There is a place for behaviorists.....A Guest Post by Beth Huntington

There is a place for behaviorists, and I'm sure if you introduce them to it slowly, with consistent and appropriate rewards for steps in the right direction, they won't mind the heat so much when they get there.

In response to my last posting about the behaviorists crowing that they were right about ADD being treatable with their methods, my sister, who has ADD, wrote me. She has struggled for years with ADD, and has found that medication is a godsend. Her words were pretty powerful, and she gave me permission to post them here as a guest post. I love this because it so fully and powerfully expresses the frustration people have who live with ADD and have to deal with the prejudices against them and their treatment plans.

From Beth Huntington (her blog is here: http://wilsonhuntington.blogspot.com/)


ADD is far from behavioral. Any adult with ADD can tell you that. I have never wanted to behave badly. In fact, I never knew and still never know when I am doing something that is unacceptable. So all I can say is that they are full of crap....

Okay so I am tempted to post this on my blog but since I can't sit down long enough to write a whole blog at once I will write it to you and I will try not to swear cause stuff like this really ticks me off. It makes me feel so not valid when I know that it is not me that is wrong, but that my brain is wired a bit differently. All those health people can go jump in the lake because I didn't spend hours in front of the TV as a kid and I don't as an adult.

I have ADD and I have had it for as long as I can remember and it's not just cause the doctor told me so when I was a kid because I wasn't diagnosed until I was 23 years old. When I started taking medication my doctor told me this: "You need to change your diet. Higher protein diets will be better for you. Make sure that you increase your exercise, sleep enough and start drinking whole milk. I don't know why, but for some reason it helps the medicine work better."

I have been taking medication for 3 years now and it still works for me. It works better if I don't have it for a while, but it almost always works. It stops working when I eat the wrong things or am not exercising enough.

Brain scans and other tests have shown that people with ADD have a slightly different wiring than those without and frankly if everyone was "normal" the world would be no fun. Everyone would always be worried about what other people thought about them and only acting like everyone else told them to.

So all those doctors can bite the wall! I will tell them personally where to go and how to get there!

Amen, sister.