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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72"><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>Opposing Realities<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Marcia J. Wick, The Write Sisters<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>March 2019<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Word Count: 1463<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I began pressing little blue pills onto my daughter’s tongue at the age of six to control her behavior. Two decades later, I squirm as she accuses me of turning her into a science experiment as a child. Seated across the table from my grown daughter, it pains me to swallow the bitter pill she now feeds me, although it is deserved. After all, I threw her onto the Ritalin roller coaster when she weighed less than 50 pounds. The drug was popular in the 1990s for treating children with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>What might have been the outcome had I not drugged my difficult daughter for more than a decade? We can’t know. She admits to me that many of her struggling friends ended up on the streets or in jail because their parents gave up on them. She knows in her heart that I love her and never intended to harm her. Still, she yearns for memories of a “normal” childhood which she feels was stolen from her.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>At age 27, she suffers gaps in her memory. She doesn’t know if what she remembers was real, drug dreams, or hallucinations; she suffers physical issues with her gut, migraines, muscle aches, and frequent illnesses that could be attributed to damage all those chemicals did to her immune system and organs. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Despite the uncomfortable conversation, I am grateful we can now share a glass of wine and talk civilly about our painful journey through the mental health maze, attempting to reconcile our opposing realities. Without question, I acknowledge my daughter is entitled to blame me for many of her current challenges, while I attempt to defend the decisions I made at the time. I believed, of course, that I was helping my daughter. Her speech was delayed, she was hyperactive and impulsive, often reckless. She tended toward aggressive and destructive play, and she struggled to fit in with friends.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>At age four, my active child was staffed into a Headstart preschool where she received speech and play therapy. Coupled with private therapy, her speech normalized by the end of kindergarten, but she already had been tagged as a troublemaker by teachers at the elementary school because of her active behavior. For two years, I networked with other parents, consulted with counselors, and defended my daughter.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal> “She’s not hyperactive, she’s only five.” <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>“She did her homework, but she lost it.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>“She’s not stupid. Find another way to test her,” I insisted. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The first grade teacher claimed my daughter was choosing to disrupt the classroom. Although I believed that no child would intentionally look for trouble or alienation from the other children, I also knew by then that neither consequences nor rewards seemed to influence my daughter’s choices. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I was desperate to find help, so I turned to a medical doctor the summer after our difficult first grade experience. Now I know I sound like I’m justifying my actions, but I truly thought I was doing right by my daughter. Truth is, I was drowning. I was a single mom with a disability. I wasn’t receiving child support, and I wasn’t driving or working due to my progressive vision loss. To me, it seemed an answer to prayer when the pediatrician pronounced a diagnosis of ADHD and prescribed a “magic” pill. I thought it could be that easy, that the stimulant would stimulate the “thinking” part of my daughter’s brain to kick in before the “impulsive” part. At least, that’s how it was explained to me. My daughter now accuses me of taking the easy way out.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>My girls’ daddy also had struggled in school, ultimately landing in vocational classes where the schools used to dump the “dummies;” he never believed he wasn’t stupid, and he suffered from alcoholism and homelessness later in life as a result. I didn’t want my daughter’s teachers to typecast my child or give up on her that way.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I simply wanted my “Energizer Bunny” to be able to sit still, focus on the teacher, and learn instead of being sent out of class. Many days at the end of school, I found my girl sitting in the “den” (the office), or at a desk outside the class door in the hallway. Other days, the children parading out of the room passed me tattling, “She got in trouble again today.” They were eager cub reporters.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I started my daughter on Ritalin before she began second grade. Fortunately, her teacher was a precious gem, patient, Warm, and kind. She approached my child calmly and gave her space to move about the room. We were lucky to work with this special teacher through two school years. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>It seemed my daughter only had behavior issues in class on days we later discovered that a dose of medication had been missed. That seem evidence to the teacher and me that the medication was effective. When I mentioned the observation to her doctor, he blithely changed her prescription from three daily doses of Ritalin to a single slow-release, long-lasting Adderall capsule. This freed Maddy from making her mid-day trip to the office for a pill, but the practice had already stigmatized her amongst fellow students. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I was disappointed the doctor hadn’t informed me sooner that a long-lasting alternative was available. If I hadn’t inquired, we could have remained on the Ritalin wagon for years. However, in hindsight, I became my own worst enemy when I decided to research the treatment of ADHD for myself. I ordered tapes and books and videos. I also learned to surf the web, the latest-greatest research tool. What I read was staggering <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>According to the current edition of the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual) and trending psychology articles, ADHD commonly co-existed with a long list of other disorders such as Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), Conduct Disorder (CD), Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and other personality and social disorders.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Soon, it seemed each visit to a psychologist or psychiatrist resulted in a new diagnosis and, along with it, a new pill. When the diagnosis of bipolar disorder was added to ADHD, a mood stabilizer was combined with the stimulant; when another psychiatrist decided that the correct disorder was Asperger’s, the class of meds changed completely; when my daughter began self-harming in middle school, the drugs the doctors prescribed turned her into a zombie. As my girl reach puberty, gaining in weight and height, the mix of meds would seem to cease working effectively. The psychiatrist (whichever one we were consulting at the time) would simply increase the dosage or add another pill to the regimen. By age 13, my blurry-eyed child was consuming a daily cocktail of five heavy-duty psychiatric medications.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Despite all the drugs, she fought to find her voice. In defiance, she began cheeking and later stuffing the pills between couch cushions. She demanded the attention of her doctors and mother with an attempt at suicide. She was repeatedly suspended, and at risk of expulsion and legal trouble. None of this justifies drugging my daughter; “I sought to temper her while she was screaming out to me for help, she makes clear to me now.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>By age 12, my daughter was in and out of the acute care unit at the local mental health hospital after she began experiencing audible, tactile, and visual hallucinations. In the middle of the night, when she begged me to take her to the hospital because ghosts were telling her to hurt me or burn the house down, I obliged.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>At the hospital, the doctors threw drugs at her like darts. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal> Ultimately, no one could say if the pharmaceuticals were helping or harming my child. Were the pills controlling or causing psychosis? I finally put on the brakes when they suggested I consider a clinical trial of an “experimental” medication because they didn’t know what else to try. By then, the only way to get my daughter back to a baseline safely so that we could “find” her again was to admit her for long-term residential treatment.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>With the help of my parents, we made a “field trip” to Denver to visit the available facilities. We selected “The Children’s Home,” a former orphanage with a homier feel than the other mental health institutions. It felt odd when we posed on the front steps for a photograph, all smiles, as if we were sending my daughter off to summer camp or college. She seemed anxious at that time to tell us “goodbye.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I’ll admit to my own sense of relief at my respite from daily drama, frantic phone calls, and school suspensions. I slept well at night knowing my daughter was secure in a place where she would receive therapy along with academic instruction, supervised living, and a safe way to descend from the pill mountain I had forced her to climb…<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>To be continued.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>