[Ivriniel]

Xfiles: You misunderstood me entirely. My point is that science really isn’t that popular. Or at least very few seem really willing to use science to inform their opinions. Rick’s got a good rant on the topic over in the video section.

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[Ivriniel]

I once got my school lace caught in the bottom of a “Movator”, (which is like an escalator only it’s a ramp) at the local Wal-Mart. Coming down the Movator behind me, were people with shopping carts, and I couldn’t get out of the way. They started trying to back up the ramp, but there were more people behind them. It felt like being in front of the giant boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark or something. I looked around and saw the emergency stop button, but I couldn’t reach it.

I managed to get my lace free, just before the cart ran into me.

Afterwards I was left wondering. “Why didn’t I just take my shoe off?”

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[Ivriniel]

JS-cart: If Science is more popular than it has ever been, then Science is in real trouble.

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[Ivriniel]

I’ve tried to learn to knit on a couple of occasions. Unfortunately, I have weak graphomotor skills, and had a lot of difficulty with the needles. I was having to put all my focus into just trying to move the needles correctly, would lose count of my stitches, and the whole thing would become a mangled mess.

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[Ivriniel]

In regards to your question Rainbow, I did a websearch and found this name:

Dr. Laurence Jerome

Psychiatrist

Assessment & treatment of children, adolescents and adults with ADHD

90 Wharncliffe Rd. South

London

Phone 519-432-3818

Fax 519-432-1748

Will assess adult patients

http://www.adrn.org/html/adult_adhd.html

Don’t know anything about him, but I did read elsewhere that he spoke at the CADDRA annual conference in Nov.

Like all Psychiatrists, you will need your GP to give you a referral to him.

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[Ivriniel]

I hadn’t heard anything about this, but after I read your post and did some googling and the study seems highly problematic. There were only 12 children in the study, and there was no separate control group.

12 individuals is a ridiculously small sample size. With such a small group, even random chance could screw up their results. Also there doesn’t seem to have been much done to control confounding factors.

Also, as any University statistics course hammers into the heads of the students “correlation does not equal causation”. Just because two factors occur together doesn’t mean that one causes the other. As my Stats prof liked to say: if you do a plot of the number of pastors and the number of drunks year over year in America in the 19th century, you will get strong correlation. Did pastors cause people to become drunks? Or did drunks cause more men to become pastors? The actual answer is that during the 19th century, the population of America was increasing at rapid rate, so the number of drunks and the number of pastors was also increasing. The rising tide lifted all boats.

Also according to what I’ve read, the Ritalin and chromosomal damage study was conducted over the course of 3 months. Which 3 months, I wonder? If the kids were tested for chromosomal damage in the spring, and then again at the end of summer, increased sun exposure during the summer months could account for an increase in chromosomal damage. Without a separate control group, we have no way of knowing if the kids would have undergone the same increases without being on Ritalin do to a third, unidentified factor.

Also the pediatric oncologist in quoted in this article: http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/news/20050301/does-ritalin-increase-cancer-risk-in-children

makes a rather excellent point. Ritalin has been used for over 50 years. If there was a significant increase in cancer risk among patients who took it, it would have been picked up on by now.

Also, from what I have read elsewhere, Ritalin has not been shown to be carcinogenic in animal studies.

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[Ivriniel]

I agree with what Johnny Bravo has said about forgiveness, but also want to add that as long as you don’t do things because of things that happened to you in the past, you are letting the past have power over you. Do you really want all that annoying High School crap have power over you now?

Forgive if you can, and if you can’t ignore the people you don’t want to friend on Facebook. They aren’t going to get a message that says “Ed2020 chose to ignore you” from Facebook or anything like that.

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[Ivriniel]

I don’t know if anyone can answer your question in regards to the meds suddenly making things worse. I know that another poster here has talked about how Concerta worked for her for two weeks, and then suddenly stopped, just leaving her with anxiety.

Like gforcewarp9 said, you really have to talk to the Doctor.

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[Ivriniel]

I would say I am a loner. I tend not to be very good at keeping in contact with people if I don’t see them on a daily basis.

If I’m with a group of people that I know, I do tend to be rather talkative and friendly. But when it’s up to me to maintain a long distance friendship, I find that very hard.

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[Ivriniel]

I’m not so sure that Family Doctors are notoriously quick to diagnose as people seem to believe, but anyways….

For starters, I would suggest having a look at CADDRA’s website especially the diagnosis and treatment guidelines for Physicians.

http://www.caddra.ca/cms4/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=70&lang=en

Armed with that, I’d start with your family Doctor. If your Doctor doesn’t seem interested in following the process outlined in the Practice Guidelines, then ask for a referral to a Psychiatrist. This can be tricky, I know. The first Psychiatrist I saw a pompous jerk. (Who puts a textbook that they co-authored out on their desk right in front of the patient’s chair? It was all about him being the authority who should not be questioned.) But I got the nerve up to go back and ask for a second referral, and this Doctor’s a lot better.

