ADD/ADHD and Generation(s) RX

Posted by Ron Ball

Sep 21, 07

About 18 months ago, I wrote an article, Just Say No to Drugs? The gist of the article was that there is a contradiction in our culture regarding drugs. In the eighties, we had the slogan, “Just Say No to Drugs.” Today, I’d amend it to, “Just say no to drugs … unless they’re prescribed or on television.” On one hand, we are vehemently against illegal drugs, while at the same time we may have several over the counter and prescription drugs around the house. How many drugs do you have in your medicine cabinet? More importantly, how many meds do your children have?

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the abuse of prescription pain killers now ranks second — only behind marijuana — as the America’s most prevalent illegal drug problem. Read Americans Are Popping Twice as Many Painkillers Than in 1997. What’s interesting is that the primary reason people take both legal prescriptions and illicit drugs is the same — to relieve physical and emotional ills and feel better. Today, a friend send me a video via Google called, The Drugging of Our Children. You can watch it below.

It’s well worth viewing. And, you’ll need to schedule time for it because it’s almost an hour and 45 minutes long. If you have children on medications or particularly kids diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, I urge you to watch it. It starts out with a teenage boy talking about finding himself in a juvenile detention center because he’d taken a gun to class and held students hostage for several minutes. This was incongruent with his upbringing. Corey Baadsgaard was a Mormon boy who didn’t smoke or drink and never used illegal drugs. However, he was hallucinating from being on the drug, Paxil, which was prescribed by his doctor and can trigger violent outbursts and suicide. Paxil has a black box warning from the FDA even though doctors don’t always heed this advice.

I grew up in a generation where other than an occasional aspirin, cough syrup or a prescription that lasted a couple of weeks, children didn’t take medication. There certainly weren’t any kids I knew on Psychotropic drugs. So then, how did dis-eases like ADD, ADHD and others get to be hereditary so quickly? In the film, Dr. Fred Baugman says, “ADHD is a means of making paying patients out of normal individuals and once they are given a prescription, put on medications that are virtually never discontinued, they have lifetime paying patients. That’s what’s behind the epidemic.”That’s an extreme point of view, and I really don’t know if it’s true. My hunch is that there are a combination of reasons kids today exhibit some of these “negative” behavior patterns which may be attributed to:

• Poor nutrition: junk food, fast food, sodas, processed foods and food additives, fatty foods, a high sugar and carbohydrate loaded diet
• Undiscovered allergies, food or environmental toxins
• Being out of touch with their body, lack of physical exercise and playing outdoors
• Over-scheduling of kid’s time, filling it with activities, instead of allowing kids to explore and discover on their own
• Watching too much television and video games, creating a need for high visual and auditory stimulation
• Boredom, not knowing how to be in the present or knowing how to relax and enjoy simple pleasures
• Schools primarily focusing on logical, left brain skills such as math and science. Not enough appreciation of intuition, creative problem solving skills, and right brain talents such as writing, art and music.
• Being barraged with an overload of communications and information
• Media focused on negative news and oftentimes speculation or gossip
• Heavy consumer print and television advertising conditioning us to believe we need drugs, a “magic pill,” for conditions that might be relieved with simpler, no-cost or low-cost ways
• Social and medical beliefs that our bodies are only chemical instead of intuitively recognizing that we’re energy too
• Not teaching kids and teens ways to cope with unresolved emotional issues
• Tremendous peer pressure, comparing and conforming to fit in and be “okay” or be ostracized
• FOCUSING on the negative — what’s wrong and broken. “Repairing” a child to fit social norms instead of focusing on what’s positively right and assisting children to recognize and develop their unique talents and abilities. Is ADD or ADHD really a gift in disguise?
• Less time family bonding — communicating and connecting with family members — feeling a part of something bigger than themselves
• Our culture’s fixation on pigeonholing and labeling — addictions, afflictions, compulsions, conditions, dis-abilities, dis-eases, dis-orders, fixations, obsessions and syndromes. See, Have You Been Diagnosed with RGA?
• Having to make decisions with too many choices

Hey, just some thoughts.

If you have children with ADD or ADHD, my first suggestion for you is to use EFT on yourself for your reactions and feelings to the situation. Often parents want a quick-fix so they’ll feel better. Change your feelings first. After that, inform or teach EFT. And, if your child shows any resistance, STOP! Let it go until they want to know more. Set an example using EFT for yourself. Here are articles related to the topic from Gary Craig’s EFT Website.

• Using EFT for Struggling Students with ADD
• A Seven Year Old Learns EFT and Calms His Own ADHD

Another excellent article is from Rick Wilkes, An ADHD Animal Lover Who Cannot Remember His Keys. Lastly, there’s a caring gentleman named Don Blackerby who wrote a book, Rediscover the Joy of Learning. Don has dedicated himself to working with ADD and ADHD kids using NLP and EFT. He’s one of the world’s most knowledgeable experts on this subject. By adding EFT to his other skills, he generates a 95% success rate in eliminating ADD. According to Don, “The symptoms of ADD/ADHD are simply ways of acting out that unconscious and unresolved trauma. EFT is wonderful for ferreting out the current traumas or the old traumas.”