FDG
pathwise dependent
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2007
- Messages
- 5,903
- MBTI Type
- ENTJ
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- 7w8
Within the USA, and the the UK as well, the people who drink alchohol at a young age are much more likely to have AD/HD, and the same is true of other drugs, so clearly you can't explain it away with law differences between countries when there are differences within countries as well.
Cool, so people with ADHD are more likely to do stuff which is considered "socially unacceptable". I don't think we should give them amphetamines for this reason, they're more impulsive than the norm (by definition), thus they will try more activities. I can bet the first person who started a man-made fire was doing something extremely socially unacceptable.
The fact is, teen tobacco smoking is as general trend, worse in developed countries that don't diagnose or treat AD/HD as frequently as others. Of course the trend goes up and down between different decades within countries, why wouldn't it?
Ritalin use hasn't significantly gone up, while smoking has significantly gone down. At the very least, that means you can't connect smoking to lack of ritalin use, because we'd see a relationship between the two variables over a timespan of 20 years.
I said that other things will affect it as well, of course. However, the fact that studies have followed children who are medicated for AD/HD and children who aren't, and found that the ones who aren't medicated are much more likely to smoke or worse, strongly suggests if not proves, that if you medicated more of the children, fewer of them would smoke and other things, whatever the baseline happens to be at that time and in that place.
Sure, you medicate children and they become emotionless zombies, it's quite normal that they will be less likely to smoke. I think a good education is more important if you really want to prevent smoking; if they still want to smoke, well, we should accept that part of humanity likes to smoke. Giving medication because it leads to "appropriate" behavior is an Orwellian nightmare. Appropriate behavior is socially defined, working for more than 2 consecutive days is considered shameful in certain aborigenal communities, do you think they're to be diagnosed as ADHD? If a good percentage of people can't take the level of concetration required to function in this society, it means that we as a whole have failed, creating a community where there's an excessive focus on mindless work.
Statistically, they are disproportionately made up of people with AD/HD, yes. As are the morbidly obese within the USA (50%).
Obviously, if you're morbidly obese, your brain chemistry will be messed up. If I don't excercise for 2 weeks, I can feel that my ability to concentrate is lower; I can't even imagine how lower it'd be if I were morbidly obese.
Are you going to ignore a fact just because you don't like it? Also people with schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, personality disorders and mood disorders are much more likely to be drug abusers, but many of the people diagnosed with these actually turn out to have had AD/HD all along when studied
That means ADHD has an excessively broad definition, if a large percentage of the human population is characterized by a certain cerebral biochemistry, it's not a disease, it's variation.
which was either misdiagnosed as something else, or lead to something else. Do you reject the evidence that drug abusers have a much higher incidence of most mental disorders before developing their habit, or just that they have a higher incidence AD/HD specifically?
Well, there's no need to reject this evidence - drug abuse is obviously a way to self-medicate. I'm simply disputing the definition of ADHD: it's too broad, almost everyone I know could fit, except perhaps the most dutiful ISTJs. I'm not exaggerating. Every single person I know doesn't like to study for more than one hour straight (we end up doing it nonetheless, but we definitely don't like it); pauses often during work, falls asleep while studying something boring, can't work for 10 hours straight on homework, etc.
For most elementary aged children, I think it's more about them being put into a completely unsuitable environment and being expected to function like adults without a hitch.
Exactly. Our education is crap, I know too many smart people that are slightly hyperactive / don't like to sit down and read, thus ended up doing very poorly in high school, while a load of dumb people that are good at sitting down for hours and spitting back everything they have read a thousand times managed to get master's degrees.