Just want to echo someone else's sub-thread:
Adderall is not at all similar to Huxley's description of Soma. Soma was about feeling good and not having to think of the evil things that make the BNW society possible, not efficiency.
> ... I have talked to pharmacologists about this matter, and a number of them say that it’s probably quite possible that it may be possible to, by pharmacological means, which will do no harm to the organism as a whole, to increase the span of attention, to increase the powers of concentration, perhaps to cut down on the necessity for sleep, and the various other things which may lead to a very considerable increase in general mental efficiency.
Also, Huxley's Soma is very close to the medicine Soma (Carisoprodol), in my experience. It's a beautiful, relaxing, euphoric high. Probably highly addictive.
That's also what I thought - Wasn't Soma more of a way to make people question less and just remain in a blissed out but maybe sort of out of it state at all times ? Seems very different than amphetamines
The link (including the transcript of Huxley’s lecture) doesn’t seem to be about Soma, unless I’m missing something. Huxley produced a lot of work outside of Brave New World, lots of it concerned with drugs and altered states of consciousness (so much so that personally I don’t think I’ve done enough drugs to understand his perspective, as I find him distinctly, and almost uniquely among such high-profile authors that I’ve tried, unreadable)
You are vey correct—the talk and link have nothing to do with Soma.
I can only presume, based on timing of the talk being 1960, that his thoughts here link to mescaline and the practical utopia he talks of in Island, whose inhabitants make use of a local psychedelic. So whatever he must have said here had more to do with his later perspectives than his feelings around the island.
Fair enough, but I have read Island, The Doors of Perception, and BNW, and none of those books described using uppers or anything about efficiency. Island was psychedelics (fantastic book in my opinion).
amphetamines feel a lot like people putting NO2 on their cars, or overclocking their computers. You might just fine in the end, but the likelihood of wear & tear catching up to you increases. It should be treated just like any other medicine, don't use it unless you really have to, and expect adverse effect (known or unknown).
To continue the analogy, a Dodge Challenger with a 50-shot of nitrous on it that gets used once a day is gonna still come out looking better at any milage/age than the same engine in a Promaster van because you can't drive around at 17k gross in a Challenger so the area under the abuse curve is way lower even if it peaks ever so slightly higher.
An office worker on meth-lite (or whatever you want to call it) is still accumulating less wear and tear than a laborer, something the human body is clearly capable of being for a lifetime if you're somewhat smart about it.
Adderall, caffeine, heck cocaine based stimulants, are probably all fine if you're not over-using the living crap out of them and stacking large amounts of them on top of other things that'll beat the body up over time.
Many people don't realize that any argument they can think of against a given medication has been gone over a thousand times by thousands of medical professionals. The truth is, they just don't trust the medical system as a whole.
Whether that is good or bad stands to be seen. However, I find that people with this position often reject effective and safe treatments along with the more questionable ones.
Amphetamines are safe, well-studied and non-addictive at prescribed doses. On the other hand, untreated ADHD VASTLY increases likelihood of addiction and many mental disorders.
Definitely DO use this medication if you need it - it's the first medication your doctor will likely ask you to try precisely because an extensive body of research says it's the most effective way for treating ADHD.
This has the same energy as the common incorrect statement “marijuana isn’t addictive”. I assume made by frequent users who want to downplay negatives.
1. People take it as a study drug, without prescription.
2. There may be over medication. Doctors will sometimes feel pushed to prescribe (as is known to happen with antibiotics)
3. At an individual level that is true, but you may need it because of your society and environment. Both ADHD rates and treatment varies between countries (even between regions and states within countries) and has varied a lot over time, which implies some external factor affects it.
Not sure about over-medication. I think about all the people I used to work with that were absolutely addicted to caffeine, just to get through the day. And the work we were doing (software) didn't seem _that_ boring to me. Some of most hardcore caffeine addicts were from when I worked briefly in game dev (and that was my own peak usage too; now I can't drink coffee due to acid reflux, its also bad for my eyes because I have glaucoma now).
I think untreated attention issues (if not the rather narrowly defined condition labeled "ADHD") are rather widespread. And society doesn't help, just look at the checklist of things you need to do on an ongoing basis to just keep a vehicle running for transport in the US, which pretty much everybody outside a city needs, and even many city dwellers elect to procure as well.
"1 out of every 5 Ivy League students is prescribed stimulants."
From the third paragraph of the article:
"Researchers analyzed responses from an online questionnaire of more than 600 Ivy League sophomores, juniors and seniors who were not diagnosed with ADHD — attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder — and therefore did not have a prescription for the medication. Writing essays and studying for an exam cause the most angst for students — of those who used stimulants, 69 percent said they used them to stay focused while writing and 66 percent said they used the drugs to help study."
Isn't the whole point of amphetamine based treatement for ADHD to correct(or beneficially alter, depending on your point of view) an non-standard brain chemistry?
AFAIK some neurodivergent brains deal with amphetamines differently and the baseline levels of chemical affected by amphetamines is different.
Wear and tear might be a thing, i don't know, but the analogy of putting NO2 in their car feels a bit off.
It'd be more like finally putting premium unleaded in your car after years of "back of the lorry" pseudo-unleaded.
I believe parent commenter was referring to recreational use, i.e., use by people without such diagnoses who want a "performance boost". I heard about that sort of thing being popular when I was in college — people would take Adderall to cram for an exam or to study late into the night.
You're right that, for people with ADHD and related disorders, stimulant medication sort of just adjusts their baselines so they can pay attention like a "normal" person.
> You're right that, for people with ADHD and related disorders, stimulant medication sort of just adjusts their baselines so they can pay attention like a "normal" person.
I have ADHD and take metylphenidate(I've tried many kinds of stimulants as well) -- and the NO2 analogy is an imperfect but better analogy than saying stimulants simply adjusts the baseline of people with ADHD to function like "normal" persons.
I feel there is a narrow window of dosage and time where it might feel that way -- i.e. stimulants at the onset might calm you down, reduce anxiety, but all stimulants are very broad hammers.
For me it feels like it's impossible to re-create chemically exactly the neurotypical focus that I've seen in other colleagues.
Like spending 5-6 hours of continous work where you drill down just enough, get back on track, don't get distracted, don't get too anxious, don't get hyperfocused AND do that consistently, day after day after day.
My non-chemical modes are either hyper focus for 2 weeks on a problem, immerse myself but then completely lose interest, most of the time without showing much for it OR procastinate it a long way, get extremely anxious and work really hard on the problem.
With stimulants it's a bit like:
- dosed just right:it evaporates anxiety, stressful situations feel easy to deal with, BUT there's always increased heart rate, grinding teeth and some tension at the end of the day
- some stimulants make mundane things wildly interesting (on isopropylphenidate I spent a few hours playing with a PLSQL debugger because I thought it was really cool), but no sense of "GO, GO, GO, do it".
- some make things seem urgent enough and help stay on track -- like the metylphenidate I'm prescribed.
- some make going into a flow-like state easy and fun (like methamphetamine and phenmetrazine).
- some are pure energy and urgency -- like modafinil.
All of the stimulants have the potential to give me euphoria, all of them temporarily increase libido I still have to be mindful of not focusing on the wrong thing, the "normal" feeling is very fleeting, it's very easy to get hyper on stimulants, all of them feel like wear & tear at the end of the day, some more than others.
I've had similar experiences to you.
I never can quite get that normalcy. I now just take rilatin but it is finnicky.
Getting enough sleep and eating the right amount of the right stuff just before ingesting is extremely important so I don't even take it all that much even tho i struggle.
I wonder if you tried lisdexamfetamine? I can't get it prescribed easily here since it's not covered the way the alternatives are but someone i know had amazing success with it. Seemingly because it's a prodrug.
I can't help but be hopefull that I'll get to try it one day and that it ends up being what I always needed.
Not the OP, but I‘ve had a rather bad experience with methylphenidate (ritalin) where it made me way more awkward around people, and increased my obsessive tendencies. It did help with focus, but the effects were very short-lived. It also obliterated my hunger and once the effects wore off, it left me feeling semi-depressed until the end of the day.
Once I got prescribed lisdexamphetamine, my life turned around almost instantaneously. While it doesn‘t really get rid of my ADHD, it does help tremendously. The everlasting brainfog isn‘t as debilitating anymore. When I get excited about something I actually tend to follow through. I still battle with my obsessive tendencies — like getting stuck at setting up the perfect project tooling stack or spending way too much time on planning and research instead of just getting to work — but these are not so much related to ADHD.
On lisdexamphetamine, I am more social, my appetite is better, when I actually commit to something, I tend to stick to it for much longer, and I have also picked up a bunch of healthy habits. For example I exercise almost every day now.
If you someday get a chance to switch to lisdex, do it. It’s much smoother, longer-lasting, with fewer side effects. But honestly, anything is better than ritalin in my book.
It's not legal where I live also, I did try 2-FMA and it felt better in certain scenarios -- like following a hard course, but I also felt the tolerance ramps up much faster in releasers than re-uptake inhibitors so methylphenidate still is a wonderful tool.
Watching a good friend of mine struggle with this after diagnosis for a few years now and I feel this really captures the nuance and complexity of this struggle well. Stimulants are an incredible tool but also an incredibly imperfect one.
Eh, for me the comment rings mostly true. It fixed my ADHD - I was incredibly more productive, present, and "on track" so to speak. I set goals for myself and achieved them (some for the first time) once I was treated.
That said, it completely destroyed my appetite. I picked up ciggies, too. It made me crave nicotine and caffeine. I started pulling all-nighters because I was so productive (or, so into whatever game I was playing.) I got cold sweats often and had some weird uh sexual health side effects. Develeoped a tolerance to 5-10mg very quickly, so went up to 15-20mg, which also felt weakened after a month or so.
So, wasn't lolng before I could tell this was not healthy. Felt like I was in overdrive mode - super mentally active, and productive, but running my body into the ground. I would never do it long-term.
Is that based on a rigorous PhD level understanding of the neurobiology of the brain and the chemistry behind that particular medication, or just something you absorbed though popular culture, eg movies and Instagram reels?
I agree, soma definitely parallels weed much more closely, but I don't think it's a perfect match. Huxley imagines a drug a bit more insidious, without obviously negative side effects, and with somewhat unrealistic(imo) intended effects.
Disagree. Weed is somewhat psychadelic ... and makes people enjoy the colors and not work so much. Soma made people numbless working with a feeling of glow. So I always understood it as antidepressant and moodlifter with some amphetamine compoments.
Weed isn't really psychedelic (it can be profound, and sometimes you'll get extra giggly...) but really it's more about being okay with the numbness.
It's also not really an antidepressant any more than it is an amphetamine (it's neither). Attempting to self-medicate in either direction is not beneficial, longer term.
If your marijuana usage carries you through such wide-ranging symptomology, that's on you homey [holds-back next pass to you]. It's okay to ask for help.
Depends on mind, use, dose. I've had THC trips that were almost as strong as concentrated mushrooms can deliver on an empty stomach, seeing shit that wasn't, patterns, my mind was light years away, reality twisted. Almost as strong.
Didn't dance as a mist of atoms to shamanic music without any connection to my real 5 senses, but then again I hardly met mushroom user who did achieve that themselves.
I agree with you that even higher doses of psilocybin (several grams) isn't that psychedelic (rather interconnected, e.g.)... I don't have enough experience with LSD to exclude its visuals capability, but even its quintessential acid visuals I rarely hear described [as such].
...unlike DMT (recommended) or Salvia (not recommended) or mescaline (neutral), which even at low dosages are strikingly visual. I have only met devils with the latter two. Ketamine isn't exactly visual, but its dreaminess is angelic.
> Marijuana often seems to promote thinking "outside the box"
Hard disagree. Cannabis induces a sensation of profundity. It makes ordinary mundane thoughts feel insightful and novel. The ideas you have when on cannabis seem like insightful out of the box ideas, but that's a perceptual illusion created by the drug. The best it can do is provide you the encouragement to see ideas through to the end, but of course this is tempered by the way it generally has a negative effect on motivation, so most often users are left thinking of ideas they think are wonderful, but not actually executing on those ideas. End result is usually a couch potato lost in unproductive thoughts.
I think he was inspired by Valium and other benzos. They put people into a docile, low-anxiety state, and they were popular around the time the book was written.
That's also more-or-less consistent with the implied literary reference to the Lotus Eaters, who I think are usually imagined as opium users. Opioids are different but are also downers that reduce anxiety.
Benzos later featured significantly in one of Adam Curtis' film-essays -- maybe Century of the Self, maybe another one. I'd view those films as being in a similar spirit to Brave New World.
If we are talking about BNW, which was written in 1931, then that book predates benzodiazepines by 25 years or so. Perhaps you are thinking about barbiturates?
Oof! Thank you for the correction. I should have checked the publication date. I thought it was from the late '50s; I was wrong.
(By contrast, turns out 1984 -- which is always paired with BNW -- came out later than I thought, in '49. Yet BNW seemed more forward-looking. I always imagined it was written partially in response. It wasn't.)
There goes my benzo theory.
Though they remain what I imagine when I read about soma.
It is, you're right, and it's super weird what happens on the internet when you suggest weed isn't some gateway to enlightenment. I love cannabis, but it's a depressant that increases dopamine, it's not that complicated. Stoners on the internet sound exactly like alcoholics—they say it makes them more creative, helps them sleep, deal with anxiety too. We do such a shit job teaching about signs of psychological addiction.
It definitely doesn’t help sleep quality, but it could plausibly help with creativity in people who have the capacity to have good creative ideas. This is because it seems to produce a feeling that all (or at least more) of one’s ideas are good.
If someone has a problem with idea development because they decide early that the idea isn’t worth exploring, perhaps due to low self confidence in ideation etc, then simply producing the feeling of it being a good idea could help them go further than they would otherwise with it. Of course it also makes dumb ideas feel like good ideas too, so for someone who doesn’t have the capacity to have good creative ideas or who doesn’t have this problem in the first place, it probably won’t help.
I’ve read that it interferes with one or more sleep stages enough to make them ineffective. My understanding is that it may help someone fall asleep, but the actual sleep they get will definitely be worse. So for insomnia, where the alternative is just not sleeping at all, yes, but otherwise no, AFAIK.
Exactly. In addition to general insomnia, people who suffer from persistent nightmares due to PTSD or other reasons will sleep restfully.
And with nightmares I’m not referring to bad dreams in general, but to horrific nightmares where a person is re-experiencing their trauma in various ways, not necessarily remembering their dreams afterwards.
Imagine sleeping eight hours but waking up more tired than when you went to sleep and in full panic mode without even knowing why. After months and years, it gets pretty tiring.
Being able to not be afraid of going to sleep is a lifesaver and can keep those people functional in their lives.
The sedation is psychological - soma suppresses discomfort and boosts easy pleasure. It’s not introspective at all, which makes it much closer to MDMA than to cannabis.
pure racemic MDMA has very little stimulant effect. street MDMA can feel stimulating because it is either intentionally mixed with caffeine/speed/meth or contains residual precursor from clandestine synthesis.
my major state was one of deep relaxation ... MDMA does not work like Dexedrine ... I feel totally peaceful.
Shulgin used dozens (hundreds?) of these compounds. I do wonder if some of his better subjective observations might be due to simply relieving withdrawal symptoms.
Exactly. The spice lets the quant guild see into the future. This ability is so valuable it has earned them the patronage of House Goldman and House Blackrock.
Everybody who could afford it adopted psychostimulants in WW2. Go pills have been part and parcel since then. Some countries have adopted modafinil, but the US still uses amphetamine.
I am an adult with ADHD and have never been able to get past the side effects that I have to drugs such as amphetamines and SSRIs. I was prescribed Modafinil for a short period for "Shift Work Disorder" when I worked shift work as a Stationary Engineer and it was glorious in regard to my ADHD symptoms with effectively zero side effects. I wish the US would expand its usage.
Modafinil is only a Schedule IV controlled substance so it's usually possible to find a doctor who will prescribe off label if you want it. (This isn't medical advice.)
Just a note for anyone passing by. The side effects are rare, except diarrhea and you need to watch your liver enzyme levels if I remember right. Everyone I know who's taken that had diarrhea the entire time (manageable with meds), and it will screw your liver long term.
I think the GI effects are basically the same between any of the -afinils, FWIW.
I wouldn't recommend them in general, but mostly because they last too long to really work with a normal 16/8 sleep cycle and the other stimmy effects can detract from things other than focus work.
I never took any long-term, but I've actually napped (purposefully) the afternoon after taking one in the morning, which is impossible on amphetamines.
Which is to say, they seem better to me, but maybe long-term use is different.
> In 1919, the Japanese discovered a more potent version of the drug — methamphetamine. The new drug was a crystalline powder soluble in water. In this form, it can be smoked, injected, snorted or taken orally. Users get an intense but brief high when they inject or smoke the drug, but if it's snorted or taken orally by capsule, the high lasts longer.
There was also a drink with same name hiropon that was generally available for some time.
I tried googling for more info but I haven't been able to find much in English and my Japanese isn't good enough to read at that level. I've only heard about it from my wife and a few other people in Japan. I've seen a few old posters for it at old bars.
An army of tweakers. I don't think that this aspect of the War and the Holocaust are discussed enough. Certainly no excuse, but it is very interesting.
