Stimulants have been shown to subdue children and make them emotionally flat
Ritalin and other ADHD drugs do reliably change a child’s behavior. However, they do not bring children back to “normal.” Amphetamines were first considered useful in treating hyperactive children when Charles Bradley gave them to students in 1937. In his 1937 report, Charles Bradley set the stage for the efficacy story that eventually emerged: “Fifteen of the thirty children responded to Benzedrine by becoming distinctly subdued in their emotional responses. Clinically in all cases this was an improvement from the social viewpoint.” Ritalin, which the FDA approved for use in children in 1961, was found to have a similar subduing effect. In a 1978 double-blind study, Ohio State University psychologist Herbert Rie studied twenty-eight “hyperactive” children for three months, half of whom were prescribed Ritalin. Here is what he wrote:
Children who were retrospectively confirmed to have been on active drug treatment appeared, at the times of evaluation, distinctly more bland or “flat” emotionally, lacking both the age-typical variety and frequency of emotional expression. They responded less, exhibited little or no initiative or spontaneity, offered little indication of either interest or aversion, showed virtually no curiosity, surprise, or pleasure, and seemed devoid of humor. Jocular comments and humorous situations passed unnoticed. In short, while on active drug treatment, the children were relatively but unmistakably affectless, humorless, and apathetic.
Numerous investigators reported similar observations. Children on Ritalin show “a marked drug-related increase in solitary play and a corresponding reduction in their initiation of social interactions,” announced Russell Barkley, a psychologist at the Medical College of Wisconsin, in 1978. This drug, observed Bowling Green State University psychologist Nancy Fiedler, reduced a child’s “curiosity about the environment.” At times, the medicated child “loses his sparkle,” wrote Canadian pediatrician Till Davy in 1989. Children treated with a stimulant, concluded a team of UCLA psychologists in 1993, often become “passive, submissive” and “socially withdrawn.” Some children on the drug “seem zombie-like,” noted psychologist James Swanson, director of an ADHD center at the University of California, Irvine. Stimulants, explained the editors of the Oxford Textbook of Clinical Psychophamacology and Drug Therapy, curb hyperactivity by “reducing the number of behavioral responses.”
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2010). Anatomy of an Epidemic Chapter 11 The Epidemic Spreads to Children (Epub p. 299). New York , NY: Crown Publishing.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychiatry / Pharmacology / Biology / Neuroscience Status:☀️