Just something I have anecdotally noticed occuring with more frequency. Several creators I follow have spoken about being diagnosed with ADHD in recent years, and their experiences with medication like adderall. When I was a kid, ADHD was something only kids had, and was famously overdiagnosed in America as an excuse to get a ton of kids on pills.
Is this just a more recent extension of that? Is it just as simple as big pharma looking for more addicts? I have definitely noticed that my own attention span has been eroded by the 24 hour news cycle and too much screen time, but I'd never think to go to the doctor about it.
It's definitely Big Pharma looking for new customers.
And the fact that the prescription meth has euphoric, habit-forming and positive side effects for the patients (weight loss, decrease need for sleep, increased cognitive productivity, etc).
The push to start recognizing Adult ADHD start about two decades ago.
The problem is that diagnosis is completely based on self-reported symptoms, checklists, etc.
The only break is that there is supposed to be documented evidence of ADHD symptoms prior to age 12. But you can imagine how extensive that fact-finding mission is and how closely it is adhered to.
Adult ADHD is also completely linear. You get the diagnosis, then you get prescription meth.
There's no alternatives explored. No non-drug therapy, other than perhaps students and employees asking for accommodations or disability claimants adding it to their file.
There are other non-meth drugs that in theory help with ADHD like atomoxetine and bupropion.
But surprise, surprise. When offered to Adult ADHD sufferers, they will to the last man come back reporting that they weren't effective.
There's also the aspect of diagnostic creep. The diagnosis is essentially made when a prescriber relents and prescribes a trial of meth.
But once given the label, it becomes part of the patient's identity and entitlement. There is essentially no way passed that point that someone can be "undiagnosed" or proven that they don't have it.
Lastly, it's a condition where essentially the patient always comes to the clinician predetermined that they suffer from Adult ADHD. It's very rare that they come with undifferentiated symptoms and let the clinician reach the diagnosis alone by expert assessment without preexisting bias.
I forget how similar adderall and meth are. Crazy that we just let people take stuff like that.
Decreased ability to sleep. The need to sleep remains the same.
I agree, but it's the clinical turn of phrase.
That's unfortunate. I was on it when I was younger, and I'd say there's a world of difference between not being tired, which "decreased need for sleep" implies, and still being as tired as you would expect, but being unable to sleep, which is what I experienced. I assure you I felt like I needed to sleep.
The persisting urge but inability to rest that you are describing is more commonly referred to as "insomnia" clinically as well as colloquially.
The "decreased need for sleep" usually refers to a state where volume of sleep hours decreases but it generally isn't bothersome to the individual.
The other common usage other than drug-induced is in the setting of mania episodes from those with bipolar disorder. Manic patients sleep less but aren't particularly concerned with it because they are Go, Go, Go.
Trust me it's not.
I was prescribed various ADHD meds including pure dextroamphetamine for over 10 years in total. I kept switching and coming on and off meds because I would have horrendous side effects.
Everything was fantastic usually for the first two months until the poor quality sleep or sleep deprivation catches up to you. The medication itself inherently masks these issues making you think that you're working optimally. In time though your performance metrics will get so much worse that you will start to notice despite the meds masking the problems.
Since I came off them 4 years ago and started eating liver to improve micronutrients in my diet I have never felt more mentally sharp. You cannot underestimate a full 8 hours of sleep.
any alternatives to liver?
I can't stand the smell of it cooking, much less eat the stuff
You will want calf liver as it has the least amount of vitamin A, overdosing on that will not be fun for you and is a real risk if you eat liver from a mature cow often. In an oven with the door ajar or in a convection oven at 80 degrees Celsius you can dehydrate it.
First you must remove the membrane that surrounds it, use kitchen paper to get a hold of an edge you may need to peel up an edge slightly first with a knife.
Then you put it in the freezer for 3 hours to let it firm up for easier slicing .
Now it's time for slicing, you may want to use a plastic glove on your off hand since it gets bloody cold, slice it in 1 cm chunks.
Use some grease on a mesh rack or use baking paper and put your liver on it, put a pan with some tin foil under it for easier cleaning if using mesh.
When you take them you can dice them up into smaller chunks to swallow like pills.
I don't do this very often but keep an eye one it and you'll see it gets done quite quickly.
Dry weight should be about one quarter of wet weight, calculate your portions based on that so you don't end up with vitamin A poisoning.
VERY IMPORTANT do not freeze liver for storage as the important vitamin B12 and B9 (folate) degrade rapidly. For storage you must use silica gel desiccant packs or it will go mouldy.
I usually eat Swedish style liver patée that I make myself from what we call "young cow liver" which has a much milder flavour this is NOT calf liver just slightly older and half the price. I usually spice it with freshly ground cloves, coriander seeds, allspice, sage, garlic a couple of splashes of Tabasco for acidity and that fermented taste, sometimes I use dill pickles instead.
Mine is heavily inspired by this recipe from a legendary Swedish chef. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjJGeA4Z-kM
Unfortunately I can't tell you precisely how I make it because I do it so often I just know how to make it by feel.
Personally for me there is no substitution for liver, unparalleled in density of nutrients and has an extremely low cost. At first when I started taking liver I was eating about 100grams a day to replenish me body of nutrients and I would get this crazy feeling of satisfaction and calmness through my body.
at that point, it almost sounds like it'd be easier to just take cod liver oil daily, lol.
Cod liver oil has no minerals in it, only vitamins A and D plus some omega 3, and it lacks the B-Vitamins.
fair.
Remember when everybody "had glaucoma" so they could get medical pot like a decade ago?
That's what this is, but for adderall. They want an excuse to never have to discipline and control their actions/impulses, and want the "miracle drug" that let's them triple their work productivity so they can laze around for the other 80% of the week.
These are people going in with a diagnosis already picked out, and magically coming out with it. Its not hard to get ADHD, anxiety or depression diagnosed by just framing normal daily stressors right.
And having those labels means they don't have to face the uncomfortable truths about themselves and work on them. They can just say "I have X" and now they are poor victims, you can't be as mean to them, and they can drug themselves into "feeling normal" when they need to. Its a literal perfect grift for someone with no dignity or shame.
They'll expand the terms for the diagnosis and then claim everyone has some level of ADHD spectrum. I've been watching it follow Autism.
Also watch how anyone with a gifted mind is immediately labeled one or the other, because you can't be gifted on its own.
Both are definitely overdiagnosed to the point of absurdity, but don't you find that brilliance is often attended by eccentric behaviours? Brilliant people certainly seem to sacrifice normal social operation in exchange for that extreme cognitive ability.
Normal is the ability to perceive things in the same way as others. So, similar experiences growing up or an IQ at the level of everyone else means normal. Unfortunately this causes a problem. Most very intelligent people perceive things in such an advanced way that the normal person seems retarded. The scene in Idiocracy with the white House cabinet is a common occurrence.
Keep in mind, someone who is normal can't tell the difference between the two, and usually the super intelligent don't think their friends are that dumb. So, the comparison gets made a lot, and the really smart people accept it because they can't argue against it.
Do you think that an average IQ person often gets genius confused with social ineptitude, then? Or does genius come with social ineptitude as a byproduct?
Depends on the type. "Genius" is a broad range and can refer to individual skills, which does lend itself to weirder behavior. For example, math geniuses can overspecialize and start looking at everything as math, or ignoring everything they can't solve with math. That is how you get "intelligent" scientists buying into climate change solutions, because they trust the numbers and don't see the manipulation going on behind the numbers.
The quiet consider the loud to be rude. The average consider not following the regular to be stupid. It takes a lot to ask actual questions and see new solutions.
HellsBells speaks truth. An expert in a field can often have no clue what something outside of their rangeifht be. I was once in a archaeological dog and the experts couldn't recognize a sepak chocrow ball in the dig. Even when I told them the people hired have been playing it regularly they wanted to drink wine and talk about it's religious aspects.
I think of it as the difference between a geek and a nerd. A geek gets into the information and tries to analyze it with limited skills. By where numbers and autism they figure it out. Nerds understand it and can do the math in their heads, but have a hard time explaining it.
You touched on the key issues.
Of course everyone has some form of adhd, when were watching 15 second tik toks and 30 second commercials filled to the brim with sublimal advertising, thats the entire point, to erode your ability to make decisions (its called decision fatigue) and break your ability to concentrate.
A pill aint going to solve it.
I blame tik tok though, my partner watched a video about adhd and now they keep talking about getting diagnosed, its frustrating as hell. At least they took my advice and they started reading more books lately. One of the best ways to increase your attention span.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9659797/
Which coincidentally reading comprehension in schools is at a all time low, gasp who could have ever guessed it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/us/reading-skills-naep.html
We are in for some very rough times ahead :(. Wait till these people become the new police officers/detectives, wcb workers, nurses, doctors, etc.
I don’t care how European you are, don’t do this gay shit
lol I was scrolling down waiting to see this since it’s the first thing I thought while reading.
Thos problem started long before TikTok with Instagram. Its just convenient to blame Tiktok because its Chinese.
Bruh
I was diagnosed ADHD about 30 years ago, I think I was maybe 5 or 6 years old when I got those pills, it's been a while, I was living in my first house at the time. I was apparently a nightmare to deal with, according to my grandmother. So they threw me on the generic form of Ritalin, which then led to other complications as my weight was extremely low to the point that the pediatric doctors I was sent to as I had to go every month for psychiatry due to the high dosage reported my weight and it was at the point they said if I didn't start to gain weight my body would literally begin eating my organs for sustenance.
So for a while they put me on Aderal and that had some severe side effects that if known they would have never put me on that one and tried something else to get my weight up.
I needed Chlonidine and a second drug I can't remember just to be able to sleep at night.
So as someone who went through all of that for over a decade before I just couldn't stand being on the drugs anymore, I've noticed a lot of the. "I might be ADHD" or "My ADHD is acting up" from people who have never had a diagnosis and are just bored.
That's what a lot of these people have, boredom. They never learned how to cope with having nothing to do, or at least nothing interesting to do.
It's not like actual ADHD where you literally cannot focus, your brain will not let you focus on the thing in front of you, not because it isn't interesting or engaging but that if you aren't moving right fucking now you want to peel off your own skin
When you do focus you have to worry about hyperfocusing to the point that 3 hours will have passed and nothing got done because you were planning out 50 different tangents on one thing because you couldn't actually decide which made the most logical sense.
I've been off the meds for about as long as I had been on them and I think sometimes I need them again, because I'm struggling to actually get the things done that I need to do.
I'm sorry to hear you had such a personal experience with ADHD. I hope that you can overcome it without drugs.
My wife had a brief experience with ADHD when it was a popular diagnosis among children in America. Whatever drug her mother put her on made her have shivering and twitching fits. She used to pretend to take the pills and stuff them in the house's HVAC vents, lol. Thankfully her father was responsible enough to put a stop to it when he saw what it was doing.
I went from ZERO coworkers on ADHD meds to 5 now. They keep telling me I have it as well. I’m with you, personal stress and the inundation of information over the last several years has caused my focus to decline pretty severely, but I’ll never go to the dr about it. I use natural supplements and meditation/frequency.
There's another few phenomena at play. It's easy to dismiss it all as a huge wave of over prescription for pill purposes. And that is a part of it. But I know something about this, I've studied it, and know some local history about it.
The city I was from has a long history of issues with ADHD diagnosis right. In this country it was infamous (at least in health/medicine circles) for it in the 90s and early 2000s, because that city's diagnosis rate was something like 10-20x the rest of the country. Was it something in the water? Or were we just better at diagnosing it? Eyebrows were raised, and audits were done, what was causing this huge apparent increase? Basically this first big wave of diagnosis ended in about 2001 after the gov inquiry because it turns out most of it wasn't legit, it was teens (last 3 years of school) and uni age students and there were 2 main clinics, two big clusters, where there was a huge surge of diagnoses. One in the northern part of the city, one in the rich southern suburbs.
What was happening was two things. The northern cluster was a bunch of parents after the not-meth, for use or for sale. But the other clinic was in a very well-to-do area and it mostly wasn't about the drugs. It was about exams. By getting the diagnosis of ADHD they got one of two things, for some it was an excuse for why their precious little diddums wasn't doing so well at school, it wasn't the kid (or the parent's fault), it was this disease they had. The 2nd was additional time in exams, they got extra time and accommodations in the big final 'SAT' (equivalent) tests done in the the final 2 years of school (and all other tests and assessments). This is an advantage even if you're a moderately smart student who studies well, extra time in the big final exams is huge when it then affects what unis and courses you can then get into. It could be the difference between getting into med school or not. And then these exam/assessment benefits continue into uni also so a decent chunk of it was 18-24 also.
So then there was a big state governmental push to clamp down on that stuff, and psychiatrists in that city became very reluctant to diagnose and prescribe for it. Once one did, word got out, and they'd get flooded with those patients, and nobody wanted the gov breathing down their neck on that after the big 2000's scandal for a while. So then we had this big wave of people who do actually have mild or moderate ADHD but who couldn't get the diagnosis because the pendulum swung the other way to being overly restrictive. Which then creates a another class of people getting the adult diagnosis, the ones who were missed in school because their case was mild/moderate but the pendulum had swung towards being overly restrictive when they went through.
So that's then means you have the following groups of people seeking it:
I'm not saying that a lot of it isn't drugs. But looking at the historical causes in the city I'm from, a good 40-50% of it was excuse-seeking and exam gaming, not the drugs. And once a wave starts, it becomes self-perpetuating as their peers and parents hear about it, and seek it out themselves.
(E: as someone else mentioned, there's also some other modern causes, so add in things like 'attention-seeking' and 'not neurotypical' bullshit too, which motivate people to try to get diagnosed, it has become 'trendy' in some circles. That is on top of other things on the supply side making it easier)
Interesting. Thanks for the personal story.
Part of it came about during the pandemic. You had people paranoid about supposed post-covid effects and the pandemic also led to loosened rules for Telehealth.
So a lot more people were getting themselves diagnosed and getting prescriptions for ADHD meds that normally require a little more upfront cost and effort.
We had close to a century of Psychology research saying "in person is the only way, you miss 75% of all information by removing non-verbal cues and in person observation" to refuse to do more than very basic out of person set ups.
Then Covid hits and magically BetterHelp has all its controversies forgotten, has millions to buy ads on literally every podcast in America, and now everyone is totes cool with having a therapist that is text only.
Psychology has morphed into a feminist control vector. The goal is to emasculate as many men as possible while validating every terrible female behavior.
The opposite of going to a psychologist is going to the gym.
With the added caveat, that not all gyms are healthy environments or have the room. Make sure not to get suckered into any long-term commitments.
A deep diver friend told me autism is now 1/14 and trending to 1/10 soon. And alot of his sons friends have it. Also, if vials arent constantly shaken, the mercury settles at the bottom and gets more concentrated as vial depletes.
Amphetamines do enhance your mental performance, and people want them for this reason. The diagnosis is either an excuse to get the pills, or a crutch (ie easier to take a pill than improve yourself).
The military has tested all the drugs that can make you more alert and productive and the only ones that work reliably without big side effects are: caffeine, modafinil (provigil), and adderal.