There are many reports of children experiencing psychosis during stimulant treatment for ADHD
Amphetamines are known to induce psychotic and manic episodes. Given this understanding of Ritalin, psychiatry could expect that giving it to young children would cause many to suffer a manic or psychotic episode as well. Although this risk isn’t well quantified, Canadian psychiatrists reported in 1999 that nine of ninety-six ADHD children they treated with stimulants for an average of twenty-one months developed “psychotic symptoms.” In 2006, the FDA issued a report on this risk. From 2000 to 2005, the agency had received nearly one thousand reports of stimulant-induced psychosis and mania in children and adolescents, and given that these MedWatch reports are thought to represent only 1 percent of the actual number of adverse events, this suggests that 100,000 youths diagnosed with ADHD suffered psychotic and or manic episodes during that five-year period. The FDA determined that these episodes regularly occurred in “patients with no identifiable risk factors” for psychosis, meaning that they were clearly drug-induced, and that a “substantial portion” of the cases occurred in children ten years or less. “The predominance in young children of hallucinations, both visual and tactile, involving insects, snakes and worms is striking,” the FDA wrote.
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2010). Anatomy of an Epidemic Chapter 11 The Epidemic Spreads to Children (Epub p. 323). New York , NY: Crown Publishing.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychiatry / Pharmacology / Biology / Neuroscience / Biochemistry / Neurochemistry Status:☀️