Troubled Teens Resources

Teen crisis intervention campaigns directed at college students try to educate both parents and students about the dangers of taking drugs prescribed for Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder recreationally. Unfortunately, Adderall has taken it’s place next to Ritalin and Oxycontin as the favored prescription that college teens abuse.

“Most popularly, Adderall has become a cheap fix for millions of college students and various other young adult professionals with places to go and people to see.”

Unfortunately these teens also combine Adderrall with alcohol, the combination allowing them to be drunkenly alert, one supposes. It seems to produce a high that they relish and the dangers inherent in mixing drugs are, as usual, ignored.

“Adderall is also used by those who want to stay up all night partying and don’t feel that they can do it of their own volition. This provides for a most dangerous combination: Adderall, a stimulant, and alcohol, a depressant, do not mix well. The medication provides a feeling of mental clarity and alertness that one does not necessarily have in actuality after imbibing for hours. This means that you don’t feel as drunk as you actually are, and that you wake up with a hangover from the depths of hell, spit straight out of Persephone’s lair, if you can manage to fall asleep in the first place (and wake up afterward).”

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And then you crash. Crashing is the term used for the experience of “coming down” off a drug. It is usually what triggers a search for more because it is extremely unpleasant. And that is one of the many ways addiction begins.

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder presents numerous quandaries for parents raising troubled teenagers. So much of the treatment is based on the specific needs of the teens. There are cases where minimal medication is required and then there are those teens whose ADHD is present with other factors that make it harder to treat. For instance, a teen might also be dealing with other emotional issues that are exacerbated by ADHD.

Parents need to also consider the future ramifications of treating an ADHD teen with medication. Some experts claim it pre-disposes them towards teen age drug abuse. A new report suggests that the longer a teen is on Ritalin, the more likely they are to commit a crime.

“Children who use Ritalin for a long period of time could be more at risk of delinquency and substance abuse, a study has found.

Doctors are suggesting children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should take a break from medication after three years of use.

An American study - published in the Medical Observer _ has found that while drugs such as Ritalin can initially help sufferers, the benefit of prolonged use is in doubt.

Some children stay on medication until they reach 18, but researchers believe it may not protect them from all the symptoms.

The US Multimodal Treatment Study of Children revealed the more days of prescribed medication, the more serious delinquency became.

In a cohort of 500 children with ADHD - followed for 36 months until they were 12 - researchers found 27 per cent were at a greater risk of committing crime, compared with 7 per cent among “normative” children.

Substance use also increased to 17 per cent in ADHD children - almost double the normal rate.”

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Do you need an argument to convince yourself and your husband that looking into schools for troubled teens is the right decision for your Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder teen. After all, he has already abused his Ritalin by selling it to make enough money to buy pot, combining the two. He’s admitted to drinking. He is remorseful, you are angry and his Dad places a great deal of blame on the public school system. And Dad would be right.

Consider this excerpt from the just released National Survey of American Attitudes on Substance Abuse XII: Teens and Parents conducted by CASA.

“This fall more than 16 million teens will return to middle and high schools where drug dealing, possession, use and students high on alcohol or drugs are part of the fabric of their school,”…“Too many of our nation’s high and middle schools have become marijuana marts and pill palaces. Parents should wake up to this reality and realize more likely than not, your teen is going to school each day in a building where drug use, sale and possession is as much a part of the curriculum as math or English and do something about it. For many of our middle and high school students, school days have become school daze.”

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Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder concerns have produced much in the way of teen crisis intervention programs to address the constellation of behavioral problems that accompany it. Now there is new information for parents of ADHD teens to digest concerning the possible affects of Ritalin.

Teen help for adolescents diagnosed with ADHD, Is thankfully, far more extensive than just a few years ago with new studies emerging offering a great deal of hope for non-medicinal treatments. Parents distressed by the latest studies on Ritalin can find many other choices to consider.

“Young children taking Ritalin for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder may experience chemical changes in their brains, say U.S. researchers who expressed concern about long-term prescriptions.

In one of the few studies to probe the effects of Ritalin on the neurochemistry of the developing brain, scientists found changes in areas linked to “higher executive functioning, addiction and appetite, social relationships and stress,” the study’s senior author Dr. Teresa Milner, a neuroscientist at New York’s Weill Cornell Medical College, said in a release.

The findings, published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest doctors must be careful in their diagnosis of ADHD before prescribing Ritalin. That’s because the brain changes noted in the study might be helpful in battling the disorder but harmful to youngsters with healthy brain chemistry, said Dr. Milner.”

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Schools for troubled teens, military boarding schools and other specialty schools all have tales similar to the one excerpted below. It speaks to the simple but powerful efficacy of discipline and sports. These are principles that professionals in the field of teen metal health will all attest to. So will the parent of the young man described here.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder combined with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder can be a monumental handicap, as one teen and his desperate parents discovered…

“In the classroom… he grew up engaged in a daily struggle – wanting to focus on reading, writing and arithmetic, but unable to do so….
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He felt alienated from his classmates and teachers, a feeling that was reinforced through violent clashes with fellow students.”
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Nothing prepares a parent for something like this, and Travis readily admits he and Heather were ill-equipped to deal with young Brent. They sought out as much information as possible on O.D.D. and ADHD, but books and pamphlets only go so far…
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Salvation for the Dicus family didn’t come in the form of a Ritalin pill or some well-meaning but ineffectual art therapy. It came in the form of an oblong ball and a green field 110 yards in length and 65 yards wide. Life started to change when Brent discovered football.

Travis and Heather knew their boy needed an outlet for his energy, somewhere he could go to hit people and get away with it. The traits that made Brent such a handful off the field were a great asset to him between the sidelines.
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Though she was skeptical early, Heather Dicus soon came to appreciate the discipline supplied to her son by his coaches, who made him run laps and do sit-ups when he got out of line. Off the field she saw tangible results. He was becoming manageable, to the point where he hardly needed any medication during football season.

It didn’t happen overnight, but by the time Brent got to Grade 7 he was ready to leave that medication behind. ”

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Brat camp taught the Carter family a lesson that they hadn’t expected to learn. Their teen daughter Amy, diagnosed two years ago with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, had been having a rough time in school. Her parents reviewed all the therapies possible, including Ritalin and Adderal but opted to work with a counselor who coached Amy how to manage her ADHD through behavioral techniques and awareness therapies. Though much improvement was made, the death of a close friend threatened her stability and Amy was still struggling with deep anxiety and anger.

Brat camp seemed like a place Amy could run her energies and exasperations into the ground. The camps location in a mountain ranch seemed an idyllic setting. It proved to be more than that. It turned Amy around. Living in a big city, Amy rarely rode a bike, never climbed trees, never held a fishing pole or had a pet. She fell in love with working with the brat camp animals and felt content after the demands of long days caring for stock.

Her parents are convinced that Amy’s exposure to nature made all the difference. Experts are apt to agree with them. Amy is now happily enrolled in a troubled teen boarding school with an emphasis on agriculture and animal husbandry.

“Richard Louv, futurist and author of Last Child in the Woods; Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, says our actions — and in some cases, lack of actions — have caused our children to become alienated from the natural world, and their resulting disconnection may be contributing to increasing diagnoses of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression and childhood obesity.

Louv was the keynote speaker at the recent Outdoor Writers Association of America Conference in Roanoke, Virginia. His presentation, adapted from his book, carried a profound and deeply disturbing message, one that every outdoorsman and woman, as well as every parent, must take to heart. It boils down to this: nature, in the broad, sweeping sense of the word, fills a critical need in the human psyche, and we eliminate its influence on our children only at great risk to them and to our society as a whole.”

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Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder is said to dissipate to a great degree by exposing teens at risk to the great outdoors. When you think about it, this “disorder” didn’t exist, for all intents and purposes, thirty years ago. Not saying the condition wasn’t perhaps present, or that some of us aren’t wired to proceed through life at 90 miles an hour. Just suggesting that thirty years ago, when a kid jumped on his bike and sailed out of the driveway, that need to go fast, to satisfy restlessness, to get a constant stream of stimuli, was satisfied.

Consider this sad fact, out of Los Angeles.

“In San Diego, 90 percent of youngsters do not know how to swim and 34 percent have never been to the ocean even though it is only 15, 20 minutes away from their homes, according to the organization, Aquatic Adventure, which is trying to change that.

Because kids don’t bike much anymore, either for transportation or recreation, bicycle sales are down 31 percent in the past five years. The outdoors industry is surviving by selling high-end expensive equipment to adults rather than entry-level gear for kids.”

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Nostalgic though it may be, those days of yore when there were three TV channels and kids preferred the company of their pals over the latest MTV reality show, were days when you rarely heard the phrase teen age drug abuse. Neither did you hear the words ADD, meth labs, or Ritalin.

No, you can’t bring the innocence of long ago back, but you can raise your troubled teen according to the same principles; play hard, work hard. A teen who does that all summer instead of getting down with his iPod won’t need to hear those words either.

