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 Adolescents who sold their prescribed drugs to other kids – who
might want the stimulants for study or diet aids – had more than
four times greater odds of being bullied than their peers without
ADHD, the study also found.
“Our findings show that there is some connection between a
prescription for stimulant medications and bullying, even after
accounting for the fact that adolescents with ADHD may have
difficulties with peers or may have other problem behaviors
associated with victimization,” lead study author Quyen Epstein-Ngo,
a researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said by
email.
To assess the connection between ADHD medication and bullying, Ngo
and colleagues surveyed middle and high school students annually for
four years.
Ultimately, the surveys involved nearly 5,000 youngsters. About 15
percent had an ADHD diagnosis and roughly 4 percent had been
prescribed stimulants within the past 12 months, the researchers
report in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology.
Among those who took ADHD medications, about 20 percent reported
being approached to sell or share them, and about half of them did
so when asked.
Overall, about 2 percent of the teens reported regularly
experiencing both physical and emotional bullying, while 15 percent
said they had never been victimized. Slightly more than 1 percent of
the youth said they had regularly experienced just physical
bullying, while 2.5 percent reported frequent emotional
mistreatment.
The odds of frequent bullying of any type were 79 percent higher for
adolescents with an ADHD diagnosis who’d been prescribed stimulants
during the past 12-months, compared to adolescents never diagnosed
with ADHD.
The odds of past-year frequent bullying of any type was roughly
three times higher for adolescents diagnosed with ADHD who were
approached to divert their prescription stimulants, compared to kids
without ADHD.
Among youngsters who did give up their meds to other kids, the odds
of past-year frequent bullying was roughly four and a half times
higher.
One limitation of the study is that researchers lacked data on drug
dosage, the authors acknowledge. The survey also didn’t capture
situations when teens with ADHD may have given away or sold their
stimulant medications without being asked.
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Bullying might be more common for children who agree to give away
drugs because they have access to a medication that other teens
want, potentially making them targets of aggression designed to gain
access to the stimulants, Dr. Frances Turcotte Benedict of Brown
University in Providence, Rhode Island, said by email.
It’s also possible that children who did sell or give away their
drugs may have been more deviant or had conduct and behavior
problems that might be independently related to bullying, noted Dr.
Timothy Wilens, a researcher at Harvard University and chief of
child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital
“While medications can be very helpful for ADHD symptoms, they may
also be associated with some behavioral adverse effects such as
irritability,” Wilens, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by
email. “Other children may react to this irritability . . . by
bullying the child.”
In addition, the teens with ADHD who take medications may have more
serious mental health problems that make them more likely targets of
bullying than children with ADHD who don’t take stimulants, said Dr.
Emma Sciberras of Deakin University in Melbourne.
“Children with ADHD are likely to be at increased risk of bullying
given the symptoms of ADHD that they experience, as well as broader
mental health difficulties that are associated with the condition,”
Sciberras, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.
“Children with ADHD who take medications represent a more severe and
impaired group.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1lBQty6 Journal of Pediatric Psychology,
online November 19, 2015.
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