>In the 1990s we drugged kids (especially young boys) who weren't able to sit still with ADHD medication

This never happened. We did not overprescribe Ritalin.

What actually happened, is uninformed people like you with no actual evidence spread FUD about how giving kids well understood medicine was "bad" and the direct result of that was people like me, my sister, and my brother who all had stereotypical ADHD symptoms that we inherited from our stereotypically ADHD parents were tested and rejected an ADHD diagnosis by untrained school guidance counselors terrified of something that wasn't happening.

Each of us spent the next 30 years utterly failing to thrive due to struggling with these symptoms, and experienced immense suffering from normal life things. We all have finally gotten real diagnosis, and some of us are getting real treatment, and we are so much better off now and able to function, and we are even able to pass those learnings back up the chain to our parents.

A huge part of the "ADHD Epidemic" right now is the fact that a couple million people with clear ADHD symptoms were passed over by people who were supposed to be helping them due to the exact FUD you are spreading now.

>This generation it's autism, and it's likely over-diagnosed just as much as ADHD.

ADHD is not overdiagnosed. Autism is not overdiagnosed. Provide any evidence at all to support your shit claims.

If someone with just a whiff of autism struggle gets diagnosed as autism, that's fine, and they will be explained how they might not even need significant support, and they don't really get any treatment at all. For people with gentle autism like that, it's mostly just about understanding why you are the way you are. "Oh, that's why I <X>". And you suddenly have a framework and vocabulary to better explain the struggles you have and the problems you experience, and a way to bond with people who have similar difficulties, and a way to think about your own brain that can help you lessen the negative impact of being different.

>It comes as no surprise that psychiatry, and medicine in general, is suffering from a massive reproducibility crisis.

There is ZERO reproducibility crisis in ADHD science, and amphetamine based ADHD medications are some of the most well supported, scientifically, medicine we have full stop. You can literally measure physiological brain differences of people with ADHD, and if you give a kid with ADHD a stimulant medication for their life, those measurable differences go away

If you give ADHD people stimulants, all cause mortality decreases. They become statistically better drivers, which is something that ADHD people are statistically worse than average at. You lower all forms of addiction and substance abuse, because ADHD people struggle with self medicating and abusing substances as a rule. Notably, all the good Ritalin does for people who struggle with ADHD is not duplicated in people who do not have ADHD. People who take unprescribed Ritalin as a "study drug" have worse outcomes than people who take it for actual ADHD.

Giving kids with ADHD stimulants reduces bone fractures and STDs!

>You either have some quantity of illness or you don't.

This is stupid. Some people with bad eyesight need glasses to do normal day to day things while others don't, or only need glasses for reading, but both are diagnosed nearsighted

>Much to the disservice of people suffering from the condition.

Stop talking for me, you are doing an atrocious job of it.

>It's not anti-science to call into question the amount of bunk, p-hacked, corporate funded garbage coming out of even the highest tier of medical grade journals.

It is entirely antiscience to demonstrably have no clue what you are talking about and yet claim the experts are wrong. That is literally antiscience. There's no p-hacking in ADHD science. There's no corporate funded garbage for ADHD. Ritalin is old and cheap and no longer patent protected.

>If anything, your own post demonstrates the anti-scientific (pop-sci) instagramification of mental illness.

How dare you thumb your nose at kids self diagnosing on tiktok (not instagram, pay attention) as "pop-sci" when you yourself know only reactionary FUD. Shame on you. Educate yourself.

> This never happened. We did not overprescribe Ritalin.

I think it is important to stress a difference between "over medicated", "over prescribed", and "over dosed" (often also called over medicated, something I have been guilty of).

An example being my partner, apparently when he was a kid and diagnosed with ADHD he was put on a very high (I am only relaying what I was told) dose that he hated being on. That has caused him now as an adult to be very cautious to go back on the medication.

Where as for myself I was not diagnosed until an adult, was able to actually advocate for myself and I started on the lowest dose possible for all of my medications (also treating Anxiety and Depression). While I do take several medications I would not consider myself over medicated because we have identified that at this point in time all of these medications are actually helpful, but I am very cautious of being on too high of a dose for each of these.

I do think there are likely people that were put on too high of a dose too quickly to expedite treatment, but being on the medication in the first place was not the issue. It doesn't mean that the diagnoses was wrong though.

I think your point could be better made with less vitriolic language, and I also think you get a few things wrong: a bunch of my peers were over-medicated to the point of being senseless during the late 80s and early 90s. These drugs were pushed on kids by many well meaning but exasperated parents whose children - mostly boys - could not sit still and behave in the way demanded of them by school and society. So it's a mixed bag with regard to the intent behind medication, and the effectiveness with which it was applied. Nowadays, if anything it's harder than ever to get amphetamines because of US drug scheduling policies and our patchwork, piecemeal healthcare system.

I just want to say, I wish I could give 100 upvotes, but I'll have to settle for one.

It's definitely the case that there is undue paranoia about stimulants.

One case you only briefly touch on, addiction. Let me elaborate. I have struggled with severe ADHD(largely untreated during childhood, mainting severity into adulthood as a result) for all my life. I've struggled with drug addiction for most of my adult life(mainly cannabis). The amount of hoops addicts are made to jump through to get access to amphetamines is insane. Generally the requirements in my country(Norway) are to deliver weekly clean drug tests for 3 months. In the case of heavy cannabis use, it takes up to 3 months from going cold turkey until tests are negative. So, a 6 month commitment before treatment can even begin. Now, the relationship between ADHD and cannabis is interesting. I know some ADHDers who swear by it as a treatment. These tend to be of the predominantly hyperactive/impulsive type.

For me, it can't really be called a treatment. It actively worsens my condition in terms of executive dysfunction. Although it does improve some of the aspects like hyperactivity and emotional lability and helps make things bearable.

By the time I'm a year into a binge, my life is such a mess that getting myself out of it without meds is completely hopeless. Here I'm talking my apartment being such a mess I'm generally expecting to be woken up by people in biohazard suits any day now, and wondering how the hell I haven't contracted some kinda crazy bacterial disease by now. Cleaning it up is weeks if not months of work even with meds. Without it's inherently impossible. And the cannabis at least numbs me to the horror of it all.

So for 6 months I have to abandon that small comfort and just exist in this hellish life until I can even begin to improve things. Try to imagine how hard that makes going cold turkey in the first place. Not to mention the fact that meds significantly help me manage the addiction in the first place. I've successfully made it through this 6 month purgatory 3 separate times in the last 13 years. I've made more failed attempts than I can count. Wasted most of my 20s hiding from the purgatory inside a bong. I often wonder ehat my life would've been like if the rules weren't so strict. There's no evidence supported medical justification for waiting any longer than about 4 weeks. Out of the bajillion or so failed attempts, I reckon maybe 3/4 made it that far. Go figure.

I'm currently, close to 2 years semi-sober(doing a new moderation based approach to my addiction, very successfully, smoking exactly once every 4 weeks. Bit unrelated to the stimulant thing, it's more about relapse avoidance. But it's worked wonders so far.) and doing better than ever, but I still have a long way to go. And I will fight anyone who sows FUD about amphetamine or methylphenidate. These are wonder drugs. If you want to freak out about psych meds, go read up on neuroleptics. Now there's something truly horrifying. But of course, that only happens to crazy people hidden away in mental wards, so no one cares about them. I've been to those mental wards and I have seen some shit I will never forget. People whose lives were destroyed, reduced to an unbearable living hell for the remainder, by a supposed "treatment". These people are treated like animals. Go talk about that. Shut the fuck up about stimulants and SSRIs already, jesus. And go touch some grass.