Tara Parker-Pope has a post at the NYT titled “Attention Disorders Can Take a Toll on Marriage.” Here is an excerpt:
Does your husband or wife constantly forget chores and lose track of the calendar? Do you sometimes feel that instead of living with a spouse, you’re raising another child?
Your marriage may be suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
An A.D.H.D. marriage? It may sound like a punch line, but the idea that attention problems can take a toll on adult relationships is getting more attention from mental health experts. In a marriage, the common symptoms of the disorder — distraction, disorganization, forgetfulness — can easily be misinterpreted as laziness, selfishness, and a lack of love and concern.
The Washington Post has an excellent article titled “Study may show whether neurofeedback helps people with ADHD and other disorders,” which talks about the high costs, potential benefits, and controversy surrounding the use of neurofeedback, specifically for psychiatric disorders like ADHD. The article identifies a government funded study currently being conducted by the the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to test if in fact the use of neurofeedback can help those who suffer from this type of diagnoses and is worth the cost, which should be published in the Summer of 2010. Here are a couple of excerpts from the article:
Ohio State University child psychiatrist L. Eugene Arnold, the NIMH project’s director, says the institute agreed to fund the study as a result of new interest by the influential national advocacy group Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. CHADD receives about one-third of its revenues from pharmaceutical firms and historically has vigorously supported medication as a first-line treatment for ADHD. Yet in recent years the group has grown more willing to consider nondrug therapies.
“A lot of CHADD’s members wanted to know about neurofeedback,” says Arnold, who is on the group’s advisory board. “The claims looked pretty good, but there wasn’t enough data to make the recommendation.”
and:
Undergoing neurofeedback demands an extraordinary commitment of time and money. A typical therapist will recommend at least 40 half-hour sessions to treat ADHD and charge as much as $100 per session. Practitioners also commonly require a diagnostic “brain map” at the start of treatment, adding as much as $900. And — with so many questions about neurofeedback still unanswered by mainstream research — none of this is normally covered by insurance. (Some plans, including Kaiser Permanente, do cover biofeedback for stress relief.)
(EEG generated image above found here.)
We want to post a research study released back in September 2009 that generated some buzz by Dave E. Marcotte and Sara Markowitz titled “A Cure for Crime? Psycho-Pharmaceuticals and Crime Trends.” There is a lot to consider in this research practically, morally, ethically, and from public policy and clinical treatment perspectives. It makes sense that treating certain psychiatric disorders with psycho-pharmaceuticals can have a relationship to crime trends. What the implications are for a drug-oriented approach to addressing crime is up for debate. This post is one in a series that is meant to help people see how our perceptions of continuously rising crime rates match with reality. Here is an excerpt of the abstract:
In this paper we consider possible links between the advent and diffusion of a number of new psychiatric pharmaceutical therapies and crime rates. We describe recent trends in crime and review the evidence showing mental illness as a clear risk factor both for criminal behavior and victimization. We then briefly summarize the development of a number of new pharmaceutical therapies for the treatment of mental illness which diffused during the “great American crime decline.” We examine limited international data, as well as more detailed American data to assess the relationship between crime rates and rates of prescriptions of the main categories of psychotropic drugs, while controlling for other factors which may explain trends in crime rates. We find that increases in prescriptions for psychiatric drugs in general are associated with decreases in violent crime, with the largest impacts associated with new generation antidepressants and stimulants used to treat ADHD. Our estimates imply that about 8.5 percent of the recent crime drop was due to expanded mental health treatment.
In previous posts we looked at how we are distracted as a culture and the challenges and misconceptions associated with multitasking and stimulants. To continue exploring this theme of distraction, concentration/focus and the idea of multitasking as a measure of our success NPR has a post titled “Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again.” Here is an excerpt:
Don’t believe the multitasking hype, scientists say. New research shows that we humans aren’t as good as we think we are at doing several things at once. But it also highlights a human skill that gave us an evolutionary edge.
As technology allows people to do more tasks at the same time, the myth that we can multitask has never been stronger. But researchers say it’s still a myth — and they have the data to prove it.
Humans, they say, don’t do lots of things simultaneously. Instead, we switch our attention from task to task extremely quickly.
(See Jeff Soto’s artwork here.)
Sphere has an article by David Knowles titled “Medical Marijuana Prescribed to Kids with ADHD.” Here is an excerpt:
In California, the state with the nation’s most permissive medical marijuana law, several doctors say that some children with attention deficit hyperacitivty disorder, or ADHD, are being treated with marijuana — a fact that has sparked a heated debate.
