Then they produce euphoria and, as a result, increasing the risk of addiction. Hence a history of substance abuse would be an important factor when considering whether a teenager is a good candidate for ADHD medication.
Get this as a PDF. Enter email to download and get news and resources in your inbox. Share this on social. Are there long-term effects of taking ADHD medication? Quick Read. Full Article. How stimulants work. Does medication become less effective over time? Does ADHD medication lead to addiction?
Caroline Miller. Caroline Miller is the editorial director of the Child Mind Institute. She is a veteran magazine, newspaper and website editor … Read Bio. Was this article helpful? Explore Popular Topics.
Behavior Problems. Learning Disorders. View More Topics. Sign Up for Our Newsletters. My partner, Lisa, and I filmed him, he looked so strange. After those first tentative steps, he ran everywhere. I bought him a toy motorcycle and trotted after him as he zoomed down our street, Fred Flintstone-style, a hundred times a day.
He wore out shoes in weeks, dragging the toes on the pavement to stop himself. Inside the house, despite massive childproofing efforts, he got into everything.
Once he poured a gallon of olive oil onto the kitchen floor while I was washing dishes not more than three feet away. In what seemed like split seconds, he climbed the bookshelves, knocked lamps over, poured bleach on the carpet. Then there was that other side to him — a soft, pensive side. Once, during nap time, I stepped outside to water the plants. I looked through the window. He was lying in his crib, playing with his feet, looking around.
He stayed like this for a long time, musing, content. When he was older, a walk down the block to the playground would take over an hour. Zachary looked at everything. The paradox, between his wild and pensive sides, was what kept me from believing my son had ADHD years later. At age three, Zachary went to pre-school, where he achieved notoriety for figuring out how to unlock the childproof latch on the gate. Lisa and I pulled him out of that school after the counselors got so angry with him for pooping on the playground that they put him in time-out for two hours.
Never mind that he was pretending to be an armadillo and that he pooped behind a shed. Clearly, his inability to listen had stretched their limits. Next was the Montessori school. How does a child get kicked out of a school that prides itself on its philosophy to nurture each child, to encourage him to be self-directed, an active explorer?
Well, Zachary was a bit too active an explorer, even for them. He hid in closets and under computer tables. There was no way he was going to perform well under that kind of pressure. Not only that, but his teacher carried a cowbell on the playground, jangling it loudly at children who failed to swing straight.
One day before we pulled him out, I parked next to the playground, waiting for the school bell to ring. My eye was drawn to a kid who had put a box over his head and was careening wildly around the playground, a couple of other boys in tow.
I waited for the teacher to jangle the cowbell. I could see the boy was out of control, and I was relieved. Someone else had a kid like Zachary. The school bell rang and the children scattered.
Box Boy slowed down, wobbly as a top, then BAM, popped the box up high off his head. It was Zachary. My heart sank. Lisa found a private school that advertised itself as focusing on the arts, and seemed open to working with Zachary. However, to receive a diagnosis of ADHD by a child psychologist or psychiatrist, a child must have at least six of nine symptoms of either hyperactivity or inattention, the child's behavior must be causing problems in his or her life, and the symptoms must not be explainable by any medical condition or any other mental disorder.
Children can be hyperactive, distracted and inattentive for a variety of reasons, Lee said, not only because of ADHD but also because some of them are abused, malnourished, depressed or have impaired vision, Lee said. Many more children meet the criteria for ADHD than are being treated for it, and many children may benefit from treatment who are not receiving it, Lee and Humphreys said.
Lee's laboratory is conducting a study of children, both with and without ADHD, who were 6 to 9 years old at the beginning of the research and are now 10 to 13, to identify predictors of early and problematic alcohol use. That research is federally funded by the National Institutes of Health.
As children with ADHD enter adolescence and adulthood, they typically fall into three groups of roughly equal size, Lee said: one-third will have significant problems in school and socially; one-third will have moderate impairment; and one-third will exhibit only mild impairment. UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of more than 40, undergraduate and graduate students.
The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Six alumni and six faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
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