Is ADHD A River In Egypt?

When Life Imitates Tennessee Williams

Parents can, to gingerly paraphrase Larkin, occasionally have a somewhat deleterious effect on their children. You need only look at the countless parenting books, blogs, and podcasts out there – an overwhelming tsunami of advice on how not to be overwhelmed – to get a sense of the grave responsibility parents feel towards their brood, and the fears we have that some mistake in parenting style will mess our kids up for life. Did you let your baby cry an hour too long? Uh oh, so much for Stanford. Did you wait til 6 months instead of 5 to start purees? Oof, now he’s a serial killer, way to go. I exaggerate only slightly…

I am here to offer some reassurance. Your kids might be able to blame you for a lot, but they can’t blame you for appendicitis. Grounding them for prom may lead to unresolved anger issues, but let not their strep throat be on your head (seriously, if they have strep throat, keep them away from your head!). I suppose one could make a case that your genes partially predisposed them to developing juvenile diabetes, but rest assured that no disciplinary outburst of yours harmed their pancreatic islets. As I often reassure first-time parents bringing in baby with her very first cold, Don’t worry, it’s not your fault, it’s nothing you did wrong.

Wouldn’t it be nice if nothing bad that happened to our kids was our fault? If every bad outcome was, like a burst appendix, a kind of medical fluke? If, following the example of that malfunctioning pancreas, every unfortunate behavior was an uncontrollable, out-of-our-hands … “condition”?

Picture a young boy, say 5 or 6 years old. He’s bright, happy, sweet. Then: divorce. All of a sudden he has no home, has to move between mom’s place and dad’s place every week. He has to somehow understand that his mommy and daddy “don’t love each other anymore,” they don’t even like each other. For the first time, he starts “acting out” at school. He stops listening to teacher, he gets in fights with his friends. A year goes by, he’s still not the same happy kid – he’ll never be that happy kid – but things have calmed down a bit. Then a new man moves in with mommy, into the house the boy lives in (well, two weeks a month). The boy starts wetting the bed for the first time in years. His school performance plummets once more. He won’t pay attention to the teacher, keeps misbehaving, won’t focus on his work.

Clear case of ADHD, am I right? Give him some Adderall and move on to the next patient.

You think I’m kidding. You, even without a fancy degree in medicine or child psychology, simply by having some basic grasp of human nature, think there is no way a young child struggling in school like this when his whole world is falling apart would get labeled as ADHD and get drugged.

You couldn’t be more wrong. I encounter this all the time. This, and similar examples of obvious trauma, may not be a majority of the cases I see, but they’re sure not a small minority, either. And if you think it’s hard to believe that a mental health professional would make that diagnosis in such a case – and I’m right there with you – it’s even harder to believe, at least for me, that the parents go right along with it. Go along is an understatement – they are positively relieved by it.  

I honestly would never have believed it… and then I saw it, over and over again. Maybe I was too sheltered, but I thought cases of denial this extreme only happened in Tennessee Williams plays. Yet I have witnessed it with my own eyes. I have seen parents in situations similar to the one above grasp on to that ADHD diagnosis with an iron grip. No, it wasn’t the divorce, these things happen, and anyway kids are resilient. The specialist told us Timmy has ADHD, it’s a real condition, it explains all his symptoms. And then – here I’m getting all Tennessee Williams again – they will take all that suppressed guilt and focus it like a laser into petitioning the school board to give him all the ADHD accommodations he needs and into ensuring they don’t miss a single visit with the psychiatrist prescribing the stimulants needed to treat this ‘condition.’

The sheer number of children out there watching their families break up every day is nightmarish to contemplate. I’m sure you’ve seen a case or two firsthand among friends and family, I know I have, it’s tragic. These children are innocent victims of a society that has thrown marriage – and thus the safety and happiness of children – into the garbage and then lit that garbage can on fire. These poor children don’t need a prescription, they need a time machine to take them back to the days before their parents destroyed their life.

I am sure that as rates of family dissolution continue to rise, ADHD stimulant use will continue to rise right alongside them. And I’m equally sure that each of those future drugged children has a “medical condition” about as real as a three dollar bill.

Denial, it turns out, is a very powerful force indeed.