AD4E Workshops

offerings with non-pathologising approaches

CHECK OUT AD4E’s UPCOMING EVENTS – because labels don’t tell truthful stories.

AD4E link

LACCC presents: Innovations in Recovery Conference, Monday, June 23rd, 8am – 4pm

The LOS ANGELES COUNTY CLIENT COALITION is putting on the 3rd Annual Innovations in Recovery Conference. The conference will ill take place on Monday, June 23, 2014 at the California Endowment Center (Directions & Innovations Conf 2014.flyer)  located at 1000 N. Alameda Street Los Angeles, CA 90012, from 8:00am to 4:00 pm. 

Please join us!!! The Wildflowers’ Movement will be exhibiting and presenting SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND, an innovative workshop with music, singing and art! Our group is about giving & receiving mindful support while practicing self-awareness, cultivating radical wellness, and celebrating diversity. We meet every 1st and 3rd Sunday at SHARE! in Culver City and out at various events, and in nature, our natural habitat.

 

 

Why French Kids Don’t Have ‘ADHD’: The Cultural Differences of Child Rearing

It’s quite encouraging to realize that in other countries the DSM is not taken seriously. In fact, it’s not used at all. For example, the focus in France is on addressing the underlying psychosocial causes of symptoms, not on finding the best pharmacological bandaids with which to mask symptoms. It is a totally different perspective from the American tendency to attribute all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in the brain.

Unfortunately, in the United States, the strict focus on pharmaceutical treatment, encourages clinicians to ignore the influence of dietary factors on our behavior. This and comparing other cultural child rearing differences can help us save our children

published by Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D. in Psychology Today

Why French Kids Don’t Have ‘ADHD’

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?

Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the United States. 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 motional 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. The DSM specifically does not consider underlying causes. It thus leads clinicians to give the ADHD diagnosis to a much larger number of symptomatic children, while also encouraging them to treat those children with pharmaceuticals.

The French holistic, psychosocial approach also allows for considering nutritional causes for ADHD-type symptoms—specifically the fact that the behavior of some children is worsened after eating foods with artificial colors, certain preservatives, and/or allergens. Clinicians who work with troubled children in this country—not to mention parents of many ADHD kids—are well aware that dietary interventions can sometimes help a child’s problem. In the United States, the strict focus on pharmaceutical treatment of ADHD, however, encourages clinicians to ignore the influence of dietary factors on children’s behavior.

And then, of course, there are the vastly different philosophies of child-rearing in the United States and France. These divergent philosophies could account for why French children are generally better-behaved than their American counterparts. Pamela Druckerman highlights the divergent parenting styles in her recent book, Bringing up Bébé. I believe her insights are relevant to a discussion of why French children are not diagnosed with ADHD in anything like the numbers we are seeing in the United States.

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. French babies, too, are expected to conform to limits set by parents and not by their crying selves. French parents let their babies “cry it out” if they are not sleeping through the night at the age of four months.

French parents, Druckerman observes, love their children just as much as American parents. They give them piano lessons, take them to sports practice, and encourage them to make the most of their talents. But French parents have a different philosophy or discipline. Consistently enforced limits, in the French view, make children feel safe and secure. Clear limits, they believe, actually make a child feel happier and safer—something that is congruent with my own experience as both a therapist and a parent. Finally, French parents believe that hearing the word “no” rescues children from the “tyranny of their own desires.” And spanking, when used judiciously, is not considered child abuse in France.

As a therapist who works with children, it makes perfect sense to me that French children don’t need medications to control their behavior because they learn self-control early in their lives. The children grow up in families in which the rules are well-understood, and a clear family hierarchy is firmly in place. In French families, as Druckerman describes them, parents are firmly in charge of their kids—instead of the American family style, in which the situation is all too often vice versa.

Copyright © Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D.

