there are freakout posts every hour or so on r/adhd. desperate plans to amass a huge petition of signatures, or challenge it legally with a class act. lawsuit, but mostly a lot of despair and disbelief. also some blaming of the so-called undeserved adderall users that are allegedly the official reason for the shortage...and something about tiktok users.

it's bad and capitalism is certainly the reason why. i'd like to understand the nuance of it more though if anyone had some good leftist takes on it.

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Effects of long-term treatment

      [...] These studies suggest that altered brain activation patterns in children with ADHD are not due to the effects of long term stimulant treatment. The best design though that could examine the effects of long term stimulant treatment on brain function in ADHD would be one that includes both a treatment naïve sample and a sample that has received long term medication, alongside a healthy comparison group. Such a study was carried out by Pliszka and colleagues [38], using a response inhibition (stop) task. On almost all comparisons, they failed to find significant differences in brain activation or behaviour between drug naïve and long term treated ADHD groups (the latter were off medication during testing for a minimum of 24 hours). In the few cases where there were differences the ADHD group who had received long term treatment was closer to the healthy comparison group. Therefore, this study suggests that if there is any effect of long term stimulant treatment, it acts in the direction of normalising neural function.

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3763932/

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      People with ADHD who take stimulant medication have lower rates of drug abuse than people with ADHD who don't.