> Chronic Meth users have deficits in memory and executive functioning as well as higher rates of anxiety, depression, and most notably psychosis. [0]
In more recent times of horror:
> After the fall of the al-Assad regime in Syria, large stockpiles of the illicit drug captagon have reportedly been uncovered.
> The stockpiles, found by Syrian rebels, are believed to be linked to al-Assad military headquarters, implicating the fallen regime in the drug’s manufacture and distribution. [1]
Im sure eventually whatever pills the Germans were taking back then were bad for you but I would imagine smoking huge doses of not so pure street meth is quite a bit different than something created in a lab.
That being said if anyone uses drugs to avoid sleeping for many days straight I would imagine it's quite horrible for your mental health
Highly recommend the book "Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich" by Norman Ohler, a podcast promo led me to get the book from the library and I really liked it!
Two, but those are just the enantiomers dextroamphetamine and levoamphetamine. Neither has any atoms extra or missing. It looks like four amphetamines because those two cationic isomers are in salts with two different anions.
Each enantiomer exhibits different effects so I don't know if that is relevant. (Even if you count dextroamphetamine sulfate and amphetamine sulfate as one, I'd still probably call it 3 because dextroamphetamine saccharate and amphetamine asparate monohydrate (the other two parts of adderall) do indeed have different forumlas).
If you synthesize amphetamine through the usual pathways, as I understand it, you get a racemic mixture, which is what is normally meant by unqualified "amphetamine", and is very close to Adderall. It's true that levoamphetamine is not really active at all in this context.
As I understand it, the aspartate and saccharate still dissociate in solution. If so, there isn't much of a plausible reason to consider them different drugs. If not, they might act more slowly or not at all.
Benzedrine (an amphetamine inhaler) was the first antidepressant marketed (although at the time I believe they used the term "psychic energizer" for antidepressants)
You've probably also heard of 3,4-Methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, though its abbreviated name (MDMA) is likely more familiar.
It's a huuuuuge family of substances though, particularly if you go one step more generic and start with Phenylethylamine as the backbone (amphetamine is a shortening of alpha-methyl-phenethylamine), the family includes hallucinogens like mescaline, empathogens like MDMA and its close cousins, the whole 2C family, the cathinones and their derivatives ('mephedrone' had a cultural moment 10-15 years back). And some real nasties like PMA, PMMA and bromo-Dragonfly.
Why does a space engineering lecturer believe he has novel thoughts on ADHD treatment inspired by an author from a medical era he didn’t bother to do cursory research of?
No, my question is why someone with a job unrelated to subject didn’t bother to do enough research to find out something as simple as the fact that amphetamines were already used to boost productivity in Huxley’s era before writing as if he had some authority on the subject.
One would think that if you are not an authority in a subject you want to write on, you should do at least the equivalent of a child’s book report research before espousing your opinion and immediately looking like an ass.
> "predicts" must be a variant of standard english which projects the past tense into the present tense because .. reasons?
Literary criticism and philosophy cast actions in and from recorded media in the "eternal present" (a term of art that should yield search results).
So, if Huxley (contemporary tense) wrote about a drug that resembles Adderall then a sentence cast in the eternal present would express "Huxley _writes_ about Soma in Brave New World which…".
I think this may ultimately be a cultural issue. American documentary style of presentation increasingly uses the present tense to describe things in the past.
I am more used to historians with horn rimmed glasses and badly fitting tweed jackets talking in the past tense about past times so when they reflect on it's impact in the present time they can use present tense about past acts correctly.
"German Troops conduct a false flag against Poland as a result of which the British issue a final demand, the echoes of which continue to the present day" is really not better than "The German troops conducted a false flag against Poland as a result of which the British issued a final demand, the echoes of which continue to the present day" when it comes down to it.
And it leads to awkward sentences like "At the time, FDR believes that he can keep the war away from America, but Japan attacks pearl harbour and he has no choice but to declare war" when the use of "Believed" and "could" and "attacked" and "had" make it clear we, the owners of backwards looking syntax and historical documents, realise this all happened a very long time ago and can keep a hold of the sequencing.
I must say matches on "the eternal present" are a giant bag of mystical wank, no disrespect to yourself intended. Perhaps you get better responses than I do but my top returns were flooded with mindfulness and cod philosophy and christianity.
> I must say matches on "the eternal present" are a giant bag of mystical wank, no disrespect to yourself intended.
Yeah, I searched _after_ I commented.
Here's what kagi yielded for `literary eternal present` [0]
> Literary works, paintings, films, and other artistic creations are assumed to exist in an eternal present. Therefore, when you write about writers or artists as they express themselves in their work, use the present tense.
(Disclosure: I am trained as a scholar of language and literature.)
The title is missing context, the full sentence would be "In his final speech, Huxley predicts Adderall". The context anchors the time frame, so "predicts" is present tense at the time of the speech.
"In his 2006 paper, Roubini sees an upcoming global financial crisis"
Journalists love to do things like this - cut out the context - as it makes the headlines seem more vivid, immediate and often alarming.
"Roubini sees an upcoming global financial crisis"
This article (and the title alone) is harmful. Adderall is not about increasing mental efficiency.
What Adderall is about is:
- helping with executive dysfunction for people who suffer from it.
- allowing people with ADHD like me to function. To do the things that everyone else does, things that we want to do and need to do, but can't do because of the way our brains are wired.
- increasing the lifespan of ADHD people who don't get help. Women with ADHD die about 9 years younger than those without ADHD [1].
- making our lives less painful, since every small task incurs pain, resulting in 3x depression rates [2] and alarmingly high suicidal ideation rates (50% of ADHD adults [3]).
Please, please, educate yourself about ADHD and medication for it before writing something like this title.
No, Aldous Huxley didn't. "predict" Adderall.
To understand more, I've put together a resource which, I hope, will be easy enough to digest. Here's my experience of getting prescribed Adderall for my ADHD:
If I have attention deficit and I could write it, I hope you (and the author of the text we're discussing) could spare some attention to it before talking about Adderall, amphetamines, and other stimulants prescribed for ADHD.
It's long, but I listened to this podcast a while back with Peter Attia and Trenna Sutcliffe discussing Autism, ADHD, and Anxiety, and found that it really reduced the stigma I associated with medication for treatment of ADHD. In particular, understanding the risks of not effectively treating ADHD, in comparison with with the potential risks/benefits of the medication. That's not to say that we should only rely on medication - behavioral therapy (with parents involved too) should also play a part.
You could draw a parallel with GLP-1 agonists: people like to grandstand about how you shouldn't need it and how it's somehow cheating. As if it's not addressing a condition that people are suffering from right now, today.
The stigma also seems to accidentally admit that things like executive function and food noise aren't equally distributed, thus some people could benefit from intervention.
For example, if you've never been fat or you never binge eat or you've never procrastinated 15min of homework until 2am despite, then you're missing the irony when your solution for people who deal with these things is to try harder and to jump through hoops that you don't need to.
Behavioral therapy is only needed to make people feel better about taking amphetamines. It takes only a very cursory review of published reputable papers to realize there's nothing behavioral therapy can do to improve ADHD because as Russell Barkley says ADHD is a disability of doing, not knowing what to do.
If medication alone has worked for you, that's great! But I don't think your opinion matches the medical consensus.
> For children with ADHD younger than 6 years of age, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends parent training in behavior management as the first line of treatment, before medication is tried.
> For children 6 years of age and older, the recommendations include medication and behavior therapy together—parent training in behavior management for children up to age 12 and other types of behavior therapy and training for adolescents. Schools can be part of the treatment as well. AAP recommendations also include adding behavioral classroom intervention and school supports. [1]
This makes sense for very young children, for various reasons, mainly that it’s hard or impossible to diagnose ADHD with reliability at such a young age, and because medication is hard to dose properly to a rapidly growing child. But these recommendations are honestly more about helping the parents cope than about treating the child’s ADHD. Behavioral therapy is more about learning how to fit in than addressing the actual problems (which are often exacerbated by the inevitable failure of such behavioral treatment and its corresponding expectations in folks with genuine ADHD).
CBT is effective in treating people whose problems mostly stem from an inaccurate view of themselves or the world around them, because CBT is training people to take a step back and reassess what they're seeing. If you're suffering from some forms of OCD for example it can be incredibly effective, it helps to reframe things.
It is not effective, and I would argue actively worsens, situations where you're feeling bad about your accurate view of things, such as when you're depressed because you're unable to ever get any of the things you need to do done despite knowing they need to be done. CBT is unable to help in that situation because most people can't simply go "oh, well its ok, its a mental health condition" - employer, while sometimes supportive, aren't going to continue employing someone who doesn't do the work they're being paid for, and reframing that would eventually result in losing their job.
> Using a random effects model, we found that CBTs had medium-to-large effects from pre- to posttreatment (self-reported ADHD symptoms: g = 1.00; 95% confidence interval [CI: 0.84, 1.16]; self-reported functioning g = .73; 95% CI [0.46, 1.00]) and small-to-medium effects versus control (g = .65; 95% CI [0.44, 0.86] for symptoms, .51; 95% CI [0.23, 0.79] for functioning). Effect sizes were heterogeneous for most outcome measures. Studies with active control groups showed smaller effect sizes. Neither participant medication status nor treatment format moderated pre-to-post treatment effects, and longer treatments were not associated with better outcomes. Conclusions: Current CBTs for adult ADHD show comparable effect sizes to behavioral treatments for children with ADHD, which are considered well-established treatments. Future treatment development could focus on identifying empirically supported principles of treatment-related change for adults with ADHD. We encourage researchers to report future findings in a way that is amenable to meta-analytic review.
Yeah, it's better at making people feel better. Not great but certainly OK at improving behaviour.
As I said, the evidence seems to suggest medication is extremely effective which is I guess is why people are quoting the first thing I wrote and acting like they disagree with me (they get mad for suggesting that CBT works a bit because they feel judged for using the arguably superior treatment?).
I want to share my counter example -- no amount of therapy could help me not almost loose it every time I drove my daughter in heavy traffic or deal with her just being a toddler.
But after 2 weeks being on concerta made lasting changes even months off the drug.
It was the best type o therapy -- you just do the thing that triggers you minus the bad part and learn it's not so bad and you can do it, it has profound implications.
No, it doesn't. It _barely_ works and mostly consists of teaching people some coping mechanisms. Medication works _much_ better, especially when using in addition to the CBT.
Therapy, and most of all, understanding how our brains work make all the difference in the world.
It's like realizing that the reason you've been getting stuck in the mud is not that you're a bad driver.
It's just that people who don't are driving 4x4 trucks, and you've had a Nissan Z series sports car.
Turns out, farms and off-road are simply not the right environment for your vehicle, and when that environment has some accomodations, like the paved surface of a highway or a race track, you're literally running circles around people in the most common vehicles.
One profound effect of taking Adderall was feeling the clarity to understand that difference, and seeing the road instead of the endless mud fields in front of me.
It does help to get things done, but around 30% of ADHD'ers aren't responsive to it.
Understanding that you're getting stuck because your brain wasn't meant for that kind of driving, however, is universally useful.
That's why I made that ADHD wiki [1], and keep posting links to it.
It's an compilation of information that has helped me tremendously to understand the above; and I know this resource was helpful to others too in their journeys.
My perspective is that of a late-diagnosed adult who's been completely unaware of what ADHD is, and thought that they can't possibly have an attention deficit because to get anything done, they have to hyperfocus on it.
Again, learning that hyperfocus is a symptom of ADHD and understanding how it works)l had a profound impact. And medication helped with that too: it's easier to not get stuck hyperfocused on the wrong thing with Adderall.
Getting Adderall was like spraying WD-40 into rusty steering components. The immediate effect is that I can go where I want to go to, not the random direction my vehicle happens to face.
The long-term effect though was understanding what makes it difficult to steer, and how to maintain it better.
And even if I don't have power steering all the time like everyone else, I'm still better off with that experience.
My point here that it's never about medication VERSUS therapy and knowledge.
Medication is not an alternative, it's a BOOSTER.
When it works, it's just dropping the difficulty from Nightmare to Medium/Hard. It doesn't play the game for you.
The said, I'm very much happy the Nightmare mode days are behind me, and I'm very sad that the only reason I've been living my life that way is stigma and lack of information.
When I took Adderall, I unexpectedly had to grieve the future I'll never get to have after being held back by all the pain I've been needlessly subjected to over the preceding three decades.
That grief, too, is a common experience in ADHD late-diagnosed adults.
Thank you for sharing that link, and contributing to the discussion and awareness <3
In your personal experience, therapy did nothing for your ADHD. That doesn't mean it is universally unhelpful.
While it is true that therapy is not a replacement for how stimulants reinforce executive function, therapy can help folks with ADHD understand their behavior patterns and better manage some of the challenges that go along with the disorder.
In my experience, therapy helped me get over my lifetime guilt around my lack of achievements, better understanding my triggers, and prioritizing self care. I couldn't have gotten through COVID lockdown with my wife and two kids in our tiny house without it.
There may be multiple types of “therapy” being mixed up here. I think it’s important to accept that therapy is never going to “fix” the differences in brain function that folks with ADHD experience. Any attempt at behavioral therapy to “fix” an ADHD brain will fail.
But talk therapy can help some folks come to accept the differences that their ADHD means in terms of how to relate to other people or to better understand why how ADHD impacts their own behavior and self-perception.
I myself have found it’s much easier and happier to shape my life around my particular ADHD than trying to change my behavior (something that’s destined to fail and only compound the negative emotions associated with ADHD).
I'm sorry that has been your experience, but I have had very different experiences - I'd encourage you to give it another shot, there is a lot left on the table for you
> I'm sorry but therapy does NOTHING for ADHD. I wish it did, it would be very useful to me, but it's just not the case.
The therapist that worked for me practiced ACT, and was more close to coaching when it came to ADHD.
Therapists are living databases of solutions to certain kinds of problems that people have.
Problems caused by ADHD certainly belong to that category, and if your therapist is specializing in that area, they can save you a lot of time and effort by suggesting approaches that you'd otherwise have to figure out on your own.
Finding such a therapist is, unfortunately, a bit like winning a lottery that most people in the US wouldn't have the resources to play.
Yes, that image is so funny, because it really is the difference between me being able to make a meal for myself vs needing something immediate.
It also helped do wonders for my anxiety, which I previously treated with sertaline.
I'm not the hyperactive sort of individual who has ADHD so I didn't get diagnosed until late in life, around a year or so ago, I'm just the "Inattentive" type.
But finally I can take my meds, and do things that other people do without feeling like it's mental torture. And I can also remember to do important things, like my taxes, on time!
It's so weird comparing my days on it to off it, when I happen to run out. I start getting a backlog of little things that my brain decided it couldn't take one minute to knock out.
The author of this piece—which I am—is reporting on Huxley’s MIT talk. He predicted a drug that improves mental efficiency/focus. And the talk discusses alternative non-pharmacological approaches.
You are welcome to either actually read my piece or, better, listen to his talk. There is no judgment against the substance but a call for additional approaches to enhance a person.
One thing I noticed is that while I hate being told what to do, and my partner hates being told what to do, and we understand deeply how we feel when someone tells us what to do, we still tell each other what to do (which goes especially badly after a long day).
Edit: I am glad you wrote this, so I didn't have to. It feels like reading my own autobiography. But the problem with reading about this stuff is that, if you forget for a minute that it's literally just how life is for you, it reads like some fantastical fiction comedy. I avoid telling anyone I deal with that I have ADHD because I feel like if I tell them they'll lump me in with some crappy mental model, and I avoid telling anyone I deal with about these problems because they sound completely absurd.
Adderall has no positive relationship to my mental efficiency. It can in fact be a negative once your passed the 8 hour windows where its still in your system.
At the end of the day, it makes it easier to not bounce between different things. It doesn't help me be smarter. It helps me drive to work without needing to listen to music and be on my phone.
The title is perhaps a bit unfortunate. I don't believe this is specifically about ADHD. Adderall is a stimulant with the effects Huxley predicted. It also happens to treat ADHD. I believe it's being used here in the former capacity.
The thing is, when you have ADHD and you take stimulants you don't feel any sort of high or however it makes people with normally functioning dopamine receptors feel, you just feel normal.
Oh, I still feel a bit high. Particularly when I start taking them after a hiatus. Or up the dose.
Anyway, here's what Huxley's had to say:
> ... I have talked to pharmacologists about this matter, and a number of them say that it’s probably quite possible that it may be possible to, by pharmacological means, which will do no harm to the organism as a whole, to increase the span of attention, to increase the powers of concentration, perhaps to cut down on the necessity for sleep, and the various other things which may lead to a very considerable increase in general mental efficiency.
No high mentioned. Remarkably accurate to my experience.
"Upping the dose" of Adderall makes me sleepy. In fact, I take a little before going to bed if I'm feeling restless. Midnight coffee is a thing for me.
I don't have a problem with attention span (ADHD isn't about short attention spans, after all), and stimulants do nothing for that.
Power of concentration? That's where ADHD people excel when that hyperfocus locks in. That's the default, unmedicated. The problem is the lack of control over where that concentration goes.
As you can see, I've been concentrating well enough on writing long enough comments in this thread to exceed the attention span of some of the commentors who respond to them (including, sadly, the author of the article we're discussing, who, while being kind enough to join this discussion, has nevertheless glossed over the points I've made that others haven't missed).
What I should have been concentrating on is sorting out the stuff in the garage from our recent camping trip.
This is what Adderall helps with. It's starting to kick in, so I'll go and do the adulting things it makes far less painful to start doing .
Wouldn't call it an increase in mental efficiency by any measure, but insofar as my spouse is concerned, it gets me off the couch; and insofar as the to-do list is concerned, I'm more productive in ticking off the boxes.
But the items on that list are far from requiring leaps in mental effort. It's things like folding the laundry, or unpacking suitcases, paying bills, making calls to insurance, mopping the floor, doing the oil change, and so on.
In short, Adderall doesn't work like Mentats from Fallout 1/2¹.
But it greatly increases the number of action points I have for Doing Things, while I feel... normal.
That is the much more common experience, and the reason it's prescribed for ADHD.
Oh, I get both for sure. Roughly 15 minutes of speedy-go-fast, then I get sleepy (but not tired) an hour later, the ability to focus throughout lasting roughly 3-4hrs. Coffee does the same thing, but with a lot more sleepy (kinda tired) and less focus. I should mention I'm on Ritalin, which may explain the speedy-go-fast.
The main effect for me is a decrease in inexplicable mental barriers. Things that were hard suddenly aren't. Same brain, different output. I dunno man, I call that an increase in mental efficiency.
I love the action point metaphor. Much better than the spoons I've heard before.
How do you differentiate attention span and concentration?
Is this confirmed? Source? I've always heard this, anecdotally, but I'm skeptical of the claim. I have every ADHD symptom, and have received 3 seperate diagnoses for it.. But Aderrall straight up felt like a drug - I could literally feel the dopamine release from just doing mundane things. Is the implication that I just didn't have ADHD?
"Dopamine release from just doing mundane things" is absolutely normal, more so after a lifetime of not being able to simply Do The Thing™.
One is supposed to feel good doing "normal" things. Completing tasks should feel good.
There can be many variables at play: maybe your dosage could be lowered, maybe Adderall isn't ideal for you, or maybe you're simply adjusting to the medication the first few times you take it, and it won't feel the way afterwards.
But most importantly: yes, you're absolutely going to feel like you've got a superpower the first time you take it. The euphoria you feel from being able to simply do things the way neurotypical people can just get up and do them is very much a part of the ADHD experience.
Also, neurotypical people don't do mundane things on Adderall. That's not what makes them feel particularly good. Because for them, doing things without friction and climbing the mental wall first is the normal experience.
They don't feel happiness experiencing it for the first time in their lives when they take Adderall. They've had that ability all along.
TL; DR: you feel that dopamine release from doing mundane things on Adderall because you have ADHD.
Yes, that actually makes perfect sense :) I suppose it was just a bit stronger than I imagined. I know that chemically, it's analogous, but it felt like MDMA.
That’s just a myth. Studies show that the drugs increase focus in everyone regardless of disease state. Surveys show that people with adhd take higher doses to get high as well.
I'm referring to the prescribed doses. I never intentionally tried to take a higher dose to "get high" , so I wouldn't know about that. But my point is non-adhd people who take normal doses prescribed for ADHD people likely feel something that ADHD people do not. The prescribed doses don't get us high.
You can't talk about Adderall without talking about ADHD just like you can't talk about allergy pills without talking about allergies, or talk about eyeglasses without talking about myopia.
> It also happens to treat ADHD
NO. Please reconsider sharing this sentiment.
Adderall is a drug for treating ADHD that also happens to be abused by people thinking it'll have the "effects Huxley predicted" (enhancing thinking efficiency).
It does not; that's the reason why it's a controlled substance. When abused, it will wreck your brain.
As an analogy: glasses make people with myopia see better, but wearing glasses without prescription is a very bad idea.
>I believe it's being used here in the former capacity.
I understand this, and it's a misconception I'm trying to dispel.
With evidence and scientific understanding, mind you, and not just with vibes about thinking what Adderall is.
Speaking of which, I forgot to take it, which means I'm about to have my breakfast at 5PM because I couldn't bring myself to do the eating task earlier.
This is what Adderall is for.
>The title is perhaps a bit unfortunate.
The title is repeated verbatim in the article, whose author has kindly replied in this thread and re-stated it twice (as did you), as if I weren't directly addressing the fallacious point that the author employed to attract attention to Huxley's lecture (which doesn't need such advertising in the first place).
It's not the title that's a bit unfortunate.
It's the mention of Adderall, and the myth that it's a "brain-enhancing" drug.
If it were, it'd be given to everyone already, and perhaps there'd be fewer people spreading vibe-based falsities in post titles, but I digress.
The point is:
==============
Adderall does NOT enhance mental efficiency, as Huxley's fantasized drug would.
Adderall HELPS people with ADHD overcome EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION.
That's what it's for. That's what it DOES.
If you take it for ANYTHING ELSE, you will NOT get the intended result, and you will likely FUCK YOURSELF UP.
Spreading the MISCONCEPTION that Adderall is a "brain-enhancing” drug (as the author opined in the comments here) drives the ABUSE of this medication, which HARMS people and makes ADHD harder to obtain for people who NEED it to function.
========
I hope I've succeeded in bringing your attention to this issue.
If this hasn't changed your point of view, please let me know what else I can elaborate on.
> I'm arguing that this is not about how Adderall relates to ADHD. I don't think our experience is the intended context.
Then whose experience is the "intended" context?
> To be fair, there's evidence it does the same to us.
Same for every prescription medication out there.
This is why they require a prescription.
This is why spreading the idea that Adderall is a pill that will boost your "mental efficiency" WITHOUT ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES, as Huxley said in his talk, is harmful and dangerous.
Adderall is very much known to not be that kind of stimulant.
Of course, same applies for e.g. nicotine. But we also know the outcome of nicotine being touted as a consequence-free stimulant.
The fact that one is widely available to anyone over 18 no questions asked, while the other requires a thousand hoops and a costly diagnosis is, of course, a bizarre travesty...
...which is only exacerbated by people promoting the abuse of this medication, as the author of the piece does (by saying that it is anywhere close to Huxley's utopian drug at population scale).
Figuring out what the drug is actually effective for, doing the lab trials, getting the FDA approval, etc is all part of R&D in the pharmaceutical industry.
A rather costly part, at that.
There's a heckton of it that needs to be done before doctors can prescribe drug X for condition Y.
Adderall was developed for helping ADHD folks, not for helping everyone else get a boost of "mental efficiency" (and particularly, without adverse consequences).
Adderall was definitely developed as a diet pill, the decision to seek approval for use as ADHD medication happened decades later when stimulants were already a widely accepted treatment.
Yes, there’s certainly research involved in getting an existing drug approved for a new condition. That’s not development.
> not for helping everyone else get a boost of "mental efficiency" (and particularly, without adverse consequences).
While that’s not what Adderall was recently approved for, that and dieting were the primary purposes driving stimulant development (and also the development of Adderall/Obetrol specifically).
The suggestion that Adderall would only benefit folks with ADHD diagnoses is also fundamentally weird, given that ADHD is not a specific identifiable condition. We can’t scan a brain and identify whether or not that brain belongs to an individual with ADHD, so an ADHD diagnosis is necessarily subjective and not objective.
you can take what’s called a QB test. That’s an objective and empirical computer driven measurement of a person’s ability to focus and how much they fidget. So you can measure how much inattentivity and hyperactivity someone has as separate dimensions.
You absolutely can, but the problem is that you can’t know if those metrics are really caused by “ADHD” or one of many other possible causes.
The whole idea here is that current evidence suggests that we are almost certainly currently filing a variety of disparate conditions under “ADHD” because we have no good way to determine what “ADHD” actually is.
>Yes, there’s certainly research involved in getting an existing drug approved for a new condition. That’s not development.
OK, I concede that point then. That's the information I intended to communicate.
>The suggestion that Adderall would only benefit folks with ADHD diagnoses is also fundamentally weird
Sure, let me rephrase.
There is, as we both agree, research performed to establish that Adderall is something that can help with ADHD symptoms (...and obesity).
There's plentiful data that demonstrates its effectiveness for some people with ADHD in that regard. And appetite loss is a well-known effect.
But there's no research done to establish that Adderall would work the way Huxley describes the hypothetical drug: giving anyone a boost in "mental efficiency", without adverse consequences to health otherwise.
To the contrary, we have extensive data and research that demonstrates Adderall doesn't work that way.
Particularly, for folks without ADHD, mental efficiency is likely to decrease when they take Adderall [1].
It gives them the feeling of being productive, though...
...which only exacerbates the problem.
Quote [2]:
What Adderall clearly does extremely well is make people think they are doing better — and to feel good while they’re doing it. “Adderall might not be a cognitive enhancement drug, but a ‘drive’ drug,” says Anjan Chatterjee, a professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Farah explains, “[Stimulants] make boring work seem more interesting, so they increase your motivation to work, energy for work, and that’s not nothing — that’s really helpful . . . Unfortunately, it also gets into the realm of feel-good drugs, and that means the risk of dependence is quite high.” Yet when I ask Farah exactly how addictive Adderall and other stimulant medications are, she tells me that there is currently no good answer. “Nobody has really looked at these drugs used as work enhancers and what the dependence risk there is,” she said.
"Nobody has really looked at these drugs used as work enhancers" is what I intended to communicate when I said that "this is not what Adderall was developed for".
When somebody did look (the study [1] came out years later), they found that a drug that wasn't for improving mental efficiency does not, in fact, improve mental efficiency.
The mistaken belief that Adderall is akin to Huxley's fantasy pill, which the author of the article perpetuates, is harming everyone.
As I said before, Adderall is for treating executive dysfunction: not being able to do things which you can do, should do, want to do, have the time and resources to do, but can't start doing because Brain Says No.
Adderall won't make anyone smarter. It'll make stupid people be stupid faster and with more enthusiasm.
I think we broadly agree, Adderall does not make anyone smarter.
I would hazard to suggest that it can make many people much more productive though. This topic has been studied extensively since before anyone cared about ADHD, and the answer is broadly “yes, for some tasks”.
> Nobody has really looked at these drugs used as work enhancers
I would strongly disagree with this bit, this was one of the primary purposes people have studied stimulants for. They’ve been successfully used for this in the past and continue to be used anriun the world, especially by various militaries.
Anyway, unfortunately I can’t comment here on personal experience given that I have been twice diagnosed and once undiagnosed with ADHD. Adderall makes me more productive and more prone to tunnel vision, but certainly not smarter.
The historical and continued use by various militaries of stimulants seems to suggest that at least many very highly motivated big spenders seem to expect the same to apply to the general population.
>I would hazard to suggest that it can make many people much more productive though
That suggestion is disproved by the research I linked, particularly when it comes to mental tasks.
>the answer is broadly “yes, for some tasks
For mindless tasks, like long-haul driving, where staying awake is pretty much all that's required ? Sure.
Anything else, citation needed.
>The historical and continued use by various militaries of stimulants seems to suggest that at least many very highly motivated big spenders seem to expect the same to apply to the general population.
Military use is more commonly to increase stamina (e.g. for pilots on 48 hour bombing missions), not efficiency.
And military scenarios simply don't transfer to civilian life.
Staying awake without sleep when you're a bomber pilot is a matter of life and death, so adverse health consequences and even decrease in mental capacity can be tolerated, because being dumb and awake is better than being smart and asleep in that context.
...to an extent. Until you end up shooting some Canadians dead [1].
Which is why the "historical" use by militaries is not continuous. It's been abandoned by militaries that tried it; particularly by the USAF after that incident.
As for use by the military in general, note that the average lifespan of a Russian soldier on the front line in the Ukraine war is measured in hours[2].
That's a very different context than anyone talking here is facing. And one where the ability to stay alert matters more than anything else.
That doesn't translate to efficient or productive in any normal sense. A solider is waiting most of the time. Then something happens, fast. Any delay in reaction, and you're dead.
We can discuss the effectiveness of amphetamines in such scenarios, but that has nothing to do with Huxley's description (or productivity, efficiency, etc).
As I said in my top comment: Adderall is for helping people act without delay. This translates well to military use.
> For mindless tasks, like long-haul driving, where staying awake is pretty much all that's required ? Sure
This currently describes most tasks humans do.
I certainly won’t go and suggest that taking stimulants for long-haul driving is a good idea, unless of course you’re in a war zone and lives depend on it. But stimulants do improve performance in these tasks for the vast majority of people. While the side effects probably aren’t worth it for the society as a whole, they probably are on an individual level for e.g. a cab driver who is able to work more hours and pay his rent. That’s of course not a desirable state of affairs, but it is real.
A software developer grinding out a boring project could also greatly benefit, while being much less risky than the cabbie on stimulants.
In the end I believe there are many people without ADHD living in situations where Adderall could meaningfully improve their lives, making it easier to grind through hours of mindless work. Someone living paycheck to paycheck could pick up a few extra hours and significantly improve their financial situation and overall wellbeing.
Should anyone take Adderall in the hopes that it’ll make them smarter? No.
Adderall also treats excessive daytime sleepiness associated with narcolepsy and I'd be a shambolic zombie without it. It's downright insulting when people think pharmaceuticals are some kind of shortcut to avoid some more disciplined approach. It's medicine to treat illness. Any medicine can be abused or misused but some of us just really need it to correct dysfunction.
Here here. I also have ADHD though I couldn’t use stimulant medications due to bad reactions to it, but I’ve had success with non-stimulant medications (Straterra aka atomoxetine [1]).
A big thing I struggled with prior to medical treatment that I don’t often hear discussed about ADHd was rejection sensitivity.
For those unfamiliar: imagine a time someone said something that hurt your feelings or caused a strong emotional reaction.
Now imagine that as a routine emotional response to day to day interactions. Feeling intensely sad, irritated, insulted, etc. to extents completely o it of proportion to whatever was said or even implied.
It’s brutal. It contributes to a lot of depression and social anxiety for folks with ADHD. It doesn’t matter if you’re aware of the response being disproportionate—you get to go on that emotional roller coaster whenever somebody says they don’t care for your favorite food, accidentally cut you off in a conversation, or the day just turns out differently than you were expecting.
Medical treatment makes a huge difference—in my particular case the difference between feeling like I had the emotional regulation of a toddler and not needing to constantly question every emotion I felt prior to responding to things I was reacting to.
Stimulant medications didn’t work for me, but they do this for most people with ADHD (more effectively, too!) and like alterom it saddens me whenever FUD like this crops up.
Rejection sensitivity may be the reason I detest to-do lists. The lists inevitably languish and slowly turn into a perpetual reminder of who I haven't become, i.e. a rejection from past-me.
I'd argue that it is nonsense to treat symptoms instead of the cause (of an issue) , but actually doing just that is quite intellectual when a bunch of money stands to be made
I suppose that's true, in much the same way that chemotherapy treats the symptom of cells spontaneously deciding to replicate in your body. That does not mean we judge people battling a cancer diagnosis and tell them to pursue non-medicated approaches because it's "just treating symptoms".
If you encounter a bit of bitterness from the ADHD community online, let me provide some perspective: I have been called lazy my entire life, I have wondered why everybody could just do stuff and apply themselves. Why couldn't I just clean my house, do my homework, keep on top of chores, or even find the energy to play games after a day of work? I only found out as an adult I have a disability which makes all of that an uphill battle for me, INCLUDING finding the motivation for the fun stuff. There is an easy fix for this, some meds that take care of SOME of the problem. They don't fix it in much the same way that a wheelchair doesn't fix the legs of a crippled person, but it sure is like playing life on easy mode if you're used to dragging yourself around by your arms. And now I'm stuck explaining this to people who have done the barest minimum of research and who say 'oh it only is treating symptoms'. They have the audacity of calling me lazy (again!) for not training my arms more to overcome my disability that way. And my response is simple: You can take my metaphorical wheelchair over my dead body, and if you were in my position you would feel exactly the same way.
i understand your perspective viscerally and as such i understand the push back ... the argument is that there is nothing wrong with someone labelled 'adhd' , rather that the modern western system both a) does not handle adhd behaviour properly and b) exhibits conditions where non-adhd individuals exhibit adhd behaviour ... when taking into account that speed will motivate anybody (both adhd and non adhd) , and that demotivation is a natural response to a hopeless scenario , i do not see adhd as a disability in and of itself ... recommend to look up the effect of hope on drowning rats ...
Even if you were 100% correct and the world is broken, fully causing ADHD as a disorder: Please fix the world FIRST and only once proven ADHD is caused by what once was the shape of western society and no longer applies, THEN you get to take the metaphorical wheelchair away.
The alternative is that you prevent millions of people in managing their disability while asking them to bet on your view of the world AND on our collective ability to change it. In the best case scenario where we manage that shift, that's what, 10 years of my life gone while society adjusts? Will you write my kids a nice letter explaining them their dad is going to be a deadbeat the next 10 years while we fix society, because somebody on the internet thinks daddy shouldn't be on stimulant medication?
You're just not presenting an attractive deal to anyone, whilst very politely telling disabled people making the best of their shit situation that their crutches should not exist. Hell, maybe they shouldn't need to exist, but how is that my fault? And while I can't tell if you stand on the side of 'using meds to manage ADHD is a failure of self discipline and morality', but if you do: I promise you most people with ADHD have more self discipline in their little toe than others do in their entire body. But self discipline doesn't make a cripple walk, as much as it doesn't make my brain make the chemicals I need to put my body into action. I've spent enough time of my life flogging myself into action, believing I was a fundamentally lazy human, I'll take the meds.
