(bright music) - ADHD, it stands for attention deficit... Oh, hey, are those donuts?

Hey, everyone, Myles Bess here, journalist, host of Above the Noise, and donut lover.

But I'm not here to talk to you about donuts 'cause I could talk about 'em all day.

Come on, brain, focus, focus.

Today I'm talking about ADHD meds.

Now there's a lot of hype around drugs like Adderall and Ritalin.

You're only supposed to use them if a doctor prescribes them for something like ADHD.

But the reality is lots of people without ADHD take them, especially college students.

They're often seen as these magical pills that can make you study longer, focus harder, and cram more info into your brain.

But is that true?

And aren't there some dangerous side effects with these drugs?

So today we're asking, what happens if you take ADHD drugs but you don't have ADHD?

(light music) Most ADHD drugs are stimulants.

They stimulate and activate your central nervous system within 15 or 20 minutes of popping a pill.

Caffeine is also a stimulant, but ADHD drugs are a lot more powerful, like Adderall, which is one of the most commonly prescribed stimulant medications in the US.

The active ingredient is a version of amphetamine, which has been around a long time.

It was first synthesized in the late 1800s in Romania and hit the US in the 1930s under the brand name Benzedrine.

It was prescribed for a bunch of things: head colds, weight loss, sleep disorders like narcolepsy, and even depression.

During World War II, soldiers were given amphetamine to keep them awake and focused.

And it's rumored that Adolf Hitler got daily injections of the stuff.

By the time the war ended in 1945, it's estimated that 30 million tablets of amphetamine were being produced every month.

And those pills continued to be gobbled up by Americans through the 1960s, which is when doctors really started to notice all the dangerous side effects, like spikes in blood pressure and the potential for drug-induced psychosis.

And that's no joke.

We're talking things like paranoia, delusions, and even hallucinations because they took too high of a dose.

But probably the biggest problem was addiction.

By 1970, 5% of Americans, around 9.7 million people, used prescription amphetamines and another 3.2 million were addicted.

It's actually referred to as America's first amphetamine epidemic.

Now at this point, the US government was like, "Um, maybe we should do something about this?"

So in 1971, the government made amphetamine a Schedule II drug.

That means it has, and I quote, "A high potential for abuse, with use potentially leading to severe psychological or physical dependence."

Some other Schedule II drugs you might have heard of are cocaine and Vicodin, both of which are also very addictive.

So how did we get from soldiers popping amphetamine pills in battle to students popping Adderall in school?

It all has to do with the little diagnosis called ADD, that started to become a thing in the early '80s.

It stands for attention deficit disorder.

And in 1987, it was changed to ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

ADHD is now the official name, though people still use both terms.

ADHD is one of the most common mental health conditions in people under 18, but the name can create some confusion.

People with ADHD aren't just a bunch of six-year-olds on sugar highs running around Chuck E. Cheese, or me being distracted by those donuts over there when I should be recording this episode.

It's more like having 100 tabs open on your browser but in your brain, so you end up paying attention to the wrong stuff instead of focusing on which you need to actually get done.

Now, if you're like me, at some point in your life, you might have asked yourself, "Wait, do I have ADHD?"

I mean, who doesn't struggle with attention and focus from time to time or actually have 100 tabs open on their computer?

Fair question.

But for people with diagnosed ADHD, it can mess with their lives was on a day-to-day basis.

- I remember having a super messy desk.

Things just falling out of it.

My locker so messy that I couldn't shut the door.

And every year I remember telling myself, "Okay, this year I'm gonna write the right subject in the right notebook and put the right papers in the right folder.

And I could never get it.

Probably it wasn't even the middle of the school year before everything was in the wrong place.

And then when I went to study, I couldn't because I didn't know where to find the right stuff.

So I floundered because of disorganization, and on the outside it probably looked like I wasn't knowledgeable or maybe didn't care.

- Gloria is a therapist and ADHD coach, but she also has ADHD herself.

She didn't get officially diagnosed until just after grad school, but her symptoms were a problem even back in elementary and in middle school.

- I would always say, "I'm not that smart."

That was like my thing.

And people would look at me and talk to me and be like, "You are smart.

What do you mean you're not that smart?"

And it was because I couldn't hold it together, or I felt like I couldn't.

I couldn't organize myself.

I was always pulling out a crumpled piece of paper that was my homework, and teachers would just shake their heads.

And I felt like I was constantly disappointing people.

I felt like I was disappointing my teachers.

I felt like I was disappointing my friends.

- In the US, the most common drug prescribed to treat ADHD is Adderall.

Turns out, when a doctor works with a patient to find the right dose and combines it with behavioral therapy, people with ADHD have an easier time focusing and blocking out distractions.

So you're gonna find ADHD meds at schools and at colleges.

And ADHD doesn't just vanish when you turn 18; adults can have it too, so you're also gonna find them in the workplace.

