By Alan Schwarz
VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee
holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses
Dominion Psychiatric Associates.
It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and
received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she
insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now
as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted
to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored
Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to
kill him.”
It was where, after becoming violently delusional and
spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor
and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in
his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.
The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college
class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in
the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D.,
doctors and other experts said.
Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of
children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines
provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms
to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry
serious psychological dangers. These efforts are facilitated by a segment of
doctors who skip established diagnostic procedures, renew
prescriptions reflexively and spend too little time with patients to accurately
monitor side effects.
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