[randomForest]

"Why French Kids Don't Have ADHD"

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suff...have-adhd/

Allow me to quote the relevant portions:

Quote:

"In the United States, at least 9% 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%. How come the epidemic of ADHD—which has become firmly established in the United States—has almost completely passed over children in France?"

...

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.

...

French child psychiatrists don't use the same system of classification of childhood emotional problems as American psychiatrists. They do not use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM. According to Sociologist Manuel Vallee, the French Federation of Psychiatry developed an alternative classification system as a resistance to the influence of the DSM-3. This alternative was the CFTMEA (Classification Française des Troubles Mentaux de L'Enfant et de L'Adolescent), first released in 1983, and updated in 1988 and 2000. The focus of CFTMEA is on identifying and addressing the underlying psychosocial causes of children's symptoms, not on finding the best pharmacological bandaids with which to mask symptoms.

To the extent that French clinicians are successful at finding and repairing what has gone awry in the child's social context, fewer children qualify for the ADHD diagnosis. Moreover, the definition of ADHD is not as broad as in the American system, which, in my view, tends to "pathologize" much of what is normal childhood behavior.

...

From the time their children are born, French parents provide them with a firm cadre—the word means "frame" or "structure." Children are not allowed, for example, to snack whenever they want. Mealtimes are at four specific times of the day. French children learn to wait patiently for meals, rather than eating snack foods whenever they feel like it."

The TL;DR version

The structure, sense of boundaries, and clear hierarchy of the functional, intact nuclear family rears children who are capable of controlling their desires without pharmaceuticals. This, combined with the reticence of French clinicians (and broader French society) to pathologize normal boyhood behavior makes for nearly 20 times fewer diagnoses of ADHD per capita. This also results in fewer French fatties, to boot. That French society has significantly lower levels of single motherhood and uninvolved/emasculated fatherhood than American society likely plays a pivotal role in it's ability to enforce structure and discipline upon it's children.

None of this will come as shock to the denizens of this estimable forum.

Remember this the next time some hag tries to cite older/aging fathers as a key risk factor for autism spectral disorders in children.

[Pyre]

I don't know. Americans seem to have this infatuation that "everything is better in France."

The stats are heavily skewed, however, because the French are more reluctant to diagnose a lot of things like adhd than the US. When I lived there I visited a few doctors who didnt even know what ritalin or adderall were. No one one would prescribe it.

OTOH, the french have their own share of problems.

[Akula]

(12-02-2013 07:54 AM)Pyre Wrote:  

I don't know. Americans seem to have this infatuation that "everything is better in France."

The stats are heavily skewed, however, because the French are more reluctant to diagnose a lot of things like adhd than the US. When I lived there I visited a few doctors who didnt even know what ritalin or adderall were. No one one would prescribe it.

OTOH, the french have their own share of problems.

I dunno, American doctors get paid to medicate everything and that's gotta be a big reason that there's so much more of it there. We're the most over-medicated society on the planet I think. It's almost always about treatment as opposed to prevention in the US too, or at least it seems that way to me.

The French eat healthier food, work less and have less stress so I'd argue that would tend to make them healthier and less afflicated by certain diseases too. I don't think their economy as is is really sustainable, but the people enjoying living there now sure have it pretty good.

Sometimes we seem to just treat boys for 'hyperactivity' and "ADHD" when they are 'just being boys' too. All the crappy processed food and sugars Americans eat can't help either.

There are several books about how the French way of parenting is better than in the US too. Basically the US has really slipped up in the past 30-40 years in feeding, educating and raising its children.

I wonder what the percentage of "ADHD" kids in the US are boys? Bet it's well over 50%.