NHS spending on ‘chemical cosh’ drugs to treat hyperactivity has soared by two-thirds to £31million in just four years, new figures revealed yesterday.  Nearly 750,000 prescriptions are now being doled out every year for Ritalin and similar drugs – most of them to children.  The surge triggered concerns that children are being unnecessarily drugged as poor discipline is increasingly seen as a medical issue.  Teachers warned today that prescribing calming drugs was often cheaper and easier than ‘talking cures’ and parenting support.

An increase in the cost of the drugs partly accounts for increase. But statistics also show that, over the same period, the number of prescriptions issued by doctors surged, from 486,536 to 744,078.

The figures may underestimate the true scale of spending since private prescriptions and those handed out by in-house hospital pharmacies are excluded from the data, which was issued to The Guardian by the NHS Business Services Authority.

Official NHS guidelines recommend drug treatment for the most severely affected but some doctors take this more literally than others.  Figures published in 2008 showed that doctors in the Wirral dispensed one Ritalin prescription for every seven children under 16, although this did not equate to one in seven children taking Ritalin – since one child could have repeat prescriptions.

Across England, the average was one for every 23 children, while Stoke-on-Trent doled out just one prescription for every 159 children.  Experts warned that some doctors and teachers are too keen to pin medical labels on what would previously have been branded poor discipline.  Dr Gwynedd Lloyd, an education researcher at the University of Edinburgh, said: ‘You can’t do a blood test to check whether you’ve got ADHD – it’s diagnosed through a behavioural checklist.

‘Getting out of your seat and running about is an example – half the kids in a school could qualify under that criterion.  ‘I know a lot of children have genuine difficulties, and some of these are biological, but most are social and cultural.’  Meanwhile teachers warned that funding pressures on schools could lead to an increase in prescribing in future.  Mental health programmes to help children through counselling and parental support were labour-intensive, they said.

Tim Bown, assistant head of Queen’s Park Community School, North London, said: ‘Ideally, schools would prefer to offer intensive one-to-one support, but if the resources are limited – which they usually are – then we’re pushed into a choice between medication or exclusion.  ‘Hearing a student say that a drug “takes away his soul” doesn’t sit comfortably with us as a school, but permanent exclusion doesn’t either.’  He warned that therapists, counsellors and mentors could be sacrificed as schools fought to keep teachers.

Professor Frank Furedi, a sociology expert from Kent University and author of Therapy Culture, said: ‘Parents are ambitious for their children and teachers are at a loss about how to manage classroom behaviour, so they medicalise it.’  Since ADHD was first recognised as a medical condition in the mid-1980s, debate has raged over the use of drugs to treat it.  Side-effects can include stunted growth and cardiovascular problems, as well as insomnia, lethargy and headaches.  But research also shows that youngsters treated with Ritalin and similar drugs do better in tests.

Source: DailyMail

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