Day 58: Education Fraud Part 19 – Medicalization of the Education System Part 7 - Professionals involved in the medicalizing process.

This blog is a continuation from: 

http://crimesjourneytolife.blogspot.com/2012/09/day-52-international-crime-research.html

http://crimesjourneytolife.blogspot.com/2012/09/day-53-education-fraud-part-14.html

http://crimesjourneytolife.blogspot.com/2012/10/day-54-education-fraud-part-15.html#

http://crimesjourneytolife.blogspot.com/2012/10/day-55-education-fraud-part-16.html

http://crimesjourneytolife.blogspot.com/2012/10/day-56-education-fraud-part-17.html

http://crimesjourneytolife.blogspot.com/2012/10/day-57-education-fraud-part-18.html#



If you have a moment I suggest read the following article:

http://www.academia.edu/1531137/Medicalization_Ambivalence_and_Social_Control_Mothers_Descriptions_of_Educators_and_ADD_ADHD


From it I have taken the following points, from which I will be walking Self-Forgiveness:

- ADD/ADHD is medicalized through educators, medical practitioners and members of the
 psy sector, the complex of social work, psychological,psychiatric and helping professionals that handle mental health and psycho-logical issues within a given culture (Donzelot, 1997).

 - Medicalization is not always complete, but occurs in varying degrees, depending on whether competing definitions of the problem exist (as is the case withADD/ADHD), and on the relationship between professionals who are involved in the medicalizing process (Conrad, 1992). With ADD/ADHD,there are gaps in the medicalization process at both the conceptual level and the institutional level.

 - the medicalization of ADD/ADHD was, at the time of the study, far more entrenched in Canada than in the UK in both professional and lay circles.It is not surprising, then, that mothers describe a high preparedness of teachers in Canada to accept the ADD/ADHD label when compared withdescriptions of UK educators.

 - It has been argued that, in the United States, educators have come to embrace ADD/ADHD and drug therapy as a result of decreased access to the useof traditional educational social controls of physical discipline and student expulsion or suspension (Kiger, 1985)

 - As western society has become less tolerant of difference, and as medical,educational and psychiatric professions have developed, the range of behaviors identified or perceived of as pathological has grown (Porter,1987). This decreased tolerance and increased psychiatric surveillance over a broad range of behaviors and signs that once were accepted as part of the continuum of human possibility, but that now have become problems to be resolved through expert practice, has been termed the ‘psychiatriza-tion of difference’ (Castel et al., 1982)

 - the behaviors to be measured by parents and teachers on assessment instruments relate primarily to the classroom, and indeed, most parents in both sites noted that their children’s problems began or escalated once they entered the school system.

 - Researchers have tied ADD/ADHD’s legitimacy to aggressive pharmaceutical marketing strategies and middle-class parent support groups seeking a medical label for their children’s behavioral problems (Conrad and Schneider, 1980). Others relate its rise to reductions in educational funding and restricted classroom discipline policies (Kiger,1985), or as part of a general increase in the psychiatric labeling of children (Armstrong, 1993). Still others note that ADD/ADHD as a diagnostic category is connected to the rise of the relatively new fields of special education and educational psychology, through which an increasingly broad array of assessment tools have been employed in classifying and identifying differences in children (Slee, 1994).

 - Canada, influenced by its proximity to the United States, is strongly immersed in the legacy of developmental and behavioral psychology, where tests, measures and classification systems have emerged to organize and regulate populations (Armstrong, 1983; Rose, 1985, 1990; Burman, 1994). Thus, in Canada, mothers with children who are ‘different’ will typically encounter an educational or developmental psychologist and undergo behavioral and pencil-and-paper testing with an aim to categorizing and 'labeling' the child.

 - The difference in diagnostic tools and psy sector cultures has material effects, resulting in different degrees of medicalization, as evidenced by rates of diagnosis and treatment in the UK and Canada. British Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology figures indicate that in 1995 only 6000 (or 0.03%) UK schoolchildren were being treated with any psycho-stimulant (Kewley, 1998). In 1995 in Alberta, approximately 2.5 percent of school-aged children were prescribed Ritalin alone, representing a four-fold increase since 1987 when record keeping began (Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons, 1999). Thus, we can expect that British mothers’stories reflect a context where ADD/ADHD remains a partially or perhaps even non-medicalized phenomenon, while Canadian mothers’ stories reflect a context where ADD is highly legitimated as a medical diagnosis.

 - There are two stages in the ADD/ADHD labeling process: identification and assessment. In Canada, teachers were the prime identifiers of children who ultimately became labeled as having ADD. Of 17 Canadian children in the study, only two children had already been identified and tentatively diagnosed prior to attending primary school. Mothers of the remaining 15 reported that, although their child had always been in many ways ‘different’during infancy and early childhood, it was really only once the child went to school that these differences came to be identified as problematic enough that the child was identified for formal intervention. Canadian teachers who identified these children as problematic were often quite directive in their suggestions, in many cases going so far as to tell mothers that they should consider ADD as a diagnosis and Ritalin as a treatment.

 - even when evidence of classroom abuse was not present, the constant pressure of phone calls, meetings and questions about medication left the parents feeling they should at least give medication a trial. Thus, although Canadian teachers were not qualified to perform a diagnosis or prescribe treatment legitimately, they were able to exercise considerable influence in having mothers push physicians and psychologists for a label and medicalization.

 - Additionally, the reported demands teachers made of Canadian mothers to consider drug therapy for their children may reflect the relative lack of alternative forms of social control that Canadian educators have availableto them in managing disruptive classroom behavior.

 - Again and again, mothers described working through oneavenue of treatment after another, never having a name for what they andtheir children were struggling with, because the name itself was problem-atic to educators and helping professions.

 - In 2000, the British government estimated the average initial assessment for any child in Britain would cost the school approximately £480 (NICE, 2000: 10) and often, once a child is assessed,schools risk losing any transfer moneys into their budgets because the Statemented child (to be diagnosed) is often moved to a specialized setting. Thus, the initiating school bears the cost, while the receiving school enjoys the benefits.

 - Canadian mothers rarely described teachers who seemed willing or able to implement appropriate educational strategies for the ADD identified children in their classroom. Again and again, mothers described providing medical and psy sector information to teachers about their child specifically, and about ADD children in general, only to be ignored.


 Self-Forgiveness to follow...





 Source:

 Malacrida C, "Medicalization, Ambivalence and Social Control: Mothers’ Descriptions of Educators and ADD/ADHD." Academia.edu. Publication Date: Jan 1, 2004. Accessed on 8 Oct 2012.

Day 39: International Crime Research: Education Fraud Part 1 – Denying Children a Practical Education

 I suggest watch the following Documentary:

The College Conspiracy 

From the transcription of the Documentary I will draw information for the application of self-forgiveness on the current Education System of the World:

"From the time an American child reaches the sixth grade their thoughts on the key to success in life, is to do well in high school so that they can get accepted to the best possible college. The better grades they get in high school the better college they will have an opportunity to get into. If they get into a great college and get a college degree they can get any type of job they desire in the field of their choice which will be there waiting for them after. Most Americans today have an expectation of future economic success simply by attaining a college degree. The entire purpose of elementary school is to prepare students for high school and the entire purpose of high schools to prepare students for college. The US now has hundreds of private college preparatory high schools that at a cost of twenty five thousand dollars per year are supposed to increase students chances of getting into top-tier college. Students are taught to believe that if they don't go to college they will be on a path to nowhere, who'll have no chance of ever building a successful career. Government regulations like 'no child left behind' have left grade in high school in shambles.  Instead of teachers having the freedom to think outside the box and use creative techniques to prepare their students for the real world they are forced to be narrow-minded and teach with worthless information that will never helped their students have successful careers. Today there are no high schools in left in America that teach students the knowledge necessary to start their own business, event their own product or even how to use the internet and other free resources to become educated about things without attending college."

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to give permission to a schooling system, which is supposed to support humans to become functional beings within this world, but instead prepare the person to live and work in the money system.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to make the emphasis and Value of Life about Capital and how much of it you have, and therefore the outflow of this is existing in a world where we are born to prepare ourselves to live and work in this Money System.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing education to take up 12 to 20 years of a young persons life in which the ‘soul’ purpose of education is simply to prepare one to work in the system, to make money for your survival and to be part of the greater Capitalistic System in which workers exist to serve the vast networks of income made for the Elite.

Therefore

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to present Education as something special, holy and an integral, important part of becoming and developing as a human – when in act that is a lie – as shown above.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself for designing, implementing and encourage the current education systems, without realizing, seeing and understanding the simplicity that education only exists for that part of ourselves that exist as working, thinking, money generating machines and in most cases the children – my children that get sent off to school will end up not as the minority Elite – but as the working class who have to work hard for most of their lives simply to survive within the money system.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to place such worth and value in the survival of the human – as depicted by and through the role that we give ‘Money’ and ‘Prosperity’ and ‘Success’ – that I will condemn a being to 12 to 20 years of educating themselves from a free, expressive, physical being into a thinking, calculating, fearing, consuming, competing system – ready to serve the rest of its life in a career which will make riches for others while placing the worker in constant fear of survival.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing the education system to only teach a child about survival and very little if not in most cases nothing, about how to live practically, physically, how the physical reality in fact functions and how the physical reality exists in relationship to all parts. Instead schooling teaches a child that all parts of Life can be measured and weighed and judged according to its usefulness within the money system and the need for the human to entertain itself. That is why you will always in school see that any information about this reality, about animals, nature, suffering etc.  -is always equated into a capital value, which fits in with how Capitalists want children to view the world. This means that children are brainwashed from a young age to view this world and what we allow within this world through deceptive lenses called religion, culture, society and money. The child never learns about an equal and one relationship with the physical but instead how to exploit what is here as the planet, nature, the resources and other humans – to gain from the exploitation ones own survival and enjoyment. Schooling therefore turns a child that is born without concepts, and ideas about how to exploit ‘thy neighbor’ into machines that only function to please the mind and to generate energy through the generation of Money.

I commit myself to show how schooling and education exists purely to turn a pure being that does not yet function according to humanities value systems – into a machine that serves others – and to show that Life does not exist when an agenda is so clearly seen behind why and how we raise our children.

I commit myself to show how the information that comes through the schooling system has nothing to do with creating a future that is best for all, but instead serves the idealization of the Human Mind and all that it exist as.

I commit myself to show that the production and formulation of study material is always about how to prepare children to become the next generation that will learn better, faster ways to rape the resources and to enslave the fellow human who did not learn hard or fast enough into a 8 to 5 job where they will through fear of survival and acceptance of the role of themselves as slaves – be the best working robots they can be – because form school all are taught that capitalism is and always has been the best structure for man to exist within.

More:

Success and Reward

True Activist Bizarre Oddities

Social Engineering and True Activism

Equal Money System 

Goal: Education

Education in an Equal Money System will prepare Each Human to become a Self-Aware, Responsible Part of the Human Race that lives a fulfilled and Extra Ordinary Life of Excellence, Happiness and fun. Equal Money will Ensure that every Citizen is Effectively Educated to Live in Harmony with Plants, Animals and the Environment in General.

Join us to vote on the Goals:  Education in an Equal Money System