I was diagnosed ADHD when I was 7 and the doctors put me on Ritalin.

This was the early 1970s when very little was known about how to prescribe the drug to children. The doctors put me on a dose of 20mg 3X per day. It almost killed me. I remember having an overdose in 2nd grade (at least now I know that it was a Ritalin overdose). 60mgs of Ritalin is high even for an adult much less a 7yo.

The teacher was required to distribute the pill to me mid-day. She would stop class, and say, "Rip, come up front and take your 'hyper pills.'" Thusly singled out, I would sheepishly trudge up to the front of the classroom and get my medication to the snickers off all my classmates. It was scarring.

Also my nighttime dose was usually enough to keep me awake all night. At that age I had night terrors which were exacerbated by the drug and lack of sleep. I'd return to school wiped out like a zombie.

I'm sure I did present with all the classic symptoms of ADHD: inattentiveness, restlessness, talkativeness, inability to complete tasks, constant need for interaction, etc.. I am still this way to a degree.

I'm pretty sure that nobody really bothered to try to understand what my home life was like. I was the only child of two raging alcoholics. They would get drunk and fight for hours 3-5X per week until all hours of the night. I was a terribly depressed, anxious child. And since the underlying cause of the anxiety (my horrible home) was never addressed, I've no doubt that to this day I carry around a form of PTSD from my childhood.

I'm sure there are many people from great homes with no external factors driving their ADHD. However, I know in my case, I suffered greatly from an untreated trauma, and was simply medicated so that I wouldn't disrupt my peers at school. It also didn't help that I have ~140IQ and found school absolutely tortuously boring until I finally got into an honors program in my high school. My peers were still struggling to read books aloud while I was knee-deep in LoTR.

How can we blame young children because they can't sit still and quiet day in and day out while absolutely nothing interesting ever happens? How is it that after years of being unable to complete homework assignments, nobody ever really started questioning what was happening at home?

Looking back, it is absolutely shameful how this was handled.

Treating behavioral problems in small children must begin with understanding and treating the possible behavioral problems of the adults first, otherwise it's just compounding the damage.

Interestingly when I got old enough to start using marijuana I quit the Ritalin. I found myself quite able to study on weed and my grades in college positively reflected my increasing marijuana consumption. My first year in college I used none, thinking that this would be best for my schooling, and I performed poorly. Thus discouraged, I figured that if school was going to go badly I might as well get high. My grades went from Cs and Bs to Bs and As and onto the Deans Honor Roll. I took my senior final in probabilistic modelling thoroughly blazed and broke the curve for the whole class.

Also interestingly, I cannot take other typical anti-anxiety meds. Anything in the benzo class, for example, causes terrifying complete amnesia even at low doses.

All anecdotal, I know, but I also know a lot of other people with more or less my same story.