Saturday, November 19, 2005

Discussion about ADHD and the need for fathers

Dr. Helen Smith has a review of "Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well-Intentioned Path to Harm" which has an interesting hypothesis: “ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) might be related to a lack of a positive father figure.” The books reports on a study that found children with ADHD seemed to respond well to good father figures. Many of the comments on her blog challenge the validity of the claim. Some who don’t believe the hypothesis point to children who grew up with great fathers and still have ADHD, and thus there can’t be any causition.

In general it seems many hard problems have more than one cause. I am not an expert on ADHD. My guess is there may be many different things that lead to a child developing ADHD, and that there are many different symthoms which people lump together as ADHD. There may be some chemical issues, certain chemicals in our environment may contribute or cause ADHD. There may be some genetic issues. There may be environmental issues. It seems reasonable that if there is more than one cause to ADHD, that helping men to be better fathers might help some children, but not all children.

1 comment:

Andrea R said...

There might be a correlation, but that doesn't mean it's a causation. ;) But once again, we have a medical community looking towards a single cause for a disorder - or, as I like to call it, it is a *differing* ability.

ADD? Why, yes I am. :D There's a whole houseful here too. It can also be genetic, and is misidentified as other disorders, or symtoms cam mimic other disorders.