From Prescription stimulants in individuals with and without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: People aren’t using Adderall to get smart, they’re using it to focus. But mostly it doesn’t enhance cognition in people with ADHD either.
Its main strategy is to show Adderall doesn’t enhance cognition in healthy people.
There is a vast literature trying to disprove this. It may work better for people with ADHD – a lot of them report an almost “magical” effect – but it works at least a little for most people. Meanwhile, Adderall works for people whether they “have” “ADHD” or not. They just don’t form a discrete population. Some people really do have poor concentration, they suffer a lot from it, and it’s not their fault. This doesn’t mean ADHD is “just laziness” or “isn’t biological” – of course it’s biological! Height is biological! But that doesn’t mean the world is divided into two natural categories of “healthy people” and “people who have Height Deficiency Syndrome“. Attention is the same way. It’s the neurostructural literature, the the genetics literature, a bunch of other studies, and the the Consensus Conference On ADHD. We draw a line at some point on the far left of the bell curve and tell the people on the far side that they’ve “got” “the disease” of “ADHD”. Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.īut “ability to concentrate” is a normally distributed trait, like IQ. He goes on to give me his story about how he’s at risk of getting fired from his Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers position, and at this rate he’s never going to get the promotion to Vice President Of Staring At Giant Spreadsheets, so do I think I can give him some Adderall to help him through? (it’s because his colleagues are all on Adderall already – but telling him that will just make things worse) How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently? I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering.
I didn’t realize how much of a psychiatrist’s time was spent gatekeeping Adderall.
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