> Even if you were 100% correct and the world is broken, fully causing ADHD as a disorder: Please fix the world FIRST and only once proven ADHD is caused by what once was the shape of western society and no longer applies, THEN you get to take the metaphorical wheelchair away. [...] You're just not presenting an attractive deal to anyone.
Thanks for writing this succinct counterpoint!
The argument of the commenter you're responding to reminds me of the "ADHD is a superpower!” vibe, which I perceive as toxic positivity, but couldn't rebuke quite as clearly [1].
"There's nothing wrong with you, it's literally the entire human society that's broken" has the same implication ("don't take meds, you're nOt bRoKeN”).
Of course it's the environment that causes our symptoms. Just like cold weather makes one feel cold.
It'd be rather silly to argue that winter clothes should be abandoned, that they exist only to make money for clothing manufacturers.
Some of us live in cold places. We need winter clothes. And we don't make the weather.
I don't like the superpower vibe either. I do not entirely look negative upon my ADHD, but then again, to what degree it is my personality and to what degree it is the disorder, I don't know. If others want to view their ADHD as a superpower, I'm all for it, but pushing this narrative too hard doesn't feel constructive.
For me personally, I tend to view myself as a human with some characteristics which in most contexts are not helpful, but make me uniquely suited for other situations. I try to avoid the word 'broken', but for a long time I thought about myself as 'broken in a sometimes useful way'. My burden in life is to manage and control the characteristics where they are disadvantaging me, and position myself as much as I can in positions where these characteristics are useful assets. To hook into your winter metaphore: If you always feel cold, working in a tropic resort where others would feel continually hot, sweaty and uncomfortable might just be perfect for you.
Where it crosses the line for me is neurotypical people saying 'oh I don't need winter clothes, and anyone who does is must be to use a shortcut and should just jog themselves warm instead'. Or even ADHD people saying: 'My feeling cold all the time is a superpower, you should just go work in your local sauna and you'll have no problem at all!'. Great, happy that you guys don't have this issue or figured out a workaround, but I do, and I need my damn winter clothes. I wish I didn't, I'll look for warmer situations, but I need them right now.
yeah my point is that the western society should be changed and i dont know why you think that i think that speed should be taken away entirely but i dont think that
Apologies for drawing that conclusion, but usually the argument presented is something like "amphetamines / stimulants bad especially in healthy adults -> usage on the rise due to increases ADHD diagnoses -> diagnoses potentially fraudulent? -> pharmaceutical companies are incentivized to sell stimulants -> ban stimulants entirely before it gets out of hand and rejoice our win on late stage capitalism and druggies".
I might've misunderstood the point you were trying to make, but saying 'society causes the issue' usually is followed by 'therefore treating with meds is silly and we shouldn't do that'. The latter part is what I take issue with, not the former, and if you weren't advocating for that then we have no issue and are in agreement.
I'd love to find a constructive way to change society for the better so ADHD is not as much of an issue, but personally, I don't see that happening. And I do see anti-intellectualism and puritanism on the rise, and with it, a movement that wants to take my crutches away to deal with society as it is. Maybe you weren't one of them, but I saw you making similar arguments, which is what prompted me to respond.
Calling the group of all stimulant medications "speed" is not a great sign either if I have to judge where somebody stands in this debate btw. Dextroamphetamine, one of the ingredients in Adderall, is similar to other amphetamines as found in speed, but for instance methylphenidate aka Ritalin only partially has the same working mechanisms, blocking the reuptake of dopamine and norepiphrine but not helping the extra release of more of these neurotransmitters. And that comes with a different profile in terms of addiction risks and whatnot. It is not helpful to call all of these medications 'speed' as if all ADHD people are buying potentially contaminated stuff on street corners from shady dealers, manufacturing this breaking bad style in their shed. Managing ADHD is done with clean, medical-grade, typically less-potent versions, with tightly controlled doses, closely managed by a licensed medical professional. Framing ADHD patients taking their prescription medication as speed users is not helpful. Even if you don't have any ill intent, reinforcing the belief we are all essentially the same as junkies just provides ammo for people who do want to take this away.
>I'd argue that it is nonsense to treat symptoms instead of the cause (of an issue) , but actually doing just that is quite intellectual when a bunch of money stands to be made
What specifically are you talking about here? It appears to me that your comment is an expression of vibe with zero information content.
There's no dichotomy between treating symptoms and cause even when the cause is treatable (which isn't the case with ADHD; it's a neurotype, with differences showing on brain scan levels) — and that's setting aside the discussion of whether it's something we need to "treat" in the first place.
We still have painkillers for people who need them while they are getting treatment.
We still have meds for runny noses, we still have Tylenol for fever, even though these are merely symptoms.
We still have pills for allergies.
And on that note: the symptoms (such as fever and allergic reactions) can and do kill people.
>modern western society exhibits a plethora of conditions that are likely to result in the manifestation of adhd behaviours in non adhd individuals
Maybe.
>a brain scan is not part of the diagnostic criteria for labelling adhd
Correct.
>taking speed makes anyone more productive, not just those with adhd
We arent talking about productivity gains.
>for me to reconsider my comment you would have to provide a convincing argument that doping up the populace is objectively the best path forward
"Doping up" is intentionally emotive language and a misrepresentation.
>to me it seems that this is not the best path forward, rather one that serves to minimize societal friction
You dont even clearly state your complaint. Its about patient outcomes, not "society" but you are implying they are also a social good. Great.
The best path forward is to reduce the severity of peoples illnesses. These drugs, reduce the severity of peoples illnesses. People with these illnesses, have a better life due to the medication. Why that upsets you is a deeply internal problem to you, not a problem with society or medicine.
Well it would be a net social good. But I expect I will see a different account with vastly the same posting style back here next time ADHD comes up, spewing the same nonsense.
So, instead of reading what I wrote, you choose to remain willfully ignorant.
I am not responding further for your sake, but for the sake of those who read this thread.
> taking speed makes anyone more productive, not just those with adhd.
Speed (methamphetamine) has the same relationship to Adderall (dextroamphetamines) as methanol does to ethanol; a difference in methyl group.
Ethanol (aka alcohol) is commonly used for recreational purposes.
If you think Adderall is the same thing as "speed", I hope you wouldn't mind drinking a glass of methanol to prove the point that chemically similar substances have similar effects.
> modern western society exhibits a plethora of conditions that are likely to result in the manifestation of adhd behaviours in non adhd individuals
Which is why the diagnostic criteria for ADHD require a lifelong manifestation of ADHD symptoms.
Notice how you say behaviors, not symptoms or traits, i.e. how people act, and not how they feel, which difficulties they face, what cost they bear, and so on.
The behavior of an ADHD individual might be no different from one without ADHD. We can be on time, for example.
It is just immensely more difficult for us, just like it's difficult for someone with a broken leg that didn't quite heal to walk.
And yes, anyone can bump their toe on a table leg and experience pain for a while. That doesn't mean that people with broken legs don't exist.
>a brain scan is not part of the diagnostic criteria for labelling adhd.
It isn't, because we have cheaper and more reliable ways.
The difference is there though.
> you would have to provide a convincing argument that doping up the populace is objectively the best path forward - to me it seems that this is not the best path forward, rather one that serves to minimize societal friction.
Believing that "doping up the populace" is what's taking place is a delusion that I can't address in the same way that I can't address the belief that the Loch Ness monster caused the 2019 Coronavirus pandemic.
Unfortunately, your worldview seem to be as strongly detached from reality as you are convinced about the veracity of your unshakable beliefs.
But again, if you sincerely believe people taking Adderall are taking speed, you really could save a lot on booze by drinking methanol instead.
>youre very close to freeing yourself but the speed has an iron grip on your thoughts , i wish you all the best and hope that things may settle down
Oh my. I was going to ask if you've drank a glass of methanol to argue that Adderall and speed the same thing, as I suggested... but judging my the content of your comments, you might have had more than one already.
we could choose to produce an environment that handles normal human behaviour , but instead we label normal human behaviour as dissonant , its an idea so simple yet one so violently opposed , such violence only spurs me on to champion the idea
ADHD behavior is normal human behavior, because we're all human.
And indeed, some quite reasonable accommodations and changes in the way the society functions and forms expectations of ourselves and others would go a long way towards making ADHD folks living fulfilling lives without pain.
All that said, executive dysfunction is still a thing, and ADHD folks routinely find themselves struggling with their own goals and lives, apart from the society and its expectations.
Technology can and does help a lot (electric kettles that turn themselves off, washer-dryer combo machines that don't require remembering to take clothes out, etc).
But then there are still things that I struggle with on my own, like wanting to send postcards to friends and taking literal years to get to it.
I really can't blame it on the society.
That's where the meds can make a big difference in one's life.
In some ways, ADHD is an advantage. We fare better than others in emergencies. Hyperfocus is an asset. Having a million hobbies is a plus.
But in other ways, it's something that makes us need support.
The meds are one of the ways the society accommodates us and gives us that support.
if you took an adhd cunt and threw him in the bush he would be fine ... but if you threw him into a cookie cutter hyper capitalist no-hope no-wife no-friends no-third-space doomscroll-to-death sealed box , that man wouldn't be fine! the man in question never changed , only his environment did. ergo , societal amphetamines are about as supportive as me handing you a set of crutches after i broke your legs. but trying to blame adhd on society is basically a copout as it reflects the way that society treats individuals ("here, take this speed and wreck your heart so that you fit better into the box we designed for you"). the only way forward is to through honest questioning as to why adhd diagnoses are thousands of times greater in the west, eg. maybe if we didn't get forced into a 9-5 schedule and instead had a bit more freedom , people would be more happy to devote energy to their work ...
i mean it was funny the first time but you have to put some extra sauce on the bait if you want more bites , to be clear i never told anyone to settle i said i hope things settle around them because i believe adhd behaviours can be produced by chaotic environments
Take a person, put them somewhere near equator in January, they're fine. Take them to Finland, they're freezing.
The only thing that changed is the environment. The person is fine.
So all this "winter clothing" scam exists only to enrich clothes makers.
The world simply should be warm everywhere, then none of that stuff would be necessary.
Winter clothes aren't a solution to feeling cold, because they don't address the root problem of Finland being on the map.
People simply shouldn't be subjected to such conditions.
...see how you sound like?
======
>societal amphetamines are about as supportive as me handing you a set of crutches after i broke your legs
Well, the common ground here is that the crutches would indeed be helpful in this scenario.
>if you took an adhd cunt and threw him in the bush he would be fine
I get your point, but nobody would be fine like that. People are social animals.
Sure, the society sucks. But we literally can't live without it.
And while we're fixing it, well, we better have the meds.
> eg. maybe if we didn't get forced into a 9-5 schedule and instead had a bit more freedom , people would be more happy to devote energy to their work ...
100%.
> "here, take this speed and wreck your heart so that you fit better into the box we designed for you"
Counterpoint: stimulants are still useful and helpful even when you take the society away.
I can be living on my own and on my own terms, and still be upset that it took me literally 11 (eleven) years to mail a gift to a friend [1].
Sure, there could be ways mailing a package could be easier. But I really can't blame the 11 year delay on society trying to fit me in a box.
>the only way forward is to through honest questioning as to why adhd diagnoses are thousands of times greater in the west,
Citation needed. But availability and quality of mental healthcare is one big factor here in any cases.
Saying this as some born in the USSR.
My mother got an ADHD diagnosis in her 50s, long after moving to the US.
It's not like she didn't struggle with ADHD in the USSR, it just wasn't an option to get an ADHD diagnosis there.
we aren't fixing anything , humanity is happy enough to rely on bandaid solutions until the wound festers out of control ... no society didnt force you not to send that message you did that yourself and blaming a condition is inherently giving up responsibility for your actions ... i dont have the energy to rebut attacks on my language techniques any more , goodbye sir
That is nonsense, it makes perfect sense to treat symptoms when it works and lessens those symptoms. Most of medicine works that way- our understanding of biology is primitive, and we often cannot identify or treat underlining causes.
Just want to echo someone else's sub-thread: Adderall is not at all similar to Huxley's description of Soma. Soma was about feeling good and not having to think of the evil things that make the BNW society possible, not efficiency.
Not Soma! From a talk by Huxley:
> ... I have talked to pharmacologists about this matter, and a number of them say that it’s probably quite possible that it may be possible to, by pharmacological means, which will do no harm to the organism as a whole, to increase the span of attention, to increase the powers of concentration, perhaps to cut down on the necessity for sleep, and the various other things which may lead to a very considerable increase in general mental efficiency.
https://www.organism.earth/library/document/realizing-human-...
Sounds more like opiates (5000 BCE) or benzos (1950s).
Also, Huxley's Soma is very close to the medicine Soma (Carisoprodol), in my experience. It's a beautiful, relaxing, euphoric high. Probably highly addictive.
I was surprised to see the mention of ritual drink of Vedic people.
It turns out to refer to a drug in fiction which is named after the Vedic ritual drink.
Original Vedic "soma" is indeed more like a drink of inspiration and ecstasy, with myths similar to the norse "Mead of poetry".
"somasya tA mada indraS cakAra" - "In the exhilaration of soma, Indra has done these great deeds" - is a rig-vedic refrain.
That's also what I thought - Wasn't Soma more of a way to make people question less and just remain in a blissed out but maybe sort of out of it state at all times ? Seems very different than amphetamines
The link (including the transcript of Huxley’s lecture) doesn’t seem to be about Soma, unless I’m missing something. Huxley produced a lot of work outside of Brave New World, lots of it concerned with drugs and altered states of consciousness (so much so that personally I don’t think I’ve done enough drugs to understand his perspective, as I find him distinctly, and almost uniquely among such high-profile authors that I’ve tried, unreadable)
You are vey correct—the talk and link have nothing to do with Soma.
I can only presume, based on timing of the talk being 1960, that his thoughts here link to mescaline and the practical utopia he talks of in Island, whose inhabitants make use of a local psychedelic. So whatever he must have said here had more to do with his later perspectives than his feelings around the island.
Fair enough, but I have read Island, The Doors of Perception, and BNW, and none of those books described using uppers or anything about efficiency. Island was psychedelics (fantastic book in my opinion).
Guess more of us should have read the link more carefully..... oops !
So kind of like our social media feeds then?
I would've said like marijuana.
amphetamines feel a lot like people putting NO2 on their cars, or overclocking their computers. You might just fine in the end, but the likelihood of wear & tear catching up to you increases. It should be treated just like any other medicine, don't use it unless you really have to, and expect adverse effect (known or unknown).
To continue the analogy, a Dodge Challenger with a 50-shot of nitrous on it that gets used once a day is gonna still come out looking better at any milage/age than the same engine in a Promaster van because you can't drive around at 17k gross in a Challenger so the area under the abuse curve is way lower even if it peaks ever so slightly higher.
An office worker on meth-lite (or whatever you want to call it) is still accumulating less wear and tear than a laborer, something the human body is clearly capable of being for a lifetime if you're somewhat smart about it.
Adderall, caffeine, heck cocaine based stimulants, are probably all fine if you're not over-using the living crap out of them and stacking large amounts of them on top of other things that'll beat the body up over time.
I don't disagree at all. at medicinal doses, treated as medicine are fine. at higher doses they're addictive and lend themselves to excessive use.
Many people don't realize that any argument they can think of against a given medication has been gone over a thousand times by thousands of medical professionals. The truth is, they just don't trust the medical system as a whole.
Whether that is good or bad stands to be seen. However, I find that people with this position often reject effective and safe treatments along with the more questionable ones.
Amphetamines are safe, well-studied and non-addictive at prescribed doses. On the other hand, untreated ADHD VASTLY increases likelihood of addiction and many mental disorders.
Definitely DO use this medication if you need it - it's the first medication your doctor will likely ask you to try precisely because an extensive body of research says it's the most effective way for treating ADHD.
“non-addictive at prescribed doses”
Less likely to be addictive, definitely not non-addictive.
https://talbottcampus.com/resources/how-adderall-addiction-s...
This has the same energy as the common incorrect statement “marijuana isn’t addictive”. I assume made by frequent users who want to downplay negatives.
The "if you need it" is important.
1. People take it as a study drug, without prescription.
2. There may be over medication. Doctors will sometimes feel pushed to prescribe (as is known to happen with antibiotics)
3. At an individual level that is true, but you may need it because of your society and environment. Both ADHD rates and treatment varies between countries (even between regions and states within countries) and has varied a lot over time, which implies some external factor affects it.
Not sure about over-medication. I think about all the people I used to work with that were absolutely addicted to caffeine, just to get through the day. And the work we were doing (software) didn't seem _that_ boring to me. Some of most hardcore caffeine addicts were from when I worked briefly in game dev (and that was my own peak usage too; now I can't drink coffee due to acid reflux, its also bad for my eyes because I have glaucoma now).
I think untreated attention issues (if not the rather narrowly defined condition labeled "ADHD") are rather widespread. And society doesn't help, just look at the checklist of things you need to do on an ongoing basis to just keep a vehicle running for transport in the US, which pretty much everybody outside a city needs, and even many city dwellers elect to procure as well.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna95111
1 out of every 5 Ivy League students is prescribed stimulants.