Reliable figures on the use of marijuana to treat ADHD are hard to come by, as reported by The New York Times. Though California says it has issued more than 36,000 medical marijuana cards since 2004, the state does not compile statistics on prescriptions for specific conditions, such as ADHD. And many doctors and patients are reluctant to talk about it. Still, experts say such prescriptions are becoming more common as the number of pot dispensaries and doctors prescribing marijuana continues to grow.
And not everyone is happy about it.
“Let me count the ways in which prescribing marijuana for teens with ADHD is a bad idea,” said Stephen Hinshaw, professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. Marijuana, Hinshaw said, is a “cognitive disorganizer” that produces roughly the same effect in users as those associated with ADHD.
Wray Herbert at We’re Only Human has a post titled “A Case for the Distractible Toddler.” Here is an excerpt:
Toddlers are distractible. Their minds flit constantly here and there, and they have a terrible time concentrating on even the most stimulating project. They might be fascinated by a colorful new toy, but only until the next best toy comes along, or the next or the next.
This can be maddening for parents, especially for those of us who want to give our kids a leg up on getting into a premier university. Parents often try to teach their toddlers self-control and mental discipline, to reign in their impulsivity. Increasingly, pre-school teachers do this, too. They see inattention and lack of focus as academic problems to be fixed.
But should we really be trying to teach self-control? Is there perhaps a reason why toddlers are such space cadets? Psychologists are beginning to raise these questions, and some are even suggesting that it may be detrimental to the developing brain to push it toward maturity too soon. Indeed, children’s impulsivity may be an essential tradeoff, one that allows the young mind to learn social conventions and language.
University of Pennsylvania neuropsychologist Sharon Thompson-Schill and her colleagues study a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. This is basically the part of the brain that gives us mental agility and self-control; it filters out irrelevant information and allows us to focus. It is also the last part of the brain to mature and become fully functional. It lags behind the rest of the brain until about age four.
As we have suggested before, redefining developmental milestones for children and adolescents as we learn more about the brain will go a long way toward helping us work with them as they are, not as we want them to be. This push to get children to focus at such early ages and our frustration with them when they can’t needs to be grounded in why this is happening. The view of children over the past few decades as mini-adults who must be hyper-performers and mature beyond their years is in direct contrast to who they are and how they learn and develop. Studies like the one presented here can hopefully play a role in calming parents and educators down so that a child can be allowed to act their age.
Phillip Dawdy at Furious Seasons has posted a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry which states there is “no evidence of pre-adolescent mania.” Check out the post including the interview he did with Psychology Today about this subject matter which is a must read. Here is an excerpt from the interview:
To me, you can lay all of this squarely at the feet of the pharma companies, which had a slew of newish drugs come online in the 80s and 90s and wanted them taken by as many humans as possible—consequences for the patients be damned—and a crew of child psychiatrists at Harvard/MGH who see deeply-flawed, ill-for-life children where other psychiatrists might see personality disorders and issues that will burn out over time. The pharma companies and the Harvard crew worked hand-in-hand to bring America a generation of ADHD kids and bipolar children, and their profound influence can be seen in the millions of children and teens who now carry lifetime diagnoses and take gobs of psychotropic drugs each day, often to their detriment.
That may sound extreme to some people, but it’s worth noting that the rest of the world has not embraced these diagnostic and treatment paradigms—except Britain, where there was an initial embrace of ADHD and stimulants, but where there’s now a significant backlash. Meanwhile, in France and Italy ADHD is rarely diagnosed and it’s difficult to see where French and Italian culture have suffered as a result. As for bipolar disorder in kids (meaning pre-teens and younger), it’s simply not an issue in the rest of the world. The bipolar child is a purely American phenomenon, as big a metaphor of our times as credit swaps, subprime loans, and government bailouts.
One of the central themes of this site, my research, and our work as an agency is identifying the ways in which psychiatric diagnoses are named and how they are treated by all of us, professionals and laypersons alike. This quest for insight and answers is why you see the naming and treating logo in childrens’ blocks in the banner above. Throughout these many posts we survey the progress being made on behalf of people who are truly suffering from mental disorders and where the harm is being done when too broad a net is being cast over our population in terms of who in fact has a mental illness and who does not. Why is this particular focus so important to us? The answer is that we have seen so much damage being done in the ways we name and treat each other and nowhere is this more apparent then in the rising tide of diagnosing mental disorders since the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) came into power, leading to the dramatic rise in psychiatric diagnoses and use of psychiatric medications. Read more…
Stanley Greenspan, M.D. has a book out titled Overcoming ADHD: Helping Your Child Become Calm, Engaged, and Focused–Without a Pill. We respect and track Dr. Greenspan’s approaches to helping children with developmental and learning disorders and encourage parents and professional to seek his work out. Read more…
