Pulled from a tunnel and into the light

Prejudice

Someone with a similar concern about prejudice is a 41-year-old woman living in Beijing who says she learned recently that her daughter, 9, has ADHD.

The woman, who also requested anonymity, says she will keep the diagnosis a tightly held secret, and not even tell the teacher who had advised her to seek professional help for her daughter.

"If I tell even one person, everyone's going to know my daughter is mentally ill and treat her as though she's a lunatic, and she's going to be cut off."

The woman says she bitterly regrets having punished and scolded her daughter whenever she was told she was misbehaving at school.

"She's vivacious and talkative, and her teacher told me she talks too much, disturbing other children in class, that she is careless and seldom does her homework. I had just thought she was a little silly and a bit too boisterous, and had never dreamed she might be ill."

Her daughter has been prescribed drugs, and the mother worries about the side effects, including loss of appetite.

The ADHD specialist Qian says that families themselves can find it difficult to accept a diagnosis of ADHD when it is given. She tells of the time a grandfather lambasted her and her colleagues, angry that his son had taken his grandson to a mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as having ADHD.

Teachers

Wei Ling, the neurologist with Peking University Third Hospital, says that in many cases teachers are the first to notice that a child may have ADHD. The number of parents taking their children to the hospital for ADHD diagnosis often peaks around the start of a new semester or before major exams, she says.

Normally a diagnosis can be given only for children above the age of 6, she says, and one common reason for being taken in for diagnosis is that adults around the child feel he or she seems to lack focus.

Sometimes parents ask doctors to evaluate the child's IQ, as required by teachers, Wei says. If the IQ is below average, medical certification of that fact allows the child's exam results to be excluded from school rankings, Wei says. However, labelling a child as having a low IQ is detrimental to his or her development, she says.

Qian and Wei say that the school performance of children with ADHD tends to sharply decrease in the third or fourth grade, when they cannot keep up with increasingly difficult study tasks, and once they have dropped behind it is difficult to catch up.

The good thing is that these children may be talented in sports and creative fields such as arts, literature, public speaking and communication, and it is important to make the most of their talents, Qian and Wei say.

Medication and psychological treatment can help the patients manage their symptoms, and live relatively normal lives, although, as with the case of the Beijing girl, medication may produce side effects such as decreased appetite, insomnia, and headaches, Wei says. In other cases the medication may not work at all.

The Beijing man, cursed with ADHD but at least fortunate enough to have had enlightened parents who did their best to help, looks ruefully back on the toll that the disorder took on his childhood. Today, though, knowing how to cope with ADHD, he is thankful that having emerged from his dark world.