I think it’s time we stop pretending like prescriptions magically mean the substance isn’t abused or is truly needed.
"1 out of every 5 Ivy League students is prescribed stimulants."
From the third paragraph of the article:
"Researchers analyzed responses from an online questionnaire of more than 600 Ivy League sophomores, juniors and seniors who were not diagnosed with ADHD — attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder — and therefore did not have a prescription for the medication. Writing essays and studying for an exam cause the most angst for students — of those who used stimulants, 69 percent said they used them to stay focused while writing and 66 percent said they used the drugs to help study."
> at prescribed doses
If you're getting Adderall from "a guy I know" instead of with a prescription, that's the problem. you keep taking more until you're satisfied.
Isn't the whole point of amphetamine based treatement for ADHD to correct(or beneficially alter, depending on your point of view) an non-standard brain chemistry?
AFAIK some neurodivergent brains deal with amphetamines differently and the baseline levels of chemical affected by amphetamines is different.
Wear and tear might be a thing, i don't know, but the analogy of putting NO2 in their car feels a bit off.
It'd be more like finally putting premium unleaded in your car after years of "back of the lorry" pseudo-unleaded.
I believe parent commenter was referring to recreational use, i.e., use by people without such diagnoses who want a "performance boost". I heard about that sort of thing being popular when I was in college — people would take Adderall to cram for an exam or to study late into the night.
You're right that, for people with ADHD and related disorders, stimulant medication sort of just adjusts their baselines so they can pay attention like a "normal" person.
> You're right that, for people with ADHD and related disorders, stimulant medication sort of just adjusts their baselines so they can pay attention like a "normal" person.
I have ADHD and take metylphenidate(I've tried many kinds of stimulants as well) -- and the NO2 analogy is an imperfect but better analogy than saying stimulants simply adjusts the baseline of people with ADHD to function like "normal" persons.
I feel there is a narrow window of dosage and time where it might feel that way -- i.e. stimulants at the onset might calm you down, reduce anxiety, but all stimulants are very broad hammers.
For me it feels like it's impossible to re-create chemically exactly the neurotypical focus that I've seen in other colleagues.
Like spending 5-6 hours of continous work where you drill down just enough, get back on track, don't get distracted, don't get too anxious, don't get hyperfocused AND do that consistently, day after day after day.
My non-chemical modes are either hyper focus for 2 weeks on a problem, immerse myself but then completely lose interest, most of the time without showing much for it OR procastinate it a long way, get extremely anxious and work really hard on the problem.
With stimulants it's a bit like: - dosed just right:it evaporates anxiety, stressful situations feel easy to deal with, BUT there's always increased heart rate, grinding teeth and some tension at the end of the day - some stimulants make mundane things wildly interesting (on isopropylphenidate I spent a few hours playing with a PLSQL debugger because I thought it was really cool), but no sense of "GO, GO, GO, do it". - some make things seem urgent enough and help stay on track -- like the metylphenidate I'm prescribed. - some make going into a flow-like state easy and fun (like methamphetamine and phenmetrazine). - some are pure energy and urgency -- like modafinil.
All of the stimulants have the potential to give me euphoria, all of them temporarily increase libido I still have to be mindful of not focusing on the wrong thing, the "normal" feeling is very fleeting, it's very easy to get hyper on stimulants, all of them feel like wear & tear at the end of the day, some more than others.
I've had similar experiences to you. I never can quite get that normalcy. I now just take rilatin but it is finnicky. Getting enough sleep and eating the right amount of the right stuff just before ingesting is extremely important so I don't even take it all that much even tho i struggle.
I wonder if you tried lisdexamfetamine? I can't get it prescribed easily here since it's not covered the way the alternatives are but someone i know had amazing success with it. Seemingly because it's a prodrug. I can't help but be hopefull that I'll get to try it one day and that it ends up being what I always needed.
Not the OP, but I‘ve had a rather bad experience with methylphenidate (ritalin) where it made me way more awkward around people, and increased my obsessive tendencies. It did help with focus, but the effects were very short-lived. It also obliterated my hunger and once the effects wore off, it left me feeling semi-depressed until the end of the day.
Once I got prescribed lisdexamphetamine, my life turned around almost instantaneously. While it doesn‘t really get rid of my ADHD, it does help tremendously. The everlasting brainfog isn‘t as debilitating anymore. When I get excited about something I actually tend to follow through. I still battle with my obsessive tendencies — like getting stuck at setting up the perfect project tooling stack or spending way too much time on planning and research instead of just getting to work — but these are not so much related to ADHD.
On lisdexamphetamine, I am more social, my appetite is better, when I actually commit to something, I tend to stick to it for much longer, and I have also picked up a bunch of healthy habits. For example I exercise almost every day now.
If you someday get a chance to switch to lisdex, do it. It’s much smoother, longer-lasting, with fewer side effects. But honestly, anything is better than ritalin in my book.
> lisdexamfetamine.
It's not legal where I live also, I did try 2-FMA and it felt better in certain scenarios -- like following a hard course, but I also felt the tolerance ramps up much faster in releasers than re-uptake inhibitors so methylphenidate still is a wonderful tool.
Watching a good friend of mine struggle with this after diagnosis for a few years now and I feel this really captures the nuance and complexity of this struggle well. Stimulants are an incredible tool but also an incredibly imperfect one.
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Eh, for me the comment rings mostly true. It fixed my ADHD - I was incredibly more productive, present, and "on track" so to speak. I set goals for myself and achieved them (some for the first time) once I was treated.
That said, it completely destroyed my appetite. I picked up ciggies, too. It made me crave nicotine and caffeine. I started pulling all-nighters because I was so productive (or, so into whatever game I was playing.) I got cold sweats often and had some weird uh sexual health side effects. Develeoped a tolerance to 5-10mg very quickly, so went up to 15-20mg, which also felt weakened after a month or so.
So, wasn't lolng before I could tell this was not healthy. Felt like I was in overdrive mode - super mentally active, and productive, but running my body into the ground. I would never do it long-term.
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Is that based on a rigorous PhD level understanding of the neurobiology of the brain and the chemistry behind that particular medication, or just something you absorbed though popular culture, eg movies and Instagram reels?
An observation of how our body and machines in general behave under stress, and a skim of the wiki page for amphetamine.
It's a good thing that human bodies are not analogous to cars then. The research on these chemicals does not align with your metaphor.
i picked cars at random, it could be any machine. I picked overclocking computers as well, maybe that is easier for you to relate the concepts.
What are the "wear & tear" effects of using Adderall and its derivatives as prescribed for many years or decades?
I read champignons and it kind of fit even better. Adderall (Brave New World) and mushrooms (Island).
Soma in BNW is more analogous to MDMA as it's about sedated pleasure, not mental clarity/performance.
MDMA isn't sedated pleasure, it's very stimmy pleasure.
Kind of depends really. I’ve definitely had Molly trips that have been very oozy/cuddly/spacey.
I really prefer the term ‘ecstacy’ for mdma paired with a stimulant, even if it’s just caffeine - because that is a distinct experience.
I seem to think marijuana is more about sedated pleasure than MDMA. Granted, it's been about 30 years since I read Brave New World.
I agree, soma definitely parallels weed much more closely, but I don't think it's a perfect match. Huxley imagines a drug a bit more insidious, without obviously negative side effects, and with somewhat unrealistic(imo) intended effects.
Disagree. Weed is somewhat psychadelic ... and makes people enjoy the colors and not work so much. Soma made people numbless working with a feeling of glow. So I always understood it as antidepressant and moodlifter with some amphetamine compoments.
Weed isn't really psychedelic (it can be profound, and sometimes you'll get extra giggly...) but really it's more about being okay with the numbness.
It's also not really an antidepressant any more than it is an amphetamine (it's neither). Attempting to self-medicate in either direction is not beneficial, longer term.
If your marijuana usage carries you through such wide-ranging symptomology, that's on you homey [holds-back next pass to you]. It's okay to ask for help.
> Weed isn't really psychedelic
Depends on mind, use, dose. I've had THC trips that were almost as strong as concentrated mushrooms can deliver on an empty stomach, seeing shit that wasn't, patterns, my mind was light years away, reality twisted. Almost as strong.
Didn't dance as a mist of atoms to shamanic music without any connection to my real 5 senses, but then again I hardly met mushroom user who did achieve that themselves.
I agree with you that even higher doses of psilocybin (several grams) isn't that psychedelic (rather interconnected, e.g.)... I don't have enough experience with LSD to exclude its visuals capability, but even its quintessential acid visuals I rarely hear described [as such].
...unlike DMT (recommended) or Salvia (not recommended) or mescaline (neutral), which even at low dosages are strikingly visual. I have only met devils with the latter two. Ketamine isn't exactly visual, but its dreaminess is angelic.
.. and it is on you, if you misread. I believe my writing was clear.
(Antidepressant was about "Soma", the Huxley fantasy drug)
' " ` A soma in time saves nine ` " '
I'd say something with the intensity of weed (relatively low) along with the effects of MDMA. Essentially "MDMA lite"
Marijuana often seems to promote thinking "outside the box" which is probably not what the Brave New World people would want for their population
> Marijuana often seems to promote thinking "outside the box"
Hard disagree. Cannabis induces a sensation of profundity. It makes ordinary mundane thoughts feel insightful and novel. The ideas you have when on cannabis seem like insightful out of the box ideas, but that's a perceptual illusion created by the drug. The best it can do is provide you the encouragement to see ideas through to the end, but of course this is tempered by the way it generally has a negative effect on motivation, so most often users are left thinking of ideas they think are wonderful, but not actually executing on those ideas. End result is usually a couch potato lost in unproductive thoughts.
I think he was inspired by Valium and other benzos. They put people into a docile, low-anxiety state, and they were popular around the time the book was written.
That's also more-or-less consistent with the implied literary reference to the Lotus Eaters, who I think are usually imagined as opium users. Opioids are different but are also downers that reduce anxiety.
Benzos later featured significantly in one of Adam Curtis' film-essays -- maybe Century of the Self, maybe another one. I'd view those films as being in a similar spirit to Brave New World.
If we are talking about BNW, which was written in 1931, then that book predates benzodiazepines by 25 years or so. Perhaps you are thinking about barbiturates?
Oof! Thank you for the correction. I should have checked the publication date. I thought it was from the late '50s; I was wrong.
(By contrast, turns out 1984 -- which is always paired with BNW -- came out later than I thought, in '49. Yet BNW seemed more forward-looking. I always imagined it was written partially in response. It wasn't.)
There goes my benzo theory.
Though they remain what I imagine when I read about soma.
It is, you're right, and it's super weird what happens on the internet when you suggest weed isn't some gateway to enlightenment. I love cannabis, but it's a depressant that increases dopamine, it's not that complicated. Stoners on the internet sound exactly like alcoholics—they say it makes them more creative, helps them sleep, deal with anxiety too. We do such a shit job teaching about signs of psychological addiction.
It definitely doesn’t help sleep quality, but it could plausibly help with creativity in people who have the capacity to have good creative ideas. This is because it seems to produce a feeling that all (or at least more) of one’s ideas are good.
If someone has a problem with idea development because they decide early that the idea isn’t worth exploring, perhaps due to low self confidence in ideation etc, then simply producing the feeling of it being a good idea could help them go further than they would otherwise with it. Of course it also makes dumb ideas feel like good ideas too, so for someone who doesn’t have the capacity to have good creative ideas or who doesn’t have this problem in the first place, it probably won’t help.
It definitely helps sleep quality in some people.
I’ve read that it interferes with one or more sleep stages enough to make them ineffective. My understanding is that it may help someone fall asleep, but the actual sleep they get will definitely be worse. So for insomnia, where the alternative is just not sleeping at all, yes, but otherwise no, AFAIK.
Exactly. In addition to general insomnia, people who suffer from persistent nightmares due to PTSD or other reasons will sleep restfully.
And with nightmares I’m not referring to bad dreams in general, but to horrific nightmares where a person is re-experiencing their trauma in various ways, not necessarily remembering their dreams afterwards.
Imagine sleeping eight hours but waking up more tired than when you went to sleep and in full panic mode without even knowing why. After months and years, it gets pretty tiring.
Being able to not be afraid of going to sleep is a lifesaver and can keep those people functional in their lives.
The sedation is psychological - soma suppresses discomfort and boosts easy pleasure. It’s not introspective at all, which makes it much closer to MDMA than to cannabis.
mdma is pleasureful but extremely non-sedated
pure racemic MDMA has very little stimulant effect. street MDMA can feel stimulating because it is either intentionally mixed with caffeine/speed/meth or contains residual precursor from clandestine synthesis.
my major state was one of deep relaxation ... MDMA does not work like Dexedrine ... I feel totally peaceful.
- Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL
https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal109...
Shulgin used dozens (hundreds?) of these compounds. I do wonder if some of his better subjective observations might be due to simply relieving withdrawal symptoms.
Yeah, Shulgin is not really a reliable witness here. He's also a single anecdote.
that was certainly the story when I found opioids to be energizing
I meant the psychological role in the book - soma as a tool to melt away discomfort or disturbing feelings, not its literal pharmacology.
The street drug Ecstasy is MDMA usually mixed with speed. MDMA doesn't have a stimulating effect.
Isn't it more like morphine or another opiate?
Which "Island", is that a book?
Dune also predicted it. The spice must flow.
without spice the navigators I mean air traffic controller/spirit airlines pilots cannot function
Exactly. The spice lets the quant guild see into the future. This ability is so valuable it has earned them the patronage of House Goldman and House Blackrock.
Substituted amphetamines were already very popular in the 1950s.
Methamphetamine was invented in Germany in 1937 and the German military at the time was very quick to adopt its use.
Everybody who could afford it adopted psychostimulants in WW2. Go pills have been part and parcel since then. Some countries have adopted modafinil, but the US still uses amphetamine.
I am an adult with ADHD and have never been able to get past the side effects that I have to drugs such as amphetamines and SSRIs. I was prescribed Modafinil for a short period for "Shift Work Disorder" when I worked shift work as a Stationary Engineer and it was glorious in regard to my ADHD symptoms with effectively zero side effects. I wish the US would expand its usage.
Modafinil is only a Schedule IV controlled substance so it's usually possible to find a doctor who will prescribe off label if you want it. (This isn't medical advice.)
It’s also noted as an off label treatment for ADHD as well by some doctors.
Adrafinil is straight up unregulated in the US and is metabolized to modafinil in the body if you want to, you know, expand its usage personally.
Just a note for anyone passing by. The side effects are rare, except diarrhea and you need to watch your liver enzyme levels if I remember right. Everyone I know who's taken that had diarrhea the entire time (manageable with meds), and it will screw your liver long term.
But I'm not a doctor either so who knows really.
I think the GI effects are basically the same between any of the -afinils, FWIW.
I wouldn't recommend them in general, but mostly because they last too long to really work with a normal 16/8 sleep cycle and the other stimmy effects can detract from things other than focus work.
I never took any long-term, but I've actually napped (purposefully) the afternoon after taking one in the morning, which is impossible on amphetamines.
Which is to say, they seem better to me, but maybe long-term use is different.
I am not sure if that's still the case, but "go pills," Dexedrine, were certainly used in Afghanistan. Here was a horrible potential side-effect:
https://www.cbc.ca/news2/background/friendlyfire/gopills.htm...
> In 1919, the Japanese discovered a more potent version of the drug — methamphetamine. The new drug was a crystalline powder soluble in water. In this form, it can be smoked, injected, snorted or taken orally. Users get an intense but brief high when they inject or smoke the drug, but if it's snorted or taken orally by capsule, the high lasts longer.
There was also a drink with same name hiropon that was generally available for some time.
I tried googling for more info but I haven't been able to find much in English and my Japanese isn't good enough to read at that level. I've only heard about it from my wife and a few other people in Japan. I've seen a few old posters for it at old bars.
An army of tweakers. I don't think that this aspect of the War and the Holocaust are discussed enough. Certainly no excuse, but it is very interesting.
> Chronic Meth users have deficits in memory and executive functioning as well as higher rates of anxiety, depression, and most notably psychosis. [0]
In more recent times of horror:
> After the fall of the al-Assad regime in Syria, large stockpiles of the illicit drug captagon have reportedly been uncovered.
> The stockpiles, found by Syrian rebels, are believed to be linked to al-Assad military headquarters, implicating the fallen regime in the drug’s manufacture and distribution. [1]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3764482/
[1] https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-drug-captagon-and-ho...
There were also reports about widespread use of captagon during the attacks of October 7th 2023.
I had not heard that, but I can believe it.
Im sure eventually whatever pills the Germans were taking back then were bad for you but I would imagine smoking huge doses of not so pure street meth is quite a bit different than something created in a lab.
That being said if anyone uses drugs to avoid sleeping for many days straight I would imagine it's quite horrible for your mental health
Considering the soldiers were already extremely high risk for lead poisoning, might have been low on the list of concerns.
So…not that different.
Highly recommend the book "Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich" by Norman Ohler, a podcast promo led me to get the book from the library and I really liked it!
Yep. There’s a video of Adolf rocking back and forth looking like he was tweaking
Adderall is just regular amphetamine, not even a substituted amphetamine.
