Absolutely, as someone diagnosed at 6, and 33 now. Being on medication allows me to actual live my life. Ive tried to be "normal" and not be medicated various times in my life, but it's just been bad every time. Our brains are wires differently, you can't just overcome it.
My family has a long history of alcohol and substance abuse, I'm the first to be diagnosed and medicated for ADHD. If you're not medicated and have ADHD the risk of substance abuse is much higher, and there is a strong link to alcoholics being undiagnosed with ADHD.
I'm always scared of the long term effects of the medication, but without it I can't work or hardly even function.. I'm not sure of these benefits another user mentioned, but whatever they are is not worth the trade off at all.
I have ADHD, which to avoid boredom, “tells” me to do more risky things. Is it a surprise that life expectancy is lowered with higher risk? And that the ADHD medication lowers the risky bits therefore increasing life expectancy?
Question to my fellow ADHDers who take the meds, is fun still fun and happening? or has calmness become the new fun?
Stimulants don’t dampen the fun. More fun, if anything. Very few downsides.
But being a Category 2 controlled substance means health care providers are always pushing me towards off-label use of antidepressants that DO have very big and worrying side effects.
I have the inattentive version but it's simply not bad enough to take meds.
What I don't like about this study is that they only take meds into consideration, but there are other treatment options. For example cognitive behaviour therapy.
Also, they included studies that included self-diagnosed ADHD. Self diagnoses are on the rise and very often wrong (I.e. trauma response might present with adhd like symptoms). Aside from some other flaws I think the significance of this study is limited...
I got diagnosed super late in life and I'm currently enjoying the fun cessation phase of said medication. Calmness is not the word I would use to describe it, but I'm glad it works for other people. Couldn't pay me a million dollars to take another pill, I'll just procrastinate and get bored often
For me, yes, I still have all the fun. I just have a much lower baseline stress level to compare the fun times to. Like, if now I’m going from 70% joyful on a normal day to 100% fun on a special occasion, it’s not as much of a swing as when going from 5% joyful to 95% happy.
You may have the Hyperactive-Impulsive presentation (or the Combined one), which is relatively rare among adults. I have the other one of the three (Inattentive), and I wouldn't say it raises my impulsivity, though I guess it's hard to know. The meds literally saved my life and career, but I also almost exclusively take them when working or in lowkey social situations so it's hard to say what they might do when, like, rock climbing or whitewater boating or something.
I suppose impulsivity in terms of working on what I should be working on instead of going into some rabbit hole is a type of impulsivity, and that's certainly decreased! I wouldn't call the former state "fun" though... more like "shameful", "irrational", and "distressing". Personally -- YMMV.
Anyway: yes that's plausible, as this review found pretty strong evidence of increased mortality from injury. Still, I'd personally say it's unlikely for two major reasons:
1. Presumably most injury deaths happen to adults, which are relatively quite unlikely to have the HI presentation.
2. There's just so many plausible causes of injuries, especially in a society with cars. The inclusion of "intentional injury" also introduces a factor that's no doubt strongly corellated with socioeconomic status (i.e. being murdered/manslaughtered), another very plausible cause.
I know that my rate of low speed car accidents has dropped dramatically off since I got on the meds.
Just an anecdote there, but I believe there's a study or two demonstrating a correlation between ADHD and car accidents - I imagine being inattentive in a car is likely to also increase your risk.
As a person with severe ADHD, who has never taken any medication, I find this study troubling. It uses statistical correlation to indicate causation.
People on ADHD medicine are also going through mental health treatments and get special care and privileges in society. At the same time, the effects of ADHD medication numb their responses and emotions to what seems outwardly stable and normal but deep inside it is an inhibitor of development.
So excuse me for saying so, but I don’t buy into the conclusions of this study at all.
It sounds like you are confusing ADHD meds, which are stimulants (basically speed) with benzos, which they give for depression/anxiety. First you have to understand what ADHD even IS, which is a lack of executive function. All that means is it is harder to know what to do out of the millions of things floating in front of your brain every second. Stimulants, which usually make people feel more wired, tend to make those with ADHD feel more calm. Because they aren't flitting between thoughts and the stimulant empowers them to have a more normal executive function to actively choose what to pay attention to.
