Stimulants have been shown to not improve behavior over the long-term
Schools have found Ritalin to be useful in subduing hyperactive students and making them more easily manageable. However, when researchers looked at whether stimulants improved a child’s behavior over the long term, they couldn’t find any benefit. When a child stopped taking Ritalin, ADHD behaviors regularly flared up, the “excitability, impulsivity, or talkativeness” worse than ever. “It is often disheartening to observe how rapidly behavior deteriorates when medication is discontinued,” confesses psychologist Carol Whalen. Nor was there evidence that staying on a stimulant led to a sustained improvement in behavior. “Teachers and parents should not expect long-term improvement in academic achievement or reduced antisocial behavior,” wrote the psychologist James Swanson and director of an ADHD center at the University of California, Irvine in 1993. The 1994 edition of the APA’s Textbook of Psychiatry admitted to the same bottom-line conclusion: “Stimulants do not produce lasting improvements in aggressivity, conduct disorder, criminality, education achievement, job functioning, marital relationships, or long-term adjustment.” Thirty years of research had failed to provide any good-quality evidence that stimulants helped “hyperactive” children thrive, and in the early 1990s, a team of prominent ADHD experts picked to lead a long-term NIMH study, known as the Multisite Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD, acknowledged that this was so. “The long-term efficacy of stimulant medication has not been demonstrated for any domain of child functioning,” they wrote.
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2010). Anatomy of an Epidemic Chapter 11 The Epidemic Spreads to Children (Epub p. 308). New York , NY: Crown Publishing.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychiatry / Pharmacology / Biology / Neuroscience Status:☀️