[romwell]

You understand incorrectly, and you are propagating a harmful stereotype (which makes medication harder to obtain for people who need it).

Aderall has vastly different effects on people with ADHD vs. the rest.

The best I can say is the Adderall makes us feel the way you feel normally. To us, it feels like magic. The ability to switch from a task you're engaged in? The ability to do something that you need to do and want to do - and even enjoy - when you want to do it? Magic.

Enjoy the superpowers you never knew you had.

[hirvi74]

Any sources for your claims, I've read the opposite?

> Many double blind studies over the past 40 years have uniformly agreed that stimulants such as methylphenidate, dextro-amphetamine, as well as other substances, are very effective in the treatment of 70%–80% of children and adults with ADHD. One of the myths of ADHD is that ADHD children show a paradoxical effect of being calmed by stimulants, while “normal” individuals are stimulated by them. However, studies have shown that the activity levels are decreased and attention levels are increased by stimulants in individuals with and without ADHD. The difference is that since the levels of hyperactivity and inattention are much higher in ADHD subjects, the improvement is relatively much greater, giving the impression that they respond, while non-ADHD subjects do not.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC2626918/

I also have ADHD, and I feel like the medication benefits are vastly overstated. To use an analogy, I was lead to believe that the medication is as effective as opioids for severe pain, but my experiences have been about as effective as Ibuprofen for severe pain. I've tried many different formulations, brands, drug classes -- many of which multiple times at multiple dosages, and I don't feel "magical" yet.

I still take some meds because they're better than nothing, but I am starting to wonder if people are just being overly hyperbolic, and I had too great of expectations.

[romwell]

Medication doesn't have the same effect for everyone. I was lucky in the way it worked for me, perhaps.

The point is, just experiencing this month of calm and ability to do things helped me overcome a lifetime of learned helplessness.

I am more effective now without Adderall than I was before I've had it, simply because I can catch myself getting into the brain fog and using e.g. the help of my partner to break out of it.

Speaking of Ibuprofen, it feels like magic to me too. I've had 100+ degree fever from COVID booster, my whole body was aching, I felt cold, but putting my socks on (which I had in my hands felt like an immense chore). Ibuprofen cleared that within an hour.

Was it "severe" pain? Let's say, I've had worse. But Ibuprofen took me from 100% non-functioning to mostly-functioning. Magic.

In any case, I feel like what you wrote does not contradict what I said.

Let's use glasses as an analogy. Arguably, prescription glasses can be used by people with good vision either to resolve finer print, or to resolve text much further away. The laws of optics work the same for them.

However, we would say that the effect of wearing glasses is drastically different for people who need a strong prescription vs. people who do not.

As they say, size (of the effect) matters.

>The difference is that since the levels of hyperactivity and inattention are much higher in ADHD subjects, the improvement is relatively much greater, giving the impression that they respond, while non-ADHD subjects do not.

It's like saying that giving food to someone who's starving is the same as to someone who's eating well. The effect is the same, the response is different.

Those who don't live in constant brain fog don't really get to feel how Adderall helps with that.

Anyway, my personal experience with Adderall is written up here:

https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Medication

I'll be glad to look to sources to back up my claims (or stand corrected and learn); but can you help me out and say what it is that you want references for? I struggled to understand where we're disagreeing, though we'd perhaps use different words to talk about the same thing.

[hirvi74]

> Speaking of Ibuprofen, it feels like magic to me too. I've had 100+ degree fever from COVID booster, my whole body was aching, I felt cold, but putting my socks on (which I had in my hands felt like an immense chore). Ibuprofen cleared that within an hour.

Damn, I should have tried that. I got laid out after shot #2 and #3. I just ended suffering through it for about 24 hours both days after.

I like your analogy and it does convey a good point.

Perhaps, I can word it my initial point like this. It's suspected (or perhaps merely just a product of combined statistics) that 10% to 20% of people who suffer from ADHD do not benefit from any of the mediation types - MPH, AMP, M. AMP, or the various non-stimulant formulations. So, what then? Do they not have ADHD then? What analogy would you use for them? What advice would have for them?

As ADHD as I am, I am not sure living 2/3 of my life (so far) untreated could accurately be described as "brain-fog." I have had brain-fog before from various other things, and I wouldn't use it to describe my symptoms, at least not on a daily basis. On days I go med-free, then sure, but I attribute that to the sudden withdraw and rebound-effects.

I think a huge problem for me was not the 'spacey' feelings or lack of attention, but that my attention was too good. My mind is like a Ferrari with no steering wheel. It can go fast, but there is no controlling it.

If something really attracts my attention, I can laser in on it to the point I cannot pull myself away be it video games, a topic I enjoy, etc.. (Hyperfocus, yes I know)

This a symptom medication does not improve, but actually makes worse. I guess I have to take the good with the bad. A doctor told me, "if you can find me 'the perfect' (no negatives) pill, then found a pill that doesn't do anything at all."

However, hyperfocus is my Icurus Complex. I basically cannot do any meaningful work it out, but alas it flies me too close to the sun where I can barely doing any meaningful work because of it.

Perhaps I had too high of expectations for medication. Maybe deep down I wanted something that made life easier, and not something that made life better.

[tgaj]

To be honest he is somehow right. It's magic for everyone but for people with ADHD (like me or you) it gets us to the level of normal people. For normal people is giving them nearly superhuman focus. I don't think the theory that stimulants are working somehow very different for us than for normal people is valid. But that of course is my opinion.

[HighlandSpring]

> Enjoy the superpowers you never knew you had.

This so much. I rarely attempt to communicate the experience of ADHD because it's rarely worth the effort but one of the times that I did to a good friend I was met with an affectionate "so you're a bit of a retard" and it's hard to argue otherwise.

[romwell]

The best I can come up with in terms of analogy is manual focus (like on old-school camera lens) vs. autofocus

* Manual focus may not be very sharp, but you can change it instantly, and get within the ballpark every time.

* Autofocus is very sharp... but not necessarily on what you want to capture. If it's not shiny enough, autofocus never locks in on that subject. If a bird flies past the window while you snap a photo of the blackboard, it will focus on the bird, and the blackboard comes out blurry. Since it's automatic, you can't just focus where you want to; you need to trick the circuit to work properly.

[randallsquared]

While I have never taken that specific stimulant, nor been diagnosed with ADHD, my partner is diagnosed, and I'm... somewhat familiar with the topic, let's say (though she's prescribed something other than Adderall). You may have read SSC[0][1] on the topic, but I'll leave it here in case you haven't, or for others.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...

[1] SSC (now switched to astralcodexten.substack.com) is a psychiatrist who has some expertise in the area.

[romwell]

>While I have never taken that specific stimulant, nor been diagnosed with ADHD

...you are not qualified to make statements of the sort, and I urge you to listen to people who have been diagnosed with ADHD and do take Adderall.

Another, fascinating thing to consider is that you may have ADHD. I was one of those people who said things similar to what you just did, because I had no idea that everyone, in fact, did not have the same struggles. How many of the posts in [2] do you find yourself relating to? If it's more then a dozen, consider getting an assessment (and reading up).

>You may have read SSC...

No, I have not. Thank you for linking it. If you read it, again, you will see that he reaffirms my point: that there are serious risks associated with Adderall taken by people who don't have ADHD, while it is an effective tool for people with ADHD (though, like every medication, it does not work for some, and can have side effects).

Please read what I have to say about ADHD medication, Adderall specifically, here: [1], and compare and contrast with SSC's "Summary" section.

Additionally, I should add that the introduction part of that article sounds like a failed attempt to describe a complex disorder to laymen. Part of it are not correct.

Psychiatrists are not infallible. I can go at length addressing which parts you shouldn't take, but let's say, the take-away from that article is in the summary, and please read what I have to say about it, and see how it compares with your experience of stimulants being taken by non-afflicted people.

[1] On Adderall: https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Medication

[2] All posts: https://romankogan.net/adhd/

----

TL;DR: Adderall helps me calm down, helps me switch between tasks (i.e. break focus), and helps me fall asleep when I go to bed.

This is not how it works for neurotypical people. If this is how it works for you, perhaps get yourself assessed for ADHD.

[hirvi74]

What are your credentials? Why should we trust your blog post over some random post on Facebook or Reddit?

I am not trying to be rude or anything. I am just more likely to believe a medical professional's opinions on medical topics than a non-medical professional.

With that being said, that doesn't mean you cannot still be right. I'm just curious for my own personal reasons.

[romwell]

I don't have medical credentials.

I do have an ADHD diagnosis confirmed by multiple people who do, and a PhD in math as a baseline for avoiding making false claims.

You should trust my blog because about 50% of it is quotes/art from ADHD advocates (with and without credentials), and the rest is details of how it applies to me.

I'm speaking there as a member of a community.

My blog has three kinds of information:

* My personal experience. This is obviously 100% true, as I'm the primary source on that.

* Relatable illustrations/comics, made by ADHD advocates, and relatable memes, taken from ADHD communities, which indicate that my experience is shared by many other people, and help you understand it better.

You shouldn't trust my blog. It's meant as a PSA. It's there for one reason only:

For you, to see if you relate to many of these entries.

If you do, then this is a starting point for you to understand yourself better, and get help.

This blog is also intended as an aid for ADHD people to explain the condition to others. Many people have thanked me as it helped them to that end.

Guess I'll add a testimonials section one day.

Finally, of course you should trust the opinions of medical professionals. You'll find that I'm either linking those, or if you look them up, they corroborate my experience.

However, again, this blog is not meant as a diagnostic tool or an authoritative source. It's for other undiagnosed people with ADHD to learn about what it is that they have.

I was one of such people. I learned about ADHD from memes. I'm passing it on.

[hirvi74]

Sorry for the delay. I tend to lurk more than I tend to contribute, and I still haven't investigated any methods for alerting myself if someone replies to a comment I made, assuming it's even built in.

To preface my reply, I must say that I was also diagnosed, albeit not until my early 20s. People tend to think I am intelligent, but I would argue I am just tend to luck out more than others, or at least, I am not as intelligent as people think I may appear. I just have a ridiculous strong long-term memory. Not "total recall" levels, but definitely above average.

The doctor that conducted my psychoanalysis said I had the strongest long-term memory he has ever seen, but I also went to college in a small town, so perhaps his sample size should be considered, or perhaps he was just trying to boost my confidence.

I find you math PHD to be impressive. I am probably average to low-above-average. Good enough to make it through a comp sci degree (mostly unmedicated), but I feel like my critical thinking skills would fail me before I reached PHD potential. I hated math growing up, and my significant other was a math major who now tutors children in the same school system I grew up in. It was a rather affluent area (excluding my middle class family), and the school system reflected that. However, she said she can understand why I struggled in school growing up with the way they still teach students, so maybe weak fundamentals are partially to blame. But look at me, I am already getting distracted. ;)

Regardless, your lack of medical credentials does not mean much in a world, where credentials may have some positive correlation with domain knowledge, but the relationship is definitely not causative e.g. I've met many medical professionals in my life, like any other field, that baffle me as to how they even made it that far into their field. I feel like many never read another journal or book the second they step out of med school. There is natural distribution to all elements of humanity, I suppose. But, that is just my opinion.

> * My personal experience. This is obviously 100% true, as I'm the primary source on that.

> * Relatable illustrations/comics, made by ADHD advocates, and relatable memes, taken from ADHD communities, which indicate that my experience is shared by many other people, and help you understand it better.

For both these points, how do you mitigate confirmation bias, or do you not even try? I have yet to read your blog, but I will when I have more time available. Confirmation bias is a problem I have noticed with ADHD material e.g. "I forgot my lunch on the way to work because I am so ADHD" implying that only ADHD people do this, or "I can barely focus on anything, but I sleep only 4 hours a night, do not exercise, and eat junk food all day." Again, those are things that ADHD can be attributed to ADHD, but any body in those same circumstances would ail the same way.

> However, again, this blog is not meant as a diagnostic tool or an authoritative source. It's for other undiagnosed people with ADHD to learn about what it is that they have.

But what do they have?

Im curious about your opinions:

Do you really think ADHD is a disorder or a set of naturally distributed attributes that cause disorder circumstantially based one's environment? While a reductionist might think the differences are semantical, I disagree. I believed the first option when I was initially diagnosed, and when I learned more about the condition. However, as I have aged I am starting to believe the latter.

How are all these disordered people like Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, etc. able to be the best of the best in their Olympic sports medicated or not? How are you able to achieve a math PHD, but I struggled in Calc II? Maybe there is more factors in life that hinder one than just ADHD. (I'm not implying you didn't struggle in your studies or life in general, I am just using you as probably inaccurate example -- the idealistic image I have of you perhaps.)

I am not saying ADHD is "not real." All I am saying is that the way society is structures, and given the demands of society for a particular type of person, anything outside the scope is considered to be disordered.

For example, I am not particularly tall -- I am with the mean range for adult human males. While many professional basketball players are n + 1 standard deviations taller than the average person. If I were to be compared to them in a game of professional basketball, would I have Height Deficit Disorder? I would have a height deficit in comparison to the other professional around me, and surely might height would hinder my abilities and probably cause disorder for me during the game.

Am I making any sense? Society tends to swing towards whatever works for the majority of people e.g. boring and dull classroom setting tend to have a distributed effectiveness for different types of people. Some people thrive, some people survive, some people derive, and some are buried alive.

I have no problem focusing on this novel I am typing right now, but I also should be working, but why can I not focus on work? Is it because I have ADHD? Because I hate my job? Perhaps both?

Besides attention, what other human attribute isn't on a spectrum? Height, like we already covered, but also weight, intelligence, athleticism, strength, longevity, skin color, eye color, hair color, etc.. Do you get what I am saying?

I just often wonder how much ADHD is really a disorder, and how much is socially induced. I know the "Woe is me" type will instantly shoot my claims down with something absurd like, "I am so ADHD, if I were on a deserted island I would starve to death because I would be so distracted that I forget to eat until I die." Hyperbolic or not, if that were true, then I am sure evolution is just doing its job weeding them out of the gene pool, as dark as that may seem. After all, modern medicine thankfully allows us to "play God", so to speak, but let's not forget the Law of Unintended Consequences.

What bothers me most is that we allegedly have known about this disorder for how many centuries now? Didn't the ancient Greeks even notice it? I wonder how/if the "less advanced" societies noticed these attributes. Medicine even acknowledged it a century ago +/- a few decades. Obviously, science grows damn near exponentially, so many of those centuries accomplished less than we could accomplish in weeks currently, so I am not trying to say that we have had 1000s of years to solve this. I just wish we had more answers than we currently do.

All this time, and we still have no other reliable way of verifying the condition other than symptom-based diagnostics where the person doing the diagnostics might have an implicit bias -- every screw looks like a nail to the man with a hammer.

"But fMRI brain scans have shown difference in the prefrontal cortex and the nucleus acumbines in people with ADHD vs. a controlled population" Great, it's 2022 where's the diagnostic criteria? But wait, even much of the research claims the difference isn't significant enough to be used for diagnostic purposes. Then are the brains truly that different? Maybe it's a lack of technology? Who knows?

What is thefamous quote med school professors tell med students when learning about rare conditions? "Don't look for zebras, when there are horses in the room." Maybe when trying to find differences in the brains, human biases might create zebras. Imagine how damaging it would be if the research claimed there were no differences at all? Then what? The world of psychology might actually implode upon itself.

Perhaps I have a bias -- some axe to grind. But, real or not, there is disorder in my life. I do not care about naming conventions for my disorder, titles, identities I can cling to, all I want is to live the best life I can with my one and only chance. Sometimes the meds work, and sometimes they do not, but it's a small price to pay for a chance to improve my life regardless of whether ADHD is socially constructed or not.

Anyway, sorry if this is too long. It's easier for me to type than to read lol.

I will check out the blog, and if you haven't have you ever considered writing about how one can tell if their medication(s) are working well or not? Doctors act like I asked them to solve if N=NP when I ask that question. Not saying your blog is lacking without it, I just thought I would throw out a helpful suggestion. After all, life for many doesn't magically turn to easy mode once diagnosed, but for the lucky ones I suppose it does.