Worth noting this feeling of calm comes solely as relief from spastic thoughts. Your body still responds in every other way as you would from taking a stimulant, and yet people feel calmer and more orderly because their baseline thoughts are so frenetic.
maybe what you're saying is true for some patients but I tried the stimulants when I was diagnosed and they just made me feel uncreative, suppressed my appetite until I was a dangerous weight, and overall felt horrible. also made my dick temporarily smaller while I was on the drug. but sure, explain to that person how their brain works. I'm sure you know better than them. And me too, I obviously made up those effects and chose to go back to being unmedicated because I'm wrong about the effects of the drugs.
and I have pretty severe ADHD, so I strongly believe the diagnosis was correct. drugs just affect people differently. GP is talking about stimulants. I experienced what they describe.
they even took away my sense of humor. I'd rather die.
not everyone experiences this. I know people who love these drugs and report none of this. but some do
Well, you've made some incorrect assumptions. You seem to think yourself verysmart, so you should understand a snap judgement like this is worth very little. You don't need psychological treatment alongside it and the results are pretty obvious and immediate. Try it or don't, but I have trouble seeing the value in your narrow and uninformed opinion.
It is more efficacious to have therapy alongside the medication, according to various studies I've read, but I have trouble accessing the therapy because it's expensive, so the meds alone will do for now.
I still need a list or five, but at least now I can remember I have a list, where I left my list, and to use my list.
There’s also the chicken-and-egg problem here. Know what makes it super hard to get organized and motivated to start therapy for ADHD? ADHD! Dealing with insurance companies is the exact kind of demoralizing nightmare that makes it extremely hard for the people who need the treatment to actually get it.
The other problem with the study is that it does not take income into consideration. This is my largest pet peeve with so many studies, they're basically ignoring a major indicator of quality of life and then make weird conclusions.
But ADHD has been shown to significantly affect income. It’s hard to excel in a high paying career when it’s affecting you strongly. It’s probably pretty hard to normalize for income, then, because it’s a confounding factor.
How would we know which way that runs? Lower income could expose you to stressors that make ADHD worse, maybe especially in childhood. But ADHD could also easily make it harder to earn money or hold a stable career down too.
Ooh, let me count the privileges I get, starting at zero.
Zero…
There, done. What treatment for ADHD has done for me in the real world is drastically cut my anxiety and stress. Turns out the most challenging parts of my life involved knowing I had to do a thing, or I’d get fired or evicted or sued or such, and being utterly incapable of getting myself to do it until it became a crisis. What a piece of crap I must be, right, for ignoring the things a responsible adult would be doing!
And then I started taking meds for it, and found out I could, just, decide to sit down and gather my tax paperwork, or write that report, or balance the checkbook, even though those things didn’t need to be done for several more weeks. At first, it was utterly liberating. And then it was kinda soul-crushing. I could’ve been living like this the whole time, minus all the stress and self esteem issues and anxiety? And then it was liberating again. Well, bummer life use to be like that, but it’s not anymore, so yay!
And it didn’t do a single thing to my emotions, other than removing about 90% of the anxiety from my life.
(I have to get this in before the inevitable jackass opines: no, life isn’t suddenly “easier because you’re taking meth”. I get no stimulant sensation whatsoever from my dose of Adderall. My morning coffee has a much stronger effect. It just allows me to decide what I should be working on at any given moment, even when no one’s angry at me. It is not an energy booster in any way.)
meanwhile, as a fire-breathing, unicycling, sensation-seeking, self-care-neglecting, bad-choice-making, person with severe adhd on medication, I dont buy what you dont buy. This shit's rough.
No offence, but how do you know what the effect of the medication is, if you've never taken it? Your description doesn't match my experience.
I'm unsure about the inhibitor of development bit also, do you mean physiological, intellectual, emotional... ...software?
Are you able to clarify what special care and privileges are you thinking of? I have seen a psychologist a few times, but I can't afford to do so nearly as much as I need to.
What a wild, unsubstantiated take. It's wild to suggest ADHD medications are dulling emotions and wild to suggest that this effect is less damaging than the developmental disorder which is unmedicated moderate to severe ADHD. I have watched this disorder destroy people to the point of homelessness. I've had my own struggles with it in the past. And your comment isn't even accounting for comorbidities such as severe anxiety or depression, or complications from broken executive function such as not taking care of your body, not exercising and not eating healthily. I don't think you know much about ADHD at all.
I mean, does it though...? The strongest claim they make is that "timely diagnosis and treatment" (via medication) "may reduce the risk", which seems like a pretty indisputable statement based on the observed corellations.
Anyway, as a side note:
People on ADHD medicine are also going through mental health treatments and get special care and privileges in society
I mean technically yeah, but the vast, vast majority of psychiatric medication management relationships don't involve therapy. Still more likely to pursue it though, I agree. Is that a bad thing, though? Absent of evidence pharmacological treatment doesn't help, this feels like a time we can just recommend and embrace both.
the effects of ADHD medication numb their responses and emotions to what seems outwardly stable and normal but deep inside it is an inhibitor of development
Your musings are not at all based in science, but instead personal anxieties. That's fine for you, but please don't casually muse about the secret nature of lifesaving clinical treatments, especially the treatment that is possibly the most stigmatized yet effective treatment in our society (after PrEP, I suppose).
> This review also showed a significant association between ADHD medication use and reduced rates of all-cause mortality in people with ADHD.
Can someone let the fine fellows at the DEA know this so they can knock it off with being stupidly strict with the manufacture of the stimulant medications?
Absolutely, as someone diagnosed at 6, and 33 now. Being on medication allows me to actual live my life. Ive tried to be "normal" and not be medicated various times in my life, but it's just been bad every time. Our brains are wires differently, you can't just overcome it.
My family has a long history of alcohol and substance abuse, I'm the first to be diagnosed and medicated for ADHD. If you're not medicated and have ADHD the risk of substance abuse is much higher, and there is a strong link to alcoholics being undiagnosed with ADHD.
I'm always scared of the long term effects of the medication, but without it I can't work or hardly even function.. I'm not sure of these benefits another user mentioned, but whatever they are is not worth the trade off at all.
Thanks for sharing. May I ask what medications have been most effective for you?
I misread mortality as morality and was exited for a second :‘)
Fun fact, now that you're here: adhd is severely over represented in prison populations. Several times the baseline general population rate.
I have ADHD, which to avoid boredom, “tells” me to do more risky things. Is it a surprise that life expectancy is lowered with higher risk? And that the ADHD medication lowers the risky bits therefore increasing life expectancy?
Question to my fellow ADHDers who take the meds, is fun still fun and happening? or has calmness become the new fun?
Stimulants don’t dampen the fun. More fun, if anything. Very few downsides.
But being a Category 2 controlled substance means health care providers are always pushing me towards off-label use of antidepressants that DO have very big and worrying side effects.
I have the inattentive version but it's simply not bad enough to take meds.
What I don't like about this study is that they only take meds into consideration, but there are other treatment options. For example cognitive behaviour therapy. Also, they included studies that included self-diagnosed ADHD. Self diagnoses are on the rise and very often wrong (I.e. trauma response might present with adhd like symptoms). Aside from some other flaws I think the significance of this study is limited...
You be you and do what works for you. But cognitive behavioral therapy does not work by itself for ADHD. Stimulants are the gold standard treatment.
I got diagnosed super late in life and I'm currently enjoying the fun cessation phase of said medication. Calmness is not the word I would use to describe it, but I'm glad it works for other people. Couldn't pay me a million dollars to take another pill, I'll just procrastinate and get bored often
For me, yes, I still have all the fun. I just have a much lower baseline stress level to compare the fun times to. Like, if now I’m going from 70% joyful on a normal day to 100% fun on a special occasion, it’s not as much of a swing as when going from 5% joyful to 95% happy.
Still had the fun, just stopped taking it too far. It really seemed to help my long term thinking.
You may have the Hyperactive-Impulsive presentation (or the Combined one), which is relatively rare among adults. I have the other one of the three (Inattentive), and I wouldn't say it raises my impulsivity, though I guess it's hard to know. The meds literally saved my life and career, but I also almost exclusively take them when working or in lowkey social situations so it's hard to say what they might do when, like, rock climbing or whitewater boating or something.
