That is a fairly large margin. While the article does say that ADHD treatment should be about choice, one has to wonder whether Governments could possibly look at treating people in prison if they have been diagnosed and would this be a moral road to take? Should the State impose treatment in prison to help prevent people from re-offending? Or should inmates be given the choice for treatment? Or should sufferers be treated much earlier on in a bid to curb criminal behaviour, since the study also found that sufferers of ADHD are more likely to commit a crime?
Most people are full of hate and never consider the consequences. So they going to fix most people are they, lol
I think ADHD is still commonly misdiagnosed. I was a child with sleep apnea and was diagnosed with ADHD. In Fact; children with sleep apnea are said to be 2.7 times (check stats) more likely to have ADHD. I suggest that these children are simply falling asleep or daydreaming in class as that goes along with sleep apnea. They are just tired. I was never treated for ADHD, and am glad my mother was adamant about not taking medication for it. I wonder how many kids had Ritalin shoved down their throats that merely were tired. Just because two disorders have similar symptoms does not make them the same, and medicine is only good if your doctor is good. IF YOU ARE A PARENT WITH A CHILD WITH ADHD CONSIDER HAVING THE CHILD TESTED FOR SLEEP APNEA AND QUOTE THIS POST TO YOUR CHILDS DOCTOR.
I think early detection and treatment (appropriate treatment, eg cognitive training +/- pharma) is the ideal. I doubt that enforced treatment would achieve anything, and may make it worse. You'd have to do the study to be sure but I expect that adults who are treated without consent are not going to have the same outcome as adults who do consent. I think there is a place for encouraging offenders to opt for assessment and potential treatment, but you'd have to think carefully about cofidentiality of assessment results and how to monitor the effectiveness of such a program.
Even better, quote a reliable source. Most people (and I hope all doctors) aren't that receptive to quotes from some random guy on the Internet. Bringing in a printout including a paragraph in all-caps isn't going to help either (sorry kwhilborn). ADHD and sleep disorders (WebMD.com) Is obstructive sleep apnea associated with ADHD? (PubMed.gov: Youssef et al, 2011, Ann Clin Psychiatry. 2011 Aug;23(3):213-24.)
It could be. It's a healthy discussion to have, because it addresses the problem of crime from a proactive health-centered position instead of sheer vengeance, which is the typical reaction. I think under current laws they have to be treated humanely, even though there is probably little enforcement of that rule. I also think, for reasons like medical privacy, a prisoner can't be forced to comply. An exception would be someone delusional or violent, which probably doesn't come into play here. I like that this came out of Sweden, since it's one of the countries where you'd almost expect an outlook like this, instead of the more vengeful indifference seen in places like the US. I did also wonder if ADHD is a condition that leads to getting caught more often, and that alone could affect the control. (I couldn't tell.) In any case, I would strongly favor a worldwide movement to increase MHMR funding, to try to curb criminal thinking and improve self-respect, and by a battery of programs that reach people throughout their lives to address all of the mental health and personality conditions, including ADHD.
@ Pete, I was not aware that medical research had caught up with my 40 year old assumptions. Perhaps it was someone who had experienced childhood sleep apnea that brought this to the attention of researchers by typing all caps. My target was search engines and parents, and was less concerned how the comment was received by those unaffected. Thank-you though for showing (confirming my beliefs) that Sleep Apnea can mimick the symptoms of ADHD. I am not normally a fan of typing all caps, and if someone did it in Warcraft or some such game I might put them on ignore, however Sciforums subjects sometimes pop up in searches and if all caps saves a child from unnecessary medication (is it still Ridalin) then I would be happy. I think the comparable symptoms were common sense and cannot believe they confused the two for so long. I wonder at how many kids were drugged by accident because of this? I wonder at how many kids are still being diagnosed with ADHD that merely are tired? IF YOU HAVE BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH ADHD CONSIDER SLEEP APNEA AS A POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE. Doctors are not infallible.
This is kind of ironic. I wonder how many of these people are jailed for taking speed and other anphetamines. This would be the hight of irony concidering that anphetamines are the treatment for ADD As for the ethics actually there is already an established test for that. If a person is a threat to self or others then treatment can be forced. Its slightly more complex than that but that is the general gist
I agree with you and Pete. There is tremendous potential here. And it very much is pro-active and it also allows the criminal to become actively involved in their own treatment and rehabilitation and it finally allows them to get some control over their own lives and themselves. I do not think it would be moral to force the treatment on prisoners and this should be entirely voluntary. But I do agree with Pete that treating it from as early as possible in children would be more beneficial as it may also prevent possible crimes from being committed. This study has opened up a lot of doors in regards to how else to help rehabilitate prisoners so that they do not go out and re-offend again.
