Do Amphetamines/psychostimulants for ADHD Cause Permanent Brain Damage?

Question by Ryan: Do amphetamines/psychostimulants for ADHD cause permanent brain damage?
So I’m trying to set up an appointment with a psychiatrist for a prescription for psychostimulants or amphetamines to treat my ADHD. I’ve had my Verbal IQ assessed at 118 by a psychologist (on the Wechsler), but the problem is I can’t concentrate, or motivate myself to study, even though I have strong aspirations of getting into a selective university.

I know that methamphetamine causes brain damage because of dopamine pathway depletion, do other stimulants have a similar effect on the brain in the long-term?

Best answer:

Answer by gardensallday
I dunno about the brain damage either way, because psychiatry studies are terribly done, with horrible statistics and big pharma bias and all that. It’s not astronomy, that’s for sure (those studies are much better). Profit motive is a huge distortion of the research. Anyway, there’s been a big concern that college students are shopping around for ADHD drugs, they use them to unfair advantage in college, but burn out later due to addiction or something. So I suggest you read up on that controversy, and see if you would reconsider this idea. I took different drugs for bipolar disorder, and I swear they knocked 20 or 30 points off my IQ for many years, and it took 3 years off the drugs to go back to normal, or close to normal. There could still be brain damage. I took adderall for depression, after I’d exhausted many other options, and it made me verbally aggressive and I broke a lot of stuff. Don’t believe what you read about psychiatric treatments because people in that field talk about things as if they know, with tons of jargon to make it sound brilliant, whereas some physicist will tell you what’s hypothetical and what is established, what are the controversies, and not use much jargon.

Do you do ok on your hobbies? If so, imo, it’s not ADHD. So many people are over achievers now, it makes me want to vomit, with their helicopter parents buzzing around. Start a flower garden, go birdwatching, take up fishing, etc. and just do your best. When I was a TA at one of these selective universities, these pre-med students all had extreme stress and were very unhappy people.

oh, and when I got depressed and the doctor gave me antidepressants, I got severe mania and got kicked out of my PhD program. I’ve been much worse ever since. In fact, I am on disability and can’t even work part time at KMart. Coincidentally, my brother, who was a machinist, got depressed at about the same time, also given prozac, and also flipped out and never got back to the functionality that he had before. So I have nothing good to say about drugging people so they can compete in a fancy university. At least in my case, I had serious problems before the drugs made me horribly sick. Others go thru this horror for relatively minor problems and land on disability due to drug induced pseudo-psychiatric problems. I had real and induced problems.

An IQ of about 120 isn’t that high. Get into a prestigious university and nearly everyone has an IQ that high or higher.

I’m rambling here but anyway, if you were my relative, I would beg you not to take these drugs.

Study 45 minutes, take a 15 minute break, and reward yourself. get a bowl of ice cream, call a friend, play a game, read a novel, then study 45 minutes more, take another 15 minute break, reward again. And so on. If you are having a hard time with that, study 30 min, break 30 min, reward. I got my math degree doing that. Another thing I did was get to campus as soon as the custodians opened the building and studied when it was quiet and nothing else to do. But nowadays people have their electronics, so maybe that won’t work. Good luck!

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