It's a mix of 4 different amphetamines
Two, but those are just the enantiomers dextroamphetamine and levoamphetamine. Neither has any atoms extra or missing. It looks like four amphetamines because those two cationic isomers are in salts with two different anions.
Each enantiomer exhibits different effects so I don't know if that is relevant. (Even if you count dextroamphetamine sulfate and amphetamine sulfate as one, I'd still probably call it 3 because dextroamphetamine saccharate and amphetamine asparate monohydrate (the other two parts of adderall) do indeed have different forumlas).
If you synthesize amphetamine through the usual pathways, as I understand it, you get a racemic mixture, which is what is normally meant by unqualified "amphetamine", and is very close to Adderall. It's true that levoamphetamine is not really active at all in this context.
As I understand it, the aspartate and saccharate still dissociate in solution. If so, there isn't much of a plausible reason to consider them different drugs. If not, they might act more slowly or not at all.
None of this puts Adderall in the class of substituted amphetamines like MDMA or Desoxyn or exotics like ALEPH: https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal003...
And had been researched treat symptoms of depression and what would eventually be called ADHD in the 1930's.
Benzedrine (an amphetamine inhaler) was the first antidepressant marketed (although at the time I believe they used the term "psychic energizer" for antidepressants)
... and I didn't know about them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substituted_amphetamine
The most famous in that family seems to be meth(amphetamine)
You've probably also heard of 3,4-Methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, though its abbreviated name (MDMA) is likely more familiar.
It's a huuuuuge family of substances though, particularly if you go one step more generic and start with Phenylethylamine as the backbone (amphetamine is a shortening of alpha-methyl-phenethylamine), the family includes hallucinogens like mescaline, empathogens like MDMA and its close cousins, the whole 2C family, the cathinones and their derivatives ('mephedrone' had a cultural moment 10-15 years back). And some real nasties like PMA, PMMA and bromo-Dragonfly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substituted_phenethylamine
Interesting, I didn't know they were cousins !
There's a schizophrenic vandal here in Austin that spray paints SOMA© all up and down Riverside Drive.
Why does a space engineering lecturer believe he has novel thoughts on ADHD treatment inspired by an author from a medical era he didn’t bother to do cursory research of?
Why does person with $job_title feel like they can write with authority on $subject_not_related_to_job_title?
Is that your question?
No, my question is why someone with a job unrelated to subject didn’t bother to do enough research to find out something as simple as the fact that amphetamines were already used to boost productivity in Huxley’s era before writing as if he had some authority on the subject.
One would think that if you are not an authority in a subject you want to write on, you should do at least the equivalent of a child’s book report research before espousing your opinion and immediately looking like an ass.
"predicts" must be a variant of standard english which projects the past tense into the present tense because .. reasons?
He predicted. Absent an Ouija board, he isn't predicting any more.
> "predicts" must be a variant of standard english which projects the past tense into the present tense because .. reasons?
Literary criticism and philosophy cast actions in and from recorded media in the "eternal present" (a term of art that should yield search results).
So, if Huxley (contemporary tense) wrote about a drug that resembles Adderall then a sentence cast in the eternal present would express "Huxley _writes_ about Soma in Brave New World which…".
I think this may ultimately be a cultural issue. American documentary style of presentation increasingly uses the present tense to describe things in the past.
I am more used to historians with horn rimmed glasses and badly fitting tweed jackets talking in the past tense about past times so when they reflect on it's impact in the present time they can use present tense about past acts correctly.
"German Troops conduct a false flag against Poland as a result of which the British issue a final demand, the echoes of which continue to the present day" is really not better than "The German troops conducted a false flag against Poland as a result of which the British issued a final demand, the echoes of which continue to the present day" when it comes down to it.
And it leads to awkward sentences like "At the time, FDR believes that he can keep the war away from America, but Japan attacks pearl harbour and he has no choice but to declare war" when the use of "Believed" and "could" and "attacked" and "had" make it clear we, the owners of backwards looking syntax and historical documents, realise this all happened a very long time ago and can keep a hold of the sequencing.
I must say matches on "the eternal present" are a giant bag of mystical wank, no disrespect to yourself intended. Perhaps you get better responses than I do but my top returns were flooded with mindfulness and cod philosophy and christianity.
> I must say matches on "the eternal present" are a giant bag of mystical wank, no disrespect to yourself intended.
Yeah, I searched _after_ I commented.
Here's what kagi yielded for `literary eternal present` [0]
> Literary works, paintings, films, and other artistic creations are assumed to exist in an eternal present. Therefore, when you write about writers or artists as they express themselves in their work, use the present tense.
(Disclosure: I am trained as a scholar of language and literature.)
[0] https://www.vanderbilt.edu/writing/resources/handouts/how-an...
The title is missing context, the full sentence would be "In his final speech, Huxley predicts Adderall". The context anchors the time frame, so "predicts" is present tense at the time of the speech.
"In his 2006 paper, Roubini sees an upcoming global financial crisis"
Journalists love to do things like this - cut out the context - as it makes the headlines seem more vivid, immediate and often alarming.
"Roubini sees an upcoming global financial crisis"
Shakspear writes his next big drama.
Germany invades Poland on trumped-up pretext.
Shock murder in Roman forum. Details to follow.
And even "predicted" isn't right, as amphetamines were already in decently-wide use by the 1950s.
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This article (and the title alone) is harmful. Adderall is not about increasing mental efficiency.
What Adderall is about is:
- helping with executive dysfunction for people who suffer from it.
- allowing people with ADHD like me to function. To do the things that everyone else does, things that we want to do and need to do, but can't do because of the way our brains are wired.
- increasing the lifespan of ADHD people who don't get help. Women with ADHD die about 9 years younger than those without ADHD [1].
- making our lives less painful, since every small task incurs pain, resulting in 3x depression rates [2] and alarmingly high suicidal ideation rates (50% of ADHD adults [3]).
Please, please, educate yourself about ADHD and medication for it before writing something like this title.
No, Aldous Huxley didn't. "predict" Adderall.
To understand more, I've put together a resource which, I hope, will be easy enough to digest. Here's my experience of getting prescribed Adderall for my ADHD:
https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Medication
If I have attention deficit and I could write it, I hope you (and the author of the text we're discussing) could spare some attention to it before talking about Adderall, amphetamines, and other stimulants prescribed for ADHD.
Thank you in advance.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/23/nx...
[2] https://add.org/adhd-and-depression/
[3] https://crownviewpsych.com/blog/adhd-increased-risk-suicide-...
It's long, but I listened to this podcast a while back with Peter Attia and Trenna Sutcliffe discussing Autism, ADHD, and Anxiety, and found that it really reduced the stigma I associated with medication for treatment of ADHD. In particular, understanding the risks of not effectively treating ADHD, in comparison with with the potential risks/benefits of the medication. That's not to say that we should only rely on medication - behavioral therapy (with parents involved too) should also play a part.
https://peterattiamd.com/trennasutcliffe/
You could draw a parallel with GLP-1 agonists: people like to grandstand about how you shouldn't need it and how it's somehow cheating. As if it's not addressing a condition that people are suffering from right now, today.
The stigma also seems to accidentally admit that things like executive function and food noise aren't equally distributed, thus some people could benefit from intervention.
For example, if you've never been fat or you never binge eat or you've never procrastinated 15min of homework until 2am despite, then you're missing the irony when your solution for people who deal with these things is to try harder and to jump through hoops that you don't need to.
This is an excellent parallel.
Behavioral therapy is only needed to make people feel better about taking amphetamines. It takes only a very cursory review of published reputable papers to realize there's nothing behavioral therapy can do to improve ADHD because as Russell Barkley says ADHD is a disability of doing, not knowing what to do.
If medication alone has worked for you, that's great! But I don't think your opinion matches the medical consensus.
> For children with ADHD younger than 6 years of age, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends parent training in behavior management as the first line of treatment, before medication is tried.
> For children 6 years of age and older, the recommendations include medication and behavior therapy together—parent training in behavior management for children up to age 12 and other types of behavior therapy and training for adolescents. Schools can be part of the treatment as well. AAP recommendations also include adding behavioral classroom intervention and school supports. [1]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/adhd/treatment/index.html
This makes sense for very young children, for various reasons, mainly that it’s hard or impossible to diagnose ADHD with reliability at such a young age, and because medication is hard to dose properly to a rapidly growing child. But these recommendations are honestly more about helping the parents cope than about treating the child’s ADHD. Behavioral therapy is more about learning how to fit in than addressing the actual problems (which are often exacerbated by the inevitable failure of such behavioral treatment and its corresponding expectations in folks with genuine ADHD).
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Not true.
CBT works pretty well for adhd, studies are clear on this.
But medication seems even better, as does a combination of therapy and medication.
ADHD isn't unusual as far as the effectiveness of therapy, it's unusual in how well the medication is proven to work.
CBT is effective in treating people whose problems mostly stem from an inaccurate view of themselves or the world around them, because CBT is training people to take a step back and reassess what they're seeing. If you're suffering from some forms of OCD for example it can be incredibly effective, it helps to reframe things.
It is not effective, and I would argue actively worsens, situations where you're feeling bad about your accurate view of things, such as when you're depressed because you're unable to ever get any of the things you need to do done despite knowing they need to be done. CBT is unable to help in that situation because most people can't simply go "oh, well its ok, its a mental health condition" - employer, while sometimes supportive, aren't going to continue employing someone who doesn't do the work they're being paid for, and reframing that would eventually result in losing their job.
Here's part of a meta analysis.
> Using a random effects model, we found that CBTs had medium-to-large effects from pre- to posttreatment (self-reported ADHD symptoms: g = 1.00; 95% confidence interval [CI: 0.84, 1.16]; self-reported functioning g = .73; 95% CI [0.46, 1.00]) and small-to-medium effects versus control (g = .65; 95% CI [0.44, 0.86] for symptoms, .51; 95% CI [0.23, 0.79] for functioning). Effect sizes were heterogeneous for most outcome measures. Studies with active control groups showed smaller effect sizes. Neither participant medication status nor treatment format moderated pre-to-post treatment effects, and longer treatments were not associated with better outcomes. Conclusions: Current CBTs for adult ADHD show comparable effect sizes to behavioral treatments for children with ADHD, which are considered well-established treatments. Future treatment development could focus on identifying empirically supported principles of treatment-related change for adults with ADHD. We encourage researchers to report future findings in a way that is amenable to meta-analytic review.
Yeah, it's better at making people feel better. Not great but certainly OK at improving behaviour.
As I said, the evidence seems to suggest medication is extremely effective which is I guess is why people are quoting the first thing I wrote and acting like they disagree with me (they get mad for suggesting that CBT works a bit because they feel judged for using the arguably superior treatment?).
CBT is a TSA analogue for therapists.
> CBT works pretty well for adhd.
I want to share my counter example -- no amount of therapy could help me not almost loose it every time I drove my daughter in heavy traffic or deal with her just being a toddler.
But after 2 weeks being on concerta made lasting changes even months off the drug.
It was the best type o therapy -- you just do the thing that triggers you minus the bad part and learn it's not so bad and you can do it, it has profound implications.
Can we chat? You struck a chord with me.
> CBT works pretty well for adhd
No, it doesn't. It _barely_ works and mostly consists of teaching people some coping mechanisms. Medication works _much_ better, especially when using in addition to the CBT.
Therapy, and most of all, understanding how our brains work make all the difference in the world.
It's like realizing that the reason you've been getting stuck in the mud is not that you're a bad driver.
It's just that people who don't are driving 4x4 trucks, and you've had a Nissan Z series sports car.
Turns out, farms and off-road are simply not the right environment for your vehicle, and when that environment has some accomodations, like the paved surface of a highway or a race track, you're literally running circles around people in the most common vehicles.
One profound effect of taking Adderall was feeling the clarity to understand that difference, and seeing the road instead of the endless mud fields in front of me.
It does help to get things done, but around 30% of ADHD'ers aren't responsive to it.
Understanding that you're getting stuck because your brain wasn't meant for that kind of driving, however, is universally useful.
That's why I made that ADHD wiki [1], and keep posting links to it.
It's an compilation of information that has helped me tremendously to understand the above; and I know this resource was helpful to others too in their journeys.
My perspective is that of a late-diagnosed adult who's been completely unaware of what ADHD is, and thought that they can't possibly have an attention deficit because to get anything done, they have to hyperfocus on it.
Again, learning that hyperfocus is a symptom of ADHD and understanding how it works)l had a profound impact. And medication helped with that too: it's easier to not get stuck hyperfocused on the wrong thing with Adderall.
Getting Adderall was like spraying WD-40 into rusty steering components. The immediate effect is that I can go where I want to go to, not the random direction my vehicle happens to face.
The long-term effect though was understanding what makes it difficult to steer, and how to maintain it better.
And even if I don't have power steering all the time like everyone else, I'm still better off with that experience.
My point here that it's never about medication VERSUS therapy and knowledge.
Medication is not an alternative, it's a BOOSTER.
When it works, it's just dropping the difficulty from Nightmare to Medium/Hard. It doesn't play the game for you.
The said, I'm very much happy the Nightmare mode days are behind me, and I'm very sad that the only reason I've been living my life that way is stigma and lack of information.
When I took Adderall, I unexpectedly had to grieve the future I'll never get to have after being held back by all the pain I've been needlessly subjected to over the preceding three decades.
That grief, too, is a common experience in ADHD late-diagnosed adults.
Thank you for sharing that link, and contributing to the discussion and awareness <3
[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd
I'm sorry but therapy does NOTHING for ADHD. I wish it did, it would be very useful to me, but it's just not the case.
In your personal experience, therapy did nothing for your ADHD. That doesn't mean it is universally unhelpful.
While it is true that therapy is not a replacement for how stimulants reinforce executive function, therapy can help folks with ADHD understand their behavior patterns and better manage some of the challenges that go along with the disorder.
In my experience, therapy helped me get over my lifetime guilt around my lack of achievements, better understanding my triggers, and prioritizing self care. I couldn't have gotten through COVID lockdown with my wife and two kids in our tiny house without it.
There may be multiple types of “therapy” being mixed up here. I think it’s important to accept that therapy is never going to “fix” the differences in brain function that folks with ADHD experience. Any attempt at behavioral therapy to “fix” an ADHD brain will fail.
But talk therapy can help some folks come to accept the differences that their ADHD means in terms of how to relate to other people or to better understand why how ADHD impacts their own behavior and self-perception.
I myself have found it’s much easier and happier to shape my life around my particular ADHD than trying to change my behavior (something that’s destined to fail and only compound the negative emotions associated with ADHD).
I'm sorry that has been your experience, but I have had very different experiences - I'd encourage you to give it another shot, there is a lot left on the table for you
I felt that it was useless too.. You’re probably better off reading Getting Things Done.
The only things I’ve foung that actually works, is a daily combo of Vyvanse and dexis
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> I'm sorry but therapy does NOTHING for ADHD. I wish it did, it would be very useful to me, but it's just not the case.
The therapist that worked for me practiced ACT, and was more close to coaching when it came to ADHD.
Therapists are living databases of solutions to certain kinds of problems that people have.
Problems caused by ADHD certainly belong to that category, and if your therapist is specializing in that area, they can save you a lot of time and effort by suggesting approaches that you'd otherwise have to figure out on your own.
Finding such a therapist is, unfortunately, a bit like winning a lottery that most people in the US wouldn't have the resources to play.
Yes, that image is so funny, because it really is the difference between me being able to make a meal for myself vs needing something immediate.
It also helped do wonders for my anxiety, which I previously treated with sertaline.
I'm not the hyperactive sort of individual who has ADHD so I didn't get diagnosed until late in life, around a year or so ago, I'm just the "Inattentive" type.
But finally I can take my meds, and do things that other people do without feeling like it's mental torture. And I can also remember to do important things, like my taxes, on time!
It's so weird comparing my days on it to off it, when I happen to run out. I start getting a backlog of little things that my brain decided it couldn't take one minute to knock out.
I could second every word of what you just said (as you already know after reading that page, of course).
Just wanted to reiterate it for anyone who's reading this thread.
The author of this piece—which I am—is reporting on Huxley’s MIT talk. He predicted a drug that improves mental efficiency/focus. And the talk discusses alternative non-pharmacological approaches.
You are welcome to either actually read my piece or, better, listen to his talk. There is no judgment against the substance but a call for additional approaches to enhance a person.
You are contributing to the stigma associated with ADHD medication, and you should feel bad about that.
I read your piece. Your title is clickbait, and you know it.
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Amazing website.
One thing I noticed is that while I hate being told what to do, and my partner hates being told what to do, and we understand deeply how we feel when someone tells us what to do, we still tell each other what to do (which goes especially badly after a long day).
Edit: I am glad you wrote this, so I didn't have to. It feels like reading my own autobiography. But the problem with reading about this stuff is that, if you forget for a minute that it's literally just how life is for you, it reads like some fantastical fiction comedy. I avoid telling anyone I deal with that I have ADHD because I feel like if I tell them they'll lump me in with some crappy mental model, and I avoid telling anyone I deal with about these problems because they sound completely absurd.
Thanks for this comment! You describe a very relatable situation :)
> I am glad you wrote this, so I didn't have to.
My hope was that this website would fulfill this goal, and I'm very glad you think so <3
Exactly.
