People often have a hard time believing that they have a disorder. It takes certain scientific proof to convince them that something might be amiss. Consider this simple little video game-like test for attention deficit disorder. It's a machine that is shaped like a little desk with a curved plastic surround. There is a computer monitor in the console, and on it is a little tracking device that judges when you move as you sit before it. The test goes something like this - the screen shows you pictures of stars. Sometimes they are four pointed stars, and sometimes they are stars with five or eight points. When you see a star with the five or eight points, you're supposed to click on a button. A three-year-old could get it right; and in my head, I know I can. But the proof is in the actual doing. And I always got it wrong. Somehow I would keep clicking on the button when I saw a four pointed star (not a five- or eight-pointed one as I was told). My performance disappointed me so much I would keep fidgeting and squirming, and the motion tracking device on the monitor, and other ones that sensed how my feet moved, kept recording a great deal of nervous and unnecessary movement. Now why on earth can't I, a 40-year-old college lecturer just a simple task right?
It was simple - I had attention deficit disorder, albeit, a mild case of it. I fidgeted too much, my thoughts jumped here and there and I clicked when I shouldn't, and didn't when I should have. There aren't that many tests out there to prove conclusively that a patient has ADHD. This one might be one of the first. The reason that researchers are rushing to find real objective tests that will prove ADHD is not that there are that many patients out there that need proof. It's just that attention deficit is such a slippery problem that doctors go and diagnose it in so many who don't have it. There are even people who suggest that the doctors who do so, are hand-in-glove with the drug companies that try to push medications like Ritalin and Adderall on the market. It's a shame that they do, because these drugs have some punishing side effects that the children who take them have to put up with.
You should look at the questionnaire that doctors have used so far to diagnose a child with attention deficit. Talk about a self-serving process. The questionnaire asks if the child often makes careless mistakes, doesn't seem to pay attention when spoken to, and so on. Now who doesn't have these problems? A parent with a particular case of impatience with a child could easily answer to these leading questions as suggested. And parents don't even have to agree on what the answers might be. And that would mean that a doctor would have to pick sides, over whom to believe.
When children are taken to psychologists for all kinds of unexplained difficulties learning in school, most of them come up with a computerized test called Continuous Performance Test. It tries to measure how easily a test taking child is distracted from the task at hand. And then there is the high-tech MRI like test called SPECT that some people believe can prove attention deficit beyond doubt.
The device with the stars above is called the Quotient System. A child who comes in for the test, tries it once first, and then tries it again after having taken attention deficit disorder medication. If the child seems to improve well, the doctors know that he will make a good candidate for medication. A test like this allows doctors to spare children a drug regimen if he happens to be one of the many who don't respond properly. If a child seems to move and squirm far above what the system accepts as normal on a boring task, they will know to suspect attention deficit. It's alongside this an MRI can successfully prove that there is too much blood flowing to parts of the brain that are unnecessarily active, they'll have a diagnosis that could be pretty much incontrovertible.