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Growing pains
Driven to Distraction: ADHD 8pm, The LifeStyle Channel A
YOUNG man with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder once
described it as growing up with a tornado in his brain.
Tonight, another young man says it's like having 90
television screens flashing around your head at once, with
the channels constantly changing.
This is an attempt to dispel some of the myths about ADHD -
such as, it's the result of bad parenting - and to give a
sense of what it's like to have or to rear a child with the
condition.
It introduces us to several parents and their unruly
offspring. The despair in these families is palpable. Life
is lived constantly on the edge. One woman describes how her
two-year-old had temper tantrums that lasted all day. It's
just a phase, people said. "It was so hard to make them
understand I needed help," she says.
"He never slept. I didn't have a night's sleep until he was
five," says another worn-out mum. "His hands are never
still, his feet are never still; if he's sitting still, he's
fiddling," says another.
Rather than just a transitory phase, the problems tend to
grow with the child, who's less and less able to meet the
expectations of school and society. Frustration turns to
rage and toddler tantrums to explosive outbursts that get
children expelled from school. "I punched my mum so hard in
the face she had a black eye," an 11-year-old tells us.
Ben Polis, 22, the young man who likened ADHD to having a
battery of TV sets in his head, moved through six schools in
12 years and was so violent that his father almost took out
a restraining order against him. (Polis has written a book,
Only a Mother Could Love Him, that gives his perspective on
growing up with ADHD.)
So what makes these children such monsters? The program
stresses it's a neurological deficit, not a discipline one,
and gives us a science-lite explanation of why this is so.
The symptoms can include hyperactivity, distractibility,
disorganisation, impulsiveness and low tolerance of
frustration, sometimes to extreme degrees. People with ADHD
often have co-existing language problems, such as dyslexia,
and difficulty putting their thoughts into words. More often
than not they have high IQs that can blind teachers to the
underlying disability; the child will be unfairly written
off as lazy and disruptive.
But there is an upside to ADHD. As one doctor tonight says,
it can coexist with many strengths and there are leaders in
the sciences, medicine, the arts and music with the
condition.
But how do you tame the ADHD demon? The usual response of
doctors is medication. Many of the parents tonight say
Ritalin has transformed their children's lives. Polis is
quite frank: without Ritalin, he'd be in jail, he says.
But giving mind-altering drugs to children is
controversial. "How do you say to a six-year-old kid, well
you're bad, you do naughty things, so we're giving you
drugs?" the program asks.
One psychologist insists while Ritalin might make a child
more manageable in the short term, it does nothing to help
ADHD in the long term. He advocates neuro-feedback - which
uses computer games to enable a person to learn to control
their brainwaves - as a permanent solution.
While the National Health and Medical Research Council says
this is unproven therapy, one family tonight says it's
paying off for them.
The program doesn't offer any ideal fixes but it does give
an insight into what it's like to be literally driven to
distraction.