#1) Let's get specific about our dosages then. I know people prescribed 60mg of adderall a day. And lots of people prescribed 40mg. I guarantee if you give a pe

#1) Let's get specific about our dosages then. I know people prescribed 60mg of adderall a day. And lots of people prescribed 40mg. I guarantee if you give a person with no amphetamine tolerance 40 mg of adderall (yes, even if you split it into two doses) they are going to know they are on some speed. In fact, most people I know that use adderall "recreationally" (whether for pleasure or productivity -- that is they aren't prescribed, take the same or less than the people I know taking it prescribed -- I usually take 20 mg to crank on some work or be more chatty at a party. #2) Whether ADHD is "real" or not requires a complex discussion about epistemology, etc, as do all mental health diagnoses. What do you mean, "real"? Yes, of course it is real in so far as there are people with various clusters of symptoms that seem to go together, but they are all on a spectrum. Psychiatric diagnoses are inherently unreliable[1] -- in that it can't generally be replicated sufficiently from doctor to doctor with the same patient (or even doctor to same patient at different times) even with that giant bible sitting there we call the DSM. So yes, there are a variety of states of consciousness that vaguely cluster together that we have decided to call "depression". We know some chemicals that help some of these states -- though it's arguable that many of them are better than placebo (hello, SSRIs, but hey ketamine seems quite promising). Any therapist worth hir salt knows that depressions are different for different people -- different causes different manifestations etc. Yet thanks largely to the pharma industry, we have begun to collectively think there's this very specific thing called "depression" that's due to "brain chemistry" that can be fixed with XYZ and in fact human consciousness is much much much more complicated than that -- from both a psycho-spiritual angle and from a neuroscientific angle. Lastly, there's no doubt amphetamine usage has been around for a long time, and probably at higher concentrations than today among some population groups (middle-aged women in the 50s for example). But I doubt you can find me any study showing that we've ever seen so many people on high-dose daily amphetamines from a young age through adulthood until the past decade or so.