Adderall has no positive relationship to my mental efficiency. It can in fact be a negative once your passed the 8 hour windows where its still in your system.
At the end of the day, it makes it easier to not bounce between different things. It doesn't help me be smarter. It helps me drive to work without needing to listen to music and be on my phone.
Modafinil... maybe.
Thank you for writing this. There are so many misconceptions about what ADHD is and how it’s treatments work.
Thanks for this comment! Makes it so worthwhile to write <3
The title is perhaps a bit unfortunate. I don't believe this is specifically about ADHD. Adderall is a stimulant with the effects Huxley predicted. It also happens to treat ADHD. I believe it's being used here in the former capacity.
The thing is, when you have ADHD and you take stimulants you don't feel any sort of high or however it makes people with normally functioning dopamine receptors feel, you just feel normal.
Oh, I still feel a bit high. Particularly when I start taking them after a hiatus. Or up the dose.
Anyway, here's what Huxley's had to say:
> ... I have talked to pharmacologists about this matter, and a number of them say that it’s probably quite possible that it may be possible to, by pharmacological means, which will do no harm to the organism as a whole, to increase the span of attention, to increase the powers of concentration, perhaps to cut down on the necessity for sleep, and the various other things which may lead to a very considerable increase in general mental efficiency.
No high mentioned. Remarkably accurate to my experience.
Interesting if that it works for you that way.
"Upping the dose" of Adderall makes me sleepy. In fact, I take a little before going to bed if I'm feeling restless. Midnight coffee is a thing for me.
I don't have a problem with attention span (ADHD isn't about short attention spans, after all), and stimulants do nothing for that.
Power of concentration? That's where ADHD people excel when that hyperfocus locks in. That's the default, unmedicated. The problem is the lack of control over where that concentration goes.
As you can see, I've been concentrating well enough on writing long enough comments in this thread to exceed the attention span of some of the commentors who respond to them (including, sadly, the author of the article we're discussing, who, while being kind enough to join this discussion, has nevertheless glossed over the points I've made that others haven't missed).
What I should have been concentrating on is sorting out the stuff in the garage from our recent camping trip.
This is what Adderall helps with. It's starting to kick in, so I'll go and do the adulting things it makes far less painful to start doing .
Wouldn't call it an increase in mental efficiency by any measure, but insofar as my spouse is concerned, it gets me off the couch; and insofar as the to-do list is concerned, I'm more productive in ticking off the boxes.
But the items on that list are far from requiring leaps in mental effort. It's things like folding the laundry, or unpacking suitcases, paying bills, making calls to insurance, mopping the floor, doing the oil change, and so on.
In short, Adderall doesn't work like Mentats from Fallout 1/2¹.
But it greatly increases the number of action points I have for Doing Things, while I feel... normal.
That is the much more common experience, and the reason it's prescribed for ADHD.
____
¹ https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Mentats_(Fallout)
Oh, I get both for sure. Roughly 15 minutes of speedy-go-fast, then I get sleepy (but not tired) an hour later, the ability to focus throughout lasting roughly 3-4hrs. Coffee does the same thing, but with a lot more sleepy (kinda tired) and less focus. I should mention I'm on Ritalin, which may explain the speedy-go-fast.
The main effect for me is a decrease in inexplicable mental barriers. Things that were hard suddenly aren't. Same brain, different output. I dunno man, I call that an increase in mental efficiency.
I love the action point metaphor. Much better than the spoons I've heard before.
How do you differentiate attention span and concentration?
Is this confirmed? Source? I've always heard this, anecdotally, but I'm skeptical of the claim. I have every ADHD symptom, and have received 3 seperate diagnoses for it.. But Aderrall straight up felt like a drug - I could literally feel the dopamine release from just doing mundane things. Is the implication that I just didn't have ADHD?
"Dopamine release from just doing mundane things" is absolutely normal, more so after a lifetime of not being able to simply Do The Thing™.
One is supposed to feel good doing "normal" things. Completing tasks should feel good.
There can be many variables at play: maybe your dosage could be lowered, maybe Adderall isn't ideal for you, or maybe you're simply adjusting to the medication the first few times you take it, and it won't feel the way afterwards.
But most importantly: yes, you're absolutely going to feel like you've got a superpower the first time you take it. The euphoria you feel from being able to simply do things the way neurotypical people can just get up and do them is very much a part of the ADHD experience.
Also, neurotypical people don't do mundane things on Adderall. That's not what makes them feel particularly good. Because for them, doing things without friction and climbing the mental wall first is the normal experience.
They don't feel happiness experiencing it for the first time in their lives when they take Adderall. They've had that ability all along.
TL; DR: you feel that dopamine release from doing mundane things on Adderall because you have ADHD.
Yes, that actually makes perfect sense :) I suppose it was just a bit stronger than I imagined. I know that chemically, it's analogous, but it felt like MDMA.
That’s just a myth. Studies show that the drugs increase focus in everyone regardless of disease state. Surveys show that people with adhd take higher doses to get high as well.
I'm referring to the prescribed doses. I never intentionally tried to take a higher dose to "get high" , so I wouldn't know about that. But my point is non-adhd people who take normal doses prescribed for ADHD people likely feel something that ADHD people do not. The prescribed doses don't get us high.
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>Adderall is a stimulant with the effects Huxley predicted.
That's exactly my point: it is NOT.
Not for the people Adderall is prescribed to and was developed for.
See: https://romankogan.net/adhd#Medication
>I don't believe this is specifically about ADHD.
There's nothing to believe in here.
Adderall is a drug that's specifically about ADHD. It's a stimulant that helps people with ADHD overcome executive dysfunction:
https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Executive%20Dysfunction
You can't talk about Adderall without talking about ADHD just like you can't talk about allergy pills without talking about allergies, or talk about eyeglasses without talking about myopia.
> It also happens to treat ADHD
NO. Please reconsider sharing this sentiment.
Adderall is a drug for treating ADHD that also happens to be abused by people thinking it'll have the "effects Huxley predicted" (enhancing thinking efficiency).
It does not; that's the reason why it's a controlled substance. When abused, it will wreck your brain.
As an analogy: glasses make people with myopia see better, but wearing glasses without prescription is a very bad idea.
>I believe it's being used here in the former capacity.
I understand this, and it's a misconception I'm trying to dispel.
With evidence and scientific understanding, mind you, and not just with vibes about thinking what Adderall is.
Speaking of which, I forgot to take it, which means I'm about to have my breakfast at 5PM because I couldn't bring myself to do the eating task earlier.
This is what Adderall is for.
>The title is perhaps a bit unfortunate.
The title is repeated verbatim in the article, whose author has kindly replied in this thread and re-stated it twice (as did you), as if I weren't directly addressing the fallacious point that the author employed to attract attention to Huxley's lecture (which doesn't need such advertising in the first place).
It's not the title that's a bit unfortunate.
It's the mention of Adderall, and the myth that it's a "brain-enhancing" drug.
If it were, it'd be given to everyone already, and perhaps there'd be fewer people spreading vibe-based falsities in post titles, but I digress.
The point is:
==============
Adderall does NOT enhance mental efficiency, as Huxley's fantasized drug would.
Adderall HELPS people with ADHD overcome EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION.
That's what it's for. That's what it DOES.
If you take it for ANYTHING ELSE, you will NOT get the intended result, and you will likely FUCK YOURSELF UP.
Spreading the MISCONCEPTION that Adderall is a "brain-enhancing” drug (as the author opined in the comments here) drives the ABUSE of this medication, which HARMS people and makes ADHD harder to obtain for people who NEED it to function.
========
I hope I've succeeded in bringing your attention to this issue.
If this hasn't changed your point of view, please let me know what else I can elaborate on.
Thank you <3
> You can't talk about Adderall without talking about ADHD...
Huxley never mentions Adderall, and neither Huxley nor the article mention ADHD.
I'm not trying to argue with your points about how Adderall relates to ADHD. I agree! I empathize!
I'm arguing that this is not about how Adderall relates to ADHD. I don't think our experience is the intended context.
The talk is mostly about tailoring learning to the individual. I think you'd find it's points quite agreeable!
> you will likely FUCK YOURSELF UP.
To be fair, there's evidence it does the same to us.
> I'm arguing that this is not about how Adderall relates to ADHD. I don't think our experience is the intended context.
Then whose experience is the "intended" context?
> To be fair, there's evidence it does the same to us.
Same for every prescription medication out there.
This is why they require a prescription.
This is why spreading the idea that Adderall is a pill that will boost your "mental efficiency" WITHOUT ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES, as Huxley said in his talk, is harmful and dangerous.
Adderall is very much known to not be that kind of stimulant.
Of course, same applies for e.g. nicotine. But we also know the outcome of nicotine being touted as a consequence-free stimulant.
The fact that one is widely available to anyone over 18 no questions asked, while the other requires a thousand hoops and a costly diagnosis is, of course, a bizarre travesty...
...which is only exacerbated by people promoting the abuse of this medication, as the author of the piece does (by saying that it is anywhere close to Huxley's utopian drug at population scale).
> was developed for.
For… weight loss? Adderall was developed as a diet pill. It was never modified in any way to better suit ADHD treatment.
Figuring out what the drug is actually effective for, doing the lab trials, getting the FDA approval, etc is all part of R&D in the pharmaceutical industry.
A rather costly part, at that.
There's a heckton of it that needs to be done before doctors can prescribe drug X for condition Y.
Adderall was developed for helping ADHD folks, not for helping everyone else get a boost of "mental efficiency" (and particularly, without adverse consequences).
Not in the least because it doesn't do that.
Adderall was definitely developed as a diet pill, the decision to seek approval for use as ADHD medication happened decades later when stimulants were already a widely accepted treatment.
Yes, there’s certainly research involved in getting an existing drug approved for a new condition. That’s not development.
> not for helping everyone else get a boost of "mental efficiency" (and particularly, without adverse consequences).
While that’s not what Adderall was recently approved for, that and dieting were the primary purposes driving stimulant development (and also the development of Adderall/Obetrol specifically).
The suggestion that Adderall would only benefit folks with ADHD diagnoses is also fundamentally weird, given that ADHD is not a specific identifiable condition. We can’t scan a brain and identify whether or not that brain belongs to an individual with ADHD, so an ADHD diagnosis is necessarily subjective and not objective.
you can take what’s called a QB test. That’s an objective and empirical computer driven measurement of a person’s ability to focus and how much they fidget. So you can measure how much inattentivity and hyperactivity someone has as separate dimensions.
You absolutely can, but the problem is that you can’t know if those metrics are really caused by “ADHD” or one of many other possible causes.
The whole idea here is that current evidence suggests that we are almost certainly currently filing a variety of disparate conditions under “ADHD” because we have no good way to determine what “ADHD” actually is.
>Yes, there’s certainly research involved in getting an existing drug approved for a new condition. That’s not development.
OK, I concede that point then. That's the information I intended to communicate.
>The suggestion that Adderall would only benefit folks with ADHD diagnoses is also fundamentally weird
Sure, let me rephrase.
There is, as we both agree, research performed to establish that Adderall is something that can help with ADHD symptoms (...and obesity).
There's plentiful data that demonstrates its effectiveness for some people with ADHD in that regard. And appetite loss is a well-known effect.
But there's no research done to establish that Adderall would work the way Huxley describes the hypothetical drug: giving anyone a boost in "mental efficiency", without adverse consequences to health otherwise.
To the contrary, we have extensive data and research that demonstrates Adderall doesn't work that way.
Particularly, for folks without ADHD, mental efficiency is likely to decrease when they take Adderall [1].
It gives them the feeling of being productive, though...
...which only exacerbates the problem.
Quote [2]:
What Adderall clearly does extremely well is make people think they are doing better — and to feel good while they’re doing it. “Adderall might not be a cognitive enhancement drug, but a ‘drive’ drug,” says Anjan Chatterjee, a professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Farah explains, “[Stimulants] make boring work seem more interesting, so they increase your motivation to work, energy for work, and that’s not nothing — that’s really helpful . . . Unfortunately, it also gets into the realm of feel-good drugs, and that means the risk of dependence is quite high.” Yet when I ask Farah exactly how addictive Adderall and other stimulant medications are, she tells me that there is currently no good answer. “Nobody has really looked at these drugs used as work enhancers and what the dependence risk there is,” she said.
"Nobody has really looked at these drugs used as work enhancers" is what I intended to communicate when I said that "this is not what Adderall was developed for".
When somebody did look (the study [1] came out years later), they found that a drug that wasn't for improving mental efficiency does not, in fact, improve mental efficiency.
The mistaken belief that Adderall is akin to Huxley's fantasy pill, which the author of the article perpetuates, is harming everyone.
As I said before, Adderall is for treating executive dysfunction: not being able to do things which you can do, should do, want to do, have the time and resources to do, but can't start doing because Brain Says No.
Adderall won't make anyone smarter. It'll make stupid people be stupid faster and with more enthusiasm.
That's not what Huxley talked about.
The headline, put simply, is a dangerous lie.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adderall-ritalin-adhd-decreases...
[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/caseyschwartzauthor/add...
I think we broadly agree, Adderall does not make anyone smarter.
I would hazard to suggest that it can make many people much more productive though. This topic has been studied extensively since before anyone cared about ADHD, and the answer is broadly “yes, for some tasks”.
> Nobody has really looked at these drugs used as work enhancers
I would strongly disagree with this bit, this was one of the primary purposes people have studied stimulants for. They’ve been successfully used for this in the past and continue to be used anriun the world, especially by various militaries.
Anyway, unfortunately I can’t comment here on personal experience given that I have been twice diagnosed and once undiagnosed with ADHD. Adderall makes me more productive and more prone to tunnel vision, but certainly not smarter.
The historical and continued use by various militaries of stimulants seems to suggest that at least many very highly motivated big spenders seem to expect the same to apply to the general population.
>I would hazard to suggest that it can make many people much more productive though
That suggestion is disproved by the research I linked, particularly when it comes to mental tasks.
>the answer is broadly “yes, for some tasks
For mindless tasks, like long-haul driving, where staying awake is pretty much all that's required ? Sure.
Anything else, citation needed.
>The historical and continued use by various militaries of stimulants seems to suggest that at least many very highly motivated big spenders seem to expect the same to apply to the general population.
Military use is more commonly to increase stamina (e.g. for pilots on 48 hour bombing missions), not efficiency.
And military scenarios simply don't transfer to civilian life.
Staying awake without sleep when you're a bomber pilot is a matter of life and death, so adverse health consequences and even decrease in mental capacity can be tolerated, because being dumb and awake is better than being smart and asleep in that context.
...to an extent. Until you end up shooting some Canadians dead [1].
Which is why the "historical" use by militaries is not continuous. It's been abandoned by militaries that tried it; particularly by the USAF after that incident.
As for use by the military in general, note that the average lifespan of a Russian soldier on the front line in the Ukraine war is measured in hours[2].
That's a very different context than anyone talking here is facing. And one where the ability to stay alert matters more than anything else.
That doesn't translate to efficient or productive in any normal sense. A solider is waiting most of the time. Then something happens, fast. Any delay in reaction, and you're dead.
We can discuss the effectiveness of amphetamines in such scenarios, but that has nothing to do with Huxley's description (or productivity, efficiency, etc).
As I said in my top comment: Adderall is for helping people act without delay. This translates well to military use.
Sometimes.
A delay would've saved those Canadians.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/04/afghanistan.ri...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/average-life-expectancy-front-lin...
> For mindless tasks, like long-haul driving, where staying awake is pretty much all that's required ? Sure
This currently describes most tasks humans do.
I certainly won’t go and suggest that taking stimulants for long-haul driving is a good idea, unless of course you’re in a war zone and lives depend on it. But stimulants do improve performance in these tasks for the vast majority of people. While the side effects probably aren’t worth it for the society as a whole, they probably are on an individual level for e.g. a cab driver who is able to work more hours and pay his rent. That’s of course not a desirable state of affairs, but it is real.
A software developer grinding out a boring project could also greatly benefit, while being much less risky than the cabbie on stimulants.
In the end I believe there are many people without ADHD living in situations where Adderall could meaningfully improve their lives, making it easier to grind through hours of mindless work. Someone living paycheck to paycheck could pick up a few extra hours and significantly improve their financial situation and overall wellbeing.
Should anyone take Adderall in the hopes that it’ll make them smarter? No.
Fully agreeing with everything you said here.
Nothing to add, except dreaming of a utopian society where the grind wouldn't exist.
Paul Erdős Proves you wrong.
>Paul Erdős Proves you wrong.
In which way specifically?
I.e., what do you think is wrong in what I said, and how does Paul Erdos demonstrate it's wrong.
Adderall also treats excessive daytime sleepiness associated with narcolepsy and I'd be a shambolic zombie without it. It's downright insulting when people think pharmaceuticals are some kind of shortcut to avoid some more disciplined approach. It's medicine to treat illness. Any medicine can be abused or misused but some of us just really need it to correct dysfunction.
Thanks for the comment, and pointing this out!
>It's downright insulting when people think pharmaceuticals are some kind of shortcut to avoid some more disciplined approach.
That's the exact problem I have with the article and the title.
Nobody is talking about "championing alternatives" to antihistamines, the way this author (not Huxley! The title is misleading) talks about Adderall.
