"Ritalin Grin"
This is a song about Ritalin. I am dedicating it to Frank, who you will see in the photos during the bridge.I didn't know him personally, but Frank was given Ritalin as a child and also grew up to be a drug addict. He committed suicide in his late twenties. Ritalin has been shown to increase the risk of drug addiction later in life. It has also proven to cause permanent brain changes and has never been shown to actually improve school outcome. These are just a few of the concerns with Ritalin. Drug addiction ruins lives. Why would you give a child a medication that increases their risk of becoming a drug addict, just for some short-term benefits, mainly to make the child more manageable by adults? What kind of a trade-off is this. As a mother, this is a great concern to me, especially given that Ritalin is being handed out like candy in what is being called a 'global initiative' to 'help' children (according to the Canadian Guide to Medications and Supplement). Children are often put on Ritalin at the request of a teacher, not a doctor. The doctors just comply with the school's wishes in such cases. There have even been cases of people having their children removed by CPS for refusing to medicate them with Ritalin. In one study of children on Ritalin, 6% of the subjects became psychotic from their 'treatment'. Drug addiction, death, psychosis...What are we doing? If my child were diagnosed with ADD, the first thing I would look into would be his nutritional status and any damage from environmental toxins. Doctors who use a biomedical approach to treat ADD as well as autism get good results. I would recommend "Healing the New Childhood Epidemics" by Kenneth Bock, MD and Cameron Stauth, for anyone who is interested in this. So I am dedicating this to Frank and all the others who were medicated as kids and were permanently damaged by it.
