> methylphenidate

no, dextroamphetamine.

> The fact that [...] is effective for the treatment of ADHD does not imply that there is a "dopaminergic system" or that ADHD is caused by a disorder in dopamine specifically, any more than strep throat is caused by a penicillin deficiency.

Not all cases of ADHD are like mine; there are many possible things that can lead to it. But even then, I never said my case was an amphetamine deficiency, did I?

Penicillin can help fight off the infection that caused a case of strep throat, and stimulants can help address deficiencies that led to a case of ADHD, but in both cases, one is not suffering from a drug deficiency, they are suffering from something else that the drug can potentially mitigate.

In other words, it's the effects of the drug that they need. Sometimes those effects are supposed to happen naturally within the body, such as the immune system fighting off an infection; sometimes the body was never designed to create those effects endogenously—exotic mental disorders come to mind, if a treatment can't be induced without the help of drugs.

I know that brains certainly aren't supposed to shut down and stop working despite the conscious mind trying to perform a task, yet that is what mine did. I also definitely know that it was basically insurmountable for me, and remained so for over a decade. However, taking dextroamphetamine instantly fixed that problem completely for me; my brain no longer shuts down or disagrees with me. It also knocked out every single other symptom of ADHD that I can think of. I am now in control.

So what's the difference? Dextroamphetamine in particular is primarily a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, though it does also have action on norepinephrine and serotonin (basically a bunch of the monoamine neurotransmitters). Based on my own research and what others have told me, a lot (all?) of the ADHD symptoms I experienced were most likely caused by specifically "excessive dopamine reuptake"-induced executive dysfunction, which would in fact count as a form of ADHD. It would also explain all of my symptoms.

Have a look at the Wikipedia article for dopamine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine

Spend more than a few seconds there and you'll see "dopaminergic pathways": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopaminergic_pathways

> [...] attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) [...] can be attributed to dysfunction in specific dopaminergic pathways.

Oh hey, it looks like dysfunction of these pathways is linked to ADHD.

> The dopamine neurons of the dopaminergic pathways synthesize and release the neurotransmitter dopamine.

Hmm. Let's take a quick look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesolimbic_pathway , also known as the "reward pathway"...

> The release of dopamine from the mesolimbic pathway into the nucleus accumbens regulates incentive salience (e.g. motivation and desire for rewarding stimuli) and facilitates reinforcement and reward-related motor function learning

The release of dopamine? I must be reading this wrong because this implies that there is indeed a dopaminergic system; a system that has to do with dopamine.

Meh. Rant about lazy dopamine pseudoscience all you want. But like, a dopaminergic system does exist, and it does have an impact on all sorts of things.

(Also, oh look: a few of the dopaminergic pathways are responsible for facilitating addiction, too. Circling back to the original topic of the thread here. If a dopaminergic system doesn't exist, wikipedia must be all pseudoscience too, I guess.)