Making Progress, One Ex-Naysayer at a Time

This week: A guest post from ADHD coach Cynthia Hammer, founder and former executive director of Seattle-based non-profit ADD Resources (click here to visit her blog, “Pinnacle Coaching”).

I’ve always enjoyed Cynthia’s personal essays (look for more to come), and we both appreciate the thoughtful perspectives of Judith Warner, who writes the “Domestic Disturbances” column for The New York Times.
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Do you ever get discouraged about all the bad and inaccurate press about ADHD? That it is a condition that doesn’t exist? That those of us who have ADHD are seeking the easy way out by taking medicine or that we parents give dangerous medicine to children for a made-up condition?

I just finished reading an article by Judith Warner, a columnist for The New York Times who planned to write a book on these kinds of topics, but she kept putting off writing the book—and she finally realized why.

Here is what she had to say:

“For a long time I thought that it wasn’t getting written because I was too busy or too lazy or too scatterbrained to write it. But then I realized that it wasn’t getting written because it simply couldn’t be written. Its central argument was a tenable one in theory, but it crumbled in practice, when I ventured further than reading books and newspaper and magazine articles, and got beyond theory and started to talk to real people. To real parents who consistently told stories of how they’d painfully accepted labels and medications for their kids only after exhausting every other possible option, and to practitioners who often enough had themselves approached the whole issue of ‘flavor of the month’ diagnoses like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder with skepticism, but had then come to see their validity – and the value of properly prescribed medication – from the weight of evidence they’d amassed in clinical practice.

“I became aware, over time, that there was a name for people like me within the community of parents and doctors whose lives were consumed with treating children with A.D.H.D. and other issues: ‘naysayers.’ I learned that we – the people who had no idea what it was like to parent a child with serious issues but found it easy to theorize and moralize and pontificate about the ‘abstract other’ – were just one more burden that these parents and their children had to contend with in their already overburdened lives.”

I found her article hopeful. You can read it here.

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Gina adds:  In her column, Ms. Warner has offered clarity on several other mental health topics that affect children, including these:

“An Epidemic of Misunderstanding About Children’s Mental Health”

“Children in the Mental Health Void”

“Tough  Choices for Tough Children“