There are a few root causes: telemedicine rapidly increasing prescriptions, the mentioned Teva production issues. But one of the main problems is that the DEA tries to project the amount of adderall that’s allowed to be made/imported per year, which makes it so companies can’t quickly scale up production or hold inventories to smooth over supply issues.
IMO, the DEA should not have any input whatsoever in how much of a medicine can be produced or imported per year. Why should people who need medicine suffer just in case someone else might abuse it?
It’s hard enough as it is to manage these prescriptions because of them being controlled substances. Now it’s 10x harder because I have to play middle man between pharmacy and physician (if they only have 15mg XR in stock I can’t just get that filled to replace my 15mg IR without resending a prescription - by the time my physician sends something over they might be out of stock of that dose already) and pound pavement to find pharmacies with stock at all. Plus you have to deal with all the pharmacy staff that’s pissed at all the other people in the same boat calling in to try to get their prescriptions filled, on top of the regular baseline judgment against people with controlled substance prescriptions
And it's still the correct argument. One person abusing something isn't a reason to harm another. I really do feel for people that are dealing with opioid addiction issues. It's been something that's hit close to me as well. But the ridiculous levels of interference in proper medical treatment is a strong driver of the very addition problems its attempting to solve.
Getting proper pain management requires going to "pain specialists" which may or may not be pill mills since their entire business is now built on pain management rather than general medical care. Getting your medications is heavily restricted and complicated. You can't fill a script for more than a month. You can't fill more than 2-3 days before the date on the script. You can't stock up for a trip, and you can't even start the process of trying to get it early in a shortage situation. The fear of DEA / government means your normal providers won't touch it, and it means if you're dealing with a bad provider (say you wound up at a pill mill and you're trying to get out) other providers won't want to take you on. It means if you've been mis-managed, rather than trying to help you wean down, you're more likely to have a new provider cut you off cold turkey and then treat you as an addict when your withdrawl symptoms kick in. An uncomfortable number of addicts have the same basic history, of being put on pain meds for some reason or another and being cut off cold turkey by some other provider without consideration for their current dependency levels or their actual pain needs. And that doesn't even begin to get into how impossible it becomes to get proper help if you are an addict.
Addiction is an awful thing, and it's an issue that needs to be dealt with. Dealing with it by making it harder for non-addicts and addicts alike to get the help they need is not the answer.
The DEA could still go after pill mills or over-prescribers without supply limits. The main thing supply limits do is just make it inconvenient for everybody prescribed a particular medication to get it filled.
And it's a good one. Opiates have life-changing efficacy, it's the implementation that failed. Doctors weren't clever, if even actively malicious, about duration and tapering.
They're doing the same thing today with benzos, it's just less marked on society.
There's room in between full removal and liberal prescribing.
And I still think it’s a good one. Someone who wants to get a Rx of painkillers specifically to abuse it themselves or sell it to other abusers isn’t what we should really care about too much about outside of getting them into rehab. Someone might be a drug seeker is not a good reason to let someone who isn’t suffer.
Accidentally getting someone who had no intention of abusing it addicted without recognizing it was/is the much bigger issue and availability doesn’t really help that.
1 is a little more complicated. I believe as part of the ACA hospitals were actually evaluated on subjective pain management as reported by patients with financial implications if it seemed pain was not being managed.
Also, a lot of people got started on Oxy after a surgery in which they were given it on their way out. They either started taking it and liked it, or didn’t take it and possibly had it diverted to acquaintances/family. With adderall you have to get it prescribed for ADHD or (more rarely) narcolepsy - of course it could still get diverted, but it’s not something that’s being routinely given to the general population like painkillers.
Not if you actually need a surgery. If you need a surgery you can generally get one pretty quickly and with little complication. Getting a prescription for Adderall from a responsible doctor when you actually need it can take months and multiple visits to a psychiatrist.
There was a shortage about a decade ago, right? I remember because my partner had ADHD and had trouble getting adderall. I remember it was definitely a rough time, even after getting it back. Getting re-acclimated was not easy - the break definitely made the unpleasant parts of being on adderall 7 days a week apparent.
They've long since stopped taking medication - but that was after we both decided the software industry is, for lack of a better word, stupid and de-prioritized it generally. We still make good money off it, but we do a worse job and have more free time for what matters in life. Thank goodness for remote work :)
Careful with this. I was “self-medicating” my ADHD with exercise for years simply thinking I just liked exercise and not ever realizing that I had worked up to 25-30 hours a week just to function. Exercise absolutely does 100% work but meds that raise your baseline so you don’t have to exercise is a much healthier relationship with it.
There are a lot of habits that ADHD people fall into to “stim.” Whether or not it’s a healthy way of managing it is up to the person.
Exercise works for you, but we should be careful about overbroad generalizations. Exercise is a pretty good thing for just about everyone with lots of benefits, and it likely can help many with ADHD, but it's never going to be enough for some people. I doubt there's anything that will 100% work for everyone. Even stimulants can't help everyone with ADHD, and for those who do benefit from medication some medications will work better than others.
Ultimately it's a lifelong process to figure out what helps with symptoms, what makes them worse, and what doesn't do much if anything at all. It's probably worth giving exercise shot for people who aren't already active enough, but don't expect miracles.
Personally, I've found jogging to be excellent for curing cancer, solving world hunger and balancing the checkbook. It truly is a miracle cure.
To be less sardonic, I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic at hand. It feels like people like to kramer into any discussion about medication to offer their unsolicited advice. Just about anyone that's gone through what you've mentioned have heard that same advice 10x over.
As far as I understand it, Vyvanse is specifically designed not to be instant release. It is amphetamine attached to lysine that only becomes active after the lysine is cleaved from it in your gut.
That’s wild. I would be very concerned if my psychiatrist treated all phenylethylamines as interchangeable. I guess people have to make do with what is available though.
I was going to say the same thing but for Modafinil. It has been demonstrated to be not only non-neurotoxic but neuroprotective, you don't need to sleep sixteen hours when you cycle off, and it doesn't change your personality.
I'm diagnosed ADHD and Modafinil has been saving my life (defined as my ability to hold a high paying professional job in tech and provide for my family) for a decade and a half.
Thanks for sharing this! I have always figured I’d try it at some point, but I seem to have a system that works. If that changes, I’ll keep this in mind.
Maoi have serious side effects, dangerous interactions with other drugs (and food!) and have withdrawal effects. These do not combine well with ADHD symptoms, and are not a first line treatment for a good reason.
They also don’t cause emotional flattening or weight gain like every other mental health medication. On top of that, they’re some of the most effective medications available, commonly polled much higher than SSRIs, SNRIs, or tricyclics.
Setting aside blue cheese and kombucha was an easy choice for me.
You’re right, it’s not scientific or authoritative information. Anecdotally, though, MAOIs solve my attention issues where Ritalin and Adderall failed.
Ah yes, just don't eat blue cheese, drink grapefruit juice, or ingest one the thousands of otherwise innocuous drugs with MAOI contraindications unless you want to die a horrible death.
It’s less of a problem than you make it sound like. I don’t ever eat blue cheese and I don’t take arbitrary drugs. It’s been a lifesaver for me, and it has none of the weight gain or emotional flattening side effects of most other mental health medications. MAOIs are also commonly polled with a much higher efficacy rate.
This is an unfortunate point of view and is damaging to those legitimately suffering with issues related to ADHD and similar diagnoses.
As a child I struggled with ADHD, it’s not a state of mind. It’s not a decision. It’s a chemical imbalance that make a child’s innate lack of self control, and poor ability to self regulate something as simple as idle movements, orders of magnitude more difficult. I’m not commenting on over/under diagnosing of ADHD, I’m commenting on a condition that some individuals legitimately deal with. Some find themselves unable to focus on tasks, or get labeled the weird kid in their peer group because of behaviors they don’t even realize they’re doing.
Now I am older, I’ve learned strategies to self regulate. I’ve learned how to turn that energy into a strength. Often times I can channel that energy into my work, but I’ve also learned when I need to seek assistance either through medication, or taking some time away from work, or using my partner as a sounding board. I have 3 kids of my own now, and I see the same struggles in one of my sons. I see it now from the perspective my parent saw it from.
As a parent I didn’t want to medicate my child if it wasn’t necessary, I wanted to help him develop his own strategies to deal with his condition. But he lacks the insight and self-awareness that I developed with age and with the help of the medication. Medication that helped me to see what was possible, helped me to slow down, and helped me to understand myself and how my behaviors were affecting the world around me. Medication that I’ve seen change my sons life at school, how he interacts with his peers, his ability to constructively participate in Boy Scouts, his ability to be more patient with his older sister and younger brother. He still struggles, the medication isn’t a panacea, but it has given him the ability to improve himself.
Hopefully, one day he won’t need the medication regularly. He will make that decision when the time comes. But right now, nobody needs people like you saying “ADHD is a fictional illness”. Your opinion does not convey any value to those who have to deal with it in their daily lives. Just because it isn’t your reality does not make it a non-real issue.
> I’m not commenting on over/under diagnosing of ADHD, I’m commenting on a condition that some individuals legitimately deal with. Some find themselves unable to focus on tasks, or get labeled the weird kid in their peer group because of behaviors they don’t even realize they’re doing.
I'm of the opinion that there's nothing wrong with that. I lean more towards the acceptance side of things. Humans are diverse in many ways. I don't believe we should be attempting to stifle that with drugs. Maybe there's value in your inability to sit still and flaws in the paradigm that asks you to?
>Medication that I’ve seen change my sons life at school, how he interacts with his peers, his ability to constructively participate in Boy Scouts, his ability to be more patient with his older sister and younger brother. He still struggles, the medication isn’t a panacea, but it has given him the ability to improve himself.
Is it not possible that your son would have developed these skills with age, without the aid of amphetamine? Kids are kids. They have a lot to learn. We shouldn't expect, or desire, every child to develop in the same ways at the same time. What would be left to celebrate? Normies don't change the world.
One could say the same about many conditions or qualities one might be born with, in fact many deaf people don’t consider their inability to hear as an impairment. There is a rich deaf culture and entire schools dedicated to deaf students.
However, that’s where you have to meet reality where it is, not where you want it to be. Mental illness typically begins not with the condition but when that condition impairs the individuals ability to operate within the parameters of the society they are a member of. When the condition impairs their ability to meet their own definition of success or happiness.
My son was not happy with the way other kids treated him, it hurt me to see him hurt. My son was not happy in school, he thought the teacher was mean and didn’t like him because she wouldn’t give him enough time to finish his school work, and would force him to switch tasks with the rest of the class. My son was not happy that his older sister often didn’t want to play with him.
Was my son doing something wrong?
He just wanted to play, he wanted to run the fastest, bounce the ball the most, just go crazy. But sometimes the other kids wanted a break, sometimes they wanted rules to the game, sometimes they wanted him to stop. He could get so worked up he couldn’t just “stop”.
In school he understood all the material, it was easy for him, he could read better than most of his peers, critical thinking tasks were easy for him. However, focus and time management were completely out of his grasp. The teacher wasn’t mean, she just had more material to teach him, they had to move in to the next topic.
When he would get excited, that excitement would become intensity, that intensity would alienate him from his peers and sometimes from his older sister. His biggest advocate and ardent defender would want space away from him.
Maybe the paradigm is flawed, but sometimes a train without brakes is just a train without brakes.
> I don't believe we should be attempting to stifle that with drugs.
Even if society placed zero demands on me whatsoever and I never had to worry about being anywhere at a specific date/time, or never had to sit still for any length of time if I didn't feel like it, I still wouldn't be happy suffering from ADHD.
ADHD is not some perfectly normal but uncommon personality quirk that our narrow minded society has cruelly chosen to punish, it's a neurodevelopmental disorder impacting executive function making it difficult for people to accomplish the things they want to even entirely on their own terms.
Some people can find coping strategies that let them get by with only minor difficulty, but for others there is no amount of skill development or accommodation that is going to make up for their malfunctioning brains.
Medication isn't for everyone. It's not effective for everyone, and isn't necessary for everyone, but it'd be wrong to think that without the expectations imposed on us by society medication would never be necessary or that ADHD isn't really a problem because it's just a different way of doing things or looking at the world. It's mental illness, and one way or another symptoms will typically need to be treated or it will cause the mentally ill person needless suffering.
Since you edited your comment while I was replying, I didn’t get to address your second paragraph.
You’re right, normies don’t run the world. Be different, be you, don’t let others tell you what to like or what not to like. I have told my children this and they know they have my unconditional support and acceptance. But don’t expect acceptance from everyone, our society is not so enlightened. Especially not children. Kids want to be liked, they want to be loved, they want the acceptance of their peers and those that they admire or look up to. Children can also be cruel to one another, not intentionally, they often have a lack of matured empathy. You have to be able to choose your battles.
It’s not about making him normal, it’s about giving him the tools to be who he wants to be. It’s about giving him the control he otherwise lacks.
>I'm of the opinion that there's nothing wrong with that. I lean more towards the acceptance side of things. Humans are diverse in many ways. I don't believe we should be attempting to stifle that with drugs.
For the first time in my life, with decades of experience dealing with and managing ADHD with soft skills and sheer stubbornness I started medications for ADHD last year. The significant changes and disruptions to society and daily life of the COVID 19 pandemic left me in a position where my skills were no longer adequate to deal with my condition. A loss of focus helpers (like a dedicated working environment, commute times, access to fellow co-workers etc), added stresses caused by dealing with other medical issues in the new paradigm, easy access to other distractions and more added up to a crippling depression and self loathing as I became less and less capable of performing to the standards that I knew I was capable of and had performed at even just a couple years before.
I tried anti-depressants because I was depressed, so of course that seems the right way to go. But no amount of anti-depressant or counseling will fix self disappointment and frustration at being unable to bring yourself to perform to your known potential. There was no "value" in my inability to do my job, to do the things I'm good at and the things I enjoy. I wasn't doing something else that was more fulfilling. I wasn't learning something new about myself, or finding an alternative path to success. I was spinning in circles trying ot do what I wanted to do and failing at it over and over again for no other reason than decades of skills and practice were no longer effective in the world I found myself in.
Maybe, on a long enough time scale, I could have learned new strategies. I could have spent large enough sums of money to build a new and different environment around me to support those new skills. And in the mean time I would have spent years spiraling further and further into depression for failing to be the person I wanted to be and was capable of being.
Taking ADHD medications helped. The struggle to deal with the way life is no longer the same is still there, but I'm not having to fight my own head at the struggles at the same time. The week I started it, for the first time in my entire life I thought to myself "I need to do task A" and then just got up and did that thing to its completion, and then I did it again for task B, and again for task C. No minutes to hours prepping myself, working up the energy and mental gumption to do the thing. No mental dance to shift between tasks. No fight to stay on task A instead of jumping between A, B and C. I don't think it's possible for me to explain how incredible it felt to be able to just "decide" to do a task, or how it feels now to know I've never actually been able to do something that way before.
Skills are useful, and knowing the ones I do make it easier to deal with the days where even with the medications I still struggle. But a key component to diagnosing a disorder is "does it negatively impact your ability to conduct your life". Diversity is one thing, but no one should have to fight their own head to live the life they want just for the sake of "diversity".
As time has gone on the less sympathetic I've gotten to labels like "ADHD" and the more I've thought we should just make amphetamines not require a dx, although they should probably still require a doctors supervision.
The whole concept that a doctor has to say there's something wrong with you to get drugs I find to be very patronising. If somebody has trouble focusing, they can just take some drugs and fill out some planners, they don't need to be labelled using an acronym.
I'm not convinced ADHD is an illness either, but this isn't really specific to ADHD, I'm pretty sceptical of the entire DSM model and our need to give people a label or a combination of labels. I was diagnosed with ADHD in the aftermath of the most extreme abuse of my life because I didn't focus in class. I think a lot of the point of the label was making the adults feel like they were "helping me with an illness" rather than making an abused kid swallow strong drugs in order to keep up in this unforgiving world. In the entire diagnostic process nobody so much as asked me what had happened in the previous year.
Even when I hear arguments like this, it's pleading practicality and nessecity. We need the label so he can get these drugs. We need the label so we can do X and Y. Only the label can give me true understanding of who I really am. But the label is incidental to all of this stuff, there's no reason you actually need this specific label. I'm almost certain the main reason we have these labels at all is so present the labelled as pathetic enough to be worthy of insurance coverage.
I was fortunate to have some FMRI (I believe that's the tech) work done years ago, shortly after I was diagnosed with ADHD. The imagining made it so blatantly obvious that my brain was different than normal brains. Where a normal brain would light up like crazy for a given stimulus, mine looked like a black hole.
There are certainly bio/physical differences.
That said, I came into this comment thinking I'd take the stance of "of course it's a disease," but I think I've warmed up somewhat to what I think is your argument: lets stop with the labels.
What holds me back from getting on board is that it's not like a headache. I can't just be like "oh, I'm feeling scattered" and take a pill when I need to. That "I'm feeling scattered" is 100% of the time.
So I'm still in the "it's for sure a disease" camp. But I really don't care all that much in the end - I just want to make sure people stop hogging what allows me to even have a job and family.
Do I believe I still have ADHD now? Sure I "have it" based on how the word is commonly understood.
The thing is at this point I've had doctors write down me having about 6 different conditions in the DSM, recurring or continual, no one doctor having given me more than 3 dx at a time. I've been prescribed over a dozen psychiatric meds over the years, all discontinued. So what am I supposed to think, am I just that unique and special and statistically rare? Or am I an edge case which is poorly described by the status quo diagnostic nosology? Is it useful for me to go to a doctor or friend or authority figure and describe myself as having the kitchen sink?
But in practice almost everybody I talk to from friends to doctors to family has a different set of labels they think of me as having, and I change which labels I use to describe myself to accomplish different goals, and deep down I don't think anybody really has a clue what they're talking about.
> Where a normal brain would light up like crazy for a given stimulus, mine looked like a black hole. There are certainly bio/physical differences.
I'd be careful about this. I've never seen anything to suggest that we could screen every child with FMRI scans to catch blatantly obvious indicators of ADHD or use scans as a definitive test for who should get medications. I honestly wish it really worked that way because it'd end all the hand-wringing about overprescribed medications and prevent a lot of kids from struggling unnecessarily, but unless something's changed pretty recently there's no one test that can identify someone as having ADHD.
Thank you for catching me on that. I neglected to mention that the imagining I'd done was actually unrelated to my ADHD. A pretty important detail that I hadn't considered.
> there's no reason you actually need this specific label.
Would you feel the same way about appendicitis? Like, there's zero reason for a diagnosis or a "label" and if your side hurts you should just be able to get whatever you want cut out of you until you feel better?
Labels are important for a lot of reasons. It's human nature to classify things and it's a whole lot easier when we do. By taking a list of symptoms and assigning one or more labels to it we can differentiate between the various causes of a person's symptoms. Someone might improve their symptoms by popping stimulants all day long, but it's possible that by identifying the cause of their symptoms and finding the right label a doctor could make taking all those pills and dealing with their side effects unnecessary. A diagnosis helps doctors select the most effective treatments without nearly as much trail and error.
The diagnosis is also extremely helpful for the patient! It helps them to explain (to themselves and others) why it is that they are different, it sets expectations for what problems their condition might bring them, and helps them identify others who struggle similarly so that they can commiserate and gain insights and strategies for dealing with those problems.
It's terrible if you were misdiagnosed once and that the experience has soured you to the entire idea of diagnostic medicine but as imperfect as that science is, it's still the best we've managed to come up with, it solves a lot more problems than it causes, and those solutions help with a lot more than just sorting out the billing.
ADHD is absolutely a mental illness. I can't say if you actually have it or not. It is possible that your problems were entirely from your recent abuse and ADHD was total misdiagnosis, or maybe your recent abuse exacerbated your ADHD symptoms to the point that they became unmanageable. Either way the label you were given matters very little compared to how well your executive functioning is working today. If you're functioning to your satisfaction then the label doesn't matter much. If you're still struggling, your doctor can use your label or assign new ones to help guide you towards the best treatments to get you where you want to be. People shouldn't fear a label any more than they should let one become their identity or blind them to other possible causes for their problems.
It's wasn't that I thought I was misdiagnosed, I agreed with the diagnosis, it's that I felt mistreated. I remember coming into that office that day and thinking "I'll make sure I won't get diagnosed with something else" because a fair amount of my past abuse was a result of institutional discrimination caused by school policies that mandated certain treatment of certain children with labels to the point of stupidity regardless of the child's consent or protests. The issue was, I had the same label as what had previously typically been a more severe disability, and thus was treated as mentally incompetent by policy.
I didn't want to be diagnosed, I didn't want the treatment (And it never did end up helping), and none of this actually got to the root of my problems. I ran an experiment soon after diagnosis. I gummed my medication one week, and told the teacher I took it, and asked them how I thought I was doing. They thought I was doing great! I then took it, and said I stopped taking it due to side effects. They said I was really struggling. I stopped taking the drug after that, and got an angry response in return, as now that I was diagnosed, I had a moral obligation to treat myself. Do recall I was a recent victim of severe abuse when I say all this.
I got another label later, I took one psychiatric medication, I reacted to it badly right away and called the doctor to report this in 2 days, something I virtually never do. He just told me to tough it out for a month to see if it worked. It was a month of hell I felt I was morally obliged to go through to "Get better" because as my doctor says, the evidence says I have to give it time.
My issue isn't being misdiagnosed, it's being correctly diagnosed and the prescribed approaches not working. I've grown to see these labels as just packages of prejudices and I've had quite a bit of distaste for. I wish I could just be misdiagnosed, but it was only two years ago a coworker approached me and confided in how they had ADHD and thought I did too, so I don't have any ability to truly convince people I don't have these labels anyways. So long as this system is useful for other peoples purposes, my opinion and my experiences don't matter.
You know what my username is a reference too? It's a reference to folklore about stolen children. At first children would appear normal, but when the faeries "stole" the child in early childhood, they would start exhibiting bizarre traits like obsessively counting seeds, jumping and dancing about, and unusual intelligence for their age. The people of the time figured these children must not really be human, but changelings, replaced by faeries. Martin Luther of protestant fame figured they were children replaced by satan who could only be cured through murder. So that's what my username is, a reference to a label for children who acted differently which justified their murder.
p.s. for people who have a hard time understanding how an amphetamine can help someone with this type of condition.
Everyone is different, and most people experience a stimulant effect from amphetamines. I do not, my son does not, amphetamines significantly calm and slow us down. With the correct time delayed dosage, the world feels less “exciting” and things that were distractions or often stole my focus just become background noise. It’s not a feeling I particularly like, but the best thing I can compare it to is like a washing machine getting off balance and knocking around, sometimes you just need to slow it down and let it settle for a little bit.
I consider it to be closer to common sense than a "bold statement". Amphetamine is a highly addictive drug with serious side effects. As a nation, we prosecute those who engage in the unlicensed manufacture of amphetamine and its analogs.
As for ADHD, the man who first described the condition later confessed he fabricated the whole thing.
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Was your comment more thoughtful or substantive than the one you responded to?
> I consider it to be closer to common sense than a "bold statement".
I experienced a set of symptoms that makes it harder for me to stay focused than most people. It would make it difficult to do my job, as it was to succeed in school before I was medicated (it's no surprise to me that I flunked out of high school at first).
Adderall ameliorates these symptoms drastically without major side effects. I don't seem to be addicted as I frequently (if briefly) stop taking it for reasons of avoiding tolerance. Please explain to me what's wrong about this? Should I stop taking Adderall, to hell with the reduced quality of life, because someone on the internet says a chemical substance meant to treat my symptoms is not "medicine"?
>A software-based translation of that article from German to English does describe Dr. Eisenberg as the “father of ADHD” and report that during his “last interview” he said something similar to “ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease.” However, when one allows for the vagaries of translation from German to English and reads the statement in context, it’s clear that Dr. Eisenberg wasn’t asserting that ADHD isn’t a real disorder, but rather that he thought the influence of genetic predispositions for ADHD (rather than social/environmental risk factors) were vastly overestimated [...]
Eisenberg wasn't the first person who described the disease we know now as ADHD. In anti-ADHD circles he's called the "father of ADHD" or some other such epithet, and he clearly made significant research in the early days, but he was not the inventor nor the only one working on it.
Nerve pain is a fictional illness and SSRI/morphine/fentanyl is not medicine.
Depression is a fictional illness and antidepressants are not medicine.
Cancer is a fictional illness and chemo is not medicine.
You catch my drift? I am obviously not being serious. You are not the one who decides what is and isn't an illness. It is researchers, scientists and physicians. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Except ADHD is not even a fictional illness because it’s not an illness at all, it’s a disorder, it’s right there in the name.
To be the devils advocate, there have been plenty of researchers and psychotherapists in the recent decades lamenting ADHD as too broad a diagnosis, and it has indeed been scrutinized on multiple occasions as a convenient way to sell prescriptions.
As someone diagnosed with ADHD, depression, and nerve pain, I’d take ADHD and depression over nerve pain any day, they’re not even in the same camp, and clearly not even in the same camp as cancer.
Sure, but we don’t go around calling people with ADHD mentally ill, cough. The same way we don’t go around calling guns “mass drivers”, even though that’s exactly what they are.
I'm diagnosed with ADHD, I self-describe it as a mental retardation. Mentally ill seems accurate, too. I don't have a learning disability, per se, whereas most forms of mental retardation involve a learning disability. Perhaps that's why people aren't so fast to call ADHD a mental illness or mental retardation.
There are a few root causes: telemedicine rapidly increasing prescriptions, the mentioned Teva production issues. But one of the main problems is that the DEA tries to project the amount of adderall that’s allowed to be made/imported per year, which makes it so companies can’t quickly scale up production or hold inventories to smooth over supply issues.
IMO, the DEA should not have any input whatsoever in how much of a medicine can be produced or imported per year. Why should people who need medicine suffer just in case someone else might abuse it?
It’s hard enough as it is to manage these prescriptions because of them being controlled substances. Now it’s 10x harder because I have to play middle man between pharmacy and physician (if they only have 15mg XR in stock I can’t just get that filled to replace my 15mg IR without resending a prescription - by the time my physician sends something over they might be out of stock of that dose already) and pound pavement to find pharmacies with stock at all. Plus you have to deal with all the pharmacy staff that’s pissed at all the other people in the same boat calling in to try to get their prescriptions filled, on top of the regular baseline judgment against people with controlled substance prescriptions