Dear FRONTLINE,

Parents should be aware that manic depression bipolar disorder occurs in more than 1% of the population and has symtoms similar to ADHD.

Stimulants and/or antidepressions can be dangerous for the such children. Read: Demitri Papolos, "The Bipolar Child". Only a child psychiatrist is qualified to prescribe! Our son did have ADHD without hyperactivity and it affected his school work and social life by his teens. BUT his manic depression eventually killed him at 41 through suicide in spite of medication and caring psychiatrists.

The Ritalin he was given at 40 "gave him a new perspective on life"; I'm glad it was not given to him as a child.

Santa Rosa, CA 95401

Dear FRONTLINE,

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, women who disobeyed their husbands or tried to be individuals were often medicated or hidden away. They were considered abnormal and the best way to fix abnormal behavior was to medicate it or treat it as a disorder. Now we look back on such behavior as wrong and barbaric. Women were just being human and expressive in a repressive Victorian society.

I can guarantee you that in a few years, we will look back on the modern American tendency to medicate abnormal children as wrong and barbaric. Has anyone noticed that there has been a huge rise in ADD/ADHD at the same time as the American diet for children has turned to Mountain Dew as a beverage and fast food for breakfast, lunch and dinner? For most kids, the only vegetable they get is the iceberg lettuce on their deep fried chicken sandwich. Children are also being held up to ridiculous behavior standards, while schools everywhere cut out recess and gym class. Hello? Dont you get bored sitting around on your butt for 7 hours at a time?

If Albert Einstein went to an American public school, he would have been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD and given Ritalin because he was too smart/board to pay attention in class. Some kids may actually have these disorders, but most are just creative, exuberant, highly intelligent kids who need to express themselves. Some kids learn better by doing. Cant we let kids be kids anymore?

Joe Green-Church
Powell, OH

Dear FRONTLINE,

I am a stay-at-home mom with two young sons, and I have often said that two kids is a lot of kids. I understand the challenges and frustrations of parenting. I could not, however, understand the parents of the overweight boy on your program who was briefly panned eating I don't even know what they are called -- hohos, perhaps? -- playing video games at home.

My first thought was feed the kid a vegetable and take him outside for a game of catch, for crying out loud. He won't eat vegetables, you say? Of course he won't if he's given every other anti-nutritional option available in the US. Who does the grocery shopping? My older son, who is heavier than I think ideal, eats like a horse. But what he has available at home is organic fruit, home-cooked meals, far too much milk ovaltine is a treat, not soda, et cetera.

He's not a natural athlete, but he plays Little League and walks to the neighborhood library, a steep four-block climb home in San Francisco. I feel a rant coming on again, and will sign off at that.

Mary Bon
San Francisco, CA

Dear FRONTLINE,

Dear FRONTLINE,

My husband and I watched your show and were extremely impressed with the job you did documenting the problem of ADD/ADHD. ADD/ADHD is one of the most perplexing conditions out there. The choice to medicate, not to medicate is one of the most difficult parents face.

What I found most disconcerting in all my research on the subject that while many parents "do their homework"

few schools are willing to make exceptions for these types of children, especially parents of those who choose not to medicate, of which we are "those." We are fortunate to live in a distict where the Elementary school is quite cooperative with parents of these types of children.

ADD commands so much atttention these days and so much information is available, that often as a parent you can literally be overwhelmed. A main concern of mine in the treatment of this disorde, is the fact remains- there are still no clear cut answers, but for some reason more and more children seem to be getting this disorder. Are we facing a fact that perhaps genetically are humans are changing?

As for medication,for some children it is a Monday through Friday solution, in other words it a school week problem. In the move toward ensuring equal education for all public schools are "teaching to pass"

standard state tests forcing to children spend more time in there seats than ever filling out paperwork. For ADD/ADHD children this is death.

Where have all the hands on teaching gone? Why can't kids do more moving around? Why is so much of education based on sitting and listening? In the real world- a lot of jobs require motion? Where have all the field trips gone? Where are all the Miss Frizzels and Bill Nye the science guys? Funding says it all.

Additionally our children are being forced to move in smaller and smaller circles, no more can children run all over the neighborhoods for fear of kidnapping. Part of the problem I think is this simply this- kids have no room to just be children any more. The world is moving faster than they can catch up!

Kim Najera
San Antonio, Texas

Dear FRONTLINE,

Daughter, Dawn, now 27 finished grade, high and college, working for Marriott in excellent position. Diagnosed as clinically hyperkentic in l976. Medications sedated, stopped, dietary changes enacted. Dramatic changes in three days the period of time required by our body to clense itself.

What changes did we make? Fed her "real" food, like our grandparents ate regularly as children. She was very athletic, competative, self-initiating and well liked. Now almost vegetarian, she manages her own dietary requirements, knows when something didn't agree with her can actually feel the difference.

We all strongly feel that "we are what we eat" and that all these synthetic chemicals which are entering our bodies daily are taking a toll. The Food Industry will not tell you this. The Pharmaceutical companies will not tell you this. If everyone were to feel better and not require "synthesized" foods or "drugs" to treat the symptoms of dis-ease, these folks would file for chapter eleven. The "essential fatty acids" are just that, essential. One's body needs approximately 37 nutrients daily to survive. Without appropriate foods whole grains, meats, fish, poultry, vegetables and fruits the body reacts adversely.

Check out www.hhi.org for more information on most recent conferences on ADHD and recommendations.

Trish not given
Annapolis, MD 21401

Dear FRONTLINE,

As a freshman college student who once faced the prospect of taking these drugs, this Frontline episode hit very close to home though Frontline in general is hands down the best investigative journalism program ANYWHERE on television.

All too often today, parents will jump to the conclusion that if their child gets into any kind of trouble or is not "normal" in any way, that they need to see a mental health professional and, following that, psychiatric medication. This is a serious problem, and it is absolutely unacceptable for schools to be in a position to force student enrollment based on the use of psychotropic drugs.

This is not meant to be an attack on psychiatry or psychiatric drugs, both of which do help many people. But a slippery-slope situation is emerging where any sort of behavior can be diagnosed and medicated. Parents, psychiatrists, counselors, therapists, educators: please do not follow this trend. You all have a hard job, but you must not give in to a false, misleading, and harmful solution to a given problem or action by your children and students.

Ben Bradford
santa barbara, california

Dear FRONTLINE,

I would like to bring your attention to a "non-pill" approach that many families have found very helpful.

A good description can be found at: www.possibilitykids.com. This website opens up new

possibilities for the healing of various learning challenges.

Alan Phillip
Pasadena, CA

Dear FRONTLINE,

My son was diagnosed with adhd at the age of five. even as an infant he always seemed to have a motor going nonstop. i have tried ritalin, adderall, and cylert but these medications doped him up too much even on an extremely small dose.

then i tried him on wellbutrin and he is doing beatifully. he acts as if he is a normal child who can focus and do just about anything a normal child does. he still has a little bit of the impusiveity but its also with in the most norm for his age. he was also diagnosed with learning disabilities with discrepensies in all areas, receptive and expressive language delays, and an auditory processing disorder. with his current medication he is able to sit down and concentrate on learning and has a thirst for knowledge. he is in a special day class but is making great strides.

i love my son and for the longest time i felt i was a bad mother but in reality im a great mom. When he was diagnosed i went through a greiving process but most parents do. its only natural. i have also been invovled in a group of parents who are trying to get a larger group started to help educate parents on thier rights to help be the best advocates for thier children in the public school system and how to deal with individual educational plan process and what services to ask about for thier children as most public school systems have a dont tell policy unless asked specifically about certain subjects from parents.

for those parents out there the public school system is responsible for your child starting at the age of 3 and are supposed to provide services for your child. like an example could be if the child has language delays then speech therapy is supposed to be provided free of charge to your child even though that child is too young for kindergarten. for those famalies out there who suspect something then have your child tested even if it comes out alright but if you feel the testing is inacurrate then have the child retested with someone not in the public school system and your school district will have to pay for it in most cercumstances.

Christina Rightmer
Atascadero, California

Dear FRONTLINE,

I know this is an issue of growing concern. I read with interest the testimony of parents who have applied the medication successfully to improve the academic and social lives of their children.

I have witnessed the moderate success of drugs on one of my child's classmates. So I am convinced it does work for some kids.

Ultimately we need answers as to why more and more kids are being diagnosed with ADD and ADHD. In one instance our local public school which we visited before deciding to send him to a private school had almost all their African American and Latino students medicated and segregated in other buildings and almost none of the white and Asian students.

We immediately believed that this was being used by school officials, who where almost all white and Asian, as a tool to control the student population. I would really like to see this topic studied more.

What are the racial factors involved in medicating or not medicating African American and Latino students? Is the medication used to segregate and control these students when they are in a mostly integrated setting? Is it not prevalent when the school is in the middle of the inner city and mostly Latin and African American?

I know there are many issues surrounding the medication of children in schools and it should be a concern of all parents. That said, we can not ignore American racial history, that great social ills and successes impact the races differently and usually are detrimental, to a greater or lesser degree, to historically oppressed minorities.

