After hours of endless studying, do have trouble focusing? Could you benefit from the ability to concentrate better? Who couldn’t, right? Well, over the course of the past few years, a trend has swept the nation: Doctors are diagnosing students with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD and prescribing them medication to alleviate their symptoms.
According to an analysis of data collected by the Centers for Disease Control published by The New York Times last week, 11 percent of school-aged children have been diagnosed, and a full 19 percent of high school-aged boys have been diagnosed with ADHD. If the sheer percentage of students getting diagnosed doesn’t shock you, the increase in diagnoses should. The CDC’s newest data shows a 41 percent rise in diagnoses for children age 4-17 in just the last decade.
So maybe there’s an increase in awareness and doctors are finally beginning to learn how to diagnose ADHD right? That seems like plausible explanation. That is, until you look at the geographic distribution of diagnoses. In fact, the further east and south you go in the United States, the more likely students are to have been diagnosed with A.D.H.D. Students in South Carolina are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than those in Colorado. Education expert Sir Ken Robinson has quipped, “People start loosing interest in Oklahoma; they can hardly think straight in Arkansas; and by the time they get to Washington [D.C.] they’ve lost it completely. And there are separate reasons for that, I believe.”
All joking aside, ADHD is a real disorder. And the scientific research is clear that medication can be greatly beneficial for those who have it. But it’s hard to believe that nearly one in five high school boys has ADHD. At the very least, doctors—including those teaching, learning and working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health—should be questioning whether their doctors are, in fact, being overzealous in their diagnoses.
So who cares that more students are getting diagnosed with and being prescribed medicine for ADHD? So what? First, many assume that because they are prescribed the medication it must be safe. In reality, however, the medications that doctors prescribe—such as Ritalin and Adderall, for example—have potentially serious side effects. Doctors often prescribe stimulants like Adderall, which contains an amphetamine. Under federal law, possession of Adderall or Ritalin is treated the same as possession of methamphetamine or cocaine—and with good reason. According to the United States Food and Drug Administration—which approves, regulates and monitors pharmaceuticals—Adderall “can be abused or lead to dependence.”
The most worrying trend of all, however, is that students that are diagnosed with ADHD are peddling their pills like candy. There’s a steady demand for these medicines on competitive college campuses like say, UW-Madison, where students—especially those with aspirations for graduate school—look for every competitive advantage over their peers. Besides the fact that selling these pills is a felony, though, there’s tremendous potential for misuse and abuse of these drugs when students are simply buying pills in a secondary—and illegal—market, where they have not been prescribed the medicine and they have not received a doctor’s advice on their use or been informed of potential side effects.
Students without ADHD that take prescription drugs like Adderall may see higher grades in the near term, but the potential consequences in the long term far outweigh any benefits.
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