Beyond Ritalin: Facts About Medication and Other Strategies for Helping Children, Adolescents, and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorders Paperback – February 27, 1997

Great book for alternatives to Ritalin

After months of searching for information on the subject of Ritalin, I found this book. Beyond Ritalin is the only book I've found that presents the facts of Ritalin and not the myths. Someone very dear in my life has struggled with the stigmatism of having Attention Deficit Disorder his whole life. Many people look badly upon him for taking Ritalin, but as the book points out you have to find what works for you. This book helped us sort through all the stories, you hear from both sides of the issue and for once lets the reader decide for themselves. I recommend this book to anyone who has ADD or loves someone with ADD. It will give you the facts and help you make an educated decision of your course of treatment for ADD.

This is an excellent, well-balanced book for parents, or anyone else who works or lives with a child with ADHD.What I found particularly helpful in this book were some of the excercises the author described to help children with ADHD compensate for their restlessness, impulsiveness and distractability.They recommends the children's game "statues" to help a child stay still longer. A stopwatch is used in most of the activities, and the goal is to "beat the clock". With statues the goal is to see how long the child can hold their "statue" position. While playing a game, the child is also practising standing still.There is a lot of good information about medication in this book. The author is neither for or against medication, but instead provides good information on what medication can and can't do.As a parent of a child with ADHD, I found this a very useful book.

If we had put our daughter on ritalin she would have gone into a full blown manic attack. She was diagnosed with depression with ADD as a side-effect. If you look carefully at the DSM-IV criteria for either depression or a BiPolar disorder it is easy to see how the classic symptoms of mania or depression can be misdiagnosed as ADHD/ADD. There is a current study out that shows that nearly most of the children diagnosed as bipolar have ADHD/ADD as a co-existing condition and if mistreated with a stimulant like ritalin, can further push a child into mania.

This book provided little help to us in the years we were desperate for assistance.For one thing, it focuses to narrowly on the ADHD as a disease, and not nearly enough on the possible causes. For another, the book completely dismisses the fact that by the time most parents get around to using Ritalin for their kids, they have already tried all the behavioral modifications suggested in this volume. We certainly did, to the extent of hiring a private physician to observe our child in the classroom and carefully lay out strategies to help the teacher and school staff constructively contend with our child's issues.Now it is certainly true that medication is NOT a be all and end all, and most parents who do put their children on Ritalin or other stimulants, do so with the hope that they can eventually develop coping strategies that will enable them to function without the medication.Having said that, however, behavioral modification is no more a be all and end all than the medication! And in some cases, for a host of reasons, it simply does not work on its own.Sure, it is important to teach children the proper rules of behavior and conduct. Of course, medication cannot do that. But for heavens sakes, does anyone really think that it would? We certainly did not, and in the same way, we were open to considering anything that showed proven efficacy in dealing with the medical realities.One of those, which few medical doctors discuss, is neuro-biofeedback, of both the eeg and heg varieties, which we have found exceedingly helpful. and continue to use. Doctors, too, should expand their horizons---not only beyond medication, but beyond behavior modification.Diet and vitamins are also important factors, for example, considering that the human brain continues to grow and develop until a person is about in his or her mid 20s. That's another thing this book does not discuss, and very few physicians mentioned to us, either. But nutrition is very very important.