I suppose impulsivity in terms of working on what I should be working on instead of going into some rabbit hole is a type of impulsivity, and that's certainly decreased! I wouldn't call the former state "fun" though... more like "shameful", "irrational", and "distressing". Personally -- YMMV.
Anyway: yes that's plausible, as this review found pretty strong evidence of increased mortality from injury. Still, I'd personally say it's unlikely for two major reasons:
1. Presumably most injury deaths happen to adults, which are relatively quite unlikely to have the HI presentation.
2. There's just so many plausible causes of injuries, especially in a society with cars. The inclusion of "intentional injury" also introduces a factor that's no doubt strongly corellated with socioeconomic status (i.e. being murdered/manslaughtered), another very plausible cause.
I know that my rate of low speed car accidents has dropped dramatically off since I got on the meds.
Just an anecdote there, but I believe there's a study or two demonstrating a correlation between ADHD and car accidents - I imagine being inattentive in a car is likely to also increase your risk.
your understanding of ADHD is outdated. say what you said to ai to get informed.
I don't see a way to edit my post.
You are born with ADHD and it does not get better, so the "rare" in adults is not factual, some people just get better at managing it.
As a person with severe ADHD, who has never taken any medication, I find this study troubling. It uses statistical correlation to indicate causation.
People on ADHD medicine are also going through mental health treatments and get special care and privileges in society. At the same time, the effects of ADHD medication numb their responses and emotions to what seems outwardly stable and normal but deep inside it is an inhibitor of development.
So excuse me for saying so, but I don’t buy into the conclusions of this study at all.
It sounds like you are confusing ADHD meds, which are stimulants (basically speed) with benzos, which they give for depression/anxiety. First you have to understand what ADHD even IS, which is a lack of executive function. All that means is it is harder to know what to do out of the millions of things floating in front of your brain every second. Stimulants, which usually make people feel more wired, tend to make those with ADHD feel more calm. Because they aren't flitting between thoughts and the stimulant empowers them to have a more normal executive function to actively choose what to pay attention to.
Worth noting this feeling of calm comes solely as relief from spastic thoughts. Your body still responds in every other way as you would from taking a stimulant, and yet people feel calmer and more orderly because their baseline thoughts are so frenetic.
maybe what you're saying is true for some patients but I tried the stimulants when I was diagnosed and they just made me feel uncreative, suppressed my appetite until I was a dangerous weight, and overall felt horrible. also made my dick temporarily smaller while I was on the drug. but sure, explain to that person how their brain works. I'm sure you know better than them. And me too, I obviously made up those effects and chose to go back to being unmedicated because I'm wrong about the effects of the drugs.
and I have pretty severe ADHD, so I strongly believe the diagnosis was correct. drugs just affect people differently. GP is talking about stimulants. I experienced what they describe.
they even took away my sense of humor. I'd rather die.
not everyone experiences this. I know people who love these drugs and report none of this. but some do
[delayed]
> with severe ADHD, who has never taken any medication
> going through mental health treatments and get special care and privileges in society
1. How could you know ADHD medication numb their responses if you've never taken meds?
2. I hope you have the live you deserve. You seem like a happy person.
Well, you've made some incorrect assumptions. You seem to think yourself verysmart, so you should understand a snap judgement like this is worth very little. You don't need psychological treatment alongside it and the results are pretty obvious and immediate. Try it or don't, but I have trouble seeing the value in your narrow and uninformed opinion.
It is more efficacious to have therapy alongside the medication, according to various studies I've read, but I have trouble accessing the therapy because it's expensive, so the meds alone will do for now.
I still need a list or five, but at least now I can remember I have a list, where I left my list, and to use my list.
There’s also the chicken-and-egg problem here. Know what makes it super hard to get organized and motivated to start therapy for ADHD? ADHD! Dealing with insurance companies is the exact kind of demoralizing nightmare that makes it extremely hard for the people who need the treatment to actually get it.
