This is the second part of a two-part investigation into the use of ADD and ADHD drugs as a study tool by Camosun students who do not have ADD or ADHD. Part one can be read here.
The Camosun reaction
Camosun College vice president of education John Boraas says that there are lots of factors involved in the phenomenon of students taking ADD or ADHD drugs to help them study. However, he points out that Camosun’s curriculum hasn’t changed drastically when the argument of the curriculum getting more difficult is brought up as a defence for students using these drugs.
“It’s not like our curriculum has changed dramatically in terms of intensity over the years,” he says. “We’re still built on the notion of what a full-time course load is, and it’s not appreciably different. There are minor fluctuations, but our course work isn’t that much more daunting than it was 10 years ago.”
What Boraas has seen, however, has been a big difference in the other demands on the lives of Camosun students. He says that when he started at the college, about 18 years ago, the number of students who were working was very small, and most were attending Camosun full-time.
“Now, more than 80 percent of our students are working one or more jobs,” he says. “The reality is our students are of an age where they have other things, lots of our students have children, and all of those things, I’m guessing, are in an amalgam creating a perfect storm of students feeling overwhelmed. And what is it that we do is the question.”
Chris Balmer is a counsellor at Camosun College; he says he is aware of postsecondary students using ADD and ADHD drugs without a prescription to help them stay alert in their studies, but he says that he is concerned to hear that it is as widespread at Camosun as the students we spoke to in the first part of this story would make it seem.
“I find it alarming and concerning to learn that this is possibly more widespread than occasional use by individual students,” says Balmer. “I find it very concerning.”
Balmer says that focusing on the larger issues at hand that would make students turn to drugs is currently a priority in postsecondary. He points to a conference that happened in June of last year, where such systemic stresses were a main talking point.
“The key researchers and people making keynote presentations at the conference were indicating that we really need to shine a light on the systemic nature of stresses in postsecondary and how, inadvertently and over time, we have developed a culture of competition, and our focus on academic production is coming at a great cost in terms of student emotional wellbeing. This is a real concern for the people involved in looking at this issue.”
Balmer says the fact that students are pushed to use these drugs may be a sign that, despite what Boraas says about Camosun’s curriculum, things are changing with what is being taught at the college.
“There is an important question that needs to be discussed around how our curriculum has increased in complexity and demand,” says Balmer, “and how those stresses are created systemically. I think it would really deserve an important shining of a new light on this with respect to student wellbeing and student ability to maintain resiliency and cope with these types of multitasking pressures that they experience day to day.”
To help out students, Balmer points to Camosun’s new Student Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy. He says that within that strategy are sections that focus on how Camosun needs to review their policies, programs, and practices. (Balmer says this new strategy will be readily available within the college for internal college access as well as public access.)
“In doing that, we can look for areas where they can make adjustments to improve the likelihood that students’ wellbeing and students’ stress levels will be focused on,” says Balmer, “and that adjustments can and will be made in the way we plan and present things to take into account this sense of overload from the students’ perspective that’s showing up here, so that in the individual classes and programs there will be more likelihood of planning that takes these important factors into account.”
But when talking about making changes to Camosun’s curriculum so that students who are struggling will find it easier, Boraas is quick to shoot down any allegations that this will lead to a dumbing-down of what is taught at the college.
“No,” he says when asked if Camosun is looking at making its curriculum easier. “But it may be we need to explore the depth of challenge and how much students are wanting part-time programs versus full-time. If we hear that that’s a really dramatic number, that we really do have a majority of students that need that model, what we’d be looking at then, I think, is something where we consider smaller chunks. Students could do a preparatory year for the health programs before they start, then have a lower number of courses per year but a larger number of years, those kinds of things. But I don’t think there’s any interest in any kind of dumbing-down; that’s not what we want to be about.”
Boraas says that he doesn’t want to attach any judgment to students using these drugs, but he says that he wants Camosun students to feel “strong and healthy and supported.” So what would he say to students who use the drugs?
“You’re asking the killer question,” he says. “To me, if anyone is needing to take medications to make it through any event, I think other self-care elements need to be brought in, in terms of physical health, counselling, support, all of these elements. We all end up in tough places, and I think anyone who has lived a life knows there are times where we don’t cope as well as we could. So I wouldn’t want to say inherently it’s bad or wrong, but at the same time I don’t believe it’s healthy, so how do we help our students to make healthier choices?”
While Boraas wouldn’t want to say it’s wrong, others at Camosun don’t mince words when asked about students using these drugs to study.
“It’s disappointing to me that this happens,” says Camosun Architectural Trades chair and Carpentry instructor Al van Akker. “It’s not the same as drinking coffee; coffee doesn’t require a prescription. I’m surprised that some students tolerate other students using these drugs.”
Van Akker likens students using these drugs to help them study to student athletes using performance-enhancing drugs. He feels if student athletes who don’t use the drugs learned that their competitors were using performance-enhancing drugs, they’d be angry and demand that, as he puts it, “the cheaters be disqualified.” And he says it’s even worse to be using drugs to get ahead in school.
“If a student is using drugs to enhance his academic performance, that has greater implications than winning or losing in sports,” he says. “Grades are used to determine access to further education and to determine eligibility for scholarships. Someone using ADHD drugs without being diagnosed as needing them is cheating, and I don’t think we should tolerate it. The first step should be for us to communicate loud and clear to students that non-prescribed use of these drugs is contrary to the values of fairness and academic honesty that we hold as essential to our ethos.”
“Academic doping is real, serious, illegal, and can have adverse health effects,” says Camosun dean of Arts and Science Dominic Bergeron. “In addition, as studies seem to demonstrate, ‘cognitive enhancement’ might not provide the expected benefits to healthy individuals.”
Bergeron says that he’s also concerned about the long-term impacts this will have on students once they enter the full-time workforce and have to deal with all of its pressures.
“I think students get the thin end of the wedge, mainly because it leads them to believe they can’t perform the way they expect without being under the influence of some neuropharmaceutical drug. There will be a time when they’ll have to deliver under pressure in the workplace; what’s the solution going to be then?”
Canada’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act prevents Camosun from creating an official policy banning the use of drugs to boost academic performance, as they are not able to determine if someone needs the drugs or not for a medical condition. (In the USA, North Carolina’s Duke University has passed such a policy, under pressure from students.)
An undiagnosed problem
The Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) say that they are aware of this situation but don’t know to what extent it is happening. The first issue that they bring up is one that hasn’t been touched on by anyone else yet: maybe students using these drugs actually do have ADD or ADHD but just don’t know it.
“Mental health conditions often go undiagnosed,” says CCSS external executive Andrea Eggenberger. “ADHD, for example, is something that is often dismissed as something that children have, when in fact it’s a life-long condition; a lot of people go undiagnosed. It’s very possible that many people who are taking these drugs on campuses do in fact have ADHD. It largely goes undiagnosed.”
Eggenberger says that students who are using the drugs and feel they have undiagnosed mental health issues should utilize the services of the Disability Resource Centre on campus.
“I know quite a few students who were taking drugs or were having a lot of problems focusing and they thought it was something that everyone was dealing with,” says Eggenberger, “but when they went to the doctor and talked out their problems and talked about their childhood experiences, the doctor told them they really had ADHD.”
In the first installment of this story, we talked to a student who has ADHD and wished that students who didn’t wouldn’t use these drugs, as it makes it more difficult for her to get them. Eggenberger stresses that students need to be aware of their actions and the impact they have on other students.
“Students should think about how any of their actions affect other people in their community, especially people with ADHD, which is kind of scoffed at to a point,” she says. “Actions like this really do affect that group really negatively. so students should consider that when they’re choosing to take drugs they’re not prescribed.”
Eggenberger says that the root of this issue needs to be addressed: pressure on students.
“A lot of students have jobs that take up a lot of their time, even when they’re enrolled in five classes. So part of it is definitely a funding issue. If students weren’t worried so much about paying tuition, they wouldn’t have to work to such an extent, and they’d have more time to study. Students are cramming a lot of homework into a small allotment of time because they’re required to work. Maybe they don’t want giant student loans. Maybe they weren’t eligible for student loans, or maybe they didn’t get grant funding or scholarships. I think that’s the root of the issue: if students weren’t so worried about money they’d have more time to study and wouldn’t have to get part-time jobs.”
As others have discussed, looking at Camosun’s curriculum is also a way to potentially change systemic student stressors.
“We do have to look at curriculum and how it’s set up,” says Eggenberger, “and keep in mind while creating the new curriculum that students have a limited amount of time because of the nature of college, and Camosun College especially, because we’re a bit more affordable than places like UVic. A lot of our students choose to come here because they don’t want student loans, and they can get a job that is maybe 30 hours a week and work there and come to school and get their degree at the same time.”
The biology of usage
Aside from the social and systemic causes and implications of students using these drugs, there are biological and physical impacts of using drugs that aren’t prescribed. Camosun Mental Health and Addictions instructor Michelle Bass says that it is important to remember that these drugs are stimulants and not without, as she says, “serious side effects and the potential to be addictive in the vulnerable individual.”
“These drugs amplify the activity of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that makes everyday activities more pleasurable,” she says. “Adderall and Ritalin, the two common drugs used by college students to enhance their cognitive performance, also carry risk of serious harm, including elevated blood pressure, heart arrhythmias, and psychosis. Users should be especially careful of the interactive effects of these drugs with alcohol and MAOs [monoamine oxidase inibitors, a type of antidepressant].”
Bass says that the subjective experiences produced by these drugs are different for people who have ADHD compared to people who don’t have ADHD.
“ADHD users feel calm, and non-ADHD users feel the stimulative effects,” she says, adding that “the underlying neurobiological mechanisms explaining these different perceptions are not yet determined.”
Some studies have said that misuse of stimulants is associated with risks such as psychosis and sudden death.
Whether it’s due to outside demands, undiagnosed cases of ADD or ADHD, or simply the age-old struggle of keeping up with the curriculum, unprescribed ADD and ADHD medication usage will continue on Camosun College’s campuses until the problem is solved. Unfortunately, everyone still seems to be scrambling to figure out what the problem is.
For now, Camosun’s Boraas says that he would love to see students not have to turn to medication to make it through the day. He says it’s not a healthy response but adds that he suspects that none of us have always made healthy responses at all points in our lives.
“There are times when life is heavy,” he says. “But how do we move the bar so it’s more likely that people aren’t feeling so overwhelmed or they see a place they can go to for help?”
Until that question gets answered, the drug usage continues to be the elephant in the room that is politely tiptoed around, as students sell pills to each other in the hallways of Young, the bathrooms of Fisher, the stairways of Campus Centre, illegal transactions made in attempts to get to, and excel beyond, the required demands of being a Camosun student.