Here's an un paywalled version.
Some studies have shown that while taking medication improves behavioral problems and reduces the distress patients with ADHD experience while trying to do boring school work, it doesn't improve academic results-- they can do more "seatwork" but their scores aren't actually improved.
Personally, that would make me question whether sitting in one spot for hours doing work sheets is an effective measure of academic improvement or indeed if, *gasp* it is perhaps a completely ineffective way of teaching anyone anything. But the article doesn't bring this up.
They've also seen that for a lot of patients, the positive effects of medication on behavior wear off after about a year.
There's a fun bit where the author does a little fearmongering about amphetamines being "powerfully addictive." They site no source on this and then in the next paragraph quote a doctor talking about how adhd medications are considered "easy" to prescribe, because they have no serious side effects and you can stop them at any time without requiring weaning. But they're powerfully addictive guys, we promise.
They did discover that young kids taking Ritalin long term were on average an inch shorter than their peers. One of the doctors interviewed said:
"The only long-term effect that I know of has been the suppression of growth. If you’re honest, you should tell kids that, look, if you’re interested in next week or next month or even the next year, this is the right treatment for you. But in the long run, you’re going to be shorter. How many kids would agree to take medication? Probably none.”
I think you'd lose that bet. We're a weirdly height obsessed country, sure, but we're even more weight obsessed, and I would still take my anti-depressants even if they made me gain far more weight than they did. Who gives a fuck if you're 5'6" instead of 5'7" if you get to experience even just a year of NOT walking around in a fog all the time?
The author then interviews an adhd teen getting ready to go to college, who tells his parents he takes his meds every day, but he actually he only takes them situationally when he needs to focus, because he likes who he is socially better off the meds (Sooo addictive you guys) and the article talks for a bit about adhd patients deciding to go off their meds because they don't need them all the time, and the various fucked up ways parents and doctors gaslight them into taking it daily anyway.
I take my stimulants daily, because my functioning without them is low enough that I couldn't keep my house clean or take care of myself without them. Having some trouble relating to all the kids the author is talking to who only need it to get homework done and say it makes them feel really bad when it wears off. I'm a strong advocate for patients of any kind having the right to stop taking medication if they want to, but I'm thinking maybe they shouldn't have been prescribed that long term in the first place. And I'm curious why there's no interviews with people like me.
Presumably because it would weaken the point the article finally gets to about 2/3rds of the way in, which is that some experts are suggesting a move towards a different model of understanding for ADHD where it's understood as being partially environmental and that ADHD can go away entirely if you're "in the right environment" and the purpose of medication is to "make an inhospitable environment more tolerable."
I'm not an expert in anything but being someone who has ADHD obviously, but this article smells off to me.
I'm interested in some of these findings, the stuff about ADHD being a spectrum of symptoms with no clear biological marker right now, the emphasis on alleviating the patient's distress rather than improving their "behavior." But the over all way it's framed... It comes across as "we're all a little ADHD!"
I think it could have benefited from some conversations with some children's education specialists and more ADHD adults-- The only ADHD adult interviewed is the doctor proposing the new model, who was diagnosed back when it was still called "hyperkinesis."
I'm happy for anyone who's ADHD "goes away" when they find the right environment. But that is not my lived experience with it at all. And I have to wonder how good a model for understanding ADHD this is if I and a lot of other ADHD people I know do not fit inside it, but the kid who takes adderal to study and doesn't need it the rest of the time does.
