Kim Collier’s 7-year-old daughter could not stop crying. Less than 24 hours earlier, the child had started taking Vyvanse, a drug prescribed for the treatment of ADHD. The distraught mother suggested a bike ride to distract the inconsolable child. The two set out for a park near their home outside Alliston, Ont. The girl pedalled and sobbed. Then, Collier recalled, “She screamed at me. She said, ‘I want to die.’”
Adverse Reaction Report No. 324764
Submitted by: Health Professional
Date: 2009
Location: Canada
Patient: Male
Age: 15 years old
Suspect Drug: Strattera
Side Effect: Completed Suicide
This is just one of nearly 600 cases of Canadian kids suffering serious, sometimes fatal side effects suspected to have been caused by ADHD medications in the past 10 years.
I once went to a barbecue in LA where a group of women in the pool gazebo were swapping recipes – drug recipes. These women were the Nigellas of the prescription drug scene. They knew how to mix their fluoxetine with a nice tasty opioid like hydrocodone. They knew that top-and-tailing their favourite stimulants with a couple of Xanax could produce just the right kind of high. And their recipes had one ingredient in common: Adderall.
A recent article posted in the Wall Street Journal posed the question, “Are ADHD Medications Overprescribed?” Is that a rhetorical question? 5 million children are currently taking ADHD drugs in the U.S. alone.
Szasz’s radicalism, which he combined with a sharp wit, a keen eye for obfuscating rhetoric, and an uncompromising dedication to individual freedom and responsibility, was one of his greatest strengths. Beginning with The Myth of Mental Illness in 1961 and continuing through 35 more books and hundreds of articles, the maverick psychiatrist, driven by a “passion against coercion,” zeroed in on the foundational fallacies underlying all manner of medicalized tyranny.
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