Made-up Mental Health

ADHD is a made-up mental health disorder that only exists because the companies selling the 'cure' had available supply but no demand. This might be an unpopular opinion.

We all know that American pharmaceutical companies have no morality especially when it comes to overcharging for basic medication. Former CEO of Turin, Martin Shkreli, is a perfect example of greed and profiteering from people's poor health. The man is a real-life Bond villain. Other democratic countries subsidise the rising cost for medication that treats rarer illnesses. In America, Shkreli was allowed to raise the prices of cancer-treating medication by five-hundred per cent. Normally, if an action can be shown to cause a chain of events that killed someone through intent or recklessness then that would prove manslaughter/second-degree murder. Due to the rise in costs of rare illness medication, people without health insurance couldn't afford to pay for treatment thus subsequently died.

So roughly ten years ago 'big pharma' started to mass-manufacture Adderall, why?

Romanian chemists in 1972 discovered nootropics or 'mind-affecting' drugs; these became study drugs. Keeping awake, focused and more alert than just drinking coffee meant being able to do more activities like studying. Skip forward to 1986 and in America, nootropic drugs were allowed to be put in food and drink as a 'cure-all' for narcolepsy or just plain laziness. In WWII these became know as pep-pills, used to keep soldiers alert and awake on night drills. Later though, to keep American industry alive, Nixon started the war on drugs thus re-inventing slavery through the prison system (an article for another day). The war on drugs meant that pharmaceutical companies needed appropriate new reasons to sell drugs; illnesses.

Two years ago Adderall became the twenty-seventh most prescribed drug, meaning more than twenty-four million prescriptions had been made, mostly to children under twenty years old. All this was done under the guise of a terrible new illness called ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. ADHD was not a categorised mental health disorder until after the sales of Adderall and other nootropics stopped due to changes surrounding the legal scheduling of drugs.

Surely there is a case to be made that ADHD is a real disorder that some people do suffer from. These people are also called lazy, or sleepy, or maybe some other undiscovered dwarf from 'Snow White and the Seven made-up mental illnesses.'

After changes to rules all study drugs became schedule II controlled substances; nootropics now needed to be of legitimate medical importance to be sold. Even worse though for pharmaceutical companies is the fact that they now have warehouses full of illegal drugs. Not long after new amendments to the Controlled Substances Act did ADHD start to become the 'in thing'. Nearly all students started to question whether getting out of bed was hard because they stayed up watching My Little Pony all night or because they have ADHD.

A study by the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids in 2014 reported that twenty per cent of American college students reported abusing nootropic prescription drugs - of those, Adderall made up sixty per cent. No longer do misbehaved children need punishment or discipline, now they can be drugged-up zombies with no emotion and personality. Why pay attention in school when you can just walk around with a meat-shield of over-baked mental health claims. Since that study the use of Adderall has risen to approximately one third of all American students.

No teacher, I won't pay attention... because I can't pay attention... my doctor says so.

Here we see an amazing business strategy working, knowing they had a stock of a product they couldn't sell, they managed to persuade an entire generation that not only did they want it, but they medically needed it. So are doctors and pharmacists knowingly giving out drugs to children with no care for the effects?

IMO- Max T