From 2018 to 2022, ADHD prescriptions shot up 30 percent for adults ages 20 to 39 and 17 percent for those aged 40 to 59.
The supposed theory behind prescribing amphetamines is that they increase dopamine, a hormone that produces pleasure, satisfaction and motivation. (As does cocaine.)
Dopamine also, in heavy doses, can produce psychosis.
And, no surprise, that is what a new study has revealed. Published September 12 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Boston’s McLean Hospital study links taking a high dose of ADHD drugs to a more than five times greater risk of developing psychosis.
So the dopamine party is over—or at least someone better tape a warning sign on the door.
Lead study author Dr. Lauren Moran is also not surprised. “We’ve seen this a lot,” she said. “We are seeing college students coming in being prescribed stimulants who didn’t have much of a psychiatric history developing new onset psychosis” (i.e. the first episode of psychosis for a person who never had it before).
Dr. Jacob Ballon, a psychiatrist and co-director of the INSPIRE Clinic at Stanford Medicine, which specializes in patients with psychosis, is also not surprised. Amphetamines, he says, “can flood the brain with dopamine, and when you flood the brain with dopamine you potentially can cause psychosis.”
When one peruses the NIH Library of Medicine’s list of amphetamine side effects, one finds such things as “believing things that are not true, feeling unusually suspicious of others, hallucinating (seeing things or hearing voices that do not exist), agitation, mania (frenzied or abnormally excited mood).”
That certainly sounds psychotic. And since the NIH Library is “an official website of the US government,” psychosis as a side effect of amphetamines should also be no surprise to the United States government.
Amphetamines have been known to cause psychosis longer than most of us have been alive.
According to mental health watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights, amphetamines were fed to Japanese kamikaze suicide pilots who then deliberately crashed their planes into Allied ships toward the close of World War II.
Why amphetamines?
To override the pilots’ natural impulse to survive and to exploit the drug’s side effects of euphoria, combativeness and—lo and behold—psychosis.
So, if the high command of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service of World War II were with us today, they, too, would nod and agree they’re not surprised amphetamines cause psychosis.
Amphetamines have been known to cause psychosis longer than most of us have been alive.
It is no secret. Much less a surprise.
So here’s a simple question: If everyone from the WWII Japanese high command to the United States government to the psychiatrist on the street already knows that amphetamines cause psychosis, why in the Sam Hill do we need a new research study to tell us so?
And one more question, while we’re at it: If amphetamines are known to cause psychosis, what the hell are you guys doing prescribing them in the first place?
Teva Pharmaceuticals, a key manufacturer of Adderall (a powerful amphetamine), has no comment.
