Dr. Thomas Armstrong’s Blog

Today’s edition of Education Week,  education’s news site of record, contains a Commentary piece that I wrote on the importance of valuing the strengths of students with special needs.  In the article I write about my experience as a special education teacher almost forty years ago.  I share the disillusionment I felt when I realized...
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There’s a news feature in the New York Times today (“Drowned in a Stream of Prescriptions”)  that focuses on the problem of addiction to ADHD medications.  While the article deals mainly with college students and young adults who deceive mental health professionals into thinking they have ADHD so that they can receive these highly addictive...
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Yesterday in the New York Times an op ed piece appeared entitled ”Successful and Schizophrenic’‘ that affirmed the importance of neurodiversity and the value of strengths in people with mental health labels.  Written by Elyn Saks, who has lived with schizophrenia all her life yet been highly successful in several fields (professor of law, psychoanalyst, MacArthur fellow), the piece...
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The American Institute for Learning and Human Development has just produced five short videos that take up the concept of neurodiversity (the idea that disabilities should be regarded instead as diversities), and apply it to the following diagnoses:  learning disabilities, autism, ADHD, intellectual disabilities, and emotional and behavioral disorders.  In each video, the executive director...
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The December 14th shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, have opened up a Pandora’s box of issues related to mental health.  One controversy in particular relates to the shooter Adam Lanza’s alleged identification as a person with a mild form of autism spectrum disorder called Asperger’s syndrome.  This hearsay diagnosis in turn has ignited a strong rebuttal from the...
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A new study reported in the journal Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, revealed that the youngest children in any given grade are more likely to do poorly on standardized tests, and more likely to be prescribed stimulant medications for ADHD compared to older students at the same grade level.  The...
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A study in today’s issue of Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics,  reveals that boys are more concerned now than in the past with building their bodies up to look more muscular.  Data from around 1400 boys (average age 14), was collected regarding their muscle-building behaviors.  While the data revealed that both girls and boys...
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A new study reported in The Journal of Pediatrics, reports that exercise may benefit children with ADHD.  In this study, kids with ADHD were matched with a same-age, same-socio-economic status group of “normal” children.  The groups engaged in two experimental conditions:  one day then engaged in 20 minutes of quiet reading, and the next day...
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Children’s author Frank Cottrell Boyce, who, this week, won an award from the British national newspaper The Guardian for best fiction book for children, says that the way reading is being taught in the schools today risks putting children off of reading for the rest of their lives.  In particular, he criticizes the use of standardized...
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