{"id":9217,"date":"2025-07-20T20:21:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-20T20:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/9217\/"},"modified":"2025-07-20T20:21:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T20:21:09","slug":"medicine-crisis-pushing-aussie-families-to-the-brink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/9217\/","title":{"rendered":"Medicine crisis pushing Aussie families to the brink"},"content":{"rendered":"

A\ufeffrguing with an equally desperate dad in a pharmacy over its one remaining bottle of ADHD medication as she frantically tried to get through to her doctor, Jane McFadden remembers the clear thought striking her – “how did we come to this?”<\/p>\n

A shortage of ADHD medicines is putting families in a serious squeeze around the country\ufeff, with no relief expected for months or even years.<\/p>\n

Parents are resorting to forgoing their own medication to give to their kids, mixing prescriptions, and travelling hours to try to get a piece of the ever-shrinking supply pool.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/Jane McFadden launched her ADHD Mums podcast and advocacy program after her own experiences. (ADHD Mums)<\/p>\n

McFadden, a psychologist and host of one of Australia’s biggest mental health podcasts, ADHD Mums, as well as a mother of three herself, said families and individuals with ADHD had been “completely let down”.<\/p>\n

She was diagnosed with ADHD at age 36, after which so were her three children, currently aged under 10.<\/p>\n

“It was life-changing in a really positive way,” McFadden told 9news.com.au, saying she shed tears when she took medication for the first time.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/McFadden and her three children have been diagnosed with ADHD. (Jane McFadden)<\/p>\n

“It’s mind-blowing. You realise you have been white-knuckling through life,” she said.<\/p>\n

“I’m now parenting differently, I’m on top of things, my relationship with my husband is better.”<\/p>\n

Her children had a similar happy experience when after a two-year wait and thousands of dollars in medical bills, they were also prescribed medication for ADHD.<\/p>\n

\ufeffIt was this experience which drove McFadden to launch her ADHD Mums advocacy platform.<\/p>\n

\"GPsGPs are able to diagnose ADHD and prescribe medication under new rule changes. (Nine)<\/p>\n

But then, she said, the family’s new lease on life was “ripped away”\ufeff in months as the shortage hit and medicines became harder and harder to find.<\/p>\n

The Therapeutic Goods Administration lists multiple ADHD medication shortages on its advice page<\/a>, with warnings the squeeze will continue into the end of 2026 for some.<\/p>\n

The list of medicines include \ufeffConcerta modified-release tablets, Teva-XR modified-release tablets, Ritalin LA and Rubifen LA capsules, and Ritalin 10mg immediate-release tablets.<\/p>\n

McFadden said she could spend hours on a weekend calling around to check with up to 30 pharmacies for suitable medications, in some cases followed by hours-long drives.<\/p>\n

In one heartbreaking instance, the final bottle had been sold as she travelled to the pharmacy in question, though McFadden said the business was “right” to not reserve it.<\/p>\n

On another occasion, as she tried to get through to her doctor to send through an updated prescription so she could buy another store’s last bottle of medication, a dad entered and also asked for it, prompting an argument over who had precedence.<\/p>\n

“He didn’t seem like a bad person or anything, he was just desperate like I was,” McFadden said.<\/p>\n

“It was astounding – here we were fighting \ufeffover a bottle of medicine, and I remember thinking, how did we come to this?”<\/p>\n

She says the government needs to develop a “long-term plan” to face the crisis, and questioned why there was no push to manufacture the medicines in Australia.<\/p>\n

Recently, the federal government changed the rules to permit GPs to diagnose and manage ADHD.<\/p>\n

This has been hailed as a win for accessibility – including by McFadden – but it isn’t an answer on its own.<\/p>\n

Psychologist and Macquarie Health Collective c\ufeffhief executive Tanya Forster said while the decision was a win for many, especially in regional communities, there were two central problems.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/Psychologist and Macquarie Health Collective CEO Tanya Forster. (Tanya Forster)<\/p>\n

The first is the worsening GP shortage, with doctors in increasingly short supply, and facing major work overload already.<\/p>\n

“We can’t solve one problem by worsening another,” Forster said.<\/p>\n

The other was that broadening access to ADHD tests meant diagnoses were almost certain to rise further – which increases the pressure on a limited medication supply.<\/p>\n

“It will take action from the government to correct the supply chain issue,” Forster said.\ufeff<\/p>\n

She said the situation was “really challenging” for families, who were already struggling to access the services they needed in the sector.<\/p>\n

And for children, the medicine shortage is especially dire.<\/p>\n

Forster said an early-diagnosed child with reliable access to prescribed medication was better able to absorb and learn the strategies for managing ADHD that would be “protective” as an adult.<\/p>\n

\"Close-upA shortage of GPs is being felt around the country. (Getty)<\/p>\n

For McFadden, it’s been devastating to watch her kids struggle with intermittent medicine supply.<\/p>\n

“You’re told, ‘go on another type of medication’ – it doesn’t really work that way for ADHD,” she said.<\/p>\n

She said an unreliable medicine stream meant her children could be “changing their brain function every day” – confusing and frustrating for them, as well as for their teachers and their peers.<\/p>\n

McFadden believes part of the problem is a still-entrenched perception that ADHD medicines aren’t critical to peoples’ wellbeing.\ufeff<\/p>\n

And despite the resonance of the ADHD Mums advocacy platform, with an audience of more than one million a year around Australia, she said there was a terrible feeling that nobody who could change things was listening.<\/p>\n

Forster said wheels “turned slowly” in government and urged parents facing difficulties in sourcing the right medicines not to stray from prescription guidelines but to contact their GP or paediatrician.<\/p>\n

“If we are self-medicating, sharing, or rationing medications, there are risks involved,” she said.<\/p>\n

“These are regulated medicines for a reason.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A\ufeffrguing with an equally desperate dad in a pharmacy over its one remaining bottle of ADHD medication as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[64,63,137,490],"class_list":{"0":"post-9217","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-medication","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-medication"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}