The number of prescriptions for ADHD medication has increased by 87 per cent over the past five years, according to the Health Service Executive.
ADHD Ireland, a charity supporting those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, said there had been a “tsunami” of demand in recent years that was “overwhelming” services.
Figures obtained by The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information Act found there were a total of 135,818 prescriptions of ADHD medication last year, up from 72,769 in 2020.
Young people aged 16 to 24 received the highest number of prescriptions, accounting for 43,518 last year, while men and boys accounted for almost 60 per cent of the total.
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ADHD is a condition that affects people’s behaviour, making it harder to concentrate and manage time. People with ADHD may also act impulsively and take risks.
Ken Kilbride, chief executive of ADHD Ireland, said four factors were driving demand: the Covid-19 pandemic; celebrities announcing their diagnosis; social media; and adults who were undiagnosed as children but were seeking diagnoses now.
“With Covid, what happened is people were in fairly structured environments, going to their job every day, had to be there for 9am, clicked off at 5.30pm,” Mr Kilbride said.
“Then suddenly they went into an unstructured environment of having to work from home, having to structure their own days and having to homeschool their children. A lot of people then started having what we call executive function challenges.”
Mr Kilbride said a lot of people in their early 40s were seeking help.
“Very often we’ll get a call from a parent who says: ‘My child was just diagnosed with ADHD – I was the same in school; I might have ADHD’,” he said. “So we’re certainly seeing that increase in adults coming forward which we hadn’t seen before.”
Mr Kilbride said social media could spread misinformation about ADHD, citing research that found more than 50 per cent of information about the condition shared on platforms such as TikTok was “incorrect”.
The rise in demand is having an impact on service provision. In September, the HSE wrote to local GPs in Cork, stating the service could “no longer accept referrals” from GPs to adult community mental health teams for ADHD assessment and treatment to ensure “the accessibility and sustainability of our service”.
Last May, adult ADHD services in south Dublin and Wicklow were also “paused” to address “lengthening” waiting lists.
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“That type of thing is happening all around the country,” said Mr Kilbride. “We try to fill the gap as best we can but there’s only so much we can do.”
In the last budget, the government announced four new adult ADHD teams are to be funded, fulfilling the HSE’s 2021 model for care document which pledged the establishment of 11 adult ADHD clinics.
