Those pills have different effects on people with adhd and people without it. A pretty bad explanation trying to keep it simple: The adhd brain basically destroys neurotransmitters in the brain before they can be absorbed by the body. The stimulant will cause a lot more neurotransmitters to be created so that more of them can be absorbed by the body (both the natural NTs and the ones caused by the stimulant). For someone without adhd there wasn't anything stopping the natural NTs before so all the stimulant will do is flood the body with one kind of stuff.

Everyone has the symptoms of ADHD. It's a quantitative condition, not a qualitative one. ADHDers just have them to the point that their lives are significantly impacted.

Amphetamines make everybody better. And if you take too much, they make everybody worse. Look at WWII soldiers, 1950s housewives or 21st century undergrads for examples.

That's what I don't get about a lot of medical testing.

I presume Adderall was approved based on tests that lasted a couple years at most. It definitely seems like there is a class of medicine that can be beneficial in the short-term but be likely to produce bad results over decades.

I assume opioids could fall into this category too. In the short-term they could make people happier and more productive, but also their is chance of developing a dependency that may not be noticeable in the data until much later.

If drug X was found to benefit 100% of people for the first 2 years of taking it, but 5% of people developed a dependency that landed them in rehab or worse after 5 years, would we want the FDA to approve it?

I have a lot of libertarian leanings so I am mostly fine with it, but it does seem like the boundaries for what we consider beneficial or not are pretty arbitrary.

I guess thalidomide is the archetypal example in the back of every regulatory authority's mind. Nobody wants to risk a repeat of that.

In the case of Adderall, amphetamine was sold over the counter between the mid-1930s and 1964 (in the UK. Other countries, other dates) so there must have been a fair amount of additional research to take into account.

Interestingly, the first report of amphetamine being a treatment for what we would now call ADHD was 1937. We should have had this sorted out three generations ago; instead I coasted straight on through the school system in the 1980s without attracting a second glance.

Right. I guess with thalidomide the negative side effects weren't visible until after a pregnancy - which is why it took awhile to catch on.

I'm not saying I"m acutely worried about adderall, just the possibility there are drugs that take decades to show negative effects. It doesn't seem like the testing system we have in place would have any way to detect that.

Adderall does not have different effects on people with or without ADHD; it gives everyone better concentration.

But for ADHD it doesn't just give concentration. It makes everything work properly. Emotions, Impulse control, Organization and so on. Everything that is controlled by neurotransmitters.

It improves those things for everyone else, too. While those symptoms are real, and have plenty of biological underpinnings, they are not distributed bimodally in some way that distinguishes ADHD from “just” having terrible executive function, time awareness, and so on. Same neurotransmitter deal for everyone else.

My point is that the pills cause a ton of extra neurotransmitters - that's the same for everyone. In the adhd brain it has an extra effect of giving the natural neurotransmitters a chance to be absorbed and fullfil their duty. That means that during the effect of the meds the person with adhd also gets to have a functional brain for things unrelated to what the pill affects directly.

I could swear I at least once received an email that was sent to myname.mydomain@gmail.com or something similar in my myname@mydomain email. It's been several years but I remember thinking that was fucked up and looking into the full email to see if there was any other explanation for me receiving it, which I did not find.

I once worked on a project that would not even compile if a function had a param without a comment explaining the purpose of that param written with a specific format. Every comment was validated on compile time, you couldn't even comment code just to test something. Life was hell.

Some apps actually do that. I know at least Rocket.Chat has an option to handle push that way. I'd like to believe other similar chat apps used by groups and communities have it too.

But as others have pointed out, just having the timestamp and target of the notifications already tells a lot.

People without aphantasia can recall details about things that they didn't notice when they first looked at it, because they can "look at it again" in their mind.

I can't recall anything I didn't actively notice while looking. If you stop me when I'm leaving a grocery store and ask me questions about the cashier, I won't be able to tell you their hair color or what kind of clothes they were wearing. Sometimes I won't even be able to tell you if they were tall or fat or any other physical adjectives.

That's a lot more than I can do. I can't see anything at all. No color, no shape. The most I can do is remember if something is taller or wider.

Js in bookmarks used to be somewhat common though.

"if you forget it you didn't need it" isn't true for people with ADHD.

I spent so long looking for a comfortable chair that I ended up getting used to working in my reclining chair with my notebook on my lap and a wireless mouse on the chair's arm. I don't really miss using a table anymore.

When it first launched, that's basically all we had to play.