Last year, Sinan Sonmezler of Istanbul refused to keep going to school. His eighth-grade classmates called him “weird” and “stupid,” and his teachers rebuked him for his tendency to stare out the window during class. The school director told his parents he was “lazy.”Sinan has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, a condition still little understood in many parts of the world.
While global diagnoses of A.D.H.D. are increasing rapidly, the general public understanding of the disorder has not kept pace. Debates about the validity of the diagnosis and the drugs used to treat it; the same that have long polarized Americans, are now playing out from Northern and Eastern Europe to the Middle East and South America.
A new study has found that more than 10 percent of U.S children have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Roughly 5.8 million children aged between 5 to 17 years are diagnosed with ADHD. According to the analysis of cases reported by parents from 2003 to 2011, ADHD is caused by social and behavioral problems as well as challenges in school. For parents of children struggling with attention problems, the most urgent issue is that their children aren’t getting the medical, social or educational support that they need. In many parts of the world, parents of children with A.D.H.D. say they feel stigmatized, no matter how they try to cope with the disorder.
“The sharper increase among girls was a surprise primarily because ADHD is typically diagnosed among boys,” said study co-author Sean Cleary, a public health researcher at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “One possibility to explain the increasing trend among females is a greater recognition of ADHD symptoms observed (e.g. withdrawn, internalizing) that are traditionally overlooked because they are not typically considered a sign of this condition,” Cleary added.
To study and analyze the shifts in diagnosis patterns over time, Cleary and co-author Kevin Collins of Mathematic Policy Research studied and observed data on more than 190,000 children from U.S. surveys conducted in 2003, 2007 and 2011.As part of the surveys, parents reported whether their child had been diagnosed with ADHD. Boys accounted for the majority of cases, and diagnosis for them rose 40 percent during the study period to 16.5 percent by 2011.
Quyen Epstein-Ngo, a psychology researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who wasn’t involved in the study stated that the rising diagnosis rates aren’t unexpected, and are consistent with trends U.S. clinicians have been seeing for years,
“It could be that the last several years have seen an increased ability, or willingness, to recognize that older adolescents who are still struggling could require more formal help and support,” Epstein-Ngo said.
“Alternatively, it could be that increased pressures on adolescents to perform and achieve are leading to a push for more ADHD assessments.”
Dr. Timothy Wilens, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston added “I do believe these data indicate that adolescents, girls, and certain racial ethnic groups are being monitored more stringently for behavioral and academic difficulties including ADHD and other problems,”
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