Yes, often times they are incredibly jaded and abused by the system. For example, my mom was a public school teacher. Lots of boys in her class were diagnosed with ADHD. She would make the children run off their energy before lessons, but this is not policy. The other teachers would just take a rowdy kid and send him off to assessment for ritalin or whatever drug they give these days. That was the 'standard practice'. Guess which one actually works?
I feel bad for the boys who would have excelled academically had they been chasing after farm animals the first two hours of the day instead of being given neurodepressents to calm down.
Yes my mom did too. After several times she failed to deliver them to the school nurse for their daily tranquilizers, she was eventually put on administrative leave and then denied tenure. unfortunately, you cannot fight the system. The boys she had were excelling, but the schools could not stand that they were being showed up by a mother of boys with no 'formal' research experience.
That depends on if you think the equilibrium will be something like 25% of boys needing drugs to normalize them (where it is trending in ‘leading’ counties).
Ritalin, obviously. ADHD isn't "too much energy", it's a neurological condition that, to a first approximation, can be defined as "the cluster of problems that respond well to treatment with stimulant medication".
I do feel bad for kids whose symptoms were ignored or mitigated by interventions as described, and therefore were not diagnosed, only to discover at age 30 or 50 that the reason they've struggled so much through life is because they have an executive function disorder, the methods for effectively managing it have existed for decades, and they could've made use of them if only people didn't dismiss them in childhood as "rowdy kids" in need of more exercise.
