News Millions of Kids Are on ADHD Pills. For Many, It’s the Start of a Drug Cascade.

I'm very mixed about this.

Knowing how ADHD meds can feel pleasurable, and knowing the inexperience of adolescents, it doesn't sit well.

However I guess I could argue with myself that if the kid has a supportive guardian maybe realizing that some (frankly pretty top shelf) drugs can be used in therapeutic ways.

It's a controversial thing. And I used to be more against it, but with the cocaine epidemic and seemingly promoting "droogs r kewl" in the media, perhaps this is the lesser of evils.

I mean in reality, you used to be able to buy amphetamine over the counter and coca cola had cocaine so maybe we're getting somewhere.
 
This is "news"? Its been this way for at least a few decades if not longer. In highschool, everyone around me including myself was hopped up on Ritalin and Adderall XR... and that was 25 years ago... I had people give me hundreds of pills for free. Kids were snorting the adderall and smoking the ritalin off foil. Everyone and their mom had it.

I recall my sister used to have this huge glass jar with over a thousand adderall pills in it (literally). Just pills she collected over the years from not taking her Adderall doses on weekends....
 
Paywall so can't read the whole article but ADHD has been under diagnosed AF in the UK which is why more and more children and adults are being medicated in recent years.

Not sure why the case study in the opening was switched from methylphenidate to Prozac rather than an amphetamine based med, that doesn't make much sense to me and SSRIs are (imo) far more problematic medications to pile onto a young mind than stimulants.

streaM Freak said:
Knowing how ADHD meds can feel pleasurable, and knowing the inexperience of adolescents, it doesn't sit well.

However I guess I could argue with myself that if the kid has a supportive guardian maybe realizing that some (frankly pretty top shelf) drugs can be used in therapeutic ways
Click to expand...
On this I can only say that my experience (of having and being medicated for ADHD at a young age and knowing others of a similar background) has been that young people medicated for ADHD are far less likely to gravitate into substance abuse than those left unmedicated. I believe the statistics corroborate my experience but I don't have anything to hand to cite.

Most young people diagnosed with ADHD in the UK are diagnosed on the NHS so there's no financial incentive for doctors to push medication. Rather the opposite. More and more adults are being diagnosed privately though and that certainly needs to be more strictly regulated.
Quasimoto said:
I recall my sister used to have this huge glass jar with over a thousand adderall pills in it (literally). Just pills she collected over the years from not taking her Adderall doses on weekends
Click to expand...
Teehee. I've got enough stashed away to last me at least a year without a script from doing this.
 
red22 said:

RemovePaywall | Free online paywall remover

Remove Paywall, free online paywall remover. Get access to articles without having to pay or login. Works on Bloomberg and hundreds more.
www.removepaywall.com www.removepaywall.com

Option 4 works for this article.
Click to expand...
Nope, none of them.

I tried three VPN servers too and I don't think I care enough to disable my VPN for it.

Thanks for the link anyway though.
 
Shinji Ikari said:
Paywall so can't read the whole article but ADHD has been under diagnosed AF in the UK which is why more and more children and adults are being medicated in recent years.
Click to expand...

red22 said:

RemovePaywall | Free online paywall remover

Remove Paywall, free online paywall remover. Get access to articles without having to pay or login. Works on Bloomberg and hundreds more.
www.removepaywall.com www.removepaywall.com

Option 4 works for this article.
Click to expand...
Btw, you can just put archive.ph/ in front of a paywalled url and it always bypasses it

 
I feel like I have the exact opposite of ADHD?
My concentration and focus is quite high. Sometimes problematically high.
I have an extremely high attention to detail, but because of that I process new information quite slower.
I learn slower and I'm shit at multitasking, but when I do learn something it's to my fullest comprehension of its tiny details, and my multitasking can then be improved to near muscle memory automation.
This makes starting any new job, any where, kind of challenging at first.
The problem is that idk wtf to call this kind of an opposite-of-ADHD experience?
 
NullVoidXIII said:
My concentration and focus is quite high. Sometimes problematically high.
I have an extremely high attention to detail, but because of that I process new information quite slower
Click to expand...
Slow processing and hyper focus are both symptoms of ADHD.
NullVoidXIII said:
I learn slower and I'm shit at multitasking
Click to expand...
As are these.
NullVoidXIII said:
This makes starting any new job, any where, kind of challenging at first
Click to expand...
Yup.

Not saying you have ADHD, but none of this is the opposite of ADHD...

:shruggies:
 
Shinji Ikari said:
Slow processing and hyper focus are both symptoms of ADHD.

As are these.

Yup.

Not saying you have ADHD, but none of this is the opposite of ADHD...

:shruggies:
Click to expand...

