Hello Meggie (and Mel),
I can sympathise with your current unease - our 5yo son had constant 'trouble' at school until we took him out to be educated at home (which we were inclined to do anyway) - and have had no 'problems' since. In my eyes, he was behaving like a normal child, but his behaviour was clearly 'inappropriate' for the school. As a result, we looked into the whole area of child psychiatry and ADD/ADHD - and, I'm afraid to say, came to the conclusion that ADHD is a fraudulent diagnosis.
There's not space here to go through all the claims and counterclaims about childhood psychiatric problems and drug treatments, but you could do a lot worse than visit the site of an American psychiatric MD who has questioned the whole practice of drugging 'problem' children - www.breggin.com
Here are two important parts of the testimony he gave to a US House of Representatives Committee (reproduced without permission):
"It is important for the Education Committee to understand that the ADD/ADHD diagnosis was developed specifically for the purpose of justifying the use of drugs to subdue the behaviors of children in the classroom. The content of the diagnosis in the 1994 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association shows that it is specifically aimed at suppressing unwanted behaviors in the classroom. The diagnosis is divided into three types: hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention. Under hyperactivity, the first two (and most powerful) criteria are "often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat" and "often leaves seat in classroom or in other situations in which remaining seated is expected." Clearly, these two "symptoms" are nothing more nor less than the behaviors most likely to cause disruptions in a large, structured classroom. Under impulsivity, the first criteria is "often blurts out answers before questions have been completed" and under inattention, the first criteria is "often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, work, or other activities." Once again, the diagnosis itself, formulated over several decades, leaves no question concerning its purpose: to redefine disruptive classroom behavior into a disease. The ultimate aim is to justify the use of medication to suppress or control the behaviors. Advocates of ADHD and stimulant drugs have claimed that ADHD is associated with changes in the brain. In fact, both the NIH Consensus Development Conference (1998) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (2000) report on ADHD have confirmed that there is no known biological basis for ADHD. Any brain abnormalities in these children are almost certainly caused by prior exposure to psychiatric medication."
"Children become diagnosed with ADHD when they are in conflict with the expectations or demands of parents and/or teachers. The ADHD diagnosis is simply a list of the behaviors that most commonly cause conflict or disturbance in classrooms, especially those that require a high degree of conformity. By diagnosing the child with ADHD, blame for the conflict is placed on the child. Instead of examining the context of the child's life - why the child is restless or disobedient in the classroom or home - the problem is attributed to the child's faulty brain. Both the classroom and the family are exempt from criticism or from the need to improve, and instead the child is made the source of the problem. The medicating of the child then becomes a coercive response to conflict in which the weakest member of the conflict, the child, is drugged into a more compliant or submissive state. The production of drug-induced obsessive-compulsive disorder in the child especially fits the needs for compliance in regard to otherwise boring or distressing schoolwork."
I almost cheered when I read that, having spent a year resisting the attempts of our son's school to refer him to all manner of 'professionals'.
Please do visit his site - and perhaps check out www.geocities.com/HotSprings/8568/ where other sceptical voices can be heard. It's just my opinion, but I think it's vital that we all do our homework on such diagnoses (and the internet is a very good resource) and ask hard questions of all the 'professionals' who are offering help. You might find, like we did, that it's not the child who is the 'problem', but a schooling system that fails to cope with bright, funny, active, temperamental, permanently curious children.
I hope that helps and I wish all the best to you and your family.