Are We Over-Medicating Kids Because of One Questionable Study
Twenty years ago, more than a dozen leaders in child psychiatry received $11 million from the National Institute of Mental Health to study an important question facing families with children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: Is the best long-term treatment medication, behavioral therapy or both?
The widely publicized result was not only that medication like Ritalin or Adderall trounced behavioral therapy, but also that combining the two did little beyond what medication could do alone. The finding has become a pillar of pharmaceutical companies’ campaigns to market A.D.H.D. drugs, and is used by insurance companies and school systems to argue against therapies that are usually more expensive than pills.
But in retrospect, even some authors of the study — widely considered the most influential study ever on A.D.H.D. — worry that the results oversold the benefits of drugs, discouraging important home- and school-focused therapy and ultimately distorting the debate over the most effective (and cost-effective) treatments.
Worrisome.
Exactly. I worry what we are doing to people. Will we even recognize if there are significant negative effects?
Probably not until it is too late for many people.
This is to be expected. If it sounds too good, it probably is.
We are definitely in a period of overuse. People over-indulge in things and then correct back.
Not to mention, do we really know what the latent effects of overmedication are? I’m not anti-medicine, but overusing anything is bad.
Not to mention the likelihood of developing a dependence.
I have a feeling that we are going to look back on all of this just like we do with lobotomies. At the time they were medically sound, but now we know the effects on a person.
We could be doing damage that we don’t even know.
Exactly. The benefits of medication carry risks, we need to be wary of relying on anything.