Alternately, you can go the Psychologist route. I don’t know about in Nova Scotia, but in Ontario a Psychologist isn’t covered by government health insurance. In any case, if you go to a Psychologist for a diagnosis, they cannot prescribe medications.

Clinical Social Workers can also apparently give a diagnosis. I’m not sure how one gets in contact with those.

The Learning Disabilities Association of Nova Scotia might be able to point you in the right direction: http://www.ldans.ca/

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[Ivriniel]

Oh, hey I just had a thought:

Bob would you mind if I ran your story past my sister? She’s Mennonite minister (no, not the horse and buggy kind, nor the “Complicated Kindness” kind. Don’t get me off on that tangent unless you really want to know. ) and when she was in University, she co-authored a document for Mennonite Church USA on including people with intellectual disabilities in the church.

It’s not exactly the same thing, I know, but she also has some understanding of ADHD from getting her teaching certification in Special Education in Va.

Also, a quick google search of ADD and church turned up this: http://addchurch.blogspot.com/

It’s a podcast by a minister with ADD. I haven’t had a chance to listen to anything yet… But maybe it would be helpful?

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[Ivriniel]

There have been studies that found a positive correlation between thyroid hormone resistance and the symptoms of ADHD in some patients.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1997/03/970312165726.htm

The question I would have about this research is whether the patients were misdiagnosed with ADHD in the first place, given that we know that thyroid disease can cause ADHD-like symptoms.

Anyone who thinks they might have ADHD would probably do well to have their thyroid levels checked out. For myself, my Dad read an article about thyroid disease when I was a teenager, and suggested that I go to the Doctor. My thyroid function came back as normal, but I don’t know if they test for the specific hormones that were involved in this study.

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[Ivriniel]

“we have a psychiatrist but he has given up on my son and told us to plan on him living with us for the rest of his life.”

Excuse me? That is no kind of solution for anyone. I know from family experience that that kind of arrangement can tear a family apart. And even if you got along perfectly, at the risk of sounding morbid, all it does it push off the day when your son will have to fend for himself until you are no longer able to support him.

Does your Psychiatrist think your son is incapable of taking care of himself, or capable but just not willing to? If he thinks your son is incapable, and will to put that into writing, he may be eligible for supports to help him function on his own.

My brother has CP (Physically, his CP is relatively minor, as it only effects one side of his body. Cognitively, he has a lot more issues. On the one hand, he an amazing artist and has completed High School. On the other, he doesn’t understand money, and just spends it until he is gone.). He lived with my parents for many years, until the situation became untenable. He resented what he saw as them trying to control his life, and they couldn’t deal with his angry outbursts over the littlest of things as a result. Things have been a lot better since he got his own place.

My brother is fortunate in that here are quite a few supports out there for people with brain injuries. He is on Disability, the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee manages his finances, and he has a Red Cross Home Care Worker who comes in to keep his apartment from becoming a disaster area (It got so bad at one point that one of his Support Workers refused to come to his place on Health and Safety grounds.). It’s not the perfect solution, and my parents would love to get him into a supportive living building, rather than the apartment he is in right now, but its manageable.

If it’s a matter of your son being capable but unwilling to care for himself, then you want to be sure that you are not enabling his negative behaviours. For example, you mention that your son does not have a job, and yet he takes off with his friends for days. Where is he getting the money for that? If he is treating you like the Bank of Mom and Dad, he will never have any incentive to get a job. He’s an adult, so you can’t do anything to control his negative behaviours, but at the same time, you have no obligation to facilitate them either. (If he is getting it from his friends, chances are, they are going to tire of taking care of a freeloader, and the situation may resolve itself.)

Either way, I would suggest sitting your son down and talking about this, perhaps with a family counselor to facilitiate the discussion. Start with the Psychiatrist said. I doubt that sort of arrangement is acceptable to either party here. Once you’re agreed on that, you can move into the “Where do we go from here?” conversation.

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[Ivriniel]

I forgot to send a wedding invitation to my sister.

And she’s officiating.

In my defense, she lives in the States, so when we put stamps on everything, we put hers aside so we could put US postage on it. And then it got lost.

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[Ivriniel]

Hi Bob,

I’m not Catholic, but I can totally relate to what you are saying. When I was a kid, my parents wouldn’t let us bring anything to do during Church past a certain age, and I found it impossible to pay attention to the Pastor, so I ended up reading the story parts of the Old Testament over and over.

For myself, the biggest problem I have with Church is getting myself organized to get there in the morning. I do want to go, and feel guilty for not going, it’s just that all week I seem to be rushing to be somewhere and by Sunday, I just want to veg.

The worst was when we have this pastor who would go off on tangents, and never get done on time. I wish I had known about this song back then:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-42NzUuUlLY

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