As academic pressures become too much to handle, some students go to dangerous lengths to stay in the game. Worse yet, many of these students aren’t aware of the risks they’re taking.
High school students nationwide are turning to attention deficit treatments like Adderall and Ritalin to improve their focus and help them maintain attention.
Although these drugs are only prescribed to patients who are diagnosed with ADHD, an attention disorder commonly found among adolescents, some people without the disorder take the drug without a prescription to improve focus and productivity while studying and taking tests.
“The people who abuse it are the teens who may take a pill and think it’s going to help them study for finals,” said Greenbrae pediatrician Jan Maisel.
Although it may seem like a good idea to overworked teens, Corte Madera psychiatrist Michael Freeman said that people without ADHD put themselves at serious risk by taking the drugs without a prescription.
“If you don’t have ADHD, if feels just like taking speed,” Freeman said. “If you have ADHD, then it doesn’t feel like speed, it actually has a more calming, centering effect. How it does it, very simply, is that there are some chemical differences in the brain with ADHD that are corrected and rebuilt by the medication.”
Freeman said that the more serious side effects put people who don’t have ADHD at a great risk of cardiovascular complications.
“The drugs can give you heart attacks, can cause cardiac arrest, they can do all kinds of things,” Freeman said. “They can cause you to have a stroke, and they can raise your blood pressure. They have very serious consequences.”
According to Freeman, side effects of the drug can also include dryness of mouth, appetite suppression, insomnia, high levels of energy, increased motivation, and irritability.
Both Maisel and Freeman said that on a long-term basis, the drug does not improve one’s ability to learn if taken non-medically.
“On a short-term basis, it might improve your results. You stay up all night, pull an all-nighter, read more, finish more problems,” Freeman said. “But on a long-term basis, it interrupts your sleep/wake cycles.”
Freeman said that when people are on the drug, they are learning in an “altered state.” Someone who studies in an altered state may not remember the information when he or she returns to a non-altered state.
According to Freeman, this is called state-dependent learning, and it can change the way one’s brain functions.
“When you you learn something when you’re in one state of mind, it’s hard to remember it when you’re in a different state of mind,” Freeman said.
Maisel said that the drug can also hinder one’s ability to study and retain information because one of its symptoms is difficulty falling asleep.
“If someone stays up all night, whether assisted by a medicine or not, and does all this work, and then goes off to take a test on this work, if they haven’t slept sufficient hours, they are much less able to put the work that they did into their long-term memory,” Maisel said.
Maisel said that she does not think that ADHD drugs are addictive, and that she has never had a patient who was addicted to the drugs.
However, Freeman said that taking drugs of any kind, including ADHD drugs, without a prescription can cause damage to the brain, especially in young people.
“Your brain is a very, very sensitive organ that we don’t fully understand. Once it’s damaged, it doesn’t get undamaged,” Freeman said. “Young adults and teenagers have no idea what they’re doing to their brains, and it’s causing irreversible damage and it’s really tragic.”
Both Freeman and Maisel agreed that taking Adderall to increase a test score isn’t worth the risk.
“You’re entering a whole different world where you’re no longer in charge of your own life,” Freeman said. “You’re messing up your brain in order to achieve some social effect that’s just not in your best interest.”
