by French children don't need medications to control their behavior. In the United States, at least 9 percent of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5 percent. How has the epidemic of ADHD—firmly established in the U.S.—almost completely passed over children in France? Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the U.S. In the United States, child psychiatrists consider ADHD to be a biological disorder with biological causes. The preferred treatment is also biological—psycho stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall. French child psychiatrists, on the
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French children don't need medications to control their behavior.
Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the U.S. In the United States, child psychiatrists consider ADHD to be a biological disorder with biological causes. The preferred treatment is also biological—psycho stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.
French child psychiatrists, on the other hand, view ADHD as a medical condition that has psycho-social and situational causes. Instead of treating children's focusing and behavioral problems with drugs, French doctors prefer to look for the underlying issue that is causing the child distress—not in the child's brain but in the child's social context. They then choose to treat the underlying social context problem with psychotherapy or family counseling. This is a very different way of seeing things from the American tendency to attribute all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in the child's brain.
Psychology Today: Why French Kids Don't Have ADHD
Biological psychiatry reigns supreme and all behavior was once linked to quirks in our genes, but the human genome project failed to point to any genetic traits that led to mental illness (apart from a minor gene recently found for schizophrenia, but most people with the gene do not have any problems) . What you will get in the media is news of research linking some gene to this or that psychological illness but when later research overturns the results the media ignores it. The short serotonin gene was not shown to be linked to depression in further research but the public still believes that low serotonin causes depression. Then the drug companies and the geneticists said instead that the the short serotonin gene predisposed people to depression if their upbringing was traumatic but later research overturned that theory too.
The French drug Tianeptine (Stablon) came out at the same time as Prozac but it works completely in the opposite way to SSRI's by lowering serotonin instead and is known as a serotonin re-update enhancer, SSRE, but it is just an effective as the SSRI's and a lot safer with hardly any side effects. Instead of bashing the brain into a stupor destroying passion and libido Tianeptine is neuroprtective allowing the hippocampus to regrow and this helps people overcome depression. Anglo-Saxon corporations ignored the French research and pushed their theories onto the public anyway and now millions of people are addicted to pills that stop working after a while making things worse in the long run, but this is good news for drug companies as the dosage needs to be needs to be constantly increased. I do believe their is a role to play for modern psychiatric medicine, though, when things get really bad, but the drugs are over prescribed and their dangers underestimated.
I'm not that keen on Micheal Adams but I thought his song SSRILies was very good. Very populist, I know, and things are not black and white, but the right again are on the ball with this one.