Friday, February 28, 2003

A LETTER FROM THE HEALTH UNDERGROUND

FEBRUARY 28. I was recently contacted by the mother of a sixth-grade boy who was diagnosed with ADHD. Here are some of her comments, which make a very interesting story.

“My son really did have problems. He was jittery during the day. He couldn’t sit in his seat at school, and his studies were going badly. When he came home from school, he couldn’t sit in one place. He’d tear around the house and then go outside to play with his friends, but he couldn’t play a game without getting upset and starting fights. He was unhappy a lot of the time, and bored too.

“He was sent to a school counselor, and then referred to a psychiatrist the school used to handle problem children. My husband and I and our son went to the appointment together. After one session, he was diagnosed with ADHD and I was given a prescription for Ritalin.

“After four days on the drug, he calmed down. It was rather amazing. He could concentrate in school, and he stopped getting in fights. I thought it was a miracle.”

“About ten days after he started the drug, he refused to take it. I asked him why. He told me it was because it made him feel weird. I phoned the psychiatrist and asked him about this. He said my son had to get used to Ritalin. There might be ‘a shake-out cruise,’ he told me. But he assured me that my boy would become used to the medicine and everything would be all right.”

“So, with some encouragement from me, he went back on Ritalin, and at first everything seemed all right. Then he told me he was having bad dreams. He had never said that before, on or off the drug. Obviously, he was frightened by the dreams.”

“My husband and I didn’t know what to do. We had been at our wit’s end with him, because he was such a bundle of problems before the Ritalin, and with it he seemed, all in all, so much better. Again, I spoke with the psychiatrist. He said the brain sometimes has a reaction to Ritalin, and he lowered the dose. I hoped this would take care of those dreams.”

“A few months went by. My boy was doing fairly well in school. His jitteriness had diminished. He didn’t report any more bad dreams. He was staying on Ritalin. Then, one day I just noticed that he wasn’t the same kid. He seemed listless, fatigued. He was watching more TV than usual. He wasn’t very responsive when we talked. I was alarmed by this. I had never seen him this way before.”

“I took my son back to the psychiatrist. He said, after a half hour, that he [the son] was suffering from depression. Now this was from out of the blue. My son had never been depressed in his life. Just the opposite. I was shocked. I asked the doctor where this could have come from. He didn’t seem to be very concerned. He said depression was the largest undiagnosed condition among the population. A lot of people, young and old, had it.”

“He gave me a prescription for Zoloft. He said we would try it, and if it didn’t work, he would go to one of the other antidepressant drugs, like Prozac. Sometimes, he said, you had to try several medicines. I was a little stunned. It was very odd to me, my son on a drug like Zoloft. The doctor assured me that this condition, depression, wasn’t my fault. It was not something that was caused by bad parenting. It was a chemical imbalance. And you had to deal with it that way.”

“That night I spoke with my husband. He was troubled, too. He didn’t want to put our boy on Zoloft. Believe me, this was a very big decision for us. We decided to get a second opinion. A friend recommended we see a psychiatrist who had a different approach. We didn’t know what this meant, but we made an appointment for a consultation---but we didn’t take our son along. We felt he had been exposed to too much professional analysis.”

“The psychiatrist wasn’t disappointed we hadn’t brought our boy along. He said he understood our concern with focusing too much on his [our son’s] mental problems. He said the Ritalin could sometimes cause depression. But, he said, it wouldn’t be wise to cut it off. He suggested going back to the original higher dose level of the Ritalin and then introducing a very low dose of what he called a major tranquilizer. It was Haldol. I had never heard of this. We told this doctor we wanted to think it over. He was very nice, didn’t pressure us, and said we could get back to him.”

“When we got home, my husband and I did a search on the Internet and began reading about Haldol, which is also called an anti-psychotic drug. We were staggered by that. Anti-psychotic? Our boy was having problems, but psychosis was something we couldn’t accept. We came across Dr. Peter Breggin’s site [www.breggin.com]. That was a very disturbing experience. Dr. Breggin was very much against psychiatric drugs of all kinds, and he was a psychiatrist. We found his book [Toxic Psychiatry] at our library and we read much of it. It appeared that these anti-psychotic drugs were being given to many people who weren’t psychotic. The description of the side effects really put us in a tizzy.”

“We phoned the psychiatrist we had just seen, and we told him what we had been reading about. He said that Breggin was a fringe character, and most competent professionals in the field didn’t give credence to his opinions.”

“Now we felt we were up against a blank wall. We didn’t know what to do. We had been given recommendations for two drugs, Zoloft and Haldol, and we realized that if we didn’t follow either of those suggestions, we were pretty much nowhere, as far as professional help was concerned.”

“Our son was still in a funk. He was very quiet most of the time, and he didn’t want to go outside and play at all. His grades in school, which had improved to a degree on Ritalin, were slipping again. But we were told his behavior was much better. This made us suspicious. Maybe the school counselor really meant that he was compliant because he just didn’t care about anything. He was sitting in his seat because he didn’t have the energy or will to get up.”

“My husband and I discussed all the alternatives. We could keep our son on Ritalin, or we could slowly ease him off it by lowering the dose ourselves. We could opt for one of the other drugs the psychiatrists had suggested. We could try for a third medical opinion. It was all a very confusing and disheartening mystery. We knew we were out of our depth, and we were angry at the school. If the Ritalin was really the cause of our son’s depression, we thought we didn’t want to accept any more professional referrals from the school counselor.”

“We were very wary of psychiatrists at this point, partly because one of them had suggested Haldol, which we thought was way out of line.”

“In desperation, we went to our general practitioner, a man we had known for ten years. We told him our story, from the beginning. To our surprise, he started fuming. He said we had been led down a wrong path, and we had to back up and think about this. He said the drug solution was something he personally did not recommend. We asked him what answers he had. He said this wasn’t his area of expertise, but the drugs were not a good idea.”

“We were a bit relieved, but we were still very confused. The last thing we wanted was to be on our own. We were committed to professional help of some kind, but we didn’t seem to be getting any.”

“I remembered reading an article you wrote, in which you’d mentioned a group called the Feingold Association. So I looked them up on the Internet and began reading about their dietary approach. For the first time, I began to consider what my son had been eating all these years.”

“First of all, there was the sugar. He had been loading up on sugar every day at school. Sometimes he would bring back a soft drink from one of the vending machines. He might have two or three sodas at school. I actually went to the school and bought several of those drinks and read the ingredients on the cans. He had been taking in lots of sugar, some caffeine, and some aspartame in the diet sodas. I guess something clicked for me at this point.”

“Then there was also the fact that he had been eating these junk-food desserts that were full of artificial colors and chemicals. And the school lunches didn’t seem all that good. I went to the cafeteria and looked at what they served. The quality didn’t seem all that good to me.”

“I spoke with my husband and we decided to take the bull by the horns. I’m not recommending that everybody do this, but this is what we did. We had a long talk with our son. We told him we thought we might know what was wrong. We got him to agree to very slowly cut down on the dose of his Ritalin, with the idea of getting off it altogether. He seemed to like this idea. We set up a system for doing this. Then we told him he needed to change what he was eating and drinking. I would make his lunches from now on. And we wanted him to stop drinking sodas and eating junk desserts.”

“This part wasn’t so easy. He liked all the junk. I was able to find a drink from a health-food store that tasted all right to him. It didn’t have much sugar in it. It had no caffeine and no aspartame. He agreed he would take a bottle of this to school with him every day. I also found several desserts---we experimented---at the same store that he liked, and they didn’t have much sugar in them either, as far as I could tell. They didn’t have all those chemicals in them, either. He would take these to school and he promised he would try not to use the vending machines at all.”

“After a month, he was off the Ritalin and he was pretty much following the food program we had set up.”

“He was no longer depressed. He didn’t sulk around the house. He would go outside and play with his friends after school, and there were very few fights. One day I realized that I was starting to see the son I knew from when he was seven or eight. I had really almost forgotten that boy.”

“His schoolwork wasn’t going that well, but he wasn’t parading around the room while the teacher was talking. It occurred to my husband that he was lagging behind in his courses because he hadn’t been absorbing much in class for some time. So we tried a tutor. A college student came over and began to work with him on every subject, for about an hour a day. This didn’t sit well with our son at first, but fortunately this college boy was very bright, and he started mixing in some ballplaying outside with the work.”

“Three months later, we saw a distinct improvement in our son’s grades. Not only that, he was interested in math. It had been a long time since any subject really interested him.”

“My husband is an engineer. He had never been able to work with our boy on school subjects, but now he was doing some extra math with him. As my husband described it, “things took off.” Our boy has a real aptitude for math. He’s jumping ahead of the rest of his class. My husband occasionally brings him over to his office after school, and shows him how the math can be used to do all sorts of practical engineering things. To me, this is thrilling. It’s as if a mask has been lifted from our son’s face. He looks different. He smiles and laughs. He wakes up in the morning and he looks forward to the day. The only problem we see is, he is beginning to get bored with his math work, because he knows it already. So we are trying to get the school to do something about that. I don’t think they will. We’re talking to our son about how he can deal with the boredom. That’s the best strategy we have at the moment.”

“The school is very happy about the change in our boy. We have decided on a policy of benign neglect in that respect. We haven’t told them he’s no longer taking Ritalin. We’d like to, but we think we’ll be asking for trouble. My husband is pretty angry about the whole thing. He says that other kids at the school who are on Ritalin and their parents should know there are other answers. So he and I and talking about what he might be able to do without bringing down the roof on our heads. It feels strange to be talking about how to deal with the school. It makes me realize that the school is not really a free place. They are the authorities and we are supposed to defer to them on issues that are really none of their business. So we are also talking about the possibility of home schooling. It would be a challenge on several levels, but we may be able to pull it off. Still, if we home school and then a make a big deal about the Ritalin, I think, again, we’d be asking for trouble.”

“I not only care about our son, I care about other kids and what they are going through. It’s a tragedy that the authorities are saying there is only one way. How many kids are they hurting?”

“These days I’m reading all I can about ADHD and Ritalin and other approaches. I’ve realized that what helped our son might well be good for all children. But I also see that some kids have other problems, like heavy metals in their systems, or serious reactions to vaccines. I’m at the tip of the iceberg and learning more and more as I go. I’m hoping what I’ve written here might help other parents and their kids.”

It will.

JON RAPPOPORT www.stratiawire.com

top of page