[Sca-cooks] candy and hostages

grizly grizly at mindspring.com
Sun Aug 6 15:47:19 PDT 2006


-----Original Message-----
I've been watching this thread but not commenting.  As an individual with a
mundane master's degree in counseling and having worked with ADHD kids in
the past, as well as being the mother of a mildly ADHD child, I have to say
that ADHD is one of the most misdiagnosed problems that I've seen.  Many
children who are diagnosed with ADHD are just active, energetic "normal"
children who have been given the diagnosis because a teacher, parent, or
someone with authority has pushed it.  <<<SNIP>>>

I agree that there may be an element of social learning if the parent is
truely ADHD and does not take their medication, but in the case of actual
valid ADHD diagnoses within a family where the patients all take their
medication and function normally, social learning wouldn't be an issue. > >
> >


My Master's of Science Degree is in Psychology, and my professional
experience is in Marriage and Family Counseling as well as working with
Emotion/Behavior issues with low functioning 10-17 yr olds in
Adventure-outdoor setting.  What is the saddest thing for me to see is the
all-too-frequent identifying the acting out child as the patient when the
child is siomply the "alarm" for bigger or different issues in the family.
The systems model I ascribe to, and live much of my life by, suggests that
behaviors are often the product of complex interwoven interrelationships
among people and groups and sub-groups.  People would be amiazed how quickly
some children change their behavior patterns when they don't feel
subconscious pressure to act out to take the heat off mom and dad's strained
marriage ("yell at me instead of each other"), for example.  No drugs
needed.

Social learning in a systems model is always an issue as the family system
in which we grow is how people develop concepts of acceptable versus
unacceptable behaviors as well as basic coping skills.  As we get a broader
and more interconnected relationships with other groups, the social learning
becomes more complicated, and associations and reinforcement/punishment
paradigms get way more involved.  All this is not at all to discount
physiological and endocrinological influences.  The medical model by
definition leaves little room for any save pharmacology as a resort. ADHD
does not automatically equal psychotropic materials prescrbed to and
ingested by adolescents or pre-adolescents, or adults for that matter.
After all, ADD/ADHD in the DSM IV is pretty much a description of a cluster
of behaviors & symptoms rather than a description of an organic malady like
you will find with schizophrenia or tumors.

I want also tyo make sure I am not misspeaking; I personally do not at all
lump all matters into one basket either way, but do advocate for starting
with an informed and inspired look at the broader interrelationship of the
whole system before trotting a young child off to the doctor for high
powered psychotropics.  Same for adults, when it gets down to it.  Sure
drugs are simpler, but don't do anything to adress the relationships that
are affected by the whole picture.

niccolo difrancesco
(not a tree hugger, but a believer in the power of relatinships to tell us
the core issues and to then affect meaningful changes)
Adler to Skinner to Jung . . . all found the power of human relatedness



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