20th November 2007
Jennita,
I very much appreciate your concern about drugs being given to people when scientists and psychiatrists don't know what is really wrong with people, or if anything is really wrong with them in the first place, and therefore we can't know if this drug is fixing anything or merely covering up the problem and doing unpleasant things to the body which we will only find out somewhere years down the road.
Perhaps someday scientists will understand the mechanisms behind ADD. Perhaps they will find that it is a result of maternal stress while the baby was in the womb, perhaps they will find that it is a result of environmental contamination, perhaps they will find that it is genetic and triggered by something or other. I would love to know the mechanism that causes some of us to have incredibly great difficulties utilizing the intelligence that we so obviously have. But in the meantime, it doesn't really matter what the mechanism is. Some of find that certain meds bring our brains into a usable form.
I would like to propose that most of the people who enter the psychology and psychiatry fields are well-meaning people, who, like you, are truly concerned about the suffering that they see around them. I don't think that most of these people are motivated by greed or looking for the easy "fix" by dispensing medicine without regard to the side-effects or whether the drugs are appropriate. Just as with physical disease, they notice that suffering people can be grouped into categories, and slowly they learn that certain methods (meds or counseling techniques or both) work for some of these people and not for others, and over time they re-define their groups and definitions, and they learn about the physical evidence that other scientists find over time. For example, it has been found that some people who exhibit the symptoms that have been grouped under schizophrenia do well when they take drugs like lithium. It has taken a long time after the introduction of lithium for scientists to discover the neurological workings in the brain that explain why lithium works. But it was used for a long time before that.
I would like to propose that ADD is in the early stages of medical knowledge. Psychologists and psychiatrists can see that there is clearly a group of people who suffer under the list of symptoms that have been defined. By "suffer" I mean that these people exhibit these symptoms so severely that it impairs their ability to function in life. There are all sorts of theories about what the physical mechanism is that causes these problems -- I think that there will ultimately be a physical mechanism found because we are physical beings, and our brains, as amazing as they are, are still physical constructs. Just because we can't "see" the mechanism at the moment doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. And just because we can't "see" the suffering that ADDers live with doesn't mean that therefore they don't suffer.
I thank you again for bringing up this topic. You have caused me to spend the last several hours thinking about the concerns you have raised. And if you think this post is long, you should have seen what I edited out while I was trying to marshall my thoughts and come up with something that actually pertained to the topic! :)
--Rheanna
I very much appreciate your concern about drugs being given to people when scientists and psychiatrists don't know what is really wrong with people, or if anything is really wrong with them in the first place, and therefore we can't know if this drug is fixing anything or merely covering up the problem and doing unpleasant things to the body which we will only find out somewhere years down the road.
Perhaps someday scientists will understand the mechanisms behind ADD. Perhaps they will find that it is a result of maternal stress while the baby was in the womb, perhaps they will find that it is a result of environmental contamination, perhaps they will find that it is genetic and triggered by something or other. I would love to know the mechanism that causes some of us to have incredibly great difficulties utilizing the intelligence that we so obviously have. But in the meantime, it doesn't really matter what the mechanism is. Some of find that certain meds bring our brains into a usable form.
I would like to propose that most of the people who enter the psychology and psychiatry fields are well-meaning people, who, like you, are truly concerned about the suffering that they see around them. I don't think that most of these people are motivated by greed or looking for the easy "fix" by dispensing medicine without regard to the side-effects or whether the drugs are appropriate. Just as with physical disease, they notice that suffering people can be grouped into categories, and slowly they learn that certain methods (meds or counseling techniques or both) work for some of these people and not for others, and over time they re-define their groups and definitions, and they learn about the physical evidence that other scientists find over time. For example, it has been found that some people who exhibit the symptoms that have been grouped under schizophrenia do well when they take drugs like lithium. It has taken a long time after the introduction of lithium for scientists to discover the neurological workings in the brain that explain why lithium works. But it was used for a long time before that.
I would like to propose that ADD is in the early stages of medical knowledge. Psychologists and psychiatrists can see that there is clearly a group of people who suffer under the list of symptoms that have been defined. By "suffer" I mean that these people exhibit these symptoms so severely that it impairs their ability to function in life. There are all sorts of theories about what the physical mechanism is that causes these problems -- I think that there will ultimately be a physical mechanism found because we are physical beings, and our brains, as amazing as they are, are still physical constructs. Just because we can't "see" the mechanism at the moment doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. And just because we can't "see" the suffering that ADDers live with doesn't mean that therefore they don't suffer.
I thank you again for bringing up this topic. You have caused me to spend the last several hours thinking about the concerns you have raised. And if you think this post is long, you should have seen what I edited out while I was trying to marshall my thoughts and come up with something that actually pertained to the topic! :)
--Rheanna