Study Suggests Drugging Employees with ADHD for Higher Profits

In our society today, we have become so used to the notion of the wholesale medicating of kids with ADHD that well-meaning researchers can hardly be blamed for overstepping the boundaries of common sense. In a recent study, a group of international researchers, working as part of a World Health Organization (WHO) research consortium at Harvard Medical School, found that workers with ADHD, on average, performed 22 fewer days of productive work than workers without ADHD. OK, so far, it seems like good research. They checked for other variables such as occupation, education, age, gender,and partner status and found no difference in the magnitude of ADHD related performance issues based on any of these variables.

The researchers noted that many adults don't know they have ADHD and that there are many clinically effective treatments for the disorder. In their study, they concluded "that ADHD would be a good candidate for targeted workplace screening and treatment programs." That means that employers get less effective work out of some people than they could if those people were medicated. Therefore, employers should encourage the screening and medicating of those workers in order to increase profitability. Now, tugging at the back of my mind is the question, what other drugs could improve the productivity of a company's workers? Should employers be allowed to encourage employees to take drugs in order to become better workers?

What might happen if this were carried to its logical extreme? Let's imagine the employer in question is a professional baseball team. Can anybody think of what drugs they might decide would make their employees into, say, better home run hitters? Might that same drug be applicable to employers in the construction industry or any job involving physical labor? Why stop there? If there's a tight deadline approaching, maybe companies should encourage their employees to take drugs that let them stay awake and working for two or three days straight. Workers who have an independent or rebellious streak might be better employees if they were given Prozac each morning during their coffee break. Certainly they'd be more inclined to show up every day. Of course, these are extreme examples, but the principle is the same.

When the goal of medical screening and medication is improved productivity or profitability for the employer, there is too much incentive for the system to be abused. Imagine you go to work one day a bit distracted by an illness in the family or some other temporary personal issue. Your boss notices and strongly suggests you go down to HR and get an ADHD screening from the company doctor. Do you imagine that every company doctor will be uninfluenced by the tacit wishes of the company that pays them to keep their workers as productive as possible? Wherever the potential, or even the perceived potential, of more money is involved, there will be abuses.

While I'm sure these researchers had the best of intentions and followed all proper ethics procedures, I can't help but wonder if there were any large pharmaceutical companies sponsoring the research. When WHO medical researchers worry more about improving productivity than improving people's health, then as Marcellus said to Horatio in Shakespeare's Hamlet, "There is something rotten in the state of Denmark."

Source: de Graaf et al. The prevalence and effects of adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) on the performance of workers: results from the WHO World Mental Health Survey Initiative. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2008 DOI: 10.1136/oem.2007.038448