Imprisonment itself is marketed to the citizens as a "treatment to help prevent people from re-offending." Considering what a horrible experience that is, it's hard to imagine how medication could be a whole lot worse. That sounds dystopian. Obviously if the ADHD is discovered in childhood, then parents are granted broad discretion in attempting to cure it or mitigate its effect. I don't know how it works in your country, but in the USA ADHD patients have prescriptions for amphetamine so it's legal for them to take it. Other drugs are also used, but one major advantage of amphetamine is that if the patient screws up, forgets, changes his mind, or whatever, and stops taking the medication, he can pick it up again at a later date and it will start working again. I have a friend who had been taking some other ADHD drug for 45 years (sorry I don't remember the name) and one day she just decided that she was cured and she stopped taking it. Within a few weeks she was an absolute basket case, with so much mental anguish that she was not far from suicidal. And she could not go back to her old prescription. Once you stop taking that particular drug, your body develops an immunity to it. This was more than a year ago and she still feels like crap, with her doctors trying desperately to find something else that will work. I have another friend with a similar history, but she was taking amphetamine for 45 years. Her doctor urged her to stop because once you hit 60 the risks start to outweigh the benefits. She seems to be doing fine, and the doctor reassured her that she could pick up the speed again if she ever felt she needed it. Both of these women have had perfectly fine lives, good careers, happy marriages (although one is a widow now), successful children. ADHD is curable.
It's not curable, it's treatable and your post makes a couple of assumptions. First assption is that they are correctly diognosed (or diognosed at all) and the second is that they are getting correct treatment. Both these are HUGE assumptions even in a country like Australia with universal health care let alone the US where health care is linked to employment. ADHD is going to impact on employability especially untreated, sure there are some successful people with it, billy Connolly for example and some sports players but they are in the minority and if you can't Aford treatment because you can't hold a job how employable are you going to be? Connolly himself started off as an alcoholic and this is the point, self medication through alchole and drug abuse is so common in mental illness, especially undiognosed mental illness.
Recall reading a study some years back indicating that the successful self employed and entrepreneurial in the US are more likely than others to be ADHD. That seemed plausible, to me. I filed it with the info that the very successful in business are more likely than most to have been fired at some time in their careers, the very successful in science are more likely than the normal to have had severely disrupted educational tracks, the most successful salesmen are more likely to steal from the company than the normal ones, and so forth. Crime rates vary so much between communities, cultures, eras, classes, and the like, that a correlation with ADHD doesn't quite answer the questions that come up re recidivism. That is, while offering mental health treatment as an option for those leaving jail is probably a wise and cost-effective approach in the US, forcing such treatment on the unwilling (or, as would be immediately implemented, making it a condition of early parole etc), on the basis of such statistics, seems far from justified.
Sure, the underlying physiological condition may not be curable. But when we talk about ADHD we're focusing on the behavior, not the hormones or brainwaves or pH imbalance or whatever might be triggering it. So if a course of treatment causes a long-term remission to behavior patterns that fall within the parameters of "normal," as defined both by the patient and his family, friends, coworkers and/or community at large, then neither the patient nor any of those other folks really give a rat's ass whether we've "repaired" his body chemistry and electronics, or simply given him the best Band-Aid he's ever had in his life. We call him "cured," and the odds are very high that as long as he doesn't do something really stupid (such as going off his meds without talking it over with his doctor) he'll stay "cured" and thereby satisfy the layman's definition of the word. You unrepentant Marxists sure love to bash the USA. We don't like your system because we're all ornery cusses who hate to be regimented. Not to mention our chaotically heterogeneous population that makes your national motto, "One Size Fits All," absurdly false here. (How many people in your country practice a religion that defines vaccinations, antibiotics and surgery as tools of Satan?) We're willing to make the tradeoffs that come with our system. And you greatly exaggerate the "linkage" between healthcare and employment, like all the pink-os who love to trash-talk America while depending on us to keep Chinese gunboats out of your harbors. The vast majority of people in the USA who don't have health insurance are young people who are gaming the actuarial tables, figuring they'll sign up when they reach an age at which their medical bills begin to exceed the premiums. This is certainly a horrifying problem, but it's nothing at all like the one you have misidentified. My wife was a social worker at one of the nation's largest public hospitals for many years, which meant that she spent every day working specifically with poor people, who got excellent treatment. Yes it would have been nice if they had been able to go to a clinic where the cost of care is much lower than in a full-fledged hospital. But the bottom line is that they got the care they needed. She spent a couple of years on the renal ward, and the majority of her patients there were Mexican nationals. Their doctors at home had told them that they would die ten years before they got to the front of the line for one of the country's antiquated dialysis machines, so they advised them to get to Los Angeles any way they could, gave them the address of L.A. County Medical Center, and promised them that the nice American system would save their lives. Well they were right. It did save their lives. This is one of the many reasons that virtually 100% of Mexicans love America despite our many, many faults and the crappy way we treat them in so many ways other than health care. The day after 9/11, just as on the day after Pearl Harbor, there were mile-long queues of Mexican citizens around all of our embassies and consulates, people standing in line hoping to be able to enlist in the U.S. military forces and die for OUR country. And BTW, in the last generation Mexico has transformed itself into a middle-class country so their people no longer come here for jobs, medical care or anything else except shopping, vacations, and visiting relatives who relocated here in the old days. More Mexicans are moving back home than are coming here; net immigration is negative. How much time have you spent actually observing life in America with your own eyes? You remind me of S.A.M., getting all your news about my country by reading Pravda and watching Al Jazeera. Oh wait, I know, I know! I bet they have Fox News over there! You should watch Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" instead. Specifically, people with both ADHD and dyslexia make very good managers. The reason? They have to delegate, which is the key to good management! They also don't believe in long boring meetings and they don't write a lot of memos. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I learned recently that dyslexia does not just affect reading. It's about comunication in general. My friend who has had ADHD for 45 years has had a boyfriend for ten years who is dyslexic. It's a miracle that they can communicate! She's very impatient with me because I talk too much. Her e-mails seldom contain more than two sentences. Unfortunately we just gotta do the best we can. People who commit serious crimes have, for all practical purpose, volunteered to give up many of their rights. During a period of enlightenment, like the last two or three generations in the USA, we try to help them learn to get along better, but we can't lose sight of our priority: to protect civilization against THEM!
