Kids twice as likely to get Ritalin after divorce

Belief that breakup is

hard for children

may be tied to rise

TORONTO - Children from broken marriages are twice as likely to be prescribed attention-deficit drugs as children whose parents stay together, a Canadian researcher said on Monday, and she said the reasons should be investigated.

More than 6 percent of 633 children from divorced families were prescribed Ritalin, compared with 3.3 percent of children whose parents stayed together, University of Alberta professor Lisa Strohschein reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The study of more than 4,700 children started in 1994, while all the families were intact, Strohschein said. They followed the children’s progress to see what happened to their families and to see what drugs were prescribed.


“It shows clearly that divorce is a risk factor for kids to be prescribed Ritalin,” Strohschein said.

Other studies have shown that children of single parents are more likely to get prescribed drugs such as Ritalin. But is the problem caused by being born to a never-married mother, or some other factor?

“So the question was, ‘is it possible that divorce acts a stressful life event that creates adjustment problems for children, which might increase acting out behavior, leading to a prescription for Ritalin?”’ Strohschein said in a statement.

“On the other hand, there is also the very public perception that divorce is always bad for kids and so when children of divorce come to the attention of the health-care system — possibly because parents anticipate their child must be going through adjustment problems — doctors may be more likely to diagnose a problem and prescribe Ritalin.”



This from MSNBC.