ADHD Medication: One for All?
Dr. Jon LaPook Explores the Use of Adderall on College Campuses
This week's episode of CBS DOC DOT COM took me to a college campus where I got schooled by two students about the widespread use of ADHD meds - by kids without a diagnosis of the condition - to study, stay attentive, and sometimes just to feel good. A 2005 Web survey found that 5% of US undergraduates reported having used stimulants over the previous year for non-medical reasons. But the real number may be much higher, especially if you listen to the students I interviewed with Dr. William Fisher, a psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center.
Features of ADHD include inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness. A national survey in 2003 reported that about 4.4 million children in the US have been diagnosed with ADHD and 56 percent take medication to treat it. It's estimated that about one to two thirds of the children with ADHD continue to have symptoms in adult life.
ADHD medication was in the news last week with a report that medication use in elementary school children improved math and reading scores. The gains -- equal to about a fifth of a school year in math and a third of a school year in reading -- still left the treated children lagging behind kids without the disorder. The study fans an ongoing debate on who should receive medications such as Adderall and Ritalin. These medications -- along with behavioral/psychological therapy and educational interventions -- help patients with ADHD; but they're also being used by students and adults who have not been diagnosed with the disorder.
These drugs have potentially serious side-effects such as high blood pressure, irregular heart beat, and dependency. Doctors prescribing them for patients with ADHD should be carefully weighing the risks and benefits. People taking them on their own are rolling the dice with their health. No matter what you may feel philosophically about using these stimulants, the risk-benefit of their use in patients without ADHD has simply not been established.
I feel strongly that ADHD medications should only be used under the guidance of a physician. But that's apparently often not the case. In today's segment, we explore this issue further. Why do people without ADHD take stimulants? How do they start? How does it make them feel? Is society's metronome pulsing so much faster today that people feel pressured to take drugs just to keep up? Click here for a fascinating related article which appeared recently in The New Yorker.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4999157n
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My husband took Ritalin as a kid because the school system said he was hyperactive. The pills slowed him down and he did not like taking the pills. Fortunately, he got off the pills before he became a teenager.
Dr. John Breeding has been speaking out against psychiatric pills/meds for kids for a long time.
He is a psychologist who lives in Texas and is the author of several books. Dr. Breeding knows his stuff. People can call him for advice.
His website is at the URL: http://www
Label jars not people. I like this quote, who said it - I don't know?
Enough is enough, stop medicating our kids with psychiatric drugs. Let them live drug-free in our
society.
Ritalin is amazing!! It enhances your focus, alertness, combats chronic fatigue, and channels your energy. It is easy to follow the groupthink and hate on Ritalin. A lot of you have mentioned that it is the lazy easy way out. I think students at Columbia are anything but lazy and unmotivated. Many of you have this dime store analysis of ADHD that is lazy and opting for the easy answer. You have no factual basis or experience with it but so quickly cast these students aside as brats, The fact is Ritalin has been in circulation since the 60's. The reason there is no established evidence of the long term affects is because they don't exist. It is a medication that has been widely taken for over forty years and there is insufficient study? As much as the haters push for a link with a long term effect it simply doesn't exist. I do think that it should be taken under the guise of a physician. Ritalin isn't for everyone but it is for most people!!!
FYI - $cientologists are the ones who complain about these kinds of things. I thought we were suppose to be compassionate not conspiracy buffs. I'm really hurt by what I'm reading.
No kidding! I'm shocked! I really am. This is a liberal blog spot, for the most part, and liberals will go on and on about how they support science and those who are in need. Well, apparently that doesn't include people with ADD/ADHD, and the many professionals who have dedicated their lives to studying this disorder and trying to find solutions for these people. Nice to know.
I can only hope these are the views of just a few. I'd start to feel shame as a liberal if I found there was such intolerance within an ideology that professes tolerance.
I'm shocked as hell to see so many people acting as if ADHD is an imaginary thing! That's the kind of behavior I'd expect from Michael Savage. Moreover, how is it these people are suddenly experts? How many of you are doctors? This isn't that far off from the claims that dyslexia is a made up thing and so is autism. My lord! I usually feel compassion from others I know and love on the left. Why this flood of negativity? I know people with ADHD and have worked with them. This isn't something to be treated like some fairy tale.
O.K. So, college students sometimes purchase drugs and use them. These drugs can have serious side effects. Some students will continue to use the drugs, regardless, while others will stop using the drugs. ADD/ADHD medication can be stimulants (some are not, of course). Stimulants are amphetamin
If one believes there is an over-diagnosis of ADHD (and I do), as with any wrongdoing, follow the money. Who profits from an over-medicated society? Big pharma and big insurance. Both of these industries profit, pharma is obvious, but big insurance also profits as subsidizing prescriptions is far cheaper than psychological therapy. My comment is directed to the over-diagnosis in children whose parents obtain the medications via the traditional pharmaceutical channels, not college students who obtain the meds to use as a stimulant to help study and/or minimize 3 day benders. It should be illegal for any physician not directly employed by a pharmaceutical company to receive any compensation from any pharmaceutical companies other, than literature about their products.
there are two other salient issues to consider here on the front end of this rampant problem on some college campuses and the back end: 1. i have read reliable reports where use is up to 30% for both studying and partying purposes at some major east coast universities and that access to adderall is far easier than procuring even marijuana or any other illegal drugs via multiple students casually selling them to their peers 2. on the end result side, these are powerful amphetamines, not in the league of caffeine pills, o.t.c. stimulants etc.. as a result thay can and do act for students with psychiatric disorders like panic attacks , manic-depressive disorders and schizophrenia at sufficient dosages of aderall, to precipitate such panic attacks, manic epsiodes and even decompensation into psychosis. students use these drugs not just to study, but at higher dosages to stay awake for days on prolonged alcohol binges. this is NOT low-risk , recreational drug usage by any means...
