Rich White privilege; it’s helluva drug.
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People are just going to fucking die, aren’t they?
Are medications like Ritalin over proscribed in the US compared to Europe? Yes.
Does that alone account for the level of violence and death in our schools? No fucking way.
It’s a complex issue with many factors. Identifying a single minor factor that may has a small but perhaps significant contribution to the problem doesn’t mean you get to raise up a banner that says MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Keep loaded guns out of the hands of teenagers and most adults and you’ll find the number of school shootings plummet. It’s as simple as that. Almost any additional hurdle to firearm ownership would be better than what we have now, I’m at the point where I don’t even want to debate those details.
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My comment was meant to be acerbic. The right-wing used to be against fluorinated water. And they might still be.
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I took Ritalin back in the late 60’s, when it was first being experimented with. On one hand it was a less dramatic solution than an ocular lobotomy, on the other without the help of therapy to understand what was gong on I spent many years thinking there was something wrong with me. But I still didn’t grow up to shoot anybody.
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There’s a lot of misinformation about this on the internet, but in general most who are involved in helping and treating those with ADHD do not think that ADHD meds are being overprescribed. Sure, there’s a huge uptick in how many cases we’re seeing of ADHD, but this isn’t due to an uptick in people actually having it or the “greedy doctors and pharma companies” (pretty much all the common forms of ADHD meds are available in generics and are as far from big profit medicines as you can get. They are more expensive due to the drug schedule, though, but that’s not profit for the drug companies). We’re seeing more new diagnosis because more doctors are aware of the very specific diagnostic criteria and we’re slowly moving further towards a more compassionate society.
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It’s still an issue for some folks. The fluoride alert is an advocacy group seeking an end to the fluoridation of public water supplies:
http://fluoridealert.org/issues/water/
The CDC numbers on % of people receiving fluoridated water suggest a stronger correlation between urbanization and fluoride than political proclivity, but rural areas trend more conservative than urban ones, so maybe the relationship is there if you dig far enough.
https://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/statistics/2014stats.htm
How would Mr. North explain all the Police shootings that occur daily MAGA? 
Fear of kids on Ritalin with the right to own a gun? The US gun culture can’t be blamed.
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In my kids elementary school, according to the report read out to me and the school administrators around 2002, 80% of the children were on prescription medication.
I have been told, to my face, by a parent, that she had her children on ADHD meds because after she and her husband got home from a long day of work (she is a teacher, he is in middle management at a large bank) they were not capable of dealing with the pent up energy from kids who’d been cooped up at school all day. I give her tremendous credit for honesty, and believe that she’s saying something out loud that a lot of parents are refusing to let themselves even think.
I disagree with this blanket statement as it contradicts my personal observations. In fact I believe a lot of medication is happening because we are becoming less compassionate; narrowing our definition of what is normal, acceptable behavior in a child.
Many of the kids I see getting medicated would have, in my childhood, solved their physical problems of focus and hyperactivity by spending hours running around outside. Our kids are becoming obese and developing diabetes more and more, as their level of physical activity and non-screen-mediated intellectual stimulus is less and less.
Please understand that I do approve of use of medication when it is necessary, and appreciate the many blessings of modern biochemistry. But I do not believe that 80% of the children in my former neighborhood - children I spent time with and interacted with - had anything wrong with them that an hour a day of running around like little maniacs wouldn’t comprehensively cure. I believe that these drugs are massively overprescribed because far too many children’s normal needs for physical activity and interaction simply aren’t being met by our society.
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Did he upset rich white people?
Some kids do need medication to address serious issues. But 80% is way way out of line.
All kids need special attention. And they probably aren’t getting it at school and some (maybe 80%) aren’t getting it at home.
Our society is changing, and we’re trying to compensate by treating the symptoms. Probably because we don’t know how to solve the problem.
But it does not help that many “ADHD specialists” attack anyone who claims there is a problem with our current plans. I get that they don’t want the same attitude that anti-vaxers have, people who end up doing nothing out of fear of doing some very unlikely harm. But ADHD isn’t as serious as measles, as it is not contagious and therefor doesn’t represent an acute risk to public health.
