When it comes to disseminating mental health information, newspapers often do more harm than good.  Take today’s Washington Post story headlined, “Colleges fear rise of study drugs.”

The story raises legitimate concerns about the abuse of prescription stimulants, most commonly Adderall, by students purchasing them illegally to gain an edge.  The drugs make it possible to stay awake and hyper-focus on studying. College students have always relied on chemical aids such as caffeine and energy drinks to pull all-nighters during exam crunch time.  But the increasing prevalence on campuses of students with diagnoses of ADHD (five percent of incoming freshmen, according to the article) and legitimate prescriptions for medications to manage it has made it much easier for undergraduates to score the drugs from the prescription cache of friends and roommates.

For the record, I’m not endorsing this practice.  But the way the Post article describes the medications does a disservice to those who have a legitimate need for them.  And it perpetuates an already pervasive, anti-medication bias in the media, which keeps many of my patients from taking advantage of the full range of treatment options available to them.

Although an analysis of drug and alcohol cases at DC-area universities revealed very few documented problems related to prescription stimulant medications compared to marijuana and alcohol, the reporter makes the following misleading statement:  “These prescription medications are similar to cocaine and can be addictive.”  She then goes on to contradict herself by adding that experts haven’t found a widespread crisis; nor are the rates of addiction increasing.  While it’s true that cocaine and the drugs prescribed for ADHD are both classified as stimulants, that’s pretty much where the similarities end.  Students are taking Adderall and Ritalin to hit the books, not to get high.

Suggesting that students use study drugs to help them catch up because too much partying causes them to fall behind in their schoolwork, the reporter cites a University of Maryland survey, which found that stimulant users had a lower GPA, studied less, socialized more, and missed more classes than non-users  But without knowing more about the study, you can’t draw any conclusions from these results.  Were the “users” taking the drugs illegally?  If so, were their grades and study habits compared to those who were prescribed the drugs for ADHD?  We know many people with ADHD also have learning disabilities and poor organizational skills, which medication alone does little to ameliorate. So it wouldn’t be surprising to find they goof off more and do worse academically than their more focused peers.

By far the most damaging assertion for those who need medication is that ADHD drugs may be “a kind of academic steroid.”  Unfortunately, this is a widespread misconception—one I’ve seen even among health professionals.

Consider the experience of a young relative of mine.  Although he was diagnosed with ADHD when he was seven, he didn’t start taking Adderall until his sophomore year of high school, when he and his parents decided it would make sense to try it.  He’d always been a very motivated student, but his poor attention and impulsivity interfered with his performance on tests.  After starting on the stimulant drug, his grades improved dramatically, and his self-esteem soared.  There was no doubt that the medication was extremely beneficial.  However, if he hadn’t already been serious about studying, it wouldn’t have enhanced his performance.  It simply removed the obstacles and leveled the playing field for him.

Yet when he went for his college physical, the pediatrician who’d been writing his prescriptions for three years made the steroid comparison and suggested he might try to get along without the drug.  The teenager felt embarrassed, as if he were being accused of cheating.  And, in fact, that’s exactly what the doctor was implying.

I doubt a physician would tell a college-bound youngster with diabetes to stop his insulin injections and work on controlling his blood sugar through diet and willpower alone.  So why does taking medication to correct faulty brain chemistry seem like a cop-out?

To be sure, stimulant medications are sometimes misused by students who don’t really need them.  But the advantages they confer are largely insignificant, not at all like the superhuman feats of strength made possible by steroid abuse.  To suggest otherwise is unfair to those who use stimulants as prescribed.  Maybe reporters need to pay more careful attention to these distinctions.