So I was reading this story and I think it’s rather easy to see what’s going on. Quite simply doctors have made the umbrella or the catch all classifications far far too wide. It seems like today you run into more and more kids who have to be on medication for ADD, or claim that their social interactions are bad because of autism or aspergers. While there are some people who truly do suffer, it seems like there are plenty who just need a push in the right direction.
For example, when I was in Public School they continually tried to force my mom to put me on medication. It was mostly because I was a handful to deal with. For that matter I was a handful to deal with my whole time in school, so that isn’t too surprising. It actually got to the point that during 3rd grade they wanted to switch me over to Special Ed. My mom had gotten tired of dealing with them and made the decision to switch me over to the Catholic School. Of course while I was still there I took a literacy test and scored on a nearly adult level in 3rd grade. Since it actually made the school look good, they ended up begging my mom to keep me in the school. She laughed.
One girl I used to date, her brother supposedly had really, really bad ADD. But amazingly the kid could sit down and play video games for every waking second he was out of school. But the second you’d try to tear him away from playing a game to do some homework, he would freak. If he was just doing whatever he wanted, he would normally be fine. But the second you tried to force him to do something he would freak out. By saying he was doing what he wanted, it was normally just playing video games.
Another girl I knew took the cake though. She was the perfect example of Munchhausen syndrome by proxy. You see she had a daughter with a maniac from West Virginia while she was in college. So for the first year of the girls life she was basically locked in a playpen. When she finally moved back home, she almost immediately got the kid diagnosed with autism. All of the suddenly she had the huge autism awareness bow on her car, she wore the autism awareness bracelet everywhere. Whenever the kid was out of control it was always because of autism and not bad parenting.
Of course what she more then likely failed to ever tell any doctor is how the kid basically had no development at all for at least the first year of her life. Meanwhile whenever I dealt with the kid she was fine, and nothing that she did seemed so far out of the realm of possibility for a kid that was 4-5 years old by then. For example, what kid growing up didn’t get in trouble for biting (or supposedly biting) another kid? It’s a bit worse if your 12 as compared to 5 when it happened.
I realize that these are just my experiences, and some kids really do suffer. But even the experts are willing to admit that autism in all it’s different forms have been over-diagnosed because it’s easier. It’s a lot tougher to help a kid out when he’s suffering from anxiety, poor development, or any of a number of issues that might truly be the root cause of the problem. Especially with schools pushing for any and all trouble makers to be immediately diagnosed with ADD and put on Ritalin.
It’s almost as if someone read “Brave New World” and decided that it was a good guide on how to cure most of the problems in a school. Drugging kids who might not even be suffering from what you’ve diagnosed them with is one of the things that worries me most in this society. It’s always a run to the quick fix and the drugs, instead of actually trying to fix things. I really hope as mentioned at the end of the story that they start tightening up and changing some of the diagnoses. Maybe then we’ll see a drop in the number of internet users claiming that they have Aspergers.
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add, adhd, asperger, autism, drugs, easy, Fake, munchausen, ritalin, school, self diagnoses, therapy
I can’t embed the video, so here’s the link to the news story:
http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/teen-s-fake-pregnancy-fools-school-24993410
Unless the news story is holding something back, I don’t think the people in school with her could have reacted any better then they did. Maybe some of them were calling her a whore behind her back, but these responses seem a lot more sensible then the stuff you see from those insane MTV shows. For example:
“A lot of rumors were just that I was irresponsible. No college…it was bound to happen. I knew she would get pregnant. Doesn’t she know she just ruined her life,” she said.
Is that really bad? Isn’t it better that these kids think it’s irresponsible to get pregnant at 17 then the response being “I’m so jealous of her”? Or that these kids are actually thinking about a future that involves college? She also said that some of her friends stopped talking to her and made her feel worse. News flash, there are always going to be some friends that are little more then sunshine friends. When everything is going well there’s plenty of them. But when shit hits the fan there’s nothing to be found.
I think a social experiment like this would be a lot more interesting in an area that wasn’t as liberal as Washington. I suspect that people in the deep south might have a wildly different view of things if an A student showed up to class one day pregnant. There’s also idiots like the “Pregnancy Pact” girls who vowed to all get pregnant at the same time. Even if the girl became a bit of a social outcast for a while, there are so many worse things that can happen, this seems like a rather compassionate and intelligent group of students.
In the long run, I don’t think this experiment really taught anyone all that much. It sounds like most of the students were pretty nice about it, and the assholes were probably just your normal assholes being assholes. Some people in life are going to be like that, get over it. Maybe I’m just expecting the very worse from everyone. I don’t expect what seems to be teenagers worrying about their future.
I wonder too though, is this really a top story in the world? Aren’t there more important things going on anywhere? I only saw this story because it was listed on yahoo’s top headlines. Even the whole social experiment part of it sounds sort of weak. We know what you’ll most likely be hearing when an A student shows up to school pregnant. It seems like she faced the lightest of how bad it can get. I hope at least that the video she made about everything is useful for someone.
A lot of people wonder why I’m so paranoid sometimes and why I think people are out to get me constantly. I blame it on school. I seemed to always be the person the teacher wanted to make an example out of. I always half assed classes but still passed. I normally slept through classes too, but when the teacher woke me up I gave them hell. So some of it was probably deserved. But still, it seemed like the teachers pets could cause all the trouble they wanted.
The worst was my grade school/middle school. A bunch of us transferred from public school to catholic school after 3rd grade because the catholic school had this mentally unhinged nun teaching 3rd grade. The sister teaching 4th grade immediately hated us all, and was upset she had to teach us stuff that the other kids already knew. She took it upon herself to try and get all the PS kids to leave the school, and by the end of the year it was only me and one other kid left. Amazingly though the school was having trouble with funding and could use every kid in a seat that it could get. This sister hated me through the rest of my time there and would turn her back to me getting beat on. But god be damned if I got away with anything.
Even when I did stuff right, like coming in first place at the county wide history fair, people were told not to clap for me because it would only encourage me and my friend. That was coming from the Principal of all people too. My ability to annoy anyone in authority seemed to extend to High School too. I got to know the Deans well and rather quickly. In fairness the thing that bugged me the most was that they were all former cops and treated us like criminals. My greatest day was when they threatened to kick me out my senior year. I went home and said I want to go to a different school. They spent two hours begging my mom to keep me there (they also couldn’t hold my tuition because my brother was going there so it transferred to him).
Even funnier was the final high school I graduated from. The Principal actually threatened to throw me out of the school on my final day as a Senior because one of my teachers had written him a 4 page letter complaining about me. I think someone with common sense got to him and told him to just let it go. Ironically when I went to get my diploma from him (after we had been padded down while entering the graduation ceremony) he said that my yearbook entry was great and made him smile. This so confused me it kept me from cursing him out.
Time and time again going to school it always seemed like everyone was out to get me. It helped to make me the insane paranoid bastard that I am today. Isn’t that wonderful from schools of learning?
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