R. Roach
L.A., CA

Dear FRONTLINE,

I enjoyed your thoughtful presentation on ADHD and the children it affects. Certainly medication is not the complete solution to problems such as these, but the difficulties you implied for conventional psychiatry go even further than the shortcomings of current medication.

For it is only the complete overhaul of psychiatry that will bring about useful new approaches to treatment, new approaches that I feel will come from the emergent theories of Evolutionary Psychology. As part of your coverage, you mentioned individuals with multiple disorders, and those who were resistant to conventional treatment--two issues that would work well as starting points for a discussion on this issue.

Current techniques in Psychiatry still rely on the taxonomic approach presented in DSM-IV, in which a laundry list of undesirable quirks are assembled and then stuffed into diagnosis pigeonholes. While this approach has done some good for some patients, there are those for whom it has done very little.

With the aide of Evolutionary Psychology, there is promise that a coherent diagnosis procedure will someday be in place that will look upon the whole individual in light of their ancestral evolutionary environment, and then account for where that environment has interacted adversely with modern life. As the current DSM paradigm is displaced, Psychiatry will emerge as a much more nuanced scientific endeavor in both diagnosis and treatment.

To try and explain the difference between current and emergent approaches, Psychiatry's approach today is somewhat analogous to the amateur classifying rocks along a highway using a Peterson's Field Guide--some things are recognized for what they are, but so much is missed. However, looking toward a promising future, there is the potential for Psychiatric diagnosis to eventually resemble the more subtle approach of a learned scientist ascertaining the course of natural history from those same rocks. Once this more complete conceptual framework is used to guide Psychiatry's taxonomy, a more complete individual diagnosis will facilitate treatment targeted to each patient.

I would appreciate your exploration into this matter using ADHD or Dysthymia as a point of demarcation. With these, Frontline could present a discussion of current diagnosis and treatment practices and then compare them with an Evolutionary Psychology cause and effect perspective. While the endeavor is still nascent, its theoretical construct, properly applied, will eventually produce a much more fine-tuned approach employing medication, environmental changes and therapy.

Steven Preszler
Redding, CA

Dear FRONTLINE,

My son was diagnosed with ADD when he was 11 years old, and he was on 40 mg Ritalin a day for the next four years. In the beginning, it really worked; but as he grew larger, the dose was no longer efficacious, and we stopped the medication.

After frittering away his high school years, he obtained a G.E.D. at the age of 21. Now, he's 24, and is stuck in a low-paying job that doesn't meet his living expenses and doesn't provide any benefits, even though he works full time. I am frustrated for him, because early tests showed him to have a near-genius-level IQ, and I believe he could be successful in life, but I don't know how to help him.

About a year ago, I learned about Asperger's Syndrome, and after researching it, I believe this may be a more accurate diagnosis. He doesn't want to hear about it; he thinks he's been to enough doctors, although he has not been to a doctor since we stopped his medication.

Can you, or anyone reading this message, offer me any advice?

Sandy Jones
Shaker Hts., Ohio

Dear FRONTLINE,

ADHD/ADD does seem to be very real in some people, young and old. However, my problem deals with the fact that many children are being labeled simply because they are spoiled or lazy. My child has been spoiled for the last nine years by not only her older brother and sister but also me.

When she went to live with her father, he and his wife got a doctor to prescribe Ritalin for her inability to do things when they wanted them done. They switched her to a new school and expected her to immediately conform. She was made to live in a place that she did not desire to live.

After nine years of living in my household, making very good grades, and being complimented often on being sweet and kind, she is now being told that she has a problem and needs medication. She if frequently nauseated, gets sleeply early in the day but then does not sleep long at night. She is extremely hunger late in the day, but has lost a large amount of weight. She is told that her own mother does not care enough to make sure that she gets medication that she needs.

How can anyone give a child medication simply to make her conform? The courts seem to be promoting this action as we stay in a constant battle. She used to be calm, happy, and relaxed. Now, she does not know who to believe and stays medicated all the time.

Vickie Thompson
El Dorado, Arkansas

Dear FRONTLINE,

As one who is critical of the use of Ritalin in our country I was surprised that you decided to portray the critics of Ritalin as some sort of fringe group. It is true that the Church of Scientology opposes the use of Ritalin, however that in no way means that everyone who is critical of Ritalin is a Scientologist.

