Dear Kennedy: Stop Schools From Needlessly Drugging Kids

Recently, for the first time in my standardized test-taking career, I deliberately chose the wrong answer.

I was taking the American Board of Pediatrics exam that all U.S. pediatricians must pass every few years to maintain our certification. The case study described a seven-year-old child frequently daydreaming in class. I knew the board wanted me to affirm that, as the answer key puts it, this was a clear-cut case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

I also knew it was an answer I couldn’t give. I don’t care if it costs me my job. My days of drugging daydreamers are over.

I went into pediatrics because I love kids and want to help them thrive. Yet I now find the weight of my profession daily pressuring me to medicate healthy children, possibly for life, for a condition that cannot be defined and with medicine whose long-term effects we have not even begun to understand, all to conform them to a mass-manufactured existence that would be unrecognizable as childhood to any prior generation.

This is a national scandal. I hope Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the newly announced Make America Healthy Again Commission won’t need to be prescribed stimulants to pay immediate attention to this crisis.

Typically, when a doctor like me raises alarms that mind-altering, soul-crushing stimulants are now handed out like candy, the establishment’s response is to blame irresponsible physicians who aren’t following diagnostic guidelines. That has always been a lie, and I am grateful to the American Board of Pediatrics for proving it. Being pushed into needlessly drugging young daydreamers is not only my real-world experience, it is the model case used to train the nation’s doctors!

With institutional backing like that, is it any surprise that ADHD has rapidly become the most common developmental condition of childhood? There are now more kids in America with ADHD than with asthma. Conservative estimates find it affects one in ten kids — and nearly two-thirds of them will end up on medication.

The most prescribed such medication is Ritalin. In use for decades, prescribed to millions of American children, its long-term effects remain assiduously unstudied. As one 2016 paper put it, “despite its prevalent use among children and adolescents, little is known about lasting effects of methylphenidate on the developing dopaminergic system.”

Those researchers did find enduring changes in the brains of children on the medication, and follow-up confirmed that Ritalin before the age of 16 “longlastingly affects the human brain and behavior.” Yet few seem to care. Indeed, the American Academy of Pediatrics would go on to assert, in their influential guideline, that it is “relatively low risk” for four-year-olds to microdose cocaine — er, excuse me, take stimulants — on the daily.

As we saw clearly during lockdowns, the pediatric medical establishment is a lost cause. That’s where you, dear reader, come in. Ought you worry about raising your children in an amphetamine-laced world?

Consider: while a kindergartner started on stimulants might remain on them through senior year of college, the average length of trials involving Ritalin was fewer than 30 days. On that timeline, cigarettes seem a safe bet, too — and, boy, do they help with focus! 

What, precisely, could go wrong when meddling with young minds? The experts have lately been forced to concede the possibility of heart disease. The damage control put out by one leading pro-stimulant researcher says a little cardiovascular mortality (a.k.a. dying from heart disease) is a “tricky trade-off” for an improved middle-school GPA.

Yet stimulants aren’t heart drugs, they’re brain drugs. They work on dopaminergic pathways. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in focusing on worksheets, yes, but also in rather more important domains, like the pursuit of happiness and falling in love.

Next time your doctor hands over that Adderall, ask whether drugging your daughter to love her homework may leave her incapable of loving anything or anyone that matters. The only truthful answer? Well, it didn’t come up in the month-long trial, sorry. Keep an eye out for tummy aches, though.  

Heartache of all kinds aside, ADHD treatment highlights the biggest blind spot in modern medicine: the dangers of widespread psychiatric medication. It is one thing to worry about side effects for the individual taking Prozac, but when everybody in town is on antidepressants, it is time for deeper questions about society’s sadness-inducing ills.

One may pose similar questions about a school system that needs to medicate a tenth of its students. Pharmaceutically-compelled attention is now an integral part of education. Is there a warning label for that?

What can be done? It is common in an article like this to advocate for alternative treatments. “Parents,” I am expected to urge: “forego the (insurance reimbursed) pill, pay out-of-pocket for hours of weekly therapy (fingers crossed the therapy isn’t the bad kind). Look into specialized diets; experiment with meditation.” I wish it were that simple. The harsh reality is that no therapist, no supplement, will give your childhood back.

My fellow parents, the solution is not to find non-pharmacological ways to fit your children into this 21st-century anti-childhood, but to smash the mold altogether. Resist. Fight back, fight for your children, before it’s too late.

My greatest success stories these past few years of kids who were “cured” of ADHD? They’re the ones whose families were willing to think beyond the next parent-teacher conference: homeschooling, alternative schooling, even switching districts from a large, impersonal suburban school to a small, more human-sized school — all real cases where the child went on to thrive, drug-free. If I had any role in that, it was simply in refusing to medicate at first glance, by taking the radical position that my first duty is to the health of the child, not the convenience of his homeroom teacher.

The time is ripe for change. Let us seize the MAHA moment. Prior efforts to sound the alarm failed because parents trusted the medical community not to harm their children. That trust has evaporated these past few years as parents witnessed doctors’ insistence on masking toddlers and castrating teens. Meanwhile, public trust in schools — as well as the institutions their graduates go on to run — has been hitting historic lows.

If we’re going to medicate children to fit a mold, ought we at least choose a better mold? The science is settled: the world of ADHD, where authority of teacher and doctor reign supreme, is ripe for a reckoning. Don’t count on your doctor’s guidelines to change any time soon, so spread the word yourself: the ADHD emperor has no clothes.

What of me? A doctor who won’t push pills is about as useful as a university bureaucrat who won’t apologize for Hamas — the times have passed us by. To be a pediatrician in good standing today is to take up arms against childhood.

I cannot do so — at least not until the AAP rolls out a drug powerful enough to numb my conscience. Until then, I muddle on, roll my eyes at the board exam, and pray I can keep both my practice and my soul.

Dr. Adrian Gaty writes at Substack.