Comment by taxicabjesus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taxicabjesus | Hacker News Reader

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> ADHD is a diagnosed medical disorder that affects millions of people in America. Why do we still stigmatize it in the modern age?

ADHD is a meaningless psychiatric diagnostic [1] of symptoms, not cause. The diagnosis is used to put millions of people in America on maintenance doses of addictive psychotropic drugs. Routine use of amphetamines almost always causes people's mental conditions to worsen, eventually.

Tonight one of my regular taxi passengers txt-messaged to ask if I was working. I was exhausted one night, when he was going home from the gay strip club, so I stopped at the coffee shop that was half-way between the strip club and his mother's house. I was like, "so... what's your story?"

When the passenger was in high school, he was diagnosed with ADHD. The doctor got him addicted to Ritalin, or one of the other legal prescription amphetamines. At first the amphetamine was great, but then side effects developed. Then he developed some legal troubles, which led to living in a halfway house, with hostile housemates...

Anyways... He's a bit of a mess... probably early or mid-30's... his mother pays his taxi fares. He had a job at the baseball stadium, but then he got fired. Last I saw him, he was collecting unemployment insurance.

People... people are interesting. This passenger didn't use "ridesharing" because he can't manage his money well enough, iirc.

[1] https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-doctor-isnt-... and https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/how-psychiatry-l...

First of all, ADHD is hardly the only disease or disorder with an unclear cause. Alzheimer's, autism, and fibromyalgia come to mind.

Second of all, here is a comprehensive list of peer-reviewed studies defending the existence of ADHD and the efficacy of amphetamines for ADHD (much better than some random anecdote of an improperly diagnosed taxi passenger):

https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/3at2u2/psa_the_existe...

Admittedly, psychologists seem to have a problem properly diagnosing it, but let's not diminish a disorder suffered by millions every day.

Robert Whitaker makes the case in Anatomy of an Epidemic [1] that psychiatric medications amplify the problems they supposedly treat.

[1] http://www.madinamerica.com/product/62043/

>Routine use of amphetamines almost always causes people's mental conditions to worsen, eventually.

I've not heard this before..do you have a source? Quite interested.

I don't have a specific source, it's just the impression that I get from having talked to a few people who had trouble with meth amphetamine. One friend's husband brought cocaine home. That was nice, but it got expensive, so they switched to Meth. After a while she realized she didn't like what it was doing to her personality, so she quit. Then the anxiety started. Xanax helped her not care, then she discovered Alcohol...

Here's a random quote from a mainstream medical source:

"Mood disorders similar to hypomania and mania can be elicited during intoxication with amphetamines. Depression can occur during withdrawal, and repeated use of amphetamines can produce antidepressant-resistant amphetamine-induced depression. ..."

- "Amphetamine-Related Psychiatric Disorders" (emphasis added), http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/289973-overview

Mad in America makes the case that mental health treatment is a make-work endeavor. http://www.madinamerica.com/

Are you really comparing meth to ADHD drugs?

Whoever wrote the Wikipedia page on Ritalin [1] conflates Amphatamine and methylphenidate. "Amphetamine" appears on 24 times on Ritalin's page, 5 times as "amphetamine and methylphenidate"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylphenidate

Adderall [2] is an amphetamine.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall

I know they're amphetamines, but surely there's a big difference between that and smoking street meth (which is what I assume your friend switched to from cocaine)

Well, if the ADHD drug in question is Adderall, which is an amphetamine, the mechanism of action and effects are largely similar. And Desoxyne IS meth. Methamphetamine actually metabolizes into amphetamine in the body.

Methamphetamine is an ADHD drug. I take it for my ADHD, with a legal prescription of course.

Ironically it's the most subtle and gentle of all the ADHD stimulants, at least at therapeutic doses. It has a bad reputation because of the abuse of illicitly manufactured meth available on the black market but it's completely unwarranted.

Oh good, an anecdote. Those are always indicative of larger data sets, and definitely not meaningless and heavily biased.

It's pretty irrating to support stigmatizing/banning a drug that millions of people use and get therapeutic effects from based on a few unrelated anecdotes.

true to form, user "too long didn't read" didn't read the links.

My position is simply that there is underlying causes behind people's complaints. Stimulant-prescribing doctors would rather suppress the symptom than investigate.

Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic discusses amphetamines on pages 64, 219, 228-29,236, "See also Benzedrine; Ritalin". Ritalin is covered in more depth: case studies, as cause of juvenile bipolar disorder, hiding the evidence, risks/side-effects, and silencing dissent.

More information about this book can be found through the Mad In America link above; I directly linked to its information page in another comment.

People tend to like the stimulants. They tend to hate the sedatives. Some stimulant users end up being forcibly sedated with "anti-psychotics" (courtesy of a court-order), because they couldn't keep their stimulant use under control and became psychotic.

Did you ever stop to think if possibly it could have been worse without R or whatever?

Oh, most likely not R, because it doesn't cause addiction if taken according to prescription.

I wonder how humanity ever got anything done, before we had stimulants to treat our ADHD.

Two pointers, assuming good faith:

* Many didn't cope.

* Also there were more physical work to be done.

When children are put in unnatural environments that are totally incompatible with the way children's minds actually work, they will not do well. Children should be actively learning, but school puts them in desks.

I could have been diagnosed as ADHD in college. This was not a biological problem, but that I didn't care about my classes. Stimulants might have helped me focus better, but ... why?

Robert Whitaker [1], author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, has looked into these matters, and concluded that the medications make people's conditions worse.

[1] http://www.madinamerica.com/

> Robert Whitaker [1], author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, has looked into these matters, and concluded that the medications make people's conditions worse.

Sure, I agree that the school isn't making it any better but lashing out against the things that work in lessening the pain given our current theoretical overload?

Remember, we don't need to go further back than my childhood before woodworking and sewing was a school subject, as was cooking (yeap, real food: fish, meat and vegs).

One generation back and my dad grew up with a work horse, dairy cows, dairy goats and sheep. And so on and so on.

Evolution doesn't move that fast. Banning or further restricting (i.e. beyond todays standard where you need something line 7 years of medical scool) the best solutions we have doesn't sound like something I would support.

> Banning or further restricting [...] the best solutions we have doesn't sound like something I would support.

The solutions offered by the medical profession are far from the best solutions we have, they're what are profitable for the medical-industrial establishment to offer.

> The solutions offered by the medical profession are far from the best solutions we have...

I'm all ears: Tell me about it because I know someone who really did try without and would be happy if there was a better way.

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