In a recent post titled ADHD and Psychiatric Name Calling, I reviewed studies documenting how much is currently being spent annually on ADHD drug treatments. Here are some new numbers provided by Healthline: What are we getting for this? In this post I hope to clarify this issue. As you read it, you will see phrases in blue. By clicking on each, you will be taken to the actual research article that documents my statement.

For students placed on Ritalin or other stimulant drugs, in short term studies teachers and parents report some improvement in behavior. However, even in the short term, the vast majority of research indicates that there is no improvement on academic functioning. At the end of 14 months, drug treatment was not superior than no-drug treatment on the following measures: classroom observed behaviour, parent- and teacher-rated social skills, parent-rated parent–child relationships, peer sociometric ratings, and academic achievement. By the end of three years there was no significant effects of the drugs on any measure. And yet, parents who undeniably care about their children, regularly expose their children to the side effects of these drugs, as well as potential long term risks.  Why? Because they are convinced that the helpfulness of the drugs outweigh those negatives.

What is it about these drugs that create the myth that the drugs are really helping their children? To understand how this myth is created, it will help if we first take a quick look at how people come to believe smoking cigarettes helps them to deal with stress, and drinking caffeinated coffee helps them to be more productive.

The Myth that Cigarette Smoking Reduces Stress.

In a study published in the American Psychologist, researchers found the following:

Smokers often report that cigarettes help relieve feelings of stress. However, the stress levels of adult smokers are slightly higher than those of nonsmokers, adolescent smokers report increasing levels of stress as they develop regular patterns of smoking, and smoking cessation leads to reduced stress. Far from acting as an aid for mood control, nicotine dependency seems to exacerbate stress. This is confirmed in the daily mood patterns described by smokers, with normal moods during smoking and worsening moods between cigarettes. Thus, the apparent relaxant effect of smoking only reflects the reversal of the tension and irritability that develop during nicotine depletion. Dependent smokers need nicotine to remain feeling normal. The message that tobacco use does not alleviate stress but actually increases it needs to be far more widely known. 

This paragraph just provides a summary of the research article that leads to its conclusion.  In my view, the whole article lays out a very convincing argument that the relief from a drug withdrawal reaction that occurs each time a person ingests the drug can create the illusion that a drug is helpful.  Moreover, I believe that this same argument can also be used to explain how a stimulant such as Ritalin can appear to be helpful even when it is not. Before we get to Ritalin, however, let’s first turn our attention to America’s favorite stimulant, caffeine.

My Personal Experience with Caffeine

When I was 18, I started college.  My first class began at 8 a.m.  Ugh!  That meant waking up around 6 a.m. so I could wash up, have breakfast, and take the hour train ride.

Sitting down for breakfast, I decided to have my first cup of coffee.  Both my parents drank coffee in the morning and throughout the day, too.  I had heard that it gave you a boost when you were tired, and man, I was tired.

My first sip tasted rather bitter, so I dumped a couple of teaspoons of sugar in.  Much better.  Then came a little pleasant “up” sensation, but it was accompanied with a little stomach distress.  Oh, well.  Off I went and it wasn’t long after that I was drinking coffee regularly.

As I entered into my twenties, I began to notice that in the morning before I got my first cup, I was irritable and struggling with sleepiness. With the first sips, ahhhh, relief.

In addition to my morning cups, I’d have a cup typically around 10 a.m., a cola with lunch, which has some caffeine in it, and a couple of cups after supper with dessert.

During my thirties, I began to develop headaches.  I attributed them to stress.

By the time I was forty, the headaches became so bad that I went to a physician who prescribed some pills.  I don’t like taking pills, but the headaches were so bad that I thought maybe I should give them a try.

Before filling the prescription, I looked up information about it and found the prescribed pills were made entirely of caffeine.  Then, I looked at the side effects and found that one of them was headaches. This surprised me.

Since I was already consuming caffeine throughout the day, and a side effect of caffeine was headaches, I thought maybe instead of taking the pills, the first thing I should try was to stop consuming caffeine.

Wow!  Giving up coffee was not easy.  For several days I went through a very rough period of headaches, feelings of depression, difficulty sleeping, and my brain seemed to be meandering through thick mud.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have tried tapering off coffee, reducing each week one cup at a time.  But I did make it through the morass, and in a couple of weeks I was fine.  And ever since, I no longer get any headaches.

More surprising is that when I wake up in the morning, by the time I wash up and sit down for breakfast, I’m every bit as awake as I used to become when I had finished my morning coffee.  It is now clear to me that the exhausted, irritable feelings that I used to have before I gave up coffee was due to a caffeine withdrawal effect from going a whole night without having any.  Throughout the day, I now find that I have a smoother ride and I am every bit as productive as I used to be when I was a coffee drinker.

The Myth of Ritalin’s Effectiveness

Ritalin, and most other drug treatments for “ADHD” are stimulants.  And just as I came to mistakenly believe coffee helped me to be more productive, I think Ritalin’s effects lead to the same mistaken conclusion. And just like I didn’t attribute the side effects of caffeine to my coffee drinking, I think parents don’t realize how much of their child’s sleeping problems, headaches, late afternoon miseries are due to the drugs. And when parents try to withdraw their children from the drugs to see if it is really helping, as the withdrawal effects begin to become worse and worse, parents come to think that this is how their children naturally are when they don’t take the drugs.

Now, there is more to this story than I can reveal in a single post. For example, other factors that lead to parents thinking these drugs are more effective than they actually are is the clever advertisement of the drug companies. Moreover, in some cases, children, as they become older, typically mature at a certain pace. Thus, some children viewed as having ADHD problems completely grow out of these problems without any drug treatment. If this growth in maturity occurs shortly after a child begins to take the drugs, the improvement from natural maturity growth can be easily attributed to the effects of the drugs. When this happens, parents rave to their family members and friends that Ritalin saved their child, and they push other parents to do what they did–get their children on Ritalin.

And so, this is how I think the myth of Ritalin’s effectiveness is created. An initial improvement in behavior once the drug treatment begins; a slow tolerance develops to the drug so it becomes less and less effective, but this occurs over a period of time during which the child is naturally maturing. As a result, some parents don’t notice that the drug is becoming less effective. When parents do notice the decreased effectiveness of the drug, they often take the child to the doctor to get an increased dose. Again there is a boost in apparent improvement. As tolerance to the drug once again begins to occur, more time goes by, and of course there is more growth in the child’s natural maturity.  This may lead to less attention problems, but the improvement is attributed to the drugs, rather than improved maturity.  Whenever parents try to see if their child can do just as well without the drugs, the withdrawal reactions convince them that their child really needs the drug. Negative side effects of the drugs are attributed to other causes. Couple all of this with the clever advertisement campaign of drug companies, and we end up with a pretty impressive myth.

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on.  This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence.  To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

AdderallADHDADHD Treatmentcaffeine's side effectsCoffee's side effectsdrug treatmentDSMmental illnessMythsparentingpsychiatryRitalin