Earlier quoted context omitted.
The largest users of anti-depressants are socialist style nations like Iceland, Australia, and Portugal. These countries are run almost the opposite of the US. So there's more than the usual liberal criticisms of how the US is too competitive/not competitive enough or has too easy access to drugs/not enough or whatever applies here. >North Americans to find pseudo-biological justification about everything. Yet the ab…
Regarding the use antidepressants, the USA beats everybody, according to OECD data: http://static5.techinsider.io/image/56b363792e526551008b4c1d... Also: Iceland, Australia, and Portugal cannot be called socialist by any stretch of the imagination.
Amphetamine use in America's workforce
231–240 of 261 posts
Re: Amphetamine use in America's workforce
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure I'm ready to accept that this is a myth. From "Prescription stimulants in individuals with and without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: misuse, cognitive impact, and adverse effects", published in Brain and Behaviour (2012): "In sum, the evidence concerning stimulant effects on working memory is mixed, with some findings of enhancement and some null results, although no findings of overall performan…
Unfortunately you can pretty much nanny-pick a study that supports your view for just about any purported topic and view relating to drug use. Secondly, that study is flawed because it fails to acknowledge what is known as the 30%-30%-30% jump. The difference in intelligence between a retard and a normal person is the same difference of intelligence between a normal person and a genius. Different boosts account for d…
> Unfortunately you can pretty much nanny-pick a study that supports your view for just about any purported topic and view relating to drug use.
While that's partly true, in this case it's a systematic review of the literature on this exact topic. That's not nanny-picking some random study.
Re: Amphetamine use in America's workforce
#233Re: Amphetamine use in America's workforce
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
>SSRIs, for example, take weeks to have an effect. I am not sure that the time it takes to have an effect is a good metric for whether or not something has potential for abuse. Sure SSRIs take a few weeks to have a noticeably effect but they also takes weeks to tail off. The area under the curve is not necessarily different.
Actually, time-to-action is exactly what separates addictive drugs from non-addictive alternatives. The brain cannot abstract pleasure from what are extremely subtle mechanisms.
I'd say length-of-action is just as big a factor, especially with prescription pain-killers. When people take drugs with short half life's, they tend to 'dose up'. Which, if you're not careful can easily lead to addiction.
Also, I do believe personality comes into play. When I was taking the max dose of Tramadol for over a year, I stopped dead three weeks post-op. The only noticeable side-effect was a runny-nose for a few days, hardly a big deal.
Re: Amphetamine use in America's workforce
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would actually like to know if you had dosed this morning. This is a rather lengthy narrative! If you had(not) dosed this morning, how would you have written this differently? Thanks for giving your two-cents and personal experience. Most of my friends, myself included, use amphetamines for recreational purposes. There's been a vague understanding that it works differently for people with ADHD, though I've never pe…
> I would actually like to know if you had dosed this morning. I'm curious as well. I've come to use long (but informative) rambles as an ad-hoc indicator of the kind of executive function deficit typical of ADHD. Folks who can write short, crystal-clear, on-point emails are unlikely to be (untreated) ADHD.
I always notice when I've written some long reply to a comment chain and thing "oh, right. Meds kicked in." As a kid, before I was diagnosed (parents didn't "believe" in ADHD) I'd have trouble staying on one train of thought for more than 10-15 minutes and my schoolwork suffered accordingly. Now, while I've got my dosage to a point where I don't feel overly stimulated but can focus, I'm able to actually do things.
I still need to put in the effort to do something difficult or boring (like just about anyone) and I do still feel a mild coffee-like perk up when I take my Adderall and it kicks in. But otherwise, it's a relatively mild tweak that I personally find to offer more benefits than drawbacks for the time being.
Re: Amphetamine use in America's workforce
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how humanity ever got anything done, before we had stimulants to treat our ADHD.
Two pointers, assuming good faith: * Many didn't cope. * Also there were more physical work to be done.
When children are put in unnatural environments that are totally incompatible with the way children's minds actually work, they will not do well. Children should be actively learning, but school puts them in desks.
I could have been diagnosed as ADHD in college. This was not a biological problem, but that I didn't care about my classes. Stimulants might have helped me focus better, but ... why?
Robert Whitaker [1], author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, has looked into these matters, and concluded that the medications make people's conditions worse.
Re: Amphetamine use in America's workforce
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd also not recommend melatonin, but not for the reason that the other poster gave, which suggest that they are taking melatonin in the amounts that it is formulated at pharmacies, which is usually orders of magnitude that of the recommended dose, and probably too late in the evening (>Don't However, after taking it for several years on most days, I developed heart palpitations and other strange sensations. They dis…
I take melatonin every day, and I find my ideal time to take it is about an hour before bed. I take a small dose (1mg), which seems plenty, and in fact in the past I took half of that. People vary. You can buy tablets with ridiculously large doses, and I definitely would not recommend taking those regularly.
I've noticed that in addition to becoming more expensive, over the past few years, it's started coming in really high dosages at retail outlets (drug stores, etc).
The cost difference makes it silly for me to buy a bottle of 90 1mg tablets for $10 instead of the bottle of 90 5mg tablets for $13 so I get the higher dosage and just snap bits off of them to swallow. I've seen bottles at our local Rite Aid with 10mg tablets recently! That's just crazy IMO.
From what I understand, after a certain point, there's not much benefit to higher dose and it can screw up your sleep patterns more than it helps.
Re: Amphetamine use in America's workforce
#238I think this quote sums up the article's heavy handed, decidedly outdated view on mental health. > ADHD drug abuse had become so commonplace on college campuses that Wesleyan University, among other prominent institutions, has tried to ban it altogether. ADHD is a diagnosed medical disorder that affects millions of people in America. Why do we still stigmatize it in the modern age?
> ADHD is a diagnosed medical disorder that affects millions of people in America. 4.4% of Americans are supposed to have ADHD ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16585449 ). One starts to wonder if all those people really are suffering from a medical disorder, or if it is just a character trait. I would say a disorder is something which makes it difficult or impossible to function in life. Is that the case for 4.4%…
> How would their ancestors have been surviving for all those thousands of years before Ritalin had been invented?
Different demands. I was diagnosed with ADHD and started medication. At that time, I was an engineer doing the problematic, bleeding-edge R&D-ish stuff pretty much by myself with close support of a small team and needed to focus, something that never came easy to me. The company was acquired, I moved on and accepted a technical management position at a much smaller place. Being constantly interrupted annoyed me and I stopped the medication (my psychiatrist agreeing). Without it, I felt again more at ease spread over more, different tasks.
So, to answer your question, people survived by doing jobs that didn't demand the kind of focus that's difficult for people with ADHD.
Such jobs, sadly, are not abundant anymore or evenly distributed geographically.
Re: Amphetamine use in America's workforce
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Closer to 2-3, but you may have to find the right time for you. If you have ever gone on an extended camping trip, think about the time between sundown and the time you naturally start wanting to fall asleep.
For DSPS sleepers it can be up to 5hrs.
Don't want to get too far off topic but I had never heard of DSPS. Not gonna get into self-diagnosis but...this is exactly what I have been trying to explain to people for the past 20 years or more. Interesting to learn that it's a "known issue".
Re: Amphetamine use in America's workforce
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, time-to-action is exactly what separates addictive drugs from non-addictive alternatives. The brain cannot abstract pleasure from what are extremely subtle mechanisms.
I'd say length-of-action is just as big a factor, especially with prescription pain-killers. When people take drugs with short half life's, they tend to 'dose up'. Which, if you're not careful can easily lead to addiction. Also, I do believe personality comes into play. When I was taking the max dose of Tramadol for over a year, I stopped dead three weeks post-op. The only noticeable side-effect was a runny-nose for…
I just mean in terms of potential addictiveness. Mind you, weakly binding drugs will usually be coupled with higher doses. So there's not exactly a separation between time-to-action and length-of-action and binding affinity. Dont worry about coatings and whatnot. If someone wants to abuse a drug, it will most likely be crushed up. Now, if we are talking about the actual substance - depending on whether it is a direct agonist versus a prodrug that goes through multiple passes, or has other rate limiting behavior. -- This will definitely affect the addictiveness of the drug. But 100% in addition to the binding affinity and the receptors affected. So I agree, it's a combination of a bunch of factors. But the ultimate end result, which is perceived duration, perceived impulse, is responsible for a large part of the addictive threshold of that drug. The drug's makeup is clearly responsible for everything, I'm not saying perception trumps the actual chemistry. I just mean, if there is very little perceived impulse, there will most likely be little to no physical dependency. Again, this is based on the tendency of someone to use a drug at what we want to call effective doses, or in abusing it, supra-effective doses.