Maybe you are unaware that there is increased opposition to the use of Ritalin from other sources. Did you know that in the last year alone George Will, Nicolas Regush, Thomas Sowell, Arianna Huffington, Dr. Dean Edell, and even Rush Limbaugh have all expressed very critical opinions about the skyrocketing use of Ritalin. Since your piece appeared, John Silber, the Chancellor of Boston University, has written a scathing criticism of Ritalin that appeared in the Boston Herald. I may be wrong but I do not think any of these authors have ties to Scientology. The above mentioned list only mentions popular media figures but there is also opposition to Ritalin from well-respected physicians and scientists.

I am trying to decide why you simplified the issues of who is opposed to Ritalin and I am left with two choices. 1 You were simply unaware of the scope of the criticism or, 2 you were misinformed.

If you were simply unaware of critics outside the Church of Scientology then the problem lies more with sloppy research.

If the problem is one of misinformation then I can only wonder as to where you learned that the critics of Ritalin are nothing more than Scientologists. If you learned this from the pro-Ritalin lobby then you need to do some serious soul searching about your reporting methods.

In the interview with Dr. Castellanos he mentioned that in all his previously published studies showing a difference between the brains of ADHD children and normals there was the confounding variable that the ADHD children were on medications. As an analogy, if one group of children is exposed to a chemical and another group of children is not exposed to it and we then find a difference in brain size what would your conclusion be? That the children who ingested the chemical were born differently? If I am critical of these studies does this mean I am a scientologist or a skeptical scientist?

The real question about Ritalin is: Why does our country lead the world in Ritalin consumption? Your show provided part of the answer. Only in America could a major media outlet present a discussion of Ritalin and portray the critics of psychotropic drug use in children as a special interest group.

Jonathan Leo
Pomona, CA

Dear FRONTLINE,

I'm a 33 year-old male, who has spent some time looking into both sides and tried many different aproaches to combat the affects of ADD/ADHD. As a child I was a ridalin kid from the ages of 9 to 13, and I remember both being able to function, and not being able to function. I have read enough books to understand this one thing-- everyone educated in the medical field WILL have an educated prognosis as to how to combat this affliction.

Some say medicate, some say diet, some say exercise, some say behavior modification, some say it doesn't exist. What many of them are over-looking is the basic need FOR attention thus the meaning Attention Deficient Disorder. People as parents with children who have some problems ask, "Should I medicate my child? Is he/she anti-social? Is there something wrong? Why does my child come home depressed? Why isn't my child doing better in school? Does my child have ADD? Am I a bad parent?"

All these questions, and others rattle through the minds of caring, loving parents who want nothing more than to see their children grow, create, live, and have a childhood that they too can look back on when they grow old and leave a legacy for their children to follow. But the REAL PROBLEM lies with our over-crowding schools, our inability to give quality time to our children, our inability to communicate with others, a lack of a healthy educating environment, our American fast-food diet, an overt determination to over-diagnose every child with some problem to give him/her a pill to medicate...

We, as a society, have chosen the short, fast road, and try desparately to patch a band-aid on a major wound that needs some serious qualiy time being attended to. We have chosen to say--"here's a quick-fix to your problem child. So now everyone lets try the new thing to get my child back on track." PLEASE DON'T GET ME WRONG, I am not advocating the fight against medication, I am trying to tell you that the real problem is time, and the lack of it that we as a fast-paced society are finally starting to face with our children.

James Hornsby
North Hollywood, CA

Dear FRONTLINE,

Having just finished watching your program I felt compelled to write. You see, I diagnosed myself as having ADD not ADHD about four years ago and am now on Wellbutrin and occasional Adderall. A couple of things I want to point out. First, it is too bad that the focus is always on ADHD. I was one of those kids who didn't talk much in school, had a small circle of friends, and spent the majority of my grade school staring out the window and was made fun of because I was "stupid". There was no diagnosis of ADD/ ADHD back then. The feedback my parents was given was that I just wasn't "applying" myself, that I could do better if I just paid more attention.

It appears that the kids who do not have the hyperactivity component of ADD are greatly overlooked, and from educators and psychologists that I have talked to, they are the majority of ADDer's.

My second point is that there are actually many positive aspect to this "disorder". We ADDers learn by a different method than non-ADDers. We learn by doing. Among other things, we have the ability to better understand how things work than more linear thinkers. We also often have more insight into how people are feeling at any given time.

Lastly, ADD is not the same as many other disorders. The symptoms of ADD are symptoms that all of us have to one degree or another. It is a sliding scale. Given the right circumstances, we can beat linear thinkers by a mile. As adults, we have a choice as to how we live and learn. The education system doesn't allow children that choice.

Dean Stocker
San Mateo, California