I grow up in a place where every adult thought that a hyper kid had ADHD and so many of the kids around me were being misdiagnosed. I was one of the hyperactive kids that just couldn’t seem to focus on one thing and everyone felt the need to push their opinion onto me and my family. Ritalin became really popular when I was in 2nd and 3rd grade, parents were giving it to their kids like candy just because they couldn’t handle an active child. Luckily my parents didn’t jump onto that trend and although some of my teachers desperately wanted me to be medicated, they wouldn’t do that because I didn’t have ADHD it was just my personality. So many of my friends were “diagnosed” at that time but by the time they hit 7th grade, everyone was “magically” cured, as if they never had it.

Second and third grade was hard for me because all the teachers had become used to having zombie-like students and every time there was a parent-teacher conference the teacher would just talk about how bad I was and they’d beg my parents to put me on Ritalin, my parents refused every time. In second grade my teacher HATED me, she accused me of stealing, bullied me during class, ignored me, and wouldn’t help me at all. She had her son also in her class which shouldn’t have been allowed and she was so mean to him all the time and was screaming at him to be the “perfect” example of a student but that wasn’t what he was. Even though we were only second graders she expected us to act perfect and not like kids at all which caused a lot of conflicts with her and my parents. By the last two weeks of school, she decided that she’d do a complete 180 and tried to treat me better but it was a futile attempt because it was still very obvious she still hated me. During the third grade my teacher stopped just talking to my parents about her excessive dislike for me, she’d talk about how much she hated me to the teacher in training and also any adult that would come into the classroom. One parent-teacher conference with that teacher has left a permanent mark in my memory, it was only the first month of school and apparently I hadn’t met her standers, even though I wasn’t failing, she called my parents in for a meeting and told them that if I didn’t calm down or bring up my “bad” grade she was going to fail me or have me removed from her class. If she had gone through with her threat it wouldn’t look good for me when I’d try to go to college.

Finally, fourth grade came around and it was like a breath of fresh air, at the open house my parents explained their problems with my previous teachers and wanted to make sure that if I was mistreated by another teacher again they would be pulling me out of school. My teacher that year was the sweetest and most understanding teacher they had. It was quite nice because for the first time since starting school there I had more than one friends. For the next two years I was there, I didn’t have any mean teachers but I did have the lazy ones that just didn’t care. When my friends and I finally left that school they were no longer on Ritalin and they were just fine without it; sadly a few of them later was put on anti-depressants. ADHD was something that people in my town thought the symptoms were just being hyper and easily distracted but it much more than that so please do not self-diagnosed people just from what you can see.

“30_adhd” by I Barely Knowr shared with attribution 2.0 generic (CC BY 2.0).