That a parent chooses to deal with ADHD without drug treatment is probably not a big deal for mild cases. If they do nothing that’s not great, I will admit. If they go for therapy and meditation exercises that’s an improvement over doing nothing about it. And in my (unqualified) opinion preferable in most cases.
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Too many cops on Ritalin, obviously.
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To be pedantic, since Canada’s population is roughly 1/10th that of the US, the rate is actually only 1/14 that of the US. But the thrust of the point remains unchanged.
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His quote sounds a bit like Trump, only slightly smarter, but that’s not meant as a compliment.
Prescription medication is such a large and nebulous category, and there’s so many reasons to be on many of them. Without more information this ranges to me between “so what” and “well, we’re trying to help people with problems”.
ADHD meds do not work that way though. ADHD meds work by stimulating the brain and they happen to stimulate the areas for self-control and concentration amongst others, and those are underdeveloped in those who have ADHD. In those who don’t have it generally won’t get the night-and-day help that stim meds give to those who have ADHD. They do not make kids more calm, more tame, anything like that; a kid who’s just bored and lacking outlets for energy will not benefit from ADHD meds; not in the same way.
I disagree with your personal observations because of the fact that ADHD meds do not work in the way it seems you think they do. They don’t change one’s personality, what they do very specifically is to stimulate the areas in the brain involved with self-control and concentration. The reason people say that there’s night and day difference with kids with ADHD is that those kids want to be able to do well in school and concentrate, it’s just they can’t because their brains do not let them. The stims bring activity in those areas of the brain to more neurotypical levels. If the kid has behavioral issues they will not be corrected by ADHD meds.
Guess what, this does not work for those who have ADHD, which we are finding is much more prevalent then we ever thought. ADHD is not a disorder on having too much energy that needs to be bled off, it’s a disorder in which certain areas of the brain are underdeveloped. If I go out and run around for a while it may give me a slight help by wearing down other areas of my brain, but I cannot concentrate much better and I’m just flat out exhausted from it so I am nowhere near what my peak mental performance would be if I were neurotypical.
Without knowing even the classes of those 80% people on prescriptions that can’t be said at all. How many were antibiotics? How many were antidepressants helping them through severe depression? How many were on antianxiety meds? How many on other Rx meds that are used for thousands upon thousands of medical conditions that have no connection to mental health at all? Even if 80% are on psych drugs, you very well could be in an area that has, purely by random chance (it’s gonna happen somewhere) a higher rate of random mental illnesses.
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Right-wing recipe for success.
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“… the disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence. They’ve been drugged in many cases. Nearly all of these perpetrators are male, and they’re young teenagers in most cases, and they’ve come through a culture where violence is commonplace.” …
… says the guy who sold arms illegally then illegally funneled the money to a rebel group.
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We’re agreeing more than disagreeing, perhaps; you’re making some of my points for me.
Because I’m not the person claiming that ADHD meds will help; typically it’s the parents making this claim. Some of them also claim that benadryl is a child sleeping aid. This is not exaggeration for comic effect, I am reporting things I have heard and seen personally.
Doctors being willing to cater to these parents might have a lot to do with 15 minute appointments where the pediatrician spends 8 of those minutes typing in a laptop.
Physicians are prescribing drugs for children when those drugs aren’t going to help with the problems the kids are experiencing, they are only going to (at best) mask some symptoms.
Yes, this is absolutely true. The odds are very much against it, though.
I certainly don’t want to prohibit, limit or otherwise restrict doctors’ ability to prescribe, and I don’t want to cut off anyone’s drugs. That’s too much like the insane nonsense that we are responding to overuse of opioids with, which is making things worse.
Nonetheless everything I see in the school system leads me to believe psychoactive drugs are being prescribed to children excessively, and that many of these children simply need lots of attention and exercise they aren’t getting.
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That’s a shame. I for one want them to tangle. Show us some real cluture of violence.
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Sounds like our Ollie has been having a consultation with ol’ Trumpy to obtain alternate facts! What a load of rubbish!
