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Hi Charles,

well done for continuing to stick your neck out! it is a scary process saying things that you know you will be attacked (or rather, ignored) for.

contrary to your colleagues beliefs, you are not alone (or mad or daft) in your feelings about ADHD,

books i have found really useful on the subject are

'critical voices in child & adolescent mental health' by Sami Timimi

and 'the other side of adhd' by angela southall

steve baldwin wrote some brillaint critique on psychiatric "treatments" and children, but i don't have any references to hadn right now.

also, don't knwo if you've read 'making us crazy, dsm and the creation of mental disorders' by kirk & kutchins.... can't remember off the top of my head if it directly addresses adhd but it's very good at explaining how things get in and out of the DSM in general and how political un'scientific' the whole thing is

I'm not sure how we would go about it, but it would be good to develop some communication between those of us who work in child servcies.

Gemma

Dr Gemma Dexter
Clinical Psychologist
Derbyshire Children's Hospital

---- Original message ----

Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:05:42 +0100
From: Charles Marley <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [COMMUNITYPSYCHUK] Resources?
To: [log in to unmask]

Hi all,

I’ve been on the list for some time now but this is my
first posting – I’m in need of some help and hoped that the list could
provide this for me. Me: I work in a CAMHS service in Stirling in Scotland (I’ve
also been in touch with David Fryer at Stirling Uni – again, thank you
David). I started in my post about a year ago and have been asking
critical questions about the position the service takes on a number of issues
since then… these are generally ignored (but I keep asking anyway!). I
also attempt to take as much of a community approach as I can (which is not
easy as the system is fairly medically and mainstream clinical psychology
dominated).

The reason I’m posting today is to ask for articles,
websites, books, what other people are doing, anything at all, on alternatives
to the current medical/psychological approach to dealing with what is viewed as
ADHD. The service I work in views ADHD as a real disorder with a
neuro-biological basis – I’ve been raising questions about the
validity of this position with very little impact. Over the last few
months the issue of ADHD has become more central within the service mainly
because we are receiving more and more referrals from GPs, schools, parents etc
– I believe this to be a consequence of promoting the medical notion of
ADHD within the afore mentioned groups and offering a ‘cure’ in the
form of medication. A number of other factors are also at play –
i.e. the service has a system specifically for diagnosing ADHD, which is run by
someone who also runs a private business offering teaching on ADHD and how to
manage it!

The service has ordered an ‘extraordinary
meeting’ in relation to ADHD and my concern is that the meeting is going
to be the individuals with the dominant view trying to force the rest into
holding the same view and then attempting to develop a ‘team
approach’ to ‘managing ADHD’. I see the meeting as an
opportunity to raise questions about the position being taken by the service.
I was also hoping to take along some alternative approaches for supporting
families that take into account the person’s situation, context, environment,
past exposures, social inequalities etc, as this may be more of a challenge to
ignore than my questions have been. I’ve read ‘Making and
Breaking Children’s Lives’ and got a lot from that but I thought I’d
put the question to list to see what other resources are available.

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