ADHD? Be Prescribed Adderall…and You’ll Get Really Psychotic

     A study conducted at Mclean Psychiatric Hospital in Boston last year of over a thousand inpatients aged 16-35 diagnosed with ADHD showed that those taking regular doses of an amphetamine prescription (Adderall) were more than twice as likely to develop psychosis.

     Worse, those who were taking higher doses of the amphetamine were more than five times as likely to develop psychosis or mania.

     The amphetamine Adderall is most commonly prescribed for ADHD, and the number of prescriptions for it in the US annually has been skyrocketing since 2017. That year 32 million Adderall prescriptions were written, but by 2022 the figure jumped to over 41 million prescriptions.

     That increase may be due to the ease with which it is now possible to get an Adderall prescription. A separate study showed that today’s screening questions for ADHD are highly likely to show false positives. In other words, far more people are diagnosed with ADHD from these questionnaires than those who actually have ADHD.

     The rise of on-line telehealth clinics has probably also contributed to that rise in Adderall prescriptions. Those ADHD screening questionnaires are the first diagnostic requirement for an on-line prescription to be written.

     The Mclean study, published in the September, 2024 edition of The American Journal of Psychiatry, revealed another even more disturbing statistic.

     When the researchers included outpatients into the study, they found that outpatients who were prescribed a high dose of Adderall were thirteen times more likely to develop  psychosis or mania. Those inpatient subjects in the study had been hospitalized for another diagnosis — mostly depression or anxiety — but these outpatient users of Adderall had other, far less severe diagnoses…like ADHD.

     Those outpatients are therefore far more likely to be part of that population of 41 million people who are prescribed amphetamines for ADHD.

     “The results of this study,” the researchers write, “suggest that high doses of prescription amphetamines are  associated with increased odds of incident psychosis or mania.”

     No kidding. One would think that when the first research was being done on Adderall back in the mid nineteen-nineties that  someone would have  recognized that “attention  deficit hyperactivity” is a  kind of a mania disorder all  in itself. Feeding those  individuals with  amphetamines would be  likely to increase that mania to a much more dangerous level, no?

     As if all that weren’t dangerous enough, the FDA’s Black Box warning for Adderall includes this: “Serious Cardiovascular Adverse Events: Misuse can cause sudden death and other serious cardiovascular issues.”

     Of course, it’s also highly addictive.

     And highly profitable.

     The global Adderall market, including Adderall XR, was valued at $21 billion in 2023, and it’s projected to reach about $30 billion by 2032, according to DrugPatentWatch.

     So, if you take the questionnaire that is looking for ADHD symptoms, you’re more than likely to find out you have them. Then you’ll be prescribed Adderall. Then you’ll become addicted, but by then you’ll already be psychotic and manic, so the addiction “side effect” is no big deal.

     The only really big deal, of course, is dying from cardiac arrest from this gift to our American children from psychiatry, the FDA, and Big Pharma.