"Sitting with her puppy helped, but her teachers told her it was too distracting onscreen. Ultimately her mother decided to try her on Paxil."
Sad
Sad
At this point though I'm not sure where the right balance is - the US healthcare model (you are a customer) probably drives excessive medication as much as cultural pressures, but at the same time the UK model (you are a patient, but not a paying customer) drives resistance to prescribing medication where it might actually be beneficial.
Probably somewhere between zero and a negative impact. I tried this briefly some years ago after hearing so much about productivity gains, then tried again once or twice after that. I quickly realized that while in the initial afternoon of the first use you may see some benefits, this come at the expense of later productivity. I'd say it is not too different from the impact of caffeine on sleep in this regard.
People just like taking these meds, they like the high it gives and the chemical induced "feeling productive" rush makes it easy to tell yourself a nice story about why you're taking them and what they're doing for you, but I don't think they're actually producing any real productivity gains.
Take a look at the generic name for desoxyn. I mean, if I can get it from a doctor, I'll give it a shot.
Unless you're actually arguing in favor of taking performance enhancing drugs for the purpose of boosting productivity, which based on your reaction I'd guess that you are.
The ultimate problem is that our current levels of medical knowledge simply aren't good enough, so the US approach often does more harm than good - and I would gently suggest that that shows up very clearly in US life expectancy figures.
It gets even worse when you drill into northern cities in the UK - Glasgow clocks in at a shocking 54.
You're likely confusing life expectancy with "healthy life expectancy", which is a different metric that measures the number of years a person can be expected to live in good health.
[1] https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_effect
Pretty sure that's our terrible diet and dangerous and slothful car culture.
Can you clarify - do you mean that the types of drugs used to treat ADHD make US tech workers more productive, or do you mean that it they increase the use of SV-style tech products? Somewhat contentious take either way.
Looking at the rates of ADHD diagnosis worldwide, it is clear that someone is getting it wrong - but that brings us to the deeper discussion of how far capitalism should be allowed to dominate; i.e. whether having large numbers of drugged-up but productive citizens is actually an OK situation for a country to be in.
I've heard about it, but it seemed more anecdotal, and it's not uncommon for drug users to rationalize their consumption in some way, eg based on their first experience.
U.S. Air Force, being tasked with a somewhat similar job, came to similar conclusions: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7661838/
I don't have a study, but the answer is yes, it definitely can boost productivity. But overall, a huge number of people take it for the high.
It's a sad state of affairs because people genuinely suffer for it and we don't have the foggiest what's going on, despite ever ramping research funding. Curing it could bring back billions to the economy.
It was first described (written down) in the late 1700s. Medicine is using very blunt tools (amphetamines, ect) out of necessity to treat problems which need far better understanding.
We really need better, cheaper and more accessible medical tech. A non-theranos, steve jobs style medical tech revolution would do a lot of good for a lot of people and put cured patients to useful work, who would otherwise suffer.
Isn't the usual answer something like:
"People with ADHD-like characteristics are restless and impulsive, therefore more likely to decide to strike out on big new adventures. Like emigrating to an exciting new country. So the U.S. has been an ADHD magnet since before its founding, leading to a much higher prevalence / diagnosis than most other parts of the world. And since ADHD is hereditary, it gets passed down the generations, sustaining the imbalance with the rest of the world. And/or maybe there is an amplification effect where in most populations the ADHD genes stay diluted in the gene pool, since it is not a common occurrence, and people with ADHD generally had kids with non-ADHD people. But at certain base rates, the ADHD people start having children with each other, intensify the effects."
Today, psychoactive stimulants are marketed as "Provigil" and regularly used by US troops, which is made responsible for more than one friendly fire incident.