I think, with possibly a few exceptions, the only thing dysfunctional about ADHD is the "diagnosis" by profession of non-scientiests disquised as scientists who have confused the preferred state of extended focus and calm of the theoretically idealized classroom as described by a bunch of people with degrees in education with reality.
As an example: recently a group of researchers studying the genetics of what has been labelled ADHD wondered if these genes were being expressed in populations of pastoralists in traditional societies. They went to Kenya and located just such a populations, still living the way that humans have for tens of thousands of years, and took swabs and no surprise found the genes for ADHD in a relatively normal distribution. Going back to asses the impacts of ADHD they discovered that those with the ADHD were not dysfunctional but in fact were the most successful in their society. I think you can tell why: being hypervigilant and active leads to success in the natural world and the un-natural world designed my hyper-lexic academicians is ideal for those with aspergers, who need everything nice and orderly with no surprises.
Who really is dysfunctio
Let's identify kids with the hypervigilance gene and create a classroom where their lessons are relevant to their natual mentality, just as we have done for the little hyper-lexics who have gone on to create this definition of dysfunction as it applies to those who are successfull in the traditional sense.
I do this work for a living and you have stated it better than anyone I have ever read! Brilliant!
To summarize, you want to create different academic profiles for children based on their genetic predispositions for different types of work.
Maybe we can designate them also, maybe Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, making sure to give them vocational training based on their best genetically predisposed career paths.
What a brave new world it will be.
"Features of ADHD include inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness. "
Those are features of childhood. Not a disorder needing medication. ADHD is one of the pharmaceutical industries biggest scams to date. And there are many in play now. The one thing all of these disorders have in common, they all require long term use of a 'happy pill' of some sort to relieve a set of non-specific symptoms that no conscious human being doesn't have. When I was a child not so long ago, we didn't have ADHD. However we did have nuns willing to use a ruler to keep our attention focused on the lesson at hand. ADHD, if it even exists as a true illness, is probably quite rare. I'm afraid lazy parenting, resulting in spoiled, undisciplined brats, is simply being pandered to by the medico-pha
Couldn't have said it better....
my sentiments exactly!
Ah, some sense! Thank you!
Wow! Get out more. You need to talk to those adults, who once were the children whom the nuns spanked in front of their peers everyday. You need to go to a support group for adults with ADD/ADHD and hear their stories. Their childhoods were often marked by classroom humiliation. Is ADD/ADHD diagnosed too frequently? Yes, it probably is. But it also is a very serious disorder for those who truly have it. Talk to them. Listen to them tell their stories.
ADHD has been cured elswhere in the world with doses of essential fatty acids. It may well be that children lack this essenial nutrient for brain growth and development, when animals were switched from eating grass, to grains, as corporations found it more profitable to fatten them in feed lots. This happened about the time that ADHD began appearing in the population.
It's also true that after Amphetamines could no longer be sold over the counter in the USA, in the 60's, the pharmeceutical companies shipped tons of them to Mexico, knowing that they would be smuggeled back into the US.
Standard Rations for German Troops in WW II, included Amphetamines, because German military leaders thought it turned their soldiers into supermen.
As someone who took Adderall for 5 years, I can tell you that your fears are overstated. Adderall is not very addictive (at 40mg/day taken orally). I went on and off of it several times during my first couple years of college, with zero withdrawal or any desire to take them again (testing to see if I wanted to continue or if it really helped).
Even as an adult, I probably have symptoms of ADHD and had them as a child of the 1960's. They didn't fully understand ADHD then, only just starting to prescribe Ritilan and like drugs only starting in the 1970's. Perhaps it would have helped me to become more socially adjusted, but any long-term drug use that affects the brain is something I am very concerned with - thank God I didn't get those drugs. Even today, I rarely use even Tylenol, never into the use of illegal drugs (although I do use alcohol).
There are some great books written about attention deficit disorder, and the drugs to treat it. One size does not fit all. Stimulants can cause anxiety and aggression in some people. Dr. Daniel Amen has done some excellent research on this.
Calling a drug a medication, doesn't change the fact that it's a drug.
Drug addicts use drugs to get high, and they will use any kind of drug no matter what it's called.
Children are often exposed to drugs while in utero, then again in labor and delivery. Then again, they are exposed to high doses of sugar, and Caffiene in Soda, for a toddler these drugs are like taking a hit of Cocaine.
Then there's candy, and high fructose corn syrup which is in practially everything.
Which pretty much takes you up to age 12, which is the average age of first use in this country.
We are so far from normal we don't even know what it is anymore.
5/7/09
8:58PM
Alexandria, VA
Now you tell me.
This is how the Beverly Hills and Hollywood women stay so thin...
The diet drug of choice for years.
Thank you.
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