Attention deficit hyperactive disorder can set an at risk teen up for a fall if left undiagnosed. Or so it seems when hearing the story from a neighbor, Jean.

“I didn’t have a clue about ADD until my son was diagnosed. I’ve heard that a lot - parents discovering they had ADD that way - through studying their kid. Anyway, the first thing I was concerned about was that he would do what I did. I didn’t realize at the time, when I was a kid, that so much of my anxiety and frustration wasn’t normal.

But now, when I look back and remember going through my moms medicine cabinet and finding her diet pills and thinking I found heaven. The clarity and the relief - well, i can remember it to this day. And I think that was when I started self medicating and ended up using speed - well, that’s what they called meth back then. I was so grateful for Jason’s diagnosis. He doesn’t have to fall in the same trap.”

Jean’s trap lasted 16 years before she finally quit using drugs of all kinds at age 29. Back then there wasn’t nearly the amount of information on either ADHD or teen age drug abuse that there is today. Schools for troubled teens were not as proliferous and any type of teen age drug abuse was usually treated in a psychiatric hospital as a mental illness.

Testing your teenager for ADD doesn’t mean that you have to subject he or she to Ritalin. Jean worked with her son’s ADD with nutrition and classes that focused on teaching him to work with his condition.

Teens at risk for teen age drug abuse problems, to some extent, can direct some stark criticism at adults. In a world where there is a pill touted for any ailment or disorder, imaginary or not, how are teens supposed to take seriously the constant imprecations to be drug free?

That adults tend to speak “out of both sides of their mouth” is brought home with this article out of China.

“Some stressed out parents in the Chinese financial hub of Shanghai have been searching for a prescription stimulant to give their children ahead of this week’s national college exams, the Beijing News said on Tuesday.

Their target is Ritalin, a drug used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) containing the active ingredient methylphenidate hydrochloride.”

Wow. That certainly sends a great message. The direct opposite message that a teen needs to hear. A teenager needs to realize the infinite capacity of the human mind to excel and to suggest that an exam, certainly one of the minor challenges in the whole of a person’s life - can’t be mastered without an outside stimulus is pathetic.
Even more pathetic are the unethical means parents are using to obtain the Ritalin.

“Some parents were begging people like “Sun”, whose son suffers from ADHD, to get the amphetamine-like stimulant from doctors, the newspaper said.

“I was puzzled why they needed the drug and only later understood that it was for their children preparing for the exams,” Sun was quoted as saying.

“I went to the hospital four times in the past month and every time I had to cheat the doctor by saying that I had lost the previous dose accidentally.”
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This is not the use to which these drugs were intended and parents should be faced with the consequences of getting drugs by fraudulent means, just as we demand that teenagers face the consequences of their actions. I repeat, this is pathetic.

Attention Deficit Disorder when treated with medication has a definite downside that is not fully or adequately discussed by advocates of Ritalin and other various amphetamines. It can start a troubled teen down the road to addiction. Be it Ritalin or any other mood altering drug, when administered without any attempt to address the behavioral problems sans drugs you are instructing an adolescent that the answer to all of his problems will lie in a pill.

And for teens who experience some kind “high” from their medication, the next step is to see if doubling up on the dose makes them even higher.

“At least one boy admitted to police that he snorted prescription medication in a bathroom at Lake Denoon Middle School on April 3. Four kids had their hands on the bag of attention deficit drugs, according to Muskego police.
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Many drugs now abused by teens are found in the family medicine cabinet.”

Unfortunately,a teens education can be derailed when being treated for ADHD.

“One former addict is not surprised that middle school kids abused attention deficit pills. Jordan Neary, 23, said he started on the same destructive path in his early teens.

“I ended up in the ICU at the age of 16,” he told TODAY’S TMJ4 reporter Tom Murray. “I overdosed right in my high school.

Doctors prescribed Adderall and Ritalin for Neary’s attention deficit disorder, but medical use turned to dangerous abuse.”

The middle school teens now face expulsion and the young man quoted above struggled with his addiction for years before being able to achieve sobriety.

He’s been sober for four years and now counsels incoming addicts at Teen Challenge of Wisconsin, a Christian-based drug rehab program. He said he sees a lot of his own struggle in the people he treats.

“So many of them make statements of how, as a young boy, they started snorting and taking larger amounts of their Ritalin,” he said. “It made them more comfortable with taking a pill.”
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Parents will want to investigate all alternatives to medication and consult with more than one authority before deciding how to work with their teen’s ADD.