DEI ISSUE

For Trent Sprague, a senior photojournalism student, navigating daily life amidst the stimulant medication shortage has been “brutal.”

“I do not function well without my meds,” said Sprague, who has been on ADHD medication since 2nd grade. “When I’m not on them, nothing gets done. I don’t have the ability to actually focus that much cause my ADHD is pretty bad.”

The national shortage of the ADHD medication Adderall — which the Food and Drug Administration announced last October — has since spread to other stimulant brands, including Ritalin and Concerta.

Because of the shortage, Sprague had to switch from Adderall to a different medication, which is not always easy because they do not all work exactly the same.

Fiona Noonan, a senior public relations and advertising student at DePaul University, said getting her two Adderall prescriptions has gotten harder in the past three months.

Noonan said she has been told by her pharmacy to simply “call around” to other pharmacies and inquire about in-stock extended release Adderall, and when she did that, “pharmacists have said ‘yea no.. it’s really horrible, we don’t have it right now.’”

A survey by the National College Health Association from 2020 reported 11.6% of college students as having ADHD/ADD, or nearly one in nine students. This has risen 8% in the last 20 years; in 2000, only 3.3% of students reported having ADD.

Junior design management student Sonja Larsen said she got diagnosed with ADHD and began taking Adderall almost two years ago but has been struggling to maintain her prescribed doses since last fall.

After getting sent back and forth between her pharmacist and doctor when trying to get her already-delayed medication, Larsen now tries to minimize dealing with them altogether.

“I have had to ration it so that I don’t need to go back to the pharmacy,” she said about her Adderall. “It makes me a lot less flexible; I have homework on certain days, I have class on certain days, and I take the Adderall accordingly — last semester it didn’t line up perfectly, and I ended up running out right before finals.”

Jeanne Kelley, director of Columbia’s Services for Students with Disabilities, said in an email to the Chronicle that when a student lets SSD know of their medication issues and the impact it is having on their coursework, they will “advocate for the student with the instructor to provide some flexibility.”

For students facing the shortage who are not registered with the office, Kelley recommends either asking professors for leniency or registering with SSD; even with only a couple weeks left in the semester, help is available.

Aditya Kumar Singh Pawar, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, said there are many impacts of the shortage.

“In the longer-term, untreated ADHD can negatively impact a child’s self-esteem, their sense of ability, lead to demoralization, increase vulnerability for anxiety and depression,” he said.

These effects are felt by adults, too. Noonan said that without medication, her feelings of anxiety and depression have increased.

For many people with ADHD, the brain struggles with low levels of the brain chemical dopamine — raising it is part of stimulant medication’s purpose.

“After having an artificial way to get [dopamine] every morning, having that cut off abruptly definitely has affected my feelings towards school and stuff that shouldn’t be that hard,” Noonan said.

Last December, the Drug Enforcement Administration issued a notice addressing the stimulant shortage. In the notice, the DEA said it is not raising the production quota for stimulant medication manufacturers for 2023. The production quota sets a certain quantity of medication to be manufactured each year.

Manufacturers of stimulant medications claim not to have a supply chain issue, and both the FDA and DEA support that, Pawar said. He said other reasons for the shortage include an “increased demand for stimulants in adults, potential over-prescription by some online telehealth outlets.”

A Center for Disease Control study reported a spike in persons with at least one stimulant prescription between 2020 and 2021, the beginning years of the COVID-19 pandemic when telehealth became commonplace. Females, on average, showed a 14% increase and males, on average, showed a 5% increase.

Pawar added, though, that it was “mainly for the good” that specialists could reach more patients via telehealth, as more people in need got access that otherwise could not have gotten any help.