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alterom ◴[] No.45958585[source]
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-...

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tootie ◴[] No.45961075[source]
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.
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1. alterom ◴[] No.45972750[source]
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.