“Waitin’ for the Man”…the Telehealth Man

     Lou Reed’s streetwise song takes on a new meaning today. Rather than going uptown to score in a three story brownstone on 125th Street in Harlem, you now just need to pull out your keyboard, log on to any one of the more than 15,000 telehealth psychiatric prescribers currently in operation, and soon a bottle of high-kick amphetamines will arrive in your mailbox.

     All you have to do is convince someone you’ve got ADHD.

     It’s not hard to do. The symptoms are listed all over the internet these days, along with examples of the questionnaires used to have someone pass ADHD muster with the right list of attention deficits: struggling to keep focused, easily getting distracted, and having trouble with organization.

     Those aren’t hard to fake, are they?

     Fact is, it’s getting easier and easier to score on line. 

     Regular Mad in America contributor Richard Sears reported this week on a study published in Psychiatry Research which found that prescription rates for psychiatric stimulants and other ADHD drugs tripled in Australia after the introduction of telepsychiatry consultations.

     Even more dramatic, remote video psychiatric consultations showed prescriptions for psychiatric stimulants were a whopping thirteen times greater than before telehealth prescribing.

     These increases parallel the increase in methamphetamine use in Australia over the last decade. Street “speed” use has doubled there since 2016, making Australia the second highest amphetamine use country in the world, right behind America. Illegal amphetamine street value down under is $11 billion.

     That’s a big market. No wonder there’s been such a huge investment in psychiatric telehealth prescribing in Australia and America.

     No more waitin’ for the man up on a dark corner of 125 th Street today.