All right, let's get into the science.

How does a stimulant drug like Adderall help someone with ADHD?

A lot of it has to do with the specific neurotransmitter in the brain that you've probably heard of before: dopamine.

It's key when it comes to your brain's reward pathways.

When you have a normal level of dopamine hanging out in the synapses of your brain, you're able to maintain motivation when you're doing something you're not thrilled about, like writing that paper.

You're able to tolerate doing something you don't like now for a reward in the future, that warm fuzzy feeling when you finish that paper and you never have to think about it again.

But for someone with ADHD, there's less dopamine hanging out in the synapses, so there's less motivation to get through writing that paper.

- I can remember sitting down to do something that I'm supposed to do and then having a thought in my mind just related to anything that I recently heard about or a conversation I just had, and I would wonder like, "Oh, I wonder why evolution gave us two hands?"

And then start Googling that, and then two hours later, I know all about why we have two hands but nothing about why I was supposed to do what I was supposed to do.

And the assignment is still not done.

So we have focus.

We have a great amount of focus for the things that we are interested in and curious about, but when we're forced to focus on something that we don't really wanna focus on, it's not so easy.

- ADHD meds work by helping dopamine to stick around longer in the synapses.

For people with ADHD, they can stay focused and avoid distractions, and that can be a total game-changer when it comes to getting stuff done at school or at work.

So what happens when someone without ADHD takes an ADHD drug like Adderall?

Can they jack up their dopamine even more and become this super smart, super productive version of themselves and get better grades?

Just like those soldiers back in World War II who are popping amphetamine pills to stay awake, Adderall will keep you up long past when you normally lose focus and fall asleep, and that can make you more productive, like powering through that paper, but there's no guarantee you'll get the right dose that works for you because you're not working with a doctor.

So if you take too much, you might get a dopamine overload and not be able to direct your focus on the right stuff.

- I've had college students who tell me instead of studying, they were counting every hair on their arm because the dose was too high.

- 9,992, 9,993, 9... Dr. Weyandt is a professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island and researching how college students use ADHD drugs is a big area of focus for her, and she wanted to know what I wanna know and what you wanna know: Can ADHD drugs improve cognition?

Which is just science speak for the ability to learn.

So she ran a study where a group of college students without ADHD performed a bunch of cognitive tests, one time through with ADHD meds and another time through with a placebo pill, a classic double-blind placebo-controlled study.

But did the drugs improve their cognition?

- It actually did not improve their memory.

It impaired their short-term memory.

It had no effect on their reading comprehension or on their ability to organize plan, think strategically.

So that was quite a surprise because so many students use it for those reasons.

- More complex, real-life scenarios, like exam performance and quality of writing, that hasn't been explored by researchers because it's really hard to test that stuff.

So whether ADHD meds can boost your performance in those areas is not 100% percent settled.

A bunch of other studies also showed another interesting thing, ADHD drugs can make you feel like you perform better than you actually did.

That's because that dopamine increase makes you feel alert and feel good, so you can get a false sense of confidence thinking that you totally slayed the task when you really didn't.

And that good feeling also creates the potential for addiction.

- So when dopamine is increased dramatically and then the medication starts to wear off, there's often what we call a rebound effect, where the student may get really cranky, really irritable.

It interferes with their sleep.

They sort of crash.

- You can then develop a tolerance, where you need a bigger dose to get the same effect that you got before.

And if you stop taking it, you can feel sluggish and start falling asleep and feel terrible until you pop another pill.

And that's the classic cycle of addiction.

And that's not the only potential downside.

Remember, it's illegal to use Adderall without a prescription.

And you can experience some really annoying side effects like headaches, dry mouth, high blood pressure, increased heart rate, sleep problems, weight loss, irritability, changes in sex drive, and erectile dysfunction.

And it can be even more dangerous if you have an underlying heart problem, crush the Adderall and snort it, or combine it with other substances like alcohol.

But let's get back to the main question here.

Can ADHD drugs really be some kind of magical performance enhancer?

Well, that very idea can be annoying to people who actually have ADHD.

- It's frustrating when people do that because it creates a stigma around a medication that many of us need just to do the basic things that everyone else does really easily.

I remember the first time I was on medication, when I followed up with my psychiatrist, he asked me like, "How's it going?"

And I said, "I folded my laundry."

Literally, that was what the win was for me with taking medication, and I don't think people understand that the medication doesn't put us above neurotypical people; it puts us with them, if that.

I mean, barely that some days, it feels like.

- So, quick recap, drugs to keep you awake and focused have been around for decades, and they can really help those with ADHD.

But for everyone else looking for a magical brain boost in a pill, the research just doesn't back it up, and the downsides of the drugs could hurt you in the long run.

But now, we wanna hear from you.

Do you have ADHD?

What helps you manage it?

What doesn't?

If you don't have ADHD, how do you feel about using ADHD drugs to help you study after watching this video?