EBD Blog

Joel Turtel, a self-identified libertarian who advocates for home- and private-schooling and against public schools and taxes and who appears in many right wing venues, has an article challenging the diagnosis of Attention Deficit-Hypactivity Disorder (ADHD). Quoting from two selected experts, Mr. Turtel argues that ADHD symptoms are consequences of boredom and nearly three dozen other conditions (including Learning Disabilities, sleep disorders, iron deficiency, etc.). He reports that public school personnel recommend medications to parents, a practice that would be unprofessional, let alone illegitimate! Here is his recommendation to parents:

Parents, do not fall for the ADHD arguments that some public school authorities are now attempting to foist on you and your children. Although a few children do exhibit extreme “symptoms” of ADHD, for most normal kids ADHD turns out to be a questionable “disease” at best, and a bogus disease at worst. Many public schools now use this alleged ADHD disease as a convenient excuse to pressure parents to give their normal but bored or high-energy children mind-altering drugs.

Parents, do not succumb to the temptation to drug your children with mind-altering drugs because a public-school teacher or school nurse tells you that your child is not “behaving properly” or “paying attention” in class. There are many other ways to deal with children’s “behavior” problems in school besides drugging your children. One of the best ways is to take your children out of public school so they aren’t bored to death sitting in public school classrooms. When children get engrossed in learning in a stimulating homeschool environment, they are far less likely to misbehave.

I happen to agree that schools could be organized and conducted in ways that would reduce many of the problems associated with ADHD. Providing highly engaging, fast-paced lessons which require students to respond frequently and make nuanced changes in their answers based on corresponding changes in the questions teachers ask would surely result in lower levels of attention problems than one would observe in the typical child-centered classroom. (See, for example, the study by D. Carnine of the effects of differing frequencies of teacher questioning on students attention behavior from JABA, 1976). However, I doubt that such environments will eliminate all variance in attention; some children will still have difficulty with attending, inhibiting impulses, changing activities frequently, and so forth. So I can’t altogether buy Mr. Turtel’s faulting of the schools.

I am not advocating prescription of medications. Far from it, I suspect that they are over prescribed. But, I know the literature on them shows clear benefits for many children.

Moreover, I have other problems with Mr. Turtel’s argument. Beyond using only selected authorities, he has ignored a substantial body of knowledge. It would be very interesting to know, for example, how Mr. Turtel would respond to a few of the quite-strong neuropsych studies of ADHD.

Mr. Turtel apparently deposited his article in one or more free content sites, as it has been published on scores of sites. Here’s a link to just one of them. Thanks to Liz Ditz for bringing this to my attention.