One of the greatest evils of my 90s childhood was the sedation and casual drugging of young boys for acting like boys in a school system built for little girls.
And it’s only now that we’re finally allowed to ask questions. Decades too late.
My father (the last of the old-fashioned family docs) used to say if you want to remain healthy, stay as far away from the hospital as you possibly can.
The same maxim could be said for children: you want healthy kids, keep them far away from grand medical experiments, especially when it relates to their developing minds.
How many of those 17 year olds live in a single parent household?
Correlations don’t prove causation, but they can help point the way.
Now do autism.
Or more accurately, the trendy form of autism whose symptoms suspiciously match the lack of social skills and hyperfixation that comes from being shuttled from unstable environment to unstable environment since the age of two.
In the 1990’s, the teachers were making all the ADHD diagnoses not the doctors. Seems they couldn’t be bothered dealing with discipline.
I’d like to give proper credit but someone posted that this situation remarkably occurred at the same time when women became more predominant in teaching positions in public schools.
Who knew that it was the mothers who needed the medication?
In Canada, we’ve decided that just castrating them works better.
meds up!!! is the cry.
lm autistic. absolute total opposite bouncing off the walls.
our attention deficit is everything but what absorbs our interest at the moment.
colloquially ‘daydreaming’ ie gazing out the grade school window looking at the fractal structure of the tree branches supposed to be listening to the lesson.
whatever it was about who can say.
2007 ocd on top of that translated into disability pension.
called up last boss that fired me told him l was still being paid by his taxes except dont have to work now and oh by the way l DID everything you said AND more but you wouldnt listen.
In my days it was call hipper-active.
I remember that era because I grew up in it. It was made out that Ritalin was the wonder drug for school discipline, leading to its over use.
The phrase “toxic masculinity” used to refer to those aspects of hypermasculinity that were manifestly destructive. Now it often means that masculinity itself is destructive. We should all behave like women.
But, but it’s science right?
You know the one good part about that, and I am joking because it is not good, is that most women actually want a real man, and when they encounter one, they melt.
it’s still going on but also for 20 to 40 something year old women. Many female friend of my significant other’s are on some form of ADHD or anxiety meds, despite many, if not most of them having never seen a doctor for the condition(s) that TikTok has convinced them they have, and instead being able to have phone appts with Nurse Practitioners.
It could be that ADHD in boys is just boys being entirely bored, frustrated, and sick of institional bullshit.
Agreed! Back in the 80’s, I would listen to the Vicky Gabareau show on CBC Radio in the afternoons while working. She once had a children’s award winning author on her show and asked “Why are little boys such goofballs?” She had 2 sons who were pre-teens at the time. This is the answer the author gave her.
Little boys do not have the myelin sheathing fully developed around their spinal column when they are born (but little girls do). The myelin sheathing is what goes when you are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Therefore, little boys are like faulty electrical wiring, sometimes the message gets through and sometimes it doesn’t. This is why little girls talk sooner, walk sooner and do well in elementary school.
The good news is that between the ages of 11 and 13, the myelin sheathing becomes whole in boys and that is why they take off (as well as developing lots of testosterone) in athletics and academics. This happened to my nephew- a major goof ball and then about Grade 7/8, he became an academic achiever and graduated with honors from high school in Ontario.
Patience is required when bringing up sons and daughters.
Heck I was back in the 1960.
I guess I’m from a different era than most. As kids growing up we didn’t know anyone with Autism/Aspergers and the term ADHD never came up nor did Dyslexia or nut allergies.
The only one who had a medical affliction in our group was “Stutterin’ Tim” who, only in the interest of saving time, we were sure to never ask how his day was going.
Gazing out of schoolroom windows is what 80% of the class did and a smack on the hands with the teacher’s pointer was the cure. And I find the truly impressionable can be talked into almost any malady and thanks to Elon Musk who declared himself afflicted with Aspergers I suspect we’ll have a generation or two of those who think they’re rocket scientists. Not unlike the smattering of kids in the neighbourhood who some years ago were declared “gifted” by their parents – a one minute conversation with any from that crop of Einsteins, convinced I and others that nothing could’ve been further from the truth.
Oh well.
The only malady I had growing up was FDHD … Female Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I could never get enough Females in my life … I wanted MORE and MORE and MORE. I went hyperactive trying to get with a NEW one every week. Every DAY!
I guess my nutsac was hyperactive … “toxic” … oh well.
OMG… did I read this. HAHAHA
Hey! I just had to share my victimology!
Oh well, as long as the other 77 percent identify somewhere in the LGBTQ rainbow, then this shrinking remnant of testosterone shouldn’t really be considered a problem.
Back in the 60s and 70s, it was called CBS – chronic boner syndrome.
There WERE times I couldn’t get up from my desk till after everyone in class had gone outside already …
I have some executive function disorder which may or may not be a part of ADHD. I have a lot of symptoms, but none are severe. If you’ve ever met me in life you’d never have an idea unless you know exactly what to look for.
It’s important to see an actual psychologist and come up with a plan based on symptoms. Medication can be a part of that. Dealing with a psychiatrist or GP isn’t usually enough. They can prescribe, but they don’t know how actually tackle the problem. I’ve actually inadvertently learned of the same tricks/tools that they teach ADHD patients such as body doubling.
Being diagnosed with ADHD or not isn’t relevant here, what’s important is what symptoms they have and seeking the proper treatment.
It was said, in another century, that in puberty, boys senses take over and brain takes leave without pay.
Yeah in puberty, boys think about sex 90% of the time and 10% how to get it.
3 years of boys boarding school experience talks here.
Boarding school was nothing special, they wanted to produce communist cadres of the future.
FWIW – another “medical triumph”
In today’s Coffee and Covid
“It has been 25 years since the ADHD industry took off like a SpaceX Dragon rocket with an all-male crew. The now-common diagnosis and its even more common drug treatment enjoyed no bigger cheerleader and ardent defender than the New York Times itself. But after twenty-five years of federally subsidized pediatric speed, an eye-watering 23% of boys —nearly 1 in 4— are now taking Ritalin or Adderall for the “condition.”
They’ve cured nothing.”
And for a mention
“Where does this leave us? First, I’ll direct your attention to the Times’ medical exposé from January: the horrifying admission that for the same quarter-century, we’ve also been thinking about Alzheimer’s all wrong.”
Why?
“Now, three months after the Times’ brutal takedown of Alzheimer’s research, the paper turns its attention to another scientific scandal, ADHD. But why now?
I’ll propose to you it is because they know what’s coming. Trump’s new health secretary Robert Kennedy is refocusing the public health agencies on these boring chronic conditions instead of on boutique, career-making, subsaharan diseases like monkeypox that nobody except a handful of patients gives a rat’s furry toucas about.
Kennedy has also promised to make the agencies’ internal studies public. Disclosure”
And covid and “the jabs” also get a mention
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/frozen-tuesday-april-15-2025-c-and?