01/04/2026
When he was 11, Tyrell Cooley was taking a very high dose of Concerta, along with guanfacine, sometimes used as an adjunct to a stimulant, at night.
“I used to get in trouble a lot in school,” Tyrell recalled. “I had a detention every other day.”
He was frequently anxious and sullen, a result of trauma from his birth mother’s drug use, according to his adoptive mother, Mallory Cooley.
He was medicated not to treat the underlying psychiatric condition, his mother said, but to keep him calm in school. “People just wanted to give him medications to sit still and not actually deal with why he’s doing what he’s doing,” she said.
Tyrell hated medication. “It made me feel drained overall,” he said.
The Cooleys spent a month searching for a family therapy program for Tyrell, who is on Medicaid. Twice a week for about a year a therapist came to their home in Clinton, Miss., and Tyrell’s school.
The Cooleys gradually weaned Tyrell off his medications, feeling that the pills were fueling some of the wild behavior and masking problems that were better dealt with in talk therapy.
Tyrell, now 15, said he feels much better off the medication and after the therapy. “I’m more connected with people,” he said.
Tens of thousands of kids who take prescription ADHD medication also wind up on other powerful psychotropic drugs—including antipsychotics and antidepressants, studies show.
Jennifer Havens, the chair of the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, says her field has done children a disservice by failing to recognize trauma—and rather treat manifestations of trauma as ADHD or other psychiatric disorders like bipolar disorder or psychosis.
“We have made a mess and it’s dangerous because some kids really need medication, and if we just said ‘no meds,’ that’s not the answer, but if a kid is on five, six, seven medications, that’s just wrong.”
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