Less pressure to be a star student, more conversations about the risks of using stimulants as a performance drug.
Parents Have Fueled the Abuse of A.D.H.D. Medications
Judith Warner, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Time.com, is the author of "We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication" and "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety."
Updated June 11, 2012, 7:26 PM
The widespread abuse of stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall by teenagers and college students who don’t have medical diagnoses of A.D.H.D. is a problem that has been created as much by adults as by the young people who actively engage in the illegal use and trade of the drugs.
It has been fostered by an adult-stoked environment of extreme competition and near-hysteria over the perceived super-humanness required to gain entry to a prestigious college. And it has been furthered by nearly two decades of news media reports that have conflated the medically justified use of stimulants to combat the social and cognitive impairments of A.D.H.D. with the cynical misuse of the drugs to raise academic performance. (Or so it’s falsely believed; studies have actually shown a negative association between academic performance and the use of stimulants by students who weren’t taking them in accordance with a doctor’s prescription.)
Stories that have, since the 1990s, referred to stimulants as “steroids of intellect,” “brother’s little helper” or “popular performance aids” for “bulking up mentally,” have trivialized the challenges faced by children and teenagers with A.D.H.D., burying their complex difficulties in a much more headline-grabbing and easy-to-comprehend social narrative about cheating kids and scheming parents eager to give their families a leg up in the race to nowhere. In the context of such longstanding and pervasive banalization of A.D.H.D. and the drugs most commonly used to treat it, how surprising is it, really, that such large numbers of young people (from 5 percent to 35 percent of college students, depending on the study) now view stimulants as benign study aides and turn to them almost as avidly as earlier generations reached for Diet Coke, NoDoz or cigarettes?
It’s been years now that adults have been tsk-tsking over the misuse of stimulants by teenagers and college students. If they want to actually combat the problem, they’ll need to start by confronting their own attitudes and behaviors. Journalists need to ditch the politically correct convention that leads them to frame A.D.H.D. as a primarily culturally induced condition. Parents need to push back against excessive school pressures and re-orient their kids toward more meaningful and healthy notions of success. Those who have high schoolers with A.D.H.D. need, unfortunately, to more closely monitor their teenagers’ medication use: keep control of the medicine bottles, count the pills and make sure they’re being swallowed by the right person on the right schedule.
Requiring college students to visit their health center or other centralized location to take their stimulants every day — as children in sleepaway camp or boarding school must do — would undoubtedly be too onerous a burden to place upon them, given the logistics of college life. Yet, doctors and parents (who generally pay for the meds) could undoubtedly do more to limit the number of pills available to students at any given point in time. University health centers could require a significant paper trail proving that a student truly has A.D.H.D. before prescribing stimulants. (This would mean that health insurers would have to properly pay for full neuropsych evaluations or, at the very least, lengthy and repeat appointments with child psychiatrists or pediatricians.)
Above all, adults can and must do a great deal more to drive home the fact to teens that stimulant medications are serious, potentially dangerous drugs; that their abuse can lead to seizures, psychosis and, at the very worst, death; and that at the very least, the non-medically-prescribed use of these medications does not lead to heightened academic performance.
The bottom line is that students must be educated to see that by sharing or selling stimulants, they’re hurting, not helping, their friends.