Here here. I also have ADHD though I couldn’t use stimulant medications due to bad reactions to it, but I’ve had success with non-stimulant medications (Straterra aka atomoxetine [1]).
A big thing I struggled with prior to medical treatment that I don’t often hear discussed about ADHd was rejection sensitivity.
For those unfamiliar: imagine a time someone said something that hurt your feelings or caused a strong emotional reaction.
Now imagine that as a routine emotional response to day to day interactions. Feeling intensely sad, irritated, insulted, etc. to extents completely o it of proportion to whatever was said or even implied.
It’s brutal. It contributes to a lot of depression and social anxiety for folks with ADHD. It doesn’t matter if you’re aware of the response being disproportionate—you get to go on that emotional roller coaster whenever somebody says they don’t care for your favorite food, accidentally cut you off in a conversation, or the day just turns out differently than you were expecting.
Medical treatment makes a huge difference—in my particular case the difference between feeling like I had the emotional regulation of a toddler and not needing to constantly question every emotion I felt prior to responding to things I was reacting to.
Stimulant medications didn’t work for me, but they do this for most people with ADHD (more effectively, too!) and like alterom it saddens me whenever FUD like this crops up.
Thanks for writing this comment and raising awareness!
Rejection sensitivity is neurodivergent trait that's not exclusive to ADHD, but the way it manifests with ADHD can be truly life-derailing.
Learning about it helped me a lot to deal with it (in particular, externalizing that emotion as a trait and not what me is).
I wrote about it too in that wiki. Here's my experience with rejection sensitivity in the ADHD context:
https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Rejection%20Sensitivity
Rejection sensitivity may be the reason I detest to-do lists. The lists inevitably languish and slowly turn into a perpetual reminder of who I haven't become, i.e. a rejection from past-me.
.
Thank you so much for this. I'm REALLY tired of anti ADHD medication propaganda, it's anti intellectual nonsense.
I'd argue that it is nonsense to treat symptoms instead of the cause (of an issue) , but actually doing just that is quite intellectual when a bunch of money stands to be made
I suppose that's true, in much the same way that chemotherapy treats the symptom of cells spontaneously deciding to replicate in your body. That does not mean we judge people battling a cancer diagnosis and tell them to pursue non-medicated approaches because it's "just treating symptoms".
If you encounter a bit of bitterness from the ADHD community online, let me provide some perspective: I have been called lazy my entire life, I have wondered why everybody could just do stuff and apply themselves. Why couldn't I just clean my house, do my homework, keep on top of chores, or even find the energy to play games after a day of work? I only found out as an adult I have a disability which makes all of that an uphill battle for me, INCLUDING finding the motivation for the fun stuff. There is an easy fix for this, some meds that take care of SOME of the problem. They don't fix it in much the same way that a wheelchair doesn't fix the legs of a crippled person, but it sure is like playing life on easy mode if you're used to dragging yourself around by your arms. And now I'm stuck explaining this to people who have done the barest minimum of research and who say 'oh it only is treating symptoms'. They have the audacity of calling me lazy (again!) for not training my arms more to overcome my disability that way. And my response is simple: You can take my metaphorical wheelchair over my dead body, and if you were in my position you would feel exactly the same way.
i understand your perspective viscerally and as such i understand the push back ... the argument is that there is nothing wrong with someone labelled 'adhd' , rather that the modern western system both a) does not handle adhd behaviour properly and b) exhibits conditions where non-adhd individuals exhibit adhd behaviour ... when taking into account that speed will motivate anybody (both adhd and non adhd) , and that demotivation is a natural response to a hopeless scenario , i do not see adhd as a disability in and of itself ... recommend to look up the effect of hope on drowning rats ...
Even if you were 100% correct and the world is broken, fully causing ADHD as a disorder: Please fix the world FIRST and only once proven ADHD is caused by what once was the shape of western society and no longer applies, THEN you get to take the metaphorical wheelchair away.
The alternative is that you prevent millions of people in managing their disability while asking them to bet on your view of the world AND on our collective ability to change it. In the best case scenario where we manage that shift, that's what, 10 years of my life gone while society adjusts? Will you write my kids a nice letter explaining them their dad is going to be a deadbeat the next 10 years while we fix society, because somebody on the internet thinks daddy shouldn't be on stimulant medication?
You're just not presenting an attractive deal to anyone, whilst very politely telling disabled people making the best of their shit situation that their crutches should not exist. Hell, maybe they shouldn't need to exist, but how is that my fault? And while I can't tell if you stand on the side of 'using meds to manage ADHD is a failure of self discipline and morality', but if you do: I promise you most people with ADHD have more self discipline in their little toe than others do in their entire body. But self discipline doesn't make a cripple walk, as much as it doesn't make my brain make the chemicals I need to put my body into action. I've spent enough time of my life flogging myself into action, believing I was a fundamentally lazy human, I'll take the meds.
> Even if you were 100% correct and the world is broken, fully causing ADHD as a disorder: Please fix the world FIRST and only once proven ADHD is caused by what once was the shape of western society and no longer applies, THEN you get to take the metaphorical wheelchair away. [...] You're just not presenting an attractive deal to anyone.
Thanks for writing this succinct counterpoint!
The argument of the commenter you're responding to reminds me of the "ADHD is a superpower!” vibe, which I perceive as toxic positivity, but couldn't rebuke quite as clearly [1].
"There's nothing wrong with you, it's literally the entire human society that's broken" has the same implication ("don't take meds, you're nOt bRoKeN”).
Of course it's the environment that causes our symptoms. Just like cold weather makes one feel cold.
It'd be rather silly to argue that winter clothes should be abandoned, that they exist only to make money for clothing manufacturers.
Some of us live in cold places. We need winter clothes. And we don't make the weather.
[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Superpower
I don't like the superpower vibe either. I do not entirely look negative upon my ADHD, but then again, to what degree it is my personality and to what degree it is the disorder, I don't know. If others want to view their ADHD as a superpower, I'm all for it, but pushing this narrative too hard doesn't feel constructive.
For me personally, I tend to view myself as a human with some characteristics which in most contexts are not helpful, but make me uniquely suited for other situations. I try to avoid the word 'broken', but for a long time I thought about myself as 'broken in a sometimes useful way'. My burden in life is to manage and control the characteristics where they are disadvantaging me, and position myself as much as I can in positions where these characteristics are useful assets. To hook into your winter metaphore: If you always feel cold, working in a tropic resort where others would feel continually hot, sweaty and uncomfortable might just be perfect for you.
Where it crosses the line for me is neurotypical people saying 'oh I don't need winter clothes, and anyone who does is must be to use a shortcut and should just jog themselves warm instead'. Or even ADHD people saying: 'My feeling cold all the time is a superpower, you should just go work in your local sauna and you'll have no problem at all!'. Great, happy that you guys don't have this issue or figured out a workaround, but I do, and I need my damn winter clothes. I wish I didn't, I'll look for warmer situations, but I need them right now.
yeah my point is that the western society should be changed and i dont know why you think that i think that speed should be taken away entirely but i dont think that
Apologies for drawing that conclusion, but usually the argument presented is something like "amphetamines / stimulants bad especially in healthy adults -> usage on the rise due to increases ADHD diagnoses -> diagnoses potentially fraudulent? -> pharmaceutical companies are incentivized to sell stimulants -> ban stimulants entirely before it gets out of hand and rejoice our win on late stage capitalism and druggies".
I might've misunderstood the point you were trying to make, but saying 'society causes the issue' usually is followed by 'therefore treating with meds is silly and we shouldn't do that'. The latter part is what I take issue with, not the former, and if you weren't advocating for that then we have no issue and are in agreement.
I'd love to find a constructive way to change society for the better so ADHD is not as much of an issue, but personally, I don't see that happening. And I do see anti-intellectualism and puritanism on the rise, and with it, a movement that wants to take my crutches away to deal with society as it is. Maybe you weren't one of them, but I saw you making similar arguments, which is what prompted me to respond.
Calling the group of all stimulant medications "speed" is not a great sign either if I have to judge where somebody stands in this debate btw. Dextroamphetamine, one of the ingredients in Adderall, is similar to other amphetamines as found in speed, but for instance methylphenidate aka Ritalin only partially has the same working mechanisms, blocking the reuptake of dopamine and norepiphrine but not helping the extra release of more of these neurotransmitters. And that comes with a different profile in terms of addiction risks and whatnot. It is not helpful to call all of these medications 'speed' as if all ADHD people are buying potentially contaminated stuff on street corners from shady dealers, manufacturing this breaking bad style in their shed. Managing ADHD is done with clean, medical-grade, typically less-potent versions, with tightly controlled doses, closely managed by a licensed medical professional. Framing ADHD patients taking their prescription medication as speed users is not helpful. Even if you don't have any ill intent, reinforcing the belief we are all essentially the same as junkies just provides ammo for people who do want to take this away.
would love to continue this discussion but i feel like it will involve lots of this error correction so i shall leave it here , all the best
>I'd argue that it is nonsense to treat symptoms instead of the cause (of an issue) , but actually doing just that is quite intellectual when a bunch of money stands to be made
What specifically are you talking about here? It appears to me that your comment is an expression of vibe with zero information content.
There's no dichotomy between treating symptoms and cause even when the cause is treatable (which isn't the case with ADHD; it's a neurotype, with differences showing on brain scan levels) — and that's setting aside the discussion of whether it's something we need to "treat" in the first place.
We still have painkillers for people who need them while they are getting treatment.
We still have meds for runny noses, we still have Tylenol for fever, even though these are merely symptoms.
We still have pills for allergies.
And on that note: the symptoms (such as fever and allergic reactions) can and do kill people.
Please reconsider your comment.
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>modern western society exhibits a plethora of conditions that are likely to result in the manifestation of adhd behaviours in non adhd individuals
Maybe.
>a brain scan is not part of the diagnostic criteria for labelling adhd
Correct.
>taking speed makes anyone more productive, not just those with adhd
We arent talking about productivity gains.
>for me to reconsider my comment you would have to provide a convincing argument that doping up the populace is objectively the best path forward
"Doping up" is intentionally emotive language and a misrepresentation.
>to me it seems that this is not the best path forward, rather one that serves to minimize societal friction
You dont even clearly state your complaint. Its about patient outcomes, not "society" but you are implying they are also a social good. Great.
The best path forward is to reduce the severity of peoples illnesses. These drugs, reduce the severity of peoples illnesses. People with these illnesses, have a better life due to the medication. Why that upsets you is a deeply internal problem to you, not a problem with society or medicine.
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There were no personal accusations in the comment you're responding to.
youre very close to freeing yourself but the stupid has an iron grip on your thoughts , i wish you all the best and hope that things may settle down
by all means keep jacking up the vitriol , it makes things even funnier when im the one who ends up getting censored
>censored
Well it would be a net social good. But I expect I will see a different account with vastly the same posting style back here next time ADHD comes up, spewing the same nonsense.
Correctly prescribed stimulants aren't "doping up the populace", and ADHD existed long before it was described.
So, instead of reading what I wrote, you choose to remain willfully ignorant.
I am not responding further for your sake, but for the sake of those who read this thread.
> taking speed makes anyone more productive, not just those with adhd.
Speed (methamphetamine) has the same relationship to Adderall (dextroamphetamines) as methanol does to ethanol; a difference in methyl group.
Ethanol (aka alcohol) is commonly used for recreational purposes.
If you think Adderall is the same thing as "speed", I hope you wouldn't mind drinking a glass of methanol to prove the point that chemically similar substances have similar effects.
> modern western society exhibits a plethora of conditions that are likely to result in the manifestation of adhd behaviours in non adhd individuals
Which is why the diagnostic criteria for ADHD require a lifelong manifestation of ADHD symptoms.
Notice how you say behaviors, not symptoms or traits, i.e. how people act, and not how they feel, which difficulties they face, what cost they bear, and so on.
The behavior of an ADHD individual might be no different from one without ADHD. We can be on time, for example.
It is just immensely more difficult for us, just like it's difficult for someone with a broken leg that didn't quite heal to walk.
And yes, anyone can bump their toe on a table leg and experience pain for a while. That doesn't mean that people with broken legs don't exist.
>a brain scan is not part of the diagnostic criteria for labelling adhd.
It isn't, because we have cheaper and more reliable ways.
The difference is there though.
> you would have to provide a convincing argument that doping up the populace is objectively the best path forward - to me it seems that this is not the best path forward, rather one that serves to minimize societal friction.
Believing that "doping up the populace" is what's taking place is a delusion that I can't address in the same way that I can't address the belief that the Loch Ness monster caused the 2019 Coronavirus pandemic.
Unfortunately, your worldview seem to be as strongly detached from reality as you are convinced about the veracity of your unshakable beliefs.
But again, if you sincerely believe people taking Adderall are taking speed, you really could save a lot on booze by drinking methanol instead.
Do let us know how that goes.
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>youre very close to freeing yourself but the speed has an iron grip on your thoughts , i wish you all the best and hope that things may settle down
Oh my. I was going to ask if you've drank a glass of methanol to argue that Adderall and speed the same thing, as I suggested... but judging my the content of your comments, you might have had more than one already.
we could choose to produce an environment that handles normal human behaviour , but instead we label normal human behaviour as dissonant , its an idea so simple yet one so violently opposed , such violence only spurs me on to champion the idea
You know, I'm with you on that one, actually.
ADHD behavior is normal human behavior, because we're all human.
And indeed, some quite reasonable accommodations and changes in the way the society functions and forms expectations of ourselves and others would go a long way towards making ADHD folks living fulfilling lives without pain.
All that said, executive dysfunction is still a thing, and ADHD folks routinely find themselves struggling with their own goals and lives, apart from the society and its expectations.
Technology can and does help a lot (electric kettles that turn themselves off, washer-dryer combo machines that don't require remembering to take clothes out, etc).
But then there are still things that I struggle with on my own, like wanting to send postcards to friends and taking literal years to get to it.
I really can't blame it on the society.
That's where the meds can make a big difference in one's life.
In some ways, ADHD is an advantage. We fare better than others in emergencies. Hyperfocus is an asset. Having a million hobbies is a plus.
But in other ways, it's something that makes us need support.
The meds are one of the ways the society accommodates us and gives us that support.
if you took an adhd cunt and threw him in the bush he would be fine ... but if you threw him into a cookie cutter hyper capitalist no-hope no-wife no-friends no-third-space doomscroll-to-death sealed box , that man wouldn't be fine! the man in question never changed , only his environment did. ergo , societal amphetamines are about as supportive as me handing you a set of crutches after i broke your legs. but trying to blame adhd on society is basically a copout as it reflects the way that society treats individuals ("here, take this speed and wreck your heart so that you fit better into the box we designed for you"). the only way forward is to through honest questioning as to why adhd diagnoses are thousands of times greater in the west, eg. maybe if we didn't get forced into a 9-5 schedule and instead had a bit more freedom , people would be more happy to devote energy to their work ...
I said settle down, ok?
i mean it was funny the first time but you have to put some extra sauce on the bait if you want more bites , to be clear i never told anyone to settle i said i hope things settle around them because i believe adhd behaviours can be produced by chaotic environments
Take a person, put them somewhere near equator in January, they're fine. Take them to Finland, they're freezing.
The only thing that changed is the environment. The person is fine.
So all this "winter clothing" scam exists only to enrich clothes makers.
The world simply should be warm everywhere, then none of that stuff would be necessary.
Winter clothes aren't a solution to feeling cold, because they don't address the root problem of Finland being on the map.
People simply shouldn't be subjected to such conditions.
...see how you sound like?
======
>societal amphetamines are about as supportive as me handing you a set of crutches after i broke your legs
Well, the common ground here is that the crutches would indeed be helpful in this scenario.
>if you took an adhd cunt and threw him in the bush he would be fine
I get your point, but nobody would be fine like that. People are social animals.
Sure, the society sucks. But we literally can't live without it.
And while we're fixing it, well, we better have the meds.
> eg. maybe if we didn't get forced into a 9-5 schedule and instead had a bit more freedom , people would be more happy to devote energy to their work ...
100%.
> "here, take this speed and wreck your heart so that you fit better into the box we designed for you"
Counterpoint: stimulants are still useful and helpful even when you take the society away.
I can be living on my own and on my own terms, and still be upset that it took me literally 11 (eleven) years to mail a gift to a friend [1].
Sure, there could be ways mailing a package could be easier. But I really can't blame the 11 year delay on society trying to fit me in a box.
>the only way forward is to through honest questioning as to why adhd diagnoses are thousands of times greater in the west,
Citation needed. But availability and quality of mental healthcare is one big factor here in any cases.
Saying this as some born in the USSR.
My mother got an ADHD diagnosis in her 50s, long after moving to the US.
It's not like she didn't struggle with ADHD in the USSR, it just wasn't an option to get an ADHD diagnosis there.
[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Eleven%20Years%20To%20Mail%20A%...
we aren't fixing anything , humanity is happy enough to rely on bandaid solutions until the wound festers out of control ... no society didnt force you not to send that message you did that yourself and blaming a condition is inherently giving up responsibility for your actions ... i dont have the energy to rebut attacks on my language techniques any more , goodbye sir
You settle down, ok?
That is nonsense, it makes perfect sense to treat symptoms when it works and lessens those symptoms. Most of medicine works that way- our understanding of biology is primitive, and we often cannot identify or treat underlining causes.
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