I have a hard time reading this “correction” as intended in good faith, you would have to have misread every aspect of what you’re responding to. But I’ll respond in good faith because it’s important to me that people are not misled on this, intentionally or otherwise.

First of all, I did not mean ‘no one who isn’t(crazy)’, I meant no one who is not chemically imbalanced such that they will benefit from an amphetamine prescription.

Second of all, none of my comment had anything to do with the benefits for focus or racing thoughts. When I mentioned feeling calmed and anxiety relief, those were speaking to the same benefit for ADHD patients. Amphetamines are stimulants. Heightened energy and anxiety are generally their most common side effects, just as with caffeine. People with ADHD typically (but not always) experience the opposite effect, at least up to their optimal dosage.

More to the point, and I hope this will help clarify the overall scope of my comment: ADHD—despite the name, reputation, and many diagnostic criteria—is far more than either a deficit of attention or hyperactivity. When I say my diagnosis and treatment saved my life, I mean from the effects of traumatically crippling anxiety.

I had never even wondered if I had the stereotypical ADHD symptoms. I had to work with my psychiatrists to translate the diagnostic criteria into relevant experiences with intense sensory overload, hyperfocus/hyperfixation, anxiety and depression, social problems. If it weren’t for me making the connection to sensory overload, I never would have even had the conversation with a doctor in the first place. I’d be trying—and likely failing—to find the right combination of SSRI and benzo.

This is a very common story for a lot of people diagnosed with ADHD as adults, mine just happened to be fairly extreme because I was drinking myself to death to self medicate the anxiety. Which… self medicating is another common outcome for undiagnosed adults.

Anyway. All of that is to say, you’re not wrong that amphetamines tend to have a similar effect on focus for most people, at least to a point. But lacking “focus” in that productivity sense is really more of a clue than a primary symptom of ADHD.

This misunderstanding is mostly rooted in the diagnostic criteria being oriented around adult descriptions of children’s behavior. Not the actual patient’s experience in their own words.

If you ask people diagnosed as adults, or even children who haven’t internally stigmatized their own experiences, what ADHD is like… it often more closely lines up with a lot of experiences expressed by a lot of people with autism. And it’s not that trouble focusing is a complete red herring, it’s that why we have trouble focusing isn’t a part of the discussion.

So yeah. People abuse Adderall to focus. Common trope, no argument here. Those people abusing it, unless they’re unaware they’re undiagnosed, generally feel like they’ve taken an upper. Because they have! People with ADHD often feel the opposite even at an optimal dose, and generally should expect to be able to sleep while it’s still active and noticeably effective. Many of us even get sleepy especially on lower doses. I spent months while I was stepping up in dosage where I would need a nap about an hour after taking my morning meds. That is not how people react without the chemical imbalance Adderall treats.