The difficulties of getting off adderall

[[MT...]]

This is a well done article about how the stimulants suck people in and how difficult they are to get off of. The pattern with psych drugs is so evident  I wish the world would catch on: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/magazine/generation-adderall-addiction.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science%C2%AEion=stream&module=stream_unit&vers

 

I didn't find coming off stimulants nearly as hard as benzos but the way they mess with your head is pretty intense.

[[Bu...]]

Good article MTfan.  Glad you were able to get off of them as well.  My son was diagnosed with ADHD and given Ritalin, which depressed him and then Adderall, which did nothing.  He was only on them a short time, thank goodness.  After he became depressed on the Ritalin, the doctor wanted to put him on Prozac and he was only 14 years old! 

[[MT...]]

He dodged a bullet by having bad reactions so he wasn't left on them. Congrats by the way for jumping off klonopin!

 

This article was also good: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-pharma-s-manufactured-epidemic-the-misdiagnosis-of-adhd/

 

Big Pharma’s Manufactured Epidemic: The Misdiagnosis of ADHD

 

  By Gareth Cook

 

According to the American Psychiatric Association, about 5 percent of American children suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), yet the diagnosis is given to some 15 percent of American children, many of whom are placed on powerful drugs with lifelong consequences. This is the central fact of the journalist Alan Schwarz’s new book, ADHD Nation. Explaining this fact—how it is that perhaps two thirds of the children diagnosed with ADHD do not actually suffer from the disorder—is the book’s central mystery. The result is a damning indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, and an alarming portrait of what is being done to children in the name of mental health.

 

What prompted you to write this book?

In 2011, having spent four years exposing the dangers of concussions in the National Football League and youth sports for The New York Times, I wanted another project. I had heard that high school students in my native Westchester County (just north of New York City) were snorting Adderall before the S.A.T.'s to focus during the test. I was horrified and wanted to learn more. I saw it not as a "child psychiatry" story, and not as a "drug abuse" story, but one about academic pressure and the demands our children feel they're under.

 

When I looked deeper, it was obvious that our nationwide system of ADHD treatment was completely scattershot—basically, many doctors were merely prescribing with little thought into whether a kid really had ADHD or not, and then the pills would be bought and sold among students who had no idea what they were messing with. I asked the ADHD and child-psychiatry establishment about this, and they denied it was happening. They denied that there were many false diagnoses. They denied that teenagers were buying and selling pills. They denied that the national diagnosis rates reported by the C.D.C.—then 9.5 percent of children aged 4-17, now 11 percent and still growing—were valid. They basically denied that anything about their world was malfunctioning at all. In the end, they doth protest too much. I wrote about 10 front-page stories for The New York Times on the subject from 2012-2014.

[[Bu...]]

Thanks MTfan    I'm proud to be off the benzos and hopeful that I will heal in time.

 

Amazing how big pharma pushes drugs for even children, who might not even need them or perhaps, benefit from other kinds of help...ugh!