- Attention disorder or not, pills to help in school, By Alan Schwartz, October 9, 2012, New York Times: “When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall. The pills boost focus and impulse control in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder ‘made up’ and ‘an excuse’ to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools. ‘I don’t have a whole lot of choice,’ said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. ‘We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.’ Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians. They are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money — not to treat A.D.H.D., necessarily, but to boost their academic performance…”
- Use of antipsychotic drugs up sharply among poor children in Kentucky, By Beth Musgrave, October 9, 2012, Lexington Herald-Leader: “The amount of powerful antipsychotic drugs distributed to poor and disabled children on Medicaid in Kentucky jumped 270 percent from 2000 to 2010, according to a new report by researchers at the University of Kentucky. The largest growth was for minority children, who took medications to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression at three times the rate of white children in 2010. In addition, the report found unexplained geographical differences in how minority children are treated for mental illnesses. For example, minority children in Bath County in Eastern Kentucky are taking antipsychotic medications at a rate nearly 26 times higher than minority children in Christian County in Western Kentucky. Yet the report found little difference in white children in those two counties. The study also revealed wide geographical variances in prescriptions for drugs meant to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty