ADHD Cures

Posted By Vic on November 10, 2009

What is ADHD? The latest consensus answer is a neurological disorder. Apart from the academic community, does this really make sense to the rest of us? Either ADD ADHD is a part of our natural genetic makeup, or it is an epidemic.

If a family member, a friend or we ourselves have ADD-ADHD symptoms we need to understand ADD and have confidence in that understanding. We need to assess what the doctors tell us based on our own understanding of ourselves, and not on some abstract “average” individual.

There are over 100 causes of ADD/ADHD like behavior, one of which is having an ADD/ADHD personality. The consensus says coffee will make us active and keep us awake at night. Coffee relaxes me when I am stressed, and I can drink a strong cup of coffee at bedtime, and easily fall asleep. I do not believe I am unique; there must be many people out there in the world who respond to coffee like I do. Consensus refers to a theoretical average person, not a specific individual.

Firstly, the term by which this condition is called has changed over the years (or at least the last century). Mainly because it has been serially misunderstood by science over the last century. Is it any different today?

The latest standard by which the vast majority of health professionals anchor their opinion is now 20 years out of date. The DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th Revision) was published in 1994 (based on opinions that had to be at least a few years old to be considered consensus). The next revision, the DSM-V, is due out in spring 2012.

During the last decade there have been tremendous advances in technology enabling scientists to study the workings of the brain. These advances are not reflected in the current DSM-IV.  The new DSM-V will give a different standard than the current one.

This may be OK for a health professional shuffling checklists behind a desk. But where does that leave us ADDers? Our condition is not an academic debate, but something we live with daily.

The terminology used in the DSM-IV is suspect, as admitted in the DSM-IV itself; it is not based on a diagnosable disorder, but purely on subjectively perceived behaviour.
“There are no laboratory tests, neurological assessments, or attentional assessments that have been established as diagnostic in the clinical assessment of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.”

(DSM-IV-TR, page 88)

Three of the latest scientific attitudes on ADHD are that it is:

• an attention dysregulation, not attention deficit
• that it is a neurological disorder
• it is genetic.

I will be continuing with these three points tomorrow.

Categories: ADHD Causes
Tags: Add Adhd, Adhd, Adhd Symptoms, Attention Deficit, attention dysregulation, causes of adhd, Diagnostic And Statistical Manual, Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders, DSM IV, Neurological Disorder