1. If you have an evolved stance on this topic, such as "you just need to exercise more" or "you're all mind-controlled meth addicts", do me a favor and drink your own pee instead of enlightening us in the comment section. Maybe even read up on the differences between ADHD drugs and meth. After all, the term "meth" comes from a chemical reaction called "methylation". 2. If you've been suffering as a result of the shortage, your story is important and needs to be heard. At some point, someone in the FDA or a large class action firm will do something about this situation, because it is proven to be putting people into unnecessary harm. 3. I've mispronounced a few company names. It wasn't an accident. I don't want people cutting clips of the Aytu Pharma part and reposting this without context, because it's an industry-wide problem, not one small drug company's behavior.
As for the solution: Do like Europe. It's the American insurance based system that messes most things up. Bernie Sanders recently wrote a Danish newspaper about Ozempic price differences, ignoring there are an additional 2-4 middle steps in the US, all expecting to make money off of the same product, whereas all prescription medication in Europe has fixed national prices. In Denmark there's a national database of pharmacy stock, so everybody knows where to find anything. France and Germany have a hub-and-spoke system, where you can order most things from a local pharmacy in the morning, and have it in the afternoon.
There are plenty of ready available multi-drug test kits, e.g. Markee or even simpler - just a regular urine test strps (it works on water-solutions as well).
It's the same old story unfortunately... Similar thing with antidepressants. You have to face off your parents saying "when I was your age I didn't have the time to be sad", "kids these days are just spoilt an don't know discipline" and other bullshit (very funny coming from a generation that popped barbiturates like skittles). The stigma is being eroded, but too slowly...
Man thank you so much. I'm 45 and and have experienced every detail you mentioned. Feels like I have to hide being ADHD due to how people view this medication. And the hold music... you nailed it. Every painful, irritating bit of it.
@@rasmis Most of the time you don't need to order! It's just available. I can only remember one time the drug I was prescribed wasn't available, and I was assured it would have been the next morning.
As an adult with ADHD (among other things) that is basically exactly what my psychiatrist said. They pretty much said "yes, you have lot's of symptoms of ADHD, but stimulats are not a good solution, so let's just figure out what works for you personally."
@@N8Dulcimeryup, that’s what happened with me. Funnily enough my doctor at the time was trying to put me on antipsychotics for my adhd symptoms bc they’re more “obtainable” than adhd meds. Worst time of my life, I have a new doctor now after that.
I can get my ADHD meds but discovered after a year they caused constipation and urinary retention. So I could be treated, if I never wanted to pee again.
I've been on and off ADHD meds my entire life. I believe I do have ADHD, but at this point I think that being someone who runs a business, and the amount of crazy things I have to focus on in a day, ADHD untreated actually is a beneficial trait. ADHD with meds actually causes me to not focus on the important priorities. I will lock onto something that is not crucial. ADHD untreated I think, at least for myself, allows me to madman handle more tasks then an average person can achieve. Its a shit show. I do think that when on ADHD medication that I am able to handle things better in personal life when I have the time to do so. That being said i take them in that way. If I think that ADHD medication will be good for me on a certain day because of the certain tasks ahead of me, I will take one. If I know its just going to be complete chaos, I will usually not take one, because the ADHD in me is what allows me to handle that type of chaos like not many other people can. Its weird to type this out, but its truly how I feel. I'd rather use ADHD medication as a tool, rather then making it 100% of my life. Edit: But then this starts to feel more like recreational drug usage then a treatment.
Nothing is more cruel then having someone with ADHD jump through a thousand hoops and navigating such a process to get the medication that would assist them in completing such a task...
This is one of the primary sources of my depression, especially also being on the spectrum it just feels like the whole world is against me AND expects me to function without assistance
Psychiatric disorders are in large part human created problems themselves. There is no physiological evidence of their existence, its more of a political phenomena to sort and normalize human behaviour. There probably is something there, but the idea that it’s unchanging and permanent is just completely baseless.
@@KRAMITDFROGprice gouging medication is not the same as selling an apple fan and expensive laptop. One is to function and one is a luxury. Medications and surgery should not be something fucked with when lives literally depend on it, hence why the government needs to step in and stop this madness.
Hey, pharmacy technician here. We’re not tired of you guys calling, just tired of short staffing. I’ll be helping a line of 10 people by myself when 10 calls come in. When the phone re-rings that sound is me hitting the hold button in the middle of checking somebody else out. Ik you were probably joking but I wanted to reassure you guys we do care and aren’t playing on our phones most of the time when you call us. That whole annoying call robot trying to get you not to speak to a live person WE go through 30+ times a day when calling other pharmacies and hate it probably more than the customers. Yet, they put that in place to take calls instead of hiring more staff. I LOVE MY JOB
I used to work the CVS front store myself. We were ALL being short staffed as much as possible. Oftentimes, during the night, we had only two people in the front store and three in the pharmacy. It's insane how many people are looking for jobs and now and how little employers want to pay their workers. It was so bad I was looking up possible unions or thinking of trying to form one, but I'm in Texas so that would be difficult. The only thing we got was a little less than 15 dollar per hour pay, but they also cut everyone's hours and were incredibly stingy with giving more. And this is just for the front store, the pharmacy has it way worse.
@@majormissile5596 yeah I’m in Texas too at a super busy successful store, we’re all doing fine and they’re like hmmmm what if we did this with 2/3 the hours
I can generally assure you unless you NEED a specific manufacturer of the generic. Especially the one that's known to be hot on the drug market. We don't think twice.
It is really like that sometimes… even in my own place, these little “mean girl” cultures develop. Or maybe it’s a way of coping with not being able to help someone? to just pretend they don’t actually need it. Idk, the answer is probably gonna be the same either way, the medicine is allocated to X per week and I already have to take care of Y patients that have trusted me with their care for years. So no I cannot take anyone new… but I don’t blame you, I just wish I could help more. You’re not an addict.
In most instances the doctor is a guy who shows up for 5 mins out of you hour appointment reads some papers prepared by others and follows a predetermined rigorous procedure. Medicine has become very very impersonal, ofc that guy thinks your addict he barely knows your name. Doctors, especially generalists, have far too many patients and gaps are filled by subordinate less trained staff.
@@Zippyserit doesn't matter what you think. It matters about the fact that every doctor right now that you try to get to prescribe you ADHD medication will do almost everything in their power to not prescribe it to you and will act like you're an addict if you say that garbage like Vyvanse doesn't work for you
I had a terrible pharmacy for the longest time that treated anyone with a controlled substance prescription as a drug seeker. My life is so much easier now that I changed pharmacies. It’s so unprofessional for a pharmacist to basically scold you for needing a medication and violates so many boundaries and codes of conduct. That’s like implying someone with chronic pain who needs painkillers is a drug seeker. Report them and find another pharmacy
The number of times that dealing with the insurance company, doctor, pharmacies, following correct protocols nearly causing a panic attack? Too many to count. It's such a cruel irony sundae.
My recovery journey was greatly enhanced by the therapeutic benefits of mushrooms. Other psychedelics like DMT and LSD have also proven to be remarkable.
Psilocybin mushrooms,DMT and LSD has been quite therapeutic for me. I was diagnosed with severe depression and mental health issues, not until a friend recommended golden teachers mushroom for spiritual and mental gratification. I’ve been well ever since for about 4 years now.
I was diagnosed at 11. I am now 27. Vyvanse changed my life and turned me from a gifted student who couldn’t sit still and focus to finish her homework, to a national merit scholar/graduated uni summa cum laud in STEM/now in molecular biology PhD program. This shortage is ruining my life. Disruptions in medication have tremendously affected my personal, academic, and professional relationships/outlook. My mental health has deteriorated, and I have felt increasingly more desperate, alone, frustrated, and anxious. I have had anxiety attacks, lost sleep, been condescended to by pharmacists, spent thousands out of pocket covering my medication, hundreds of cumulative hours on hold/driving around, jokingly considered black market drugs, etc. I feel like my life has been forcibly put on hold. If I end up giving up on my dream to make the world a better place in science, the ADHD drug shortage will be the reason. Not that the drug corpos or DEA will care.Don’t worry though, I’ll probably just lose my job/stipend or die in a car accident first! Anyway. Thanks for making this video. It’s very validating. Wish our complaints could actually do something. Or that anyone in power cared.
