description: Cries Unheard provides an opportunity for a new look at the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder debate. We seek to redress some basic misconceptions regarding the current interpretation of children's problem behaviours. We argue that, while a range of children's behavioural characteristics may be viewed as "symptoms" earning the child the diagnostic label of ADHD, such symptoms are not sufficient by themselves to diagnose children as ill, much less to justify medicating them. Often, a failure to make a "holistic" assessment of a child within a family context, as well as within his or her wider school and social settings, may result in a misdiagnosis of behaviour as illness. In Cries Unheard we address issues such * how changing social and economic parameters have led to an increase in the diagnosis of ADHD in children; * how parents are pressured to seek the medication of their children in order to ease problems of classroom management; * the link between a decline in the provision of services for children and an increase in their medication; * they myth that infants do not remember painful and traumatic experiences; and * the impact that a mother's depression can have on her infant. This book is written in support of the rights of the child and as such it is a book about the rights of us all. In particular we support the rights of our children to be given appropriate medical assessment and treatment and not merely to be medicated into conformity by an increasingly time pressed and stressed medical profession and education system.
language: English
title: Cries Unheard: A New Look at Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
titlecomplete: Cries Unheard: A New Look at Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
publisher: Common Ground Publishing Pty Ltd