Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies

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-...

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

For… weight loss? Adderall was developed as a diet pill. It was never modified in any way to better suit ADHD treatment.

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.

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.