A couple of Ritalin stories crossed our path recently. The first seems related to our previous post on modafinil: Chinese parents are apparently scrambling to find performance-enhancing drugs to help their children face the pressure of upcoming exams to get into college. The drug of choice is Ritalin. These exams sound fairly competitive, with 10 million kids fighting for 5.7 million places. Naturally, this practice is a bit frowned upon:
Medical experts have expressed concern about healthy children taking Ritalin, saying "willful administration" could lead to poor exam performance, the Beijing News said.
I'm obviously no medical expert, but I suspect the reason Ritalin is in such demand in this situation is because - surprise! - it actually does help some percentage of students with their exams. But continuing the train of thought from my previous post, maybe we should be showering kids in this situation with heaping piles of non-addictive modafinil to help them concentrate. Heck, perhaps we should be stashing bowls of modafinil next to the coffee pots at our workplaces, too.
Meanwhile, a Canadian study recently showed that Ritalin is more likely to be prescribed to children of divorced parents. Unfortunately, that's about all the study showed:
Lisa Strohschein said the data she used can only identify the phenomenon and cannot reveal why Ritalin use rates are double when children of divorced parents are compared to children whose parents stay married...
One possibility is that the stress of the divorce aggravated a child's existing behavioural problems to the point where Ritalin would actually be helpful, she hypothesized.
It is known that ADHD can run in families. In addition to passing on the condition to their children, parents with ADHD-type behaviour might be more likely to divorce – a theory that points towards appropriate use of the drug.
Another possibility is that in divorce, the natural emotions children experience – anxiety, sadness, anger – may manifest themselves in behaviour that is mislabelled as ADHD-like, or that parents and doctors may be anticipating problematic behaviour because of the stress of divorce. The study suggested this type of rationale would reflect inappropriate use.
The study offers no solid conclusions beyond the notion that Ritalin is not a silver bullet for treating children of divorced parents; some will handle the stress without need for medication, others won't, and doctors need to be treating kids on a case by case basis. Of course, I always assumed that's what doctors were doing anyway.
