I can't spot "Obsessive Blogging" in that list of disorders. Have they missed us? And when do the meds arrive?

We've come to a point in our culture in which "experts" are our High Holy Priesthood. When an "expert" speaks, we are supposed to genuflect.

James Taranto regularly skewers such thinking with a feature on opinionjournal Best of the Web that begins "what we do without experts?"

"Journalists" get snooty because they've been to "journalist school" and unwashed bloggers in their pj's have not. Every parent has a story or two of an encounter with a teacher who waves his/her credentials as if that trumps anything the parent wants to bring to the table. This is why the education establishment is very anti-voucher and anti-homeschooling.

These "experts" are no less prone to faddish solutions than any lay-person. And that worries me because there ARE kids who DO need to be identified and treated. My own stepson is AD/HD and it really is as distressing for him as everyone around him. If the pendulum of over diagnosing this (and doing it because too many teachers just don't know how to handle boys and look at girls as the classroom standard) to writing off truly ADD or AD/HD kids as just "troublemakers" then who wins? Certainly not the kids.

My youngest child has an hearing problem. The school said they would test him/etc. for free as well as provide speech therapy to ameliorate the problems he'd already acquired. Since we'd never used "special services" from the school and since we were unemployed at the time, we thought "Okay. We'll give it a try." They gave us about 100 pages of paperwork to fill. Three pages from the end I realized that if we signed those papers, we would be giving them the right to decide our child needed ANYTHING, including special-education classes and if we refused, they would take him away and put him with a foster family. In other words, if they decided our child was mentally retarded, they would treat him as such, despite what we -- who lived with the child -- might think or know. And they'd take custody away from us if we protested. Since our oldest child -- who read fluently in Kindergarden -- was classified as "learning disabled" by his second grade teacher and we had to have him independently tested as well as fight a battle to keep him out of special ed (he's now in highschool and routinely places/tests in the 99th percentile) we decided the freeby wasn't worth the cost and took care of our son ourselves.

Beware of governments bearing gifts...

Obsessive blogging? _I_ need to do _more_ blogging. I need some flogging. Anyway....

I agree with both Darleen and Portia once again. Good to see these two brilliant, beautiful women continuing to read and comment here in Classical Values.

Ritalin is DOPE, every bit as much as marijuana, cocaine, or speed. I'm in a position to know that because I was on it for a while as a teenager back in 1968. It felt good, _too_ good, it was highly addictive, and so I'm glad I got off it as soon as I did.

I'm all for legalizing dope for consenting adults, but that doesn't mean I have to approve of it or pay for it. It doesn't mean the government should subsidize it with my tax money, and it certainly doesn't mean the government has a right to push it on little children.

I'm against compulsory "mental health screening" in the schools. I'm against the schools taking over the rights and responsibilities of the parents. I'm for the schools going back to the the basics, reading, writing, math, science, geography, history, literature. I'm for putting the Bible back in the schools, both Old and New Testaments, along with the other great classics of our American and Western heritage, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Shakespeare, the Eddas, Homer, all of that. I'm for corporal punishment in the schools and in the home. The paddle.

Call me an ultra-conservative, an old-fashioned, rigid, rock-ribbed reactionary, an old Osseous, a Neanderthal, a dinosaur, to the Right of Granny on "The Beverly Hillbillies". That's the way I am.

I've recommended this old book before, and I'll strongly recommend it again, the best book by far on the whole subject of schools and education that I have ever read or ever will read: "Suffer, Little Children" [1962] by Dr. Max Rafferty, who was the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of California during the early 1960s, including under Governor Reagan. Dr. Rafferty was Extremely Right, and he had _style_!

PTSD is real.

It is caused by trauma.

Often child abuse. Sometimes battle field trauma. At one time it was called "shell shock".

The most common marker for this problem is drug/alcohol abuse.

There is a genetic component as well. Not every one responds the same to trauma.

Google - M. Simon drug PTSD

if you want to find out more of what I have to say on the subject.

Thanks Flea, Darleen, Portia, Steven!

M.Simon, I didn't mean to make light of real suffering. Been there myself (in therapy 4 years, recovery, etc.) My problem is with the state butting into people's lives. And the diagnoses are very flexible.

Your opinions on medication of emotional pain (in
"The Pain Enforcement Administration") are absolutely right. In logic, if there is a right to medicate physical pain, then why not emotional pain? Emotional pain is worse than physical pain; if someone with emotional pain manages to get pain meds ("legitimately") for physical pain he'll often tough it out and wait till the pain has passed and then take the stuff. We call the latter "abuse." (Ha!)

I think the physical meds are, at best a bandaid. Ten years ago I was going through a rough spot in life -- mostly having to do with being stuck in a position I hated and not able to move up or down, job wise (down would have helped. Less work. Up would have helped. More recognition. As it was, I had all the responsibility and none of the perks.) Then I caught an upper respiratory that wouldn't let me lie down and breathe at the same time. So I went to the doctor. The doctor wanted to give me prozac, because I was depressed. I told him I KNEW I was depressed and I needed to change my life to fix it. He said, no it was a chemical imballance. I asked how he could know that without testing me. He said he knew because if he gave me prozac I'd feel better. I countered if he gave me cocaine I'd feel better too. Doesn't mean I had a cocaine defficiency.

Look, I have nothing against legalizing recreational drugs for adults. I do have problems with medicating spiritual pain or even emotional discomfort. I mean -- if I'd been on prozac, I might never have had the incentive to change jobs...

P.

While ADD and ADHD are very real, there's a definite risk in treating the slightest hint of a problem. For one thing, people who suffer from those syndromes might lose a chance to develop an effective coping strategy. Witness Mike Portnoy, a drummer who has several projects going simultaneously so that he can switch to a new one the moment he's distracted. His output is amazingly large - what if he'd been drugged as a child? Would he have excelled?

Misdiagnosis is also a major concern. We know so little about how the brain functions, but we know that similar syndromes can have vastly different causes and treatments. A wrong treatment can be destructive instead of merely ineffective.

And that doesn't even begin to get into the control issue...

What if Churchill and Patton had been put on anti-depressant meds in the late 1930s?

We'd be looking out through the barbed wire of a concentration camp.