A new study from the CDC says that, during the COVID era, Adderall use exploded among young women and teenage boys. When you add this to the number of young people on psychotropic drugs for depression, you must wonder whether this prescription drug use is an underlying reason for a whole lot of problems in America.

I’m not very familiar with Adderall (or a similar drug, Ritalin). My kids spent their early years at a classic Montessori School, and Montessori kids are almost never prescribed ADHD drugs. This is because they’re not forced to sit at their desks for hours or deprived of physical activity at recess because it’s too competitive or dangerous. Instead, Montessori kids can constantly move through their classrooms if they’re doing their work, and they get hours of free play a day.

Plus, my kids grew up in a safe neighborhood where they were constantly engaged in physical play, along with team sports. In other words, they had lots of activity that safely siphoned off the animal energy in all young bodies.

That’s not the case for most American schoolchildren, which I believe explains most ADHD diagnoses today. The easiest way to make a child sit still and focus is to prescribe Adderall. That’s a combination of two amphetamines—yes, the kind of stuff that makes adults manic and often dangerous. The common side effects are nasty:

That print is small, so let me fill you in on some of the “common” side effects: They include hostility, mood changes, drug-induced psychosis, depression, aggressive behavior, altered mental status, hallucinations, manic disorder, dysphoric mood, and suicidal ideation!

So why do we give these amphetamines to kids? We do so because Adderall has a paradoxical effect: Rather than speeding kids up, it slows them down. Significantly, though, a lot of these kids become addicted and continue taking Adderall long after they cease to be kids. They’re also not immune to any of those side effects.

Adderall was already the teachers’ friend in American schools before COVID, but since COVID, it’s become a scourge (emphasis mine):

ADHD medications have become increasingly common in recent years but the loosening of online prescribing rules during the pandemic made them accessible with just a few clicks of a button.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study today showed that the biggest rise in new prescriptions was among women in their 20s, with scripts rising about a fifth from 2020 to 2021. Across all ages and sexes, scripts increased about eight percent in that time.

The CDC estimates that six percent of women aged 20 to 24 are now taking the medications. The group most likely to be prescribed ADHD drugs is still teen boys 10 to 14 - at about 10 percent - but this is largely unchanged from pre-covid.

In addition to Adderall, America’s young people are drowning in a sea of psychotropic drugs. As teens struggle with life in the modern era, doctors put them on “antidepressant” drugs in the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI) family. Take the much-prescribed Prozac. Its common side effects include symptoms of anxiety, nervousness, acute confusion, agitation, manic disorder, mood changes, suicidal ideation, memory impairment, and depersonalization.

Image: Adderall by Tony Webster. CC BY 2.0.

Even worse than that, it recently emerged that there’s a very strong likelihood that serotonin deficiency has nothing to do with depression—which means that the medicines are not working along the intended lines. And as noted, a lot of the side effects cause great suffering and may make the patient a danger to himself or others.

Regarding the latter problem, here’s a list of kids in school who committed or wanted to commit mass murder and who were also on psychotropic drugs. The list only goes through mid-2019. There are probably lots of crimes that could be added.

There’s also a list of four so-called “transgender” people who committed mass murder. I’m willing to bet all were on some prescription medicine in the Adderall or SSRI families. Given that the Tennessee shooter, a 20-something-year-old woman, was getting treated for mental illness, I would really like to know what prescription medicines she was taking.

I am not a fan of Scientology. But I do know that the one thing it got right a long time ago was that we were endangering young American people by the rush to medicalize unhappiness tied to the difficulty of growing up. Think of their emotional world: They’re bombarded with false apocalyptic climate visions, the left’s aggressive push for early sexualization (with lots of help from Hollywood), the isolation of social media, the even greater isolation of COVID, and easy access to marijuana. Add in psychotropic drugs and amphetamines, and it’s a wonder that more haven’t gone crazy.