Marilyn Wedge is the author of Pills Are Not for Preschoolers: A Drug-Free Approach for Troubled Kids

Festival of Recovery

Join us for the Festival of Recovery this Saturday, April 6th, at:

SHARE! Culver City    (press the link for directions)
6666 Green Valley Circle
Culver City, CA 90230

from 9:00 am to 5:00pm, Lunch will be provided, Free parking, suggested donation is $5

If you cannot join for the full day, please come join us at 1.30-2.30 p.m., immediately after the lunch hour, in the PROSPERITY ROOM. We would love to meet you and have you sample our group meeting 🙂  !!! We are listed under WILDFLOWERS’ MOVEMENT.

Check out more than 30 Self-Help Support Groups and find the one you want!

A support group can help you…

• Turn from struggling to thriving

• Think about your dreams and find a way to make them happen
• Cope with feeling depressed
• Overcome anger and resentment
• Get help finding or keeping a Job
• Make new friends
• Discover gratitude for your life
• Get along better with people
• Manage your money, no matter how much you have

Sponsored by SHARE! and SOS

Drowned in a Stream of Prescriptions

New York Times, By ALAN SCHWARZ, Published: February 2, 2013

VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.

It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.” It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.

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Peer Support Group

We will be resuming our peer support group meetings twice a month at SHARE! on Wednesday, September 26, 2012, at 6.30 p.m.

We hope that you will join us on Wednesdays evenings to express your dreams and concerns. We welcome you to participate in this friendly group that transcends accepted notions of normality and embraces our diverse beauty.

If you cannot join us and you are interested in attending our outings, please email us at:  ecoeducate@gmail.com   to get on our emailing list. We would love for you to join us!

Self-awareness is a key component of wellness.

Self-awareness is having a clear perception of our personality,including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions. 

Self-awareness allows us to understand other people, to be aware of how they perceive us, to understand our attitude and our responses to other people in the moment.

Breath of Gaia

Gaia, the Greek Goddess, is Mother Earth, the bringer of life and beauty. Where Gaia breathes, she brings new life to a sleeping earth. Renewal springs forth along Gaia’s every path.

Psychiatric Labeling Action Network for Truth

by Dr. Paula Caplan, Clinical & Research Psychologist, Harvard University

Alarmed by the massive numbers of people who have been seriously harmed over the decades because of psychiatric diagnosis, which is not scientifically grounded, rarely helps, and often has negative consequences, and knowing that the next edition of DSM will likely be sent to press this coming May at the American Psychiatric Association convention, we have decided it is time to stop asking the DSM editors to listen and instead to take actions. The first two actions of our PLAN T Alliance (Psychiatric Labeling Action Network for Truth) are…

Boycott the DSM

and

Call for Congressional Hearings about Psychiatric Diagnosis

The following video and information was uploaded by prokopton on Dec 4, 2007

The idea of mental illness as a biological entity is easy to refute. In 1988, Seymour S. Kety, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience in Psychiatry, and Steven Matthysse, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychobiology, both of Harvard Medical School, said “an impartial reading of the recent literature does not provide the hoped-for clarification of the catecholamine hypotheses, nor does compelling evidence emerge for other biological differences that may characterize the brains of patients with mental disease.” 

In 1992 a panel of experts assembled by the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment concluded: “Many questions remain about the biology of mental disorders. In fact, research has yet to identify specific biological causes for any of these disorders. … Mental disorders are classified on the basis of symptoms because there are as yet no biological markers or laboratory tests for them.”

Columbia University psychiatry professor Jack M. Gorman, M.D., said “We really do not know what causes any psychiatric illness.” Another Columbia University psychiatry professor, Jerrold S. Maxmen, M.D., said “It is generally unrecognized that psychiatrists are the only medical specialists who treat disorders that, by definition, have no definitively known causes or cures. … A diagnosis should indicate the cause of a mental disorder, but as discussed later, since the etiologies of most mental disorders are unknown, current diagnostic systems can’t reflect them.” Psychiatrist Peter Breggin, M.D., said “there is no evidence that any of the common psychological or psychiatric disorders have a genetic or biological component.”