But stimulants do not calm me down, they actually speed me up. 😅
With ADHD, chemicals kind of work in reverse, right? My ex was prescribed ephedrine for a while for it.
Unless, I'm thinking of this wrong? Now I'm confused. 😅
 
Relatively speaking stimulants at therapeutic doses may make somebody with ADHD appear or feel calmer, but that's probably because they can finally think and effectively complete tasks without getting distracted by the circus that is their inner monologue. It's symptom relief. Plus when you take it every day you build a tolerance and being on a stimulant becomes your baseline so you don't feel stimulated. But if you take more it gets you just as high as it gets anyone else.
 
Shinji Ikari said:
Relatively speaking stimulants at therapeutic doses may make somebody with ADHD appear or feel calmer, but that's probably because they can finally think and effectively complete tasks without getting distracted by the circus that is their inner monologue. It's symptom relief. Plus when you take it every day you build a tolerance and being on a stimulant becomes your baseline so you don't feel stimulated. But if you take more it gets you just as high as it gets anyone else.
Click to expand...

I can't take stimulants. I was born with a small handful of heart and raspatory conditions. I'm very sensitive to them. A couple energy drinks is actually kind of about my max. But if I have too much, I can MOVE faster but I don't think clearly and instead I'm completely plagued with anxiety until I crash. Some coffee is fine, or even the occasional energy drink or preworkout, but I mean I can't have them throughout the day the way that people in their early 20s do, not at my age of 38. Heh. I used to drink them all the time but I've ran into some health problems with my kidneys and so I stopped drinking them because of that.
 
Quasimoto said:
This is "news"? Its been this way for at least a few decades if not longer. In highschool, everyone around me including myself was hopped up on Ritalin and Adderall XR... and that was 25 years ago... I had people give me hundreds of pills for free. Kids were snorting the adderall and smoking the ritalin off foil. Everyone and their mom had it.

I recall my sister used to have this huge glass jar with over a thousand adderall pills in it (literally). Just pills she collected over the years from not taking her Adderall doses on weekends....
Click to expand...
You can smoke Ritalin on foil?
 
Shinji Ikari said:
Relatively speaking stimulants at therapeutic doses may make somebody with ADHD appear or feel calmer, but that's probably because they can finally think and effectively complete tasks without getting distracted by the circus that is their inner monologue. It's symptom relief. Plus when you take it every day you build a tolerance and being on a stimulant becomes your baseline so you don't feel stimulated. But if you take more it gets you just as high as it gets anyone else.
Click to expand...
Ritalin was everywhere in America in the 1990's. The problem is simple; too many kids who didn't need it were prescribed it.

The ones who need these meds; get put into the same category as the vast numbers that didn't.

When too many people( especially kids) are getting amphetamines, then people freak out. If it is a necessary med and it truly helps a kid, then great.

That didn't seem to be the case back then. Quasimoto, did a great job describing that basic time period in regards to Ritalin.
 
I flip back on forth on this all the time, I do believe that although ADHD is a debilitating condition for some, that care needs to be taken handing out stimulants.

But I watched a car crash of my life, working against the odds believing I was defective (yes this was true) but seeing on the other side I was playing a pretty challenging rule set when my brain functions they way it does.

As much as I do wonder what I’d been like to be medicated younger, I am grateful for medicating at 23, after a car crash life and then a self imposed monk like period to properly try life and not make excuses.

I presume to have learned that I can force myself to be perfect to society kind of standard (broad and grey nonetheless) but I don’t enjoy it and I suffer no matter how hard I try, and realise my perspective is what caused my issue etc- all that Gabor Mate stuff, I ran a complex needs support service for over a year, took complete care of myself and only ever took things on best I could, being observant to my own thoughts and behaviours and not doing things that made me worse.

It was still miserable.

I take methylphenidate chronically most of the time, sometimes doing a abstinence experiment to stay in touch with my baseline.

I’ve had to increase the dose but it’s stayed extremely steady for a while, it’s not a miracle but just being able to not have constant pulses of panic and adrenaline and have your own mind be so much more interesting and louder then the world around you.

That is incredibly lonely, and it hurts.

I’m not saying I tried everything, but I did a lot more than most people with giving up technology and all psychoactive drugs for 3+ years, mediating, hypertrophy training and daily long walks in nature, cooking every meal from scratch, 8-9 hours sleep a night, socialising and keeping up with postive people and not toxic people.

I’d still question no matter what and wonder if life was worth living.

I take a extremely pharmacologically pure stimulant (methylphenidate) and it alleviates 90% of the torment.

That’s good enough, something I’ve carried from reading Pete Walkers surviving to thriving - there is a good enough for many our needs.
 
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