Thomas Hoskyns Leonard Blog: AN IMPORTANT DISCUSSION ABOUT ADD AND ADHD

Alec Grant

The bullshit that is ADHD (that is the DSM)..

This video is SATIRE. It does not offer any advice on the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. This mockumentary staring comedian Peter Rowsthorn...

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Thomas Leonard ADHD is a very real condition. which is frequently misdiagnosed and maltreated. DSM is BS

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Alec Grant Well, we'll just have to beg to differ there (about ADHD), Thomas

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Thomas Leonard I have ADD Alec, as do the 5000 or more members of Adults with ADD

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Thomas Leonardhttp://thomashoskynsleonardblog.blogspot.co.uk/.../on...Manage

ON THE HISTORY OF ADHD----A SELECTIVE REVIEW

THE HISTORY OF ADHD Th...

THOMASHOSKYNSLEONARDBLOG.BLOGSPOT.COM

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Clay Garner While I'm against over-medicalisation and the 'swatting flies with sledgehammers' approach that is selling speed to little kids, I've always felt that the description of the phenomenon tends to make sense for a lot of my life.

Honestly the alternatives fill me with a bit of fear. If ADHD isn't real, then am I just a fuck up?

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Thomas Leonard You're probably just like me. Clay.I have as of the Spring of 2015, been diagnosed as suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), a physical and neurological disorder, after a lifetime of mistreatments and misdiagnoses and a fair amount of apparent bullying and two-facedness from people (including several colleagues and at least one relative) who I would have expected to be kinder to me. I have many of the symptoms of dyspraxia (e.g. clumsiness, low muscle tome, reduced sensory perceptions, reading difficulties, and lack of spatial awareness). I also have a tendency to tangentialise and to blurt out haphazard remarks during conversation. I think very much in my subconscious, which tends to get wired with a beehive of competing thoughts. My specialist thinks that the increased activity in my subconscious which is caused by my ADD is responsible for the peaks of my mathematical ability, my broad-ranging lateral thinking, and my late emerging literary abilities. My highs and lows are explainable by my ADD and not by any of the crass disorders or biochemical imbalances which have been dreamt up by the shrinks.

At age 67 I am consequently beginning to understand how my brain works for the first time in my life. As my perceptions can be a bit more varied and colourful than for most people, I need to take time modifying, refining and clarifying them. I can then rely on my perceptions just as much as anybody else. I find periods of relaxation and meditation to be very useful in this regard.

While I re-established my long-term memory and productivity following a long period of medication-induced ill health (2000-2011) I now find myself renewing and re-interpreting all my important memories as they flash through my consciousness, I now much better understand people's reactions to me; they of course never understood what was going on inside my head either.

The US and UK medical professions stand indicted for not diagnosing me properly until January 2015 despite being made aware of many of the relevant symptoms, Maybe this was not totally due to their lack of medical competence, I have of course declined to take any of the dangerous medications, such as ritalin, which are so frequently used to 'punish' children and adults who suffer from ADD .

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Alec Grant Thomas Leonard and Clay Garner, I would not doubt your experiences in common. From a crit MH standpoint, I am simply against medicalising them and calling the phenomenon a 'condition' or 'disorder' in the context of psychodiagnostic expansionism. Nor am I against formulation and psychological therapeutic alleviation input. You both no the score re the drugs and the nightmare stories of their use - espec with kids.

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Clay Garner As an adult, I spent weeks trying to convince my (US) GP that adderall (which is just pure amphetamine) was doing more harm than good. He was very reluctant to let me have ritalin again, and for no other reason than he was encouraged to hand out harder stuff.

My GP in the UK regards my methylphenidate prescription as "homeopathic" given my current body mass, but it does the job.

As a child? I was taking 2-4 times as much ritalin on a daily basis, and spent the entirety of my formative years as a social pariah because I was either incorrigible to the teachers and out of control to the other kids... or I was pharmaceutically stoned out of my mind and, to borrow from Gibson's Neuromancer, in "a particularly pliable sort of autism."

And much of *that* was while under the treatment of a paediatrician who felt that my condition would have been much improved if my parents just beat me more often.

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Thomas Leonard Both ritalin and adderall are very harmful and can cause violent behaviour, They have put children with learning disabilities into young offenders institutions

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Thomas Leonard and all toxic psych meds poison the enzymes and possibly the DNA

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Alec Grant Horrible for you, Clay Garner. What you say illustrates well the problem!

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Alec Grant Know not no

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Thomas Leonard I totally agree on medicalisation, Alec, and I would describe ADD as a neuro-physical state of being, rather than a medical disorder or condition, It should be better understood in social terms

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Alec Grant With you in what you say Thomas. In which case we are talking about difference rather than pathology - albeit difference which confers disadvantage, prejudice, othering, stigma, social exclusion... the response should be sympathetic, social and ameliorating rather than pathologising in the service of profiting BigPharma, and the ridiculous labelling of normal childhood behaviours in this regard.

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Thomas Leonard May I copy and paste this discussion and put it on a blog post. Alec Grant?

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Alec Grant Sure Thomas. Go ahead.

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Thomas Leonard With you in what you say Thomas. In which case we are talking about difference rather than pathology - albeit difference which confers disadvantage, prejudice, othering, stigma, social exclusion... the response should be sympathetic, social and ameliorating rather than pathologising in the service of profiting BigPharma, and the ridiculous labelling of normal childhood behaviours in this regard. (Alec Grant)

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Thomas LeonardGroup Admin HEALTH WARNING: I experienced some toxic reactions from the moderators of the 5000 strong Adults with ADHD Facebook group when I sent this post to their timeline and I therefore cancelled my membership of this group. They appear to be a group of nutty Big Pharma supporters who are keen to encourage their members to keep taking their Ritalin and Adderall, Please take care when you interact with this group. This is just my personal opinion of course and your comments are welcome!

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Alec Grant Thanks for this - very telling - warning, Thomas.

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Thomas Leonard It is a very dire warning, Alec Grant. If people with ADD are misdiagnosed or encouraged to take more and more ritalin, adderall, or whatever, then they are likely to do more and more evil things to themselves and other people. I have even been wondering this morning whether slave traders are lost souls on too much ritalin. It is therefore the essential responsibility of medical health practitioners to diagnose people with the 'talent' of ADD so that they can be nurtured and treated holistically within our Society, For our health authorities to shirk this responsibility is as abominable a sin as some of the consequences of the toxic psych meds,

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Alec Grant Well said Thomas. BigPharma in elective affinity with APA, orthopsychiatry and other groups use enslavement/narrative entrapment in the interests of profit and social control

Don Karp Sera Davidow, founder of WMass Recovery Learning Community (non-clinical peer support community) and frequent writer for madinamerica.com

has this to say: "I am suggesting that people struggle. Sometimes deeply. And that it leads us far down the wrong path to understand those *human* struggles by lumping them all into *medicalized* groupings that are largely artificial.

Sure, *sometimes* people will speak to benefits... Helped them better connect with others with similar struggles and hear what's worked for them, etc. But the benefits are far outweighed by the negative impacts, many of which I've already mentioned.

We'd be far better off seeing struggle as struggle, and then being able to pick and choose from the array of supports that people have used to make their way through such struggles... Lumping the struggle into a man made category that does not objectively exist, narrows our view and our options and does harm to many of us."Manage