Question for People With Family That Have ADD/ADHD

I'd like to know the ones that don't.

 

im also currently dealing with someone just diagnosed with adhd and had some young cousins who were on ritalin. more often than the parents want to admit, the ADD may be arising from depression, most likely coming from family problems. being bi-polar, or having a chemical imbalance, seems to be a common diagnosis today, but in my uneducated medical opinion, all the people I know with bi-polar disorder also come from messed up families, or families with high stress, particularly where the parents don't allow the child to act like himself. chem imbalances do seem to exist, but too often it is diagnosed instead of actual depression.

 

Many children that are diagnosed with ADD are actually suffering from Sensory Integration Dysfunction, but it is not uncommon for a dual diagnosis of ADD - SID.

Here's some info on the disability...

link

 

I hope this is good info for your family...

Sensory Integration International

 

I can't believe they prescribed to a 12 year old Adderall. There are so many other drugs out there that are more suitable for teenagers than that. I hope it doesn't screw with his puberty.

My 16yo sister has ADD, she takes Concerta, I believe. Although she's never been open to my parents about anything, the Concerta did help a little bit in this department. I couldn't tell you about her mood swings though... She wasn't diagnosed with ADD until after I had moved away to college - I don't live with her enough to know about her disposition.

 

Hi nyquil.
To me there's a real chicken-n-egg thing going on here. The messed-up families are genetically linked of course to the child with the chemical imbalance, so the chances are not low that what's messed up first and foremost is the chemistry in that genetic line. But certainly it seems like there are big time feedback loops, where maybe people are only slightly off chemical balance but then their environments make it much much worse.

 

You can't just say that because my sister has ADD that my parents must have had it too, and that my other sister and I have it too. And in the same sense, you can't just blame it on how she was raised, because the older children in my family turned out just fine.

And that's what the big arguement in Genetics is. For a while, there was the group that said it's pure genetics, and there was the group that said it's pure environment/learned behaviour - but now pretty much everyone chalks it up to a mixture of both.

But you have to remember, it's not so simple as if the parents have it then the children do, or if the children do, then the parents must have something wrong too. Genetics is really all about probability and statistics: given that the two parents have this set of genes, what is the probability that this kid will get such and such disease? And even then, that doesn't count for the random mutations and other things that arise in that individual.

 

yeah, I know meggo.

I said chicken-n-egg b/c nature-n-nurture are just that no matter how many huge books have been written and read about it (e.g. Steven Pinker's latest tome, The Blank Slate).

Cheers.

 

I've never heard (or seen) someone use this chicken-n-egg analogy for the nature v. nurture debate... Sorry for the confusion.

 

Please refrain from serving your children chicken and eggs - it may cause ADD.

 

FYI read a study the other day that excessive amounts of caffeine intake during pregnancy is positively correlated with ADHD.

 

tell him to stop snorting the stuff.