In the world today it is estimated the nearly 15 million people suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), most of that is school aged children, with the exasperating ratio of one out of every four children being diagnosed. With this many youth of the world being effected, why then is there still such a stigma within the education system on how to handle these children. On June 4th in 1997, President Clinton signed into public law the amendment known as IDEA 97, this amendment is to provide all students with disabilities the right to free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment (Knoblauch & McLane, 1999). However, even with this law in place, students suffering from ADHD must fall within certain criteria in order for this law to cover them since they must …show more content…
Thus many students with ADHD end up suffering through school because of inadequate education for the teachers, administrators not having plans in place, little to no communication with parents, misdiagnosis of the child, even the believe that ADHD doesn’t exist. Teachers are not properly trained in how to deal with the rising amount of students suffering from ADHD today. The training is available but even then some teachers are making the choice to ignore them and not take the training that is available to them. Because of this factor some students are being labeled trouble makers with in the public school settings and forced to deal with bullying by both the educator and other students alike. Many studies have been performed on the knowledge teachers have about ADHD around the globe. In one such study conducted by the education association of South Africa (2015), they found that most teachers understood the general features that are associated with ADHD but not the symptoms, effects and
Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder, otherwise known as ADHD, is the most common psychiatric condition effecting 9.5% of school-aged children in the United States (intuniv, 2013). If the disorder goes untreated, it will cause more long-term side effects and difficulties for the individual as an adult. Adults who have this condition face several adversities in every day life, such as impulsive behavior, low self-esteem and poor work performance. People are not aware of the complications that come with ADHD in adults. Not knowing the symptoms of the disease can cause people to not be sympathetic when they are interacting with someone with disorder.
I am sure that everyone has heard of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and all of the theories that have plagued it throughout the years. Even today, there are children and even some adults that continue to struggle in life due to this disorder. Parents are to blame in most cases, not because they don’t want to help their child; it is more to do with not understanding the disorder or not having the awareness of how to help their child.
As much as ADHD is a medical impediment for the patient, it can almost be considered a privilege for a certain group of people, because they are allowed to assert that a certain set of behaviors belong to their “nature". To cope with the disorder, schools often offer students suffering from ADHD a host of accommodations, including special classes and teaching assistants to help them absorb the material at the level of their peers. Legal provisions exist that allow students with ADHD to be excused from standardized testing [1] and to be given additional leniency and resources in the classroom. The individual students themselves start to pick up that they are naturally distinguished or special in some way, because they have been stigmatized from a very formative age. This kind of thinking, while warranted in some scope, does not allow the children themselves to reflect and think critically about how outcomes in their school and life can be changed. Furthermore, the idea that their behavior is an immutable characteristic of nature can have devastating effects on their self-esteem and ability to succeed later in
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, generally known as ADHD can be described as having a nonstop conversation with yourself. Constant racing thoughts, changing from one thing to another, not needing coffee because you already have a buzzed. Instead of walking, you are running. Standing in line for one minute feels like five hours. Always on the go and never looking back because, it would cause you to slow down. Imagine that always happening and not being able to control any of it. Unfortunately, this effects two to eight percent of college students dealing with ADHD and it is the most common learning disability that receives accommodations at higher levels of education (Musso and Grouvier 186). The stigma about ADHD is that it can only affect the individual at school. It actually is incorporated into every aspect of their life, making everything just a little bit harder. Each student enrolled in college with ADHD is taking on a huge responsibility and society needs to recognize the battles endured by these students everyday. One alternative that tends to help for decreasing the symptoms is medication, but that has its flaws like any other treatment option. Typical life characteristics for these students are to have minimal friendships, engage in risky behavior, make impulsive choices, and battle with another psychological disorder. The most common diagnosis paired with ADHD is depression, but more research needs to be done to confirm the correlation. As a society, it is important to keep an open mind and acknowledge that this is a disorder. These individuals cannot control the glitch in their brain, but they can only learn to live with it.
Stolzer, PhD, J. M. (2007). The ADHD Epidemic in America. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 9, 109-116.
According to Dr. Robert Epstein, Medco’s chief medical officer, seventeen percent of total drug cost spending last year was for behavior medicines; compared with sixteen percent for both asthma and antibiotics, eleven percent for skin disorders and six percent for allergy medicines. There was also a 369% increase in spending on ADHD drugs for kids under the age of five. A lot of children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and many of their parents have opted to give them behavioral drugs. Some parents give the drugs because they are not aware of the long term effects or the psychological dependency, and lastly because they are not aware of the alternatives. As parents we have to be more cognizant of what these disorders are and how they affect the child. Drugs are not always the only solution.
After reading the articles Driven to Distraction and Lost in Translation, both from Today’s Parent magazine, I have learned many new things. I learned that it is sometimes not very easy to pick out a child with ADHD, even if it is your own child. It could take years to discover that a child has ADHD. It can be easily detected once the child has entered elementary school. One of the signs of ADHD is falling behind in school, or acting up and not being able to pay attention for long periods of time. This causes frustration for the child, the parents, teachers and the other students in the classroom. It is difficult for parents because they do not want to believe that their child has a disability. It is even harder for the child because they are the ones that have to deal with the name calling, being held back a grade or two and just knowing that they are different. The issue of being different for a child living with ADHD is very stressful and could make the child not want to learn new things or pay attention in school. They just give up on trying to learn.