The other problem with the study is that it does not take income into consideration. This is my largest pet peeve with so many studies, they're basically ignoring a major indicator of quality of life and then make weird conclusions.
But ADHD has been shown to significantly affect income. It’s hard to excel in a high paying career when it’s affecting you strongly. It’s probably pretty hard to normalize for income, then, because it’s a confounding factor.
How would we know which way that runs? Lower income could expose you to stressors that make ADHD worse, maybe especially in childhood. But ADHD could also easily make it harder to earn money or hold a stable career down too.
Ooh, let me count the privileges I get, starting at zero.
Zero…
There, done. What treatment for ADHD has done for me in the real world is drastically cut my anxiety and stress. Turns out the most challenging parts of my life involved knowing I had to do a thing, or I’d get fired or evicted or sued or such, and being utterly incapable of getting myself to do it until it became a crisis. What a piece of crap I must be, right, for ignoring the things a responsible adult would be doing!
And then I started taking meds for it, and found out I could, just, decide to sit down and gather my tax paperwork, or write that report, or balance the checkbook, even though those things didn’t need to be done for several more weeks. At first, it was utterly liberating. And then it was kinda soul-crushing. I could’ve been living like this the whole time, minus all the stress and self esteem issues and anxiety? And then it was liberating again. Well, bummer life use to be like that, but it’s not anymore, so yay!
And it didn’t do a single thing to my emotions, other than removing about 90% of the anxiety from my life.
(I have to get this in before the inevitable jackass opines: no, life isn’t suddenly “easier because you’re taking meth”. I get no stimulant sensation whatsoever from my dose of Adderall. My morning coffee has a much stronger effect. It just allows me to decide what I should be working on at any given moment, even when no one’s angry at me. It is not an energy booster in any way.)
> It uses statistical correlation to indicate causation
it makes no assertion like that.
> People on ADHD medicine are also going through mental health treatments and get special care and privileges in society
what privileges?
meanwhile, as a fire-breathing, unicycling, sensation-seeking, self-care-neglecting, bad-choice-making, person with severe adhd on medication, I dont buy what you dont buy. This shit's rough.
No offence, but how do you know what the effect of the medication is, if you've never taken it? Your description doesn't match my experience.
I'm unsure about the inhibitor of development bit also, do you mean physiological, intellectual, emotional... ...software?
Are you able to clarify what special care and privileges are you thinking of? I have seen a psychologist a few times, but I can't afford to do so nearly as much as I need to.
What a wild, unsubstantiated take. It's wild to suggest ADHD medications are dulling emotions and wild to suggest that this effect is less damaging than the developmental disorder which is unmedicated moderate to severe ADHD. I have watched this disorder destroy people to the point of homelessness. I've had my own struggles with it in the past. And your comment isn't even accounting for comorbidities such as severe anxiety or depression, or complications from broken executive function such as not taking care of your body, not exercising and not eating healthily. I don't think you know much about ADHD at all.
I mean, does it though...? The strongest claim they make is that "timely diagnosis and treatment" (via medication) "may reduce the risk", which seems like a pretty indisputable statement based on the observed corellations.
Anyway, as a side note:
I mean technically yeah, but the vast, vast majority of psychiatric medication management relationships don't involve therapy. Still more likely to pursue it though, I agree. Is that a bad thing, though? Absent of evidence pharmacological treatment doesn't help, this feels like a time we can just recommend and embrace both. Your musings are not at all based in science, but instead personal anxieties. That's fine for you, but please don't casually muse about the secret nature of lifesaving clinical treatments, especially the treatment that is possibly the most stigmatized yet effective treatment in our society (after PrEP, I suppose).odds are you don't have severe ADHD.
What mental health and special care privileges are you talking about ? Other than having to have a special aid in school nothing has been of benefit.
> This review also showed a significant association between ADHD medication use and reduced rates of all-cause mortality in people with ADHD.
Can someone let the fine fellows at the DEA know this so they can knock it off with being stupidly strict with the manufacture of the stimulant medications?
Sorry, best we can do is make you cycle back off your can't-live-without-it but physically addictive medications again for umpteenth time this year.
I'm sure this will be fine and you really have nothing to worry about.
very interesting to see