Recent articles in The Socialist about ritalin are reproduced here as they are of interest to teachers. Kate Jones from Mid-Wales, who works for a Mental Health charity and Mark Skilton, a parent from Nottingham who's involved with a support group and whose child is taking Ritalin, wished to add to points made in earlier articles.

You can contact Kate at kategarnwen@hotmail.com or Mark at markskilton@hotmail.com about these articles.

ADVOCATES OF Ritalin see the child as the problem - "there is something 'wrong' with these children" - rather than as a symptom of a deeper problem, which is a disorder not in the child's brain but in the child's environment.

It is easy to give the child a pill that will make him more compliant, while failing to address the underlying causes which may include abuse, parents' own mental health problems, poor diet (too much junk-food, sugar and caffeine drinks) over-stimulation (TV on all the time), an overcrowded class in an under-resourced school with over-worked and stressed-out teachers. No wonder children are angry and confused.

As anti-establishment US psychiatrist Peter Breggin (featured in a recent Panorama programme on this subject) says - the diagnosis of ADHD "identifies children who are bored, anxious or angry around some of the adults in their lives, or in adult-run institutions, such as school or family. These 'symptoms' should not identify the child as mentally ill. They should identify the adults as requiring new efforts to attend to the needs of the children."

If a child is being abused or neglected, or society is failing to meet that child's needs, the answer is not to put the child, long-term, on to a powerful stimulant drug, similar to "speed" and other amphetamines. Ritalin is highly addictive, and can cause long-term or permanent side-effects such as muscle spasms and tics and retarded growth.

Surely, if used at all, such powerful drugs should only be used in the very short term, while a longer-term non-drug solution is sought. If you have a headache, you may take an aspirin, but you don't take high doses of aspirin every day for years. You try to find the cause of your headaches.

According to a 1998 National Health Service Executive Report by Dr Anna Gilmore, Ritalin seems only effective in children for a period of six months. After this duration, she reported, the benefits of the drug are uncertain. Department of Health figures from last year show that 157,900 prescriptions for Ritalin were issued in the UK last year compared with 126,000 prescriptions in 1998.

The problem is that non-drug therapies which can help, often involving the whole family, are expensive and time-intensive. It costs the NHS less to offer a drug.

A parent unable to afford a healthy diet can get Ritalin for the child on a free prescription. The majority of children who are put on Ritalin in the UK are working-class kids, often with single parents, on low incomes or benefit. Doesn't this tell us something about society's attitudes to us and our kids?

ADHD is rarely diagnosed in Denmark and Sweden, which have better welfare and social provision for children and families, and it is far rarer in France and Germany than in the UK.

Increased prescribing of Ritalin means huge profits for multinational drug companies - is it any wonder they are "pushing" Ritalin to doctors and hard-pressed parents and that its use has had an incredible 24-fold increase in six years?

Capitalism is failing our children and then putting them on drugs. It would probably like to do the same to its workforce. Socialists must insist on different answers.

THERE ARE tens of thousands of children on Ritalin. There is no explanation why Ritalin works the way it does, but 75% of children on it need counselling instead.

Not all children need Ritalin some just need a lot of good old TLC instead. They have often gone through some parental divorce or family bereavement just prior to being diagnosed as having ADD/ADHD. Pills should not be given to these children until they have had counselling and then only as a last resort.

The Health Authority are investigating 150 cases of children being misdiagnosed or prescribed Ritalin. Certainly, no child under the age of six should be using Ritalin but there are a lot of children under that age who do.

There are side effects from using this drug which are loss of appetite, mood swings and 'zombie-like children'. In these cases they need medication to help them eat, to liven them up and then to help them sleep at night. Do we really want our children to go through days like this?

As a parent I do not wish my child to be drugged up day after day, but with very little support from the so-called experts what can I do? Screaming and shouting gets me nowhere.

What is hyperactivity? The term is used by professionals to describe children who are over active and have difficulties concentrating for long periods of time. In the US the terms attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been used to describe hyperactive children more broadly.

In the UK the term Hyperkinetic disorder is used instead.

This problem affects one out of every 100 primary school children in the UK. The causes are not known precisely but genetic factors play a role. In some cases the families are unhappy or disorganised but it is not clear how much this causes hyperactivity because these children can be so hard to live with.

Many children especially under-five's are inattentive and restless. Parents or teachers may wonder why/if a child with these problems has hyperkinetic disorder. Making a full diagnosis requires an experienced specialist assessment because there are other important causes of disorganised or excitable behaviour. There is no simple test for hyperactivity.

The diagnosis is made by a check list of signs, observing the child and obtaining reports from schools. Your family doctor should be able to offer advice and support and will usually make a referral to a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the nearest child development centre.

There they will make a full assessment before treating the problem, But, unfortunately, some doctors just hand out pills willy - nilly and this is what we have to stop. Before taking a child to the doctors just think about what your child has gone through, what he or she is eating and can we change the way he/she eats?