meant to be in a Row and Shoes are Meant to Be Parallel. This is Only Right.
UIOP{} is the Other Shoe to QWERTY. It Is Not as Compelling to Say Over and Over: it Requires Dedication to Counteract QWERTY.
My daughter was diagnosed with ADD by a shrink, but wouldn't take the meds as they freaked her out.
After flailing about with trying to find ways to control her problems, we were referred to a clinic affiliated with a local medical school that specializes in ADD, and non-drug treatments.
After an interview with the doctor in charge and one of the staff PhD psychologists, they said she didn't have ADD, but had a panic disorder. In their experience panic disorders are often mistaken for ADD.
She got a prescription for pills for short-term use. They then used a combination of biofeedback and talk therapy to teach her how to stop the attacks from taking control. They use similar treatment regiments to help ADD patients and reduce use of Adderall and Ritalin.
One of the things about ADHD is it is said to have a higher incidence in the US than in Europe. One explanation is that the kind of people that drop everything and head for a new start on a new continent are probably disproportionately afflicted with it.
Took My Pills. All better.
All better - All better - All better - All better - All better - All better - All better.
Seven.
All better.
Eight.
All better - All better.
QWERY.
Dang.
I hope Betamax don't have no assault rifles.
There's a Door in My Head That I Never Open. I Know What Lives Behind the Door. I Could Never Write About It.
My students seem to think Adderall is a smart pill. All it does is make them obsessively go over the same small chunk of material over and over.
I think every visit to a doctor adds a medication to your life. They don't feel safe from a lawsuit unless that happens. But if there were more over-medication lawsuits then maybe we could get some balance back. Right now lawsuits are all about disregarding symptoms of disease; we need lawsuits about disregarding symptoms of over-medication.
My doctor is hard to get drugs out of. I have +240 cholesterol, my fasting blood glucose when I saw the doctor last was 108, I have terrible problems sleeping. She hasn't suggested statins or blood sugar follow up and she refused to give me a scrip for Ambien.
themightypuck said...
My doctor is hard to get drugs out of. I have +240 cholesterol, my fasting blood glucose when I saw the doctor last was 108, I have terrible problems sleeping. She hasn't suggested statins or blood sugar follow up and she refused to give me a scrip for Ambien.
12/15/13, 12:56 PM
Find another doctor.
People say that the goal is to medicate kids and make them calm, but that just ain't so. The drugs in question are stimulants, and giving them to most kids makes them about as calm as giving them caffeine or cocaine would.
If giving the kid caffeine makes them calm, instead of hyper, that's sort of unusual, no? Almost like there's something weird in their brain chemistry...
Althouse, back in the days I was raising young children, I had a friend who hated the idea of putting her son on adhd/add meds. To the point that at the beginning of one school year she didn't start him on them again, thinking the teachers might not notice, but they did.
One of the traits she talked about was that her boy could watch tv or read for extended periods of time because it interested him.
I believe my sister would have been prescribed meds, like two of our female cousins, if my sister had been worse, or if we'd had more money, or if my mom hadn't worked, or if she didn't have me as an older sister to bounce off of :) We were very close and did things together like hunt for fossils and read poetry.
Betamax3000 needs Adderall
Invisible handicaps get little respect. Mental handicaps get little respect. Social handicaps get little respect. ADHD is all three. It's treatable. The correct treatment is not always stimulant medication (but is usually related to doing things that mimic the taking of stimulants.)
I was first diagnosed with ADHD in 1966; and was told that since I was on the Dean's List of the Honors College the tests were wrong. Opps. Forty years later I was diagnosed again, and the drugs do make a difference in my life (not stimulants, btw, I can't take those.) Looking back, I can see periods of my life when it didn't affect me at all; that's when I was running 15-20 miles a day, and was smoking two or three packs of cigarettes a day. Nicotine is a stimulant; it's now being tested in non-cigarette form as an ADHD medication. The exercise alone might have been enough.
The amount of both incorrect understanding and ignorance about ADHD, in both the public and the medical profession, is astonishing to me. Of course, I have a reason to learn about it. It is both over-diagnosed (many things can look like ADHD at first glance) and under-diagnosed (some people are only lightly affected and don't have the hyperactivity facet of the disorder; they're likely to fall through the cracks and be missed, perhaps to be found near retirement age when the brain changes in working memory make the ADHD more apparent.)
The drugs are not a cure. What they can do is enable a child to learn things that other children are learning automatically about social and executive skills. When the drugs are then removed, some -- not all -- of that ability to perform as the patient desires will remain.
That quiz ... I gave it to my business partner and my wife to fill out about me as a part of my diagnosis as an adult. Without prompting, they each drew another column of answers and gave me "6's" on each question.
It's really mis-named. It's attention control disorder. There is an apparent deficit of attention, but it's because there's poor control of attention. Johny's unbreakable focus on the game is an ADHD symptom, he can't control his focus.
It appears to be a mis-regulation of the dopamine re-uptake mechanism which doesn't allow dopamine to remain in synapses long enough for the neuron to register the presence of the dopamine. Stimulants interfere in that re-uptake process (along with other things.)
Back in the late 50s and early 60s, doctors didn't call it ADHD. They called it 'nerves'. For it they recommended smoking. One of the girls I dated in high school smoked for just that reason. I started smoking because her kisses tasted bad otherwise. I quit after twenty years. I don't know if she did or not. I could ask her, she's on Facebook.
I can't believe you goaded me into using my last free monthly NYT article read for this story. It's only 1/2 way through the month. Now I'm depressed. Not to mention that use I made looking at that story with the really bad art.
Of course I didn't do the quiz honestly, because I didn't want to see a bunch of sidebar ad's encouraging me to see my Dr to get a prescription for my ADD for the next month.
Great content ...Thanks for your excellent information, the content are quiet exciting. I will be looking forward to your next publish.
shoulder exercises - Learn the best rotator cuff exercises, information and tips to successfully complete your rotator cuff therapy naturally.
Very amazing publish. I just came upon your web page and preferred to say that I've truly knowledgeable purchasing your sites. In any situation I will be deciding upon up for your feed and I wish you make again very soon!
shoulder exercises - Learn the best rotator cuff exercises, information and tips to successfully complete your rotator cuff therapy naturally.
Post a Comment