I had the same intuition as you but I looked it up in light of GP's comment and it actually seems not so clear that's how it works. Apparently the physiological effects of prescription ADHD meds will tend to still be ~same intensity for years and years. Patients often report weakened cognitive/psychological effectiveness, but obviously that's very hard to compare...

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disgruntledphd2 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Apparently the physiological effects of prescription ADHD meds will tend to still be ~same intensity for years and years.

I'm not sure how one would even measure this. Like, back in the halcyon days of my youth I took a bunch of stimulants, and experentially there was definitely less impact over time (habituation is a thing).

And given that ADHD is predominantly a psychological issue, then the only measure that matters is that of the patients themselves.

Do you have some of the sources you mentioned available, I'd be interested to understand the details?

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treis 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Practical experience is that people cycle through ADHD and depression meds. I agree that it's hard to tell what that means because we don't generally do long term double blind placebo studies.

	▲	estearum 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The issue here is more complicated than just a lack of long term RCTs. It's that we're talking about psychological acclimation within individuals. Given that people's lives change so much, even within an RCT design it's not clear how you get an actual comparison of "effectiveness" from year 0 to year 4.