First synthesized in the s to treat fatigue, depression and psychosis, Ritalin evolved from a drug to keep people happy into a drug to keep kids focused. So what are study drugs really doing to your brain, and why? And do the benefits of popping one before a test outweigh the health risks?
The short-term benefits of Adderall are scientific but not secret: It's an amphetamine, so it raises your dopamine and norepinephrine levels throughout your brain.
When Adderall hits the brain in the right spots, the result is usually beneficial: better focus, better wakefulness, less impulsivity and less depression. But doctors don't always know what parts of the brain are being affected and how.
It hits the whole thing — like cocaine. When Adderall works properly, according to Segil, it triggers the neurotransmitters in the prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for executive functioning, thus improving your concentration and focus. Then it triggers dopamine in the basal ganglia, which facilitates calm and can alleviate hyperactivity and impulsivity. And if dopamine hits the hypothalamus, the area of the brain responsible for hormone production, it can even alleviate depression.
Tim Legg, director of health sciences at Touro University Worldwide, told Mic that Adderall can impact more areas of the brain than the aforementioned ones in charge of focus and calmness. Legg says it spurs activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, striatum , thalamus and anterior cingulate cortex. Roy Boorady , MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Child Mind Institute, says he often increases the dosage within the first several years of treating a child.
But after 15 or 16, I find that kids end up needing less, not more. The child gets more aware of what the medication does and might want more of that feeling. Hinshaw, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that sometimes after years of effective treatment, a patient with ADHD needs to switch to a medication based on a different stimulant, say from Concerta to Adderall, to maintain the effect.
A big concern about ADHD medication is the worry that kids who take them will be at higher risk for substance abuse when they are older. But several studies have shown no correlation. The most recent research showed that while teens and young adults with ADHD are at higher risk for substance abuse than other kids, treating them with stimulant medications neither increases nor reduces the risk.
What the new study shows is that the risk is linked to the disorder, not to the treatment. The National Institute on Drug Abuse notes that addiction is a risk when these stimulants are abused, that is, taken in doses and via routes other than those prescribed ie they are crushed and snorted or injected.
Then they produce euphoria and, as a result, increasing the risk of addiction. Hence a history of substance abuse would be an important factor when considering whether a teenager is a good candidate for ADHD medication. Get this as a PDF.
Enter email to download and get news and resources in your inbox. Share this on social. Are there long-term effects of taking ADHD medication? Quick Read. Full Article.
How stimulants work. Does medication become less effective over time? Does ADHD medication lead to addiction? My fellow Virgo Lil Wayne has often discussed the endless flood of lyrics that scream through his head so violently that when he finally gets to work in the studio, it's a relief: he can, at last, depressurize.
But Wayne is an extreme artist, far more extreme than most, and he treats his extremities heavily with codeine cough syrup and marijuana. If I wanted to pull myself up out of the flood of information and ideas, I needed some sort of therapy: I had to find my dank drank. With a little help from my already-artificially-hyper-productive friends, I think I knew where to find it. Just as Merck used to manufacture the best cocaine on the entire planet, Shire now produces the most reliable amphetamine money can buy.
Getting a prescription for Adderall is not hard. Nearly every major city has a weekly alternative news and arts magazine that is half-full of ads for escorts and pain management clinics. After answering a few multiple-choice questions about my attention span the "right" answers were knee-slappingly clear , the briefest physical I've ever encountered, and handing over two hundred dollars in cash, I walked out the door with milligrams of generic adderall.
The super-jolt of energy novice users experience mellows after a few days of use and changes character dramatically. It does become a very sufficient coffee replacement: a little ritual combined with chemical stimulation that motivates you to get out of bed.
It turns out that my Adderall self has a knack for accounting, spreadsheets, and administrative tasks that my unstimulated self would normally shy away from: an inbox-zeroing robot bent on eking out every last ounce of productivity my heightened senses could spit out. Keeping up with the moving parts of being self-employed, as I am, is easy on Adderall. It feels almost robotic, as if I'm hiring an assistant to take care of the books.
But an Adderall prescription is much cheaper than hiring a competent assistant, and I always know I can trust myself even if it is a different version of myself to keep it honest when it comes to my bottom line. There is an issue of time here as well.
As someone in the content generation industry, my normal self's most valuable asset is creativity: producing product that others will pay, in one way or another, to consume. Transforming into an Administrative Jekyll for a certain amount of time every day limits the amount of time my Creative Hyde can come up with content to market and sell.
Luckily, amphetamines have that problem tackled as well: when you're using them, you don't have to sleep That frees up quite a few hours of the day. As someone with a penchant for eating everything that's in my field of vision often to help me avoid doing work , this was all fine with me: I waved goodbye to expensive lunches well, to lunch in general, actually and to those peanut butter and Cheetos-induced pounds that normally hang out around my waistline.
One of the first things you notice about Adderall is its "hard reset" effect on your metabolism. As you begin to come up, you'd best plan to be near a toilet. Part of the impetus for this whole shitshow was my recently-acquired and very violent intolerance of coffee. While Adderall doesn't induce the internal bleeding coffee had begun to elicit in my bowels, it's obviously a very powerful stimulant, without a lot of the rot-gut acidic effects coffee has in its arsenal.
Side effect number one, noted, with cautious optimism. Around came the second, after about two weeks of regular use: rampant eye twitches. Not anything that would interfere with my daily habits, but still an annoyance I knew was coming from the medication. A constant reminder to me and my confidants that something unnatural was acting out in my body. But the first time I became truly scared of what was happening to me was when the discharge began.
I was sentenced to 60 mg a day, an entire pill in the morning and another later on when my brain started to wander. The first morning I committed to 30 mg went swimmingly until it was time for a bathroom break. After a minute or so in Porcelainville, a small amount of seminal fluid oozed lazily out of my primary private part.
I was a little too shocked to be scared, and also flying on my new dose, so I sort of chuckled nervously and told myself a dirty schoolyard joke to take my mind off the situation. But it kept happening, every time I sat down on the toilet for more than a minute, and sometimes when I was just sitting down on a chair.
Amphetamine puts a lot of pressure on the prostate, and if it's not expressed daily, the buildup from that pressure finds its way out of your body when you don't want it to. Since we're on the subject, I'll go ahead and tell you about Adderall's "Killer App" — erectile dysfunction!!! Haaaayyyy girl!!! To be honest, seeing that on the forums didn't shock me: with my focus pinned in on work, I'd had little motivation or time to go out and get drunk enough to seek a mate read: a lot of nights spent at home with Buffy.
Amphetamine operates primarily by increasing levels of norepinephrine, stimulating the sympathetic nervous system, which in turn triggers the body's "fight or flight" mechanisms.
Quickened heartbeat, heightened awareness, enhanced muscle control and metabolic rates: processes that require a lot of blood. That excess surge of blood comes from the supply that would normally be diverted to non-essential organs. All of the other issues I could live with.
As a former user herself she had encountered similar situations and sympathized. She also made it abundantly clear that I was to cease taking my medications immediately. I didn't object. If it's never happened to you before, let me just tell you: not being able to have sex when you're used to being a Hornball From Another Dimension is terrifying.
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