To reassure the reader, who is most likely growing increasingly worried, the CDC offers …show more content…
ADHD is a serious, widespread mental illness that affects millions of children in America alone. “Approximately 11% of children 4-17 years of age (6.4 million) have been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2011 (CDC, 2015, p.4).” Even so, there are still those who continue to have ADHD into their later, adult years. To show the severity of ADHD, ADAA provides a statistic on how many adults in America have ADHD. “About 60 percent of children with ADHD in the United States become adults with ADHD; that’s about 4 percent of the adult population, or 8 million adults (ADAA, n/a, p.18).” However, not all adults seek therapy, treatment, or even diagnosis for their ADHD, which limits the numbers of how many adults have ADHD. The CDC’s study into ADHD, PLAY (Project to Learn About ADHD in Youth), has been ongoing since 2002. In South Carolina and Oklahoma, teachers were asked to screen their students and report their results. “The number of children in the community sample who had enough symptoms to fit the ADHD diagnosis at the time of each child's first assessment was 8.7% in South Carolina and 10.6% in Oklahoma (CDC, 2015, p.6)” This statistic is only a general number of children in both states who had the symptoms of ADHD, but either did or did not take medication and/or they were never diagnosed before. Thus, ADHD is an under-diagnosed illness. Further