What a load of crap ask the members here about how good there experience with your mental health system is. I recall talking one in paticular out of suicide at least twice and his comments alone dam your "patriotic" bull. Gun boats in our harbour? You live in la la land
That's fantasy, if you are talking about actual First World health care rather than emergency room and crisis treatment. I work with the poor people who haven't yet been forced into the hospital and bankrupted thusly. On one of my jobs, every single fellow employee has a chronic injury or medical problem currently untreated because they can't afford the medical care - much less a level of insurance that would cover such problems in general (even Americans who have some kind of insurance often don't have the luxury coverage that, say, Canadians have.) Everything from dislocated collarbones and broken teeth to hangover issues from being born with mild fetal alcohol syndrome. These problems fester until crisis, at which point they land in the emergency room and receive that excellent care you brag up. If you are proud of having better medical care in the US than in Mexico, hey - whatever puffs up your chest (don't forget the cheaper drugs and so forth - many Americans go to Mexico for medical reasons). Putting too much stock in a correlation like that, or in the common diagnosis and treatments of ADHD, is not the best we can do. Authoritarian approaches like that don't usually work. And yes, there would be considerable irony in forcing people jailed for amphetamine abuse to take amphetamines as a condition of release.
Exactly, what about all the criminals running the system, in the police and councils and governments. I am sure they are not going to target there hate and there organised pre meditated murder campaigns against anyone they want. Who watches the watchers in uk, no one, they just target anyone they want and make it all up. As far as i can see, most people that get into positions that hold power, just turn into wannabee murderers. Council people running vendettas against anyone they want, with police help. Then people talk about people in positions of power making the right choice, no they just make the choice for there friends, to organise some vendetta. Thats all stuff like this thread leads too.
Prisoners are forced to do a lot of worse things, from living in filth and disease, to being shanked, to being left in their cells to die. But in this case, in terms of actually trying to help a person who is generally regarded as a reprobate, their attitude toward the new system that would reach out to them would be at stake. Aside from the ethics, I can't think of any way a person could be forced to do anything that amounts to therapy, insofar as the use of force of any kind would completely alienate them. For example, if an unwilling prisoner were forceably injected, he would probably believe he was being used for drug experiments. (And what an opportunity that would open for any unscrupulous doctors that needed easy victims.) It would seem to cause more harm than good, even before you consider whether it's ethical or not. If I were king for a day, I would elevate mental health awareness to the level of AIDS and breast cancer, and speak to its early detection and treatment. I would seek a public policy in which public funds are used for free early detection and treatment, so that the child at risk is given priority over, say, filling a pothole in a road. (People will tend to vote bonds for road repair when they get sick and tired of potholes. But no one seems to be aware of how sick and tired they are of the effects of untreated mental health issues, including symptomology worse than ADHD. But at least ADHD is well known.) Yes, I think the minute you start regarding convicts as people rather than animals, many of whom are suffering worse than abused animals, and in ways that are more likely to turn them into vicious sociopaths, then a door swings open that most people have probably never entertained, at least not since the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Gunatanamo, or those of WWII, or of authoritarians infamous for their use of torture. In my mind, it goes beyond the question of recidivism and into the core of our being, of our capacity to hate the person and not the crime, and of our assumption that everyone deserves what they get (even though we know there are false convictions). It speaks to the adage that "you will know a nation by the way it treats its prisoners." We need to treat prisoners humanely for our own mental health.
