When people say “dopamine”, I don’t usually interpret as them literally meaning dopamine. I think at this point in common speech it serves as a shortcut for saying “chemically based rewards“.
No, I definitely meant literal dopamine. Just as people who benefit from many conventional antidepressants are chemically benefiting from increased serotonin (reception/production), people who have ADHD chemically benefit from increased dopamine (reception/production). And while medicating the latter is mostly straightforward (most patients benefit from stimulants which improve dopamine reception, many from improved production as well), particularly adult patients have a variety of coping strategies that relieve symptoms and it’s not a wild leap to infer that when those strategies are successful they’re improving dopamine levels specifically.