What can we do with this information that tells us that ADHD is in fact, a real problem, but that it is being over diagnosed? We must change the education system to allow for more flexibility for students who do not fit the traditional mold. Most importantly, we must prompt others around us to think seriously about the causes and effects of ADHD on one’s life.
One of the points they stress is how behavioral therapy can be a solution, but it is less effective and has it’s limitations. Despite it being less reliable, there are reasons why professionals and parents decide to give it a try. One of these is that parents and professionals don’t want to give their child medication. Another is that medication isn’t enough to curb their child’s symptoms. Lastly, their child has had reactions to the medication they’ve been given previously. In addition to those reasons, behavioral therapy has it’s limitations. It isn’t able to account for every setting the child will be in. Behavioral therapy isn’t able to reduce all of the core characteristics that come with having ADHD (short-attention span, impulsivity, hyperactivity). It also isn’t able to advance at the same rate that behavioral-altering medication can (“Identifying and Treating Attention Deficit
As a college student, the amount of students on powerful meds for ADHD and ADD is shocking. It is a topic seen in every classroom and heard in many dialogues. Conversations can be overheard frequently about how easy meds are to get and how effortless it is to receive a diagnosis. However, while I know that a vast number of students are taking prescription drugs for ADHD, I don’t think that I ever realized the full extent to which this disorder was effecting America’s youth. It wasn’t until I spent my time volunteering as a paraprofessional in a fourth grade classroom that I felt I truly understood the weight that the number of ADHD diagnosis’s were having on our nation’s children. The supervising teacher I was working with told me that in her classroom of 22 children, six of them were on some sort of prescription medication for ADHD, and many parents that I spoke to tended to blow off the risk factors involved, remarking that the drugs improved their school performance. I was shocked at this figure, especially because after working with the children, even on the days that they forgot to take their medicine, I found that by using different methods of instruction, many of the children didn’t seem to have much less trouble focusing than the children who did not have ADHD. So when we were assigned this paper, I set out to disprove the myth that children who act out in school have must ADHD and need to be put on prescription drugs in order to do well in school.
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, more commonly referred to as simply ADHD, is the most commonly diagnosed disorder among American children today. According to the National Institute on Mental Health an estimated 3 to 5 percent of school age children are affected by this disorder. (1) There are more diagnosed cases of ADHD of in the United States than there are anywhere in the world. The main symptoms of ADHD include "developmentally inappropriate levels of attention, concentration, activity, distractibility, and impulsivity." (1) While the number of people diagnosed with ADHD increases dramatically every year, there is still much about the disorder that is not understood. While scientists have deduced that ADHD originates in the brain, they still have many questions about the nature of it. The classification of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder has become quite a controversial topic in American society today. There are some who believe that by recognizing the symptoms associated with the disorder as ADHD; science is simply putting a band-aid on a problem that could be otherwise corrected with behavior modification.
We have all heard of the schoolboy who doesn't know how to stay in his seat at school; instead he climbs furniture and makes noise during work time. We have also all known a schoolgirl who looks out the window quietly daydreaming instead of paying attention to the teacher. We now know that the hyperactive boy has a neurological disorder called attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) (Hallowell & Ratey, 1994; Latham, 2000). Experts recently have agreed that the daydreaming girl also has ADHD - sometimes called ADD because it occurs without hyperactivity (Hallowell & Ratey, 1994). But what happens when the child with AD(H)D grows up? How can tutors work with college students who have AD(H)D?
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common disorders diagnosed among children in the United States (Lynch, 2013). Its growing prevalence in the United States is becoming a major controversy in the field of Psychology. The public seems to have an opinion as well. Should we be treating children with …
Many believe that medication and treatment is not the best approach for children with this illness; yet in most cases, medication and treatment is a beneficial tool which eases the individual of difficulty with focus or concentration, resulting in improvements in social behaviour, academics, and lifestyle. Although many children are diagnosed in elementary school, some children, especially those with mild cases of ADHD, may not be diagnosed until high school or college. Either way, ADHD has a great influence on school performance, and often causes students with this disorder difficulty in regards to paying attention and focusing in class. Children with this disorder tend to be very fidgety, and struggle sitting still. This is because the frontal cortex associated with attention, reason, memory planning and inhibition appears thinner and also develops slower in children with ADHD, and neurotransmitters cannot properly send chemical messages.... ...
Understanding ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) There are a lot of parents who mistake the typical ADHD symptoms in their children such as lack of concentration, daydreaming, and occasional forgetting of simple tasks etc with laziness or unwillingness to do tasks. As a parent, it is essential to understand and distinguish the signs and symptoms of ADHD in children as early as possible to not let the condition affect the child’s ability to perform, learn and get along with peers. In this article, we are going to discuss all you need to learn about ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) including its symptoms, causes, and effective treatment options.