@@Nobody-00000 Oh please. ADHD meds are safe and effective. People with ADHD need their medication to have a normal quality of life. That’s it. The hysteria over these medications is what’s causing the shortage in the first place.
I don't know if this will help, but I switched to getting my meds in the middle of the month instead of around the 1st. It's not perfect but it has considerably improved my success in filling my prescription. Be well my friend.
Yeah I had to pay $170 for a month of name-brand Vyvanse due to shortage of the generic, which was still a fraction of what my insurance paid. The normal copay is like $5. Most of these generic meds cost pennies to manufacture at-scale and are affordable outside of the United States.
I'm narcoleptic, and these stimulants are one of the most common treatments (although usually at higher doses). This is *literally* a life saving medication, preventing us from falling asleep at the wheel etc, not to mention dramatically improving quality of life (not to diminish people with ADHD). The fact that this is still a problem 4 years later is terrible.
Literally *life saving* medication is honestly how I have described it as well. I was diagnosed with ADHD in addition to living w/hypersomnia, and after I was prescribed Adderall XR, quality of life became *measurable*. After decades, I finally understood what it meant to thrive without having to disengage from everyday life. Looking back, it’s difficult to comprehend how I survived as long as I did. This shortage is criminal, and the DEA is operating like they want the black market to grow just so they can make more arrests. Investigative journalism, grass root protests, and publicity will light a fire. I’m not going back to living a life operating at only 50-60% compared to those with “normal” energy levels.
I have ADHD but was also diagnosed several years ago with progressive MS that mainly impacts my life with chronic fatigue. Without stimulants I am not able to keep conscious for more than a couple hours a day, and I have tried everything WITH the help of many different health professionals. It absolutely is life saving, because I can’t actually live a life without the help of something that at least, for now, is what works while I continue pumping thousands of dollars into testing and experimental medicine and doctors appointments. I hate our health care system and I hate the pharmacies in America so. much. Not to mention whatever is being produced as adderall and vyvanse in the last couple of years I genuinely do not think is the same formula or quality as what was produced 10 years ago.
Oh, with driving it makes me a lot safer too. Undiagnosed, for me, driving was a tricky situation. I didn’t drive for much of my adulthood because if it. My mind would wonder so much I wouldn’t see a bend. Or I’d start speeding because I was off thinking about a few other things and forgot to keep an eye on it. I have inattentive type, obviously. I’m now medicated and I can concentrate on driving so much more easily. It’s absolutely a life saver.
Im in the same boat, though fortunately there are other medications that can help instead but none of them have worked quite as well as stimulant medications.
Hearing all of this said out loud, made me cry. The validation, knowing that I truly am not alone in my struggles with getting medication for my condition
I honestly would have never known there was a shortage without hearing about it on the news. I have zero issues getting my prescriptions filled and I'm in the US.
It really is fucking madness. Sometimes it takes 2 weeks to get my meds, and I feel like a fucking criminal when dealing with pharmacists. You have no idea how comforting this video is for me. No idea. Thank you Ben.
I used to feel the same when asking for PRESCRIBED opiates due to horrible tooth aches (fortunately I solved the issue, eventually). Some Pharmacists address you like you're a criminal trying to score stuff to get high.
I don't have diagnosed ADHD, but I take a stimulant that's prescribed for something else, but I've noticed that it helps me focus a little bit. Because it does help some people focus, it's being used, off-label to treat ADHD. I take this other medication because of a separate, serious health condition. I have had trouble finding my non-adhd medication because so many people have resorted to taking this inferior stimulant to treat their ADHD. It's a bit depressing that people are resorting to taking whatever stimulant they can get prescribed just to seek treatment, and it's frustrating that other drugs are now having a shortage because of this drug shortage.
I really appreciate how this video effectively demonstrates two essential concepts of living with ADHD for people who don't have, or don't understand the condition: * The practical experience of having ADHD as an adult, and how much extra work goes into just being a "functional" person in work and personal life. * The absolutely insane emotional toll of living in a modern advanced society with the capacity to help people live equitable lives - but instead seeing the greed and anti-drug moral campaigns of a few thousand people dictate the quality of life for the rest of us. That last point is especially important because although this specific situation is aggravating, it isn't unique. The opiate crisis contributed to the deaths of so many people, and now those who have been responsibly taking opiates for pain management are treated liked addicts instead of medical patients. Even public housing policy often comes down to "that just isn't affordable or convenient for us" - but those who decide what is "affordable", don't have to worry about homelessness, and instead worry about their next vacation home. It seems the average American is unable to empathize with another person's life and advocate for that person, until something similar happens to them. I hope we grow beyond that.
In my early 20s, I met a person with chronic pain, and saw how the medical system deals with people like that. My takeaway: You can either live with pain, or .... well, we don't an answer for you. I had a pretty good childhood, with no major trauma to report. That experience (above) was one of the hardest life lessons I have ever had to learn, because it was the first time I was confronted with the harsh reality that sometimes life really really sucks and there's no appeal process. Losing my dad was the second. I guess I'm lucky to have gone that long in ignorance.
Yep, my observation is Americans [Edit: as a generalization of emergent behaviour] blame the less well-off for their situation and refuse to do anything to help level a playing field that intentionally favours the privileged in a society that's mistakenly believed to be "classless".
@@unclemick-synths That's more of the American right wing. The left wing is criticized for being "bleeding hearts" that "enable the welfare state." Presumably the majority of Americans are somewhere in between, but the most vocal minority have bifurcated into those extremes, and those are the points of view that get the most airtime.
I've known that I have ADHD or something similar for 15 years, and only just decided to try and get it diagnosed because I didn't want to deal with... all the stuff this video is talking about. For those who are curious what the life of a functional but untreated (probable) ADHD patient looks like here it is: - I work on my computer (programmer). Any time I reach the end of a page, or file, or a document, or something like that, I have to open up an unrelated application, let the application load, click at least one button on that new window, and then close it before I can go back to the task I'm trying to focus on. This is a little brainhack I developed about 10 years ago to "self medicate" my work focus. If I don't do this, I will no longer be able to read. This is not hyperbole, if I don't reset my focus in this way, I lose the ability to comprehend written language. I recognize all the letters and words but they become meaningless. - I cannot sit in the same position at work for more than 15 minutes. Currently, I deal with this by standing up, walking to a different space, and then returning to my seat without doing anything. This also resets my focus, and takes about 15 seconds, but that's only if I can remain undistracted the entire time. Often, I will be completely unable to focus unless I stand up, leave the room, and fiddle on my phone doing something else (often something that I don't find interesting in the first place) for about 5 minutes. The sheer amount of time that this takes reduces my ability to work by at least 25%. - I have over 1000 tabs open in my browser at any given time. This is mainly because I cannot trust myself to remember and come back to something unless it is already there for me to see. - Related to remembering things, I have dozens of spots around my house where specific things are supposed to be left, because I know they are the first places I will look for those things. It is not the same as remembering I left it there, when I go to look for it I cannot remember whether I left it in the spot. I just know these are the first spots I will look for it when trying to find it. Most people leave things in their spot, and then go look in that spot first. I have to do the opposite. I learn where the first place I will look is in any given space, and then learn to leave my things there. - I have to set alarms for almost anything that I want to do which is not an ingrained habit, or does not occur at the exact same time every single day/week. This includes things like brushing my teeth (every day, but not necessarily at the same times every day), taking showers (same), anniversaries/birthdays/events, meetings, errands/trips to the store, meals (if it doesn't occur at the same time, my hunger signals do not get through the noise in my brain until I am extremely hungry), or many other things that are extremely common and simple to do. - If there is something I need to accomplish that cannot be accomplished in a single task, like for instance getting a medical diagnosis which may require multiple appointments and visits, it takes me months to actually do it after I have decided I want to do it. I cannot think of a good way to describe this problem to someone who is neuro-typical. It is not that I am unaware of the steps I need to take, it's that... you know that feeling of sitting there in the dentist chair with your mouth open while the dentist pokes and prods inside your mouth? That's the way my brain feels about working on task that is "the next step" instead of "the last step". My wife has been instrumental in this part of my life in ensuring I remain a functional person. - The quality of things that I do is almost always far below my capability, because I am always looking for the shortest way to get something done. This is not because I don't care about the quality of my work, it is because the shorter I can make the task, the more likely it is to actually get done. This is true in my professional work, and well as personal goals, so it's also not something where I care about my job less or something like that. This leads to shortcuts, mistakes, etc., which I KNOW will happen, but fixing mistakes is a "separate task" in the way my brain works, so doing something badly the first time is actually an intentional strategy for me that is one of the only ways I can actually get something done at all. - I get anxiety attacks and have anxiety about encountering things which exceed my coping mechanisms I have described. For instance, a task which I cannot do wrong the first time and then fix in follow up tasks often leads to anxiety attacks. The fear that at any moment I might unexpectedly encounter one of these kinds of tasks gives me General Anxiety Disorder, which I actually HAVE be diagnosed with, and also gives me insomnia, which I have ALSO been diagnosed with. These is more, but writing this comment has been exhausting. It's taken my almost 2.5 hours to write this comment up to this point, I've had to get up twice, and I've opened a different tab in my browser in the middle of writing this comment at least 5 times to reset my task saturation and focus. I have no idea if medication would help me, and if so WHAT medication would help me. But I cannot do this any more. I'm 37 years old, and I have been living like this my entire adult life. In my 20s these problems were not less severe, they just screwed up my life to a greater extent and more frequently. I want to keep my job and continue contributing to society. I want to be able to afford the mortgage for the house my wife and I bought. But I am reaching the point where I am not sure I can do that any longer because my brain will not let me do the things that I want to do.
It’s not just ADHD meds, it’s also meds for sleep, for pain, and then there is the whole mess with PBMs and specialty pharmacies. It’s a nightmare and I am stuck in it.
Are you able to go to a privately owned pharmacy? I am on opiates for pain and couldn’t get them ANYWHERE. I started at a small privately owned pharmacy and they’re ready the day after my monthly doctor appointment.
True, the government is literally causing an opiate crisis right now by limiting production below what is necessary for chronic pain patients to not live in absolute agony, and to anyone who thinks I'm just some sort of addict I've never used more than HALF of what I'm prescribed for my chronic neuropathy pain and thank God I'm able to control my pain with that low level of medication because otherwise I would be hospitalized to cope during the months that every pharmacy in my large city is out of stock and unable to order any more due to the government's increasing restrictions each year on how much they allow pharmaceutical companies to produce, for sure there was most definitely a problem 20 YEARS AGO with doctors prescribing it too many people who didn't need it for minor pain but the corrective actions have gone WAAAAY TOO FAR in restricting it's production for the people who ACTUALLY NEED IT to survive chronic pain
@@xp7575 i don’t think you’re an addict. I think you’re just like me. Someone who follows all the rules, jumps through all the hoops and uses the least amount of medication necessary to function. I don’t have ANY joy in my life. I can barely function let alone have fun. I have been on opiates for over 15 years. I’ve been forced to taper down to 1/8 of what I was on when i felt “okay.” Every month I have to pay to see a doctor who takes away more of my necessary meds. Every month my activity level decreases more. I have to ration my energy & ability to just clean and cook for myself. At some point I won’t get any medication. I will have ZERO will to live at that point. I understand. ❤️
@@emmyali920 thank you for your reply, it helps knowing that I'm not alone at least, the first 3 years I was on them I didn't have any issues getting my scripts filled but this past year has been a disaster, I used to refill my months supply only every other month because I only needed half of what I was prescribed but I've started to attempt refilling my script every month now so that I have enough to survive when another delay comes up, and while I was always good about tracking my usage and making it a point to use the least amount I could to avoid developing a tolerance to them I now find myself using even less and just trying to get through as much pain as I can handle without them so that I can stock up on any many as I possibly can because when the pharmacy does run out they never know when they'll actually be able to get them back in stock and I suffer from crippling anxiety at times worrying about what will happen if there is ever a shortage so bad that I might run out and not have anything left to make my chronic pain tolerable, the darkest thoughts I have (which I have quite often lately) is wondering how many of my meds it would take to end my life in the event that WW3 or a Civil War broke out in this country and cut off all access to getting a refill because if that happened it would be terrible to find myself not having any left once I ran out and I would want to know how many I had to have left to make sure I ended my life so that I could make that choice before my supply got too low, and omg the thought of reaching the day where I had to make that choice terrifies me, sorry for rambling and I hope I didn't trigger any depression or anxiety in you by being this open but it's hard having to live every day alone with these thoughts bouncing off of the walls of my mind so that all just kinda came pouring out once I started talking, and again thank you for your reply because it does feel good to feel heard and understood and to know that I'm not alone, wishing you the best
I had to wait 3 years for an evaluation for ASD and ADHD, and what frustrates me to no end is they had no problem pumping my body full of prescribed medications that I did not need (antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, SSRI’s, etc), and as a result it left me with Tardive Dyskinesia. Now that I have access (inconsistent of course) to stimulant medications, like you said I feel able to just get through the day at a baseline that is workable. Thank you for putting all these thoughts and this information into a succinct video!
Yep! They have no issue with hardcore mental health meds that give us tics and TD. God forbid if we want to restart on our old ADHD med dose after finding a new provider. Gotta try 3 antidepressants to full titration first.... yay
In addition to this, Pharmacies are being closed in droves. Not because of lack of demand or usage; but because they're being bought by the big pharmacies that just close any local competition so that we get have fewer choices and receive poorer service. Not just that, but the entire industry is set up to basically bankrupt all but the largest pharmacies. I've had to switch pharmacies because of closure 3 times in the last year.
I managed a small pharmacy for several years. The owner closed 5 of the 7 he owned this year due to insurance companies not renewing our contracts, distributors like Cardinal and McKesson drastically raising our prices, and the insurance company's PBM (pharmacy benefit managers) barely reimbursing us costs on many of the prescriptions we filled. Sometimes, they won't even reimburse our cost, so we frequently lost money.
My doctor moved to a different office recently. I called there and asked to get my 30-day prescription, one that I’ve had for 4 years, refilled. I was told that since he is in a new office I am now considered a new patient. Because of this, I have to go through the entire screening process to see if I actually have ADHD. The earliest I can be seen was in 3 months. This appointment also couldn’t be a virtual one (my doctor is now 45 minutes away from my house). I work from home and without these meds it’s nearly impossible to stay on task because of the distractions of being at home. When I asked how any of this makes sense, I just got told by multiple people that “this is just how the system works.” None of them could actually justify any of this. Thats all they could say. I’ve gone months now without my medication and I feel like I’m slipping back into the deep depression I was in before I got diagnosed.
I'd hint that this sounds like extortion and that you're considering contacting a lawyer. Your medical records are on file for 4 years saying you have adhd
I don't know about America but that sounds absolutely horrible. I'm sure there are lawyers or public offices that'll hear you out and help you. As the person above said, your diagnosis is on record and as valid as the day you got it. Keep asking for YOUR meds until they give them to you, I wish you the best of lucks!
The system will always have prejudice. Medical/insurance facilities treat "the system" like a deity, a holy entity that shall never be crossed. I once had my biologic (a drug my body NEEDS TO HAVE OR ELSE IT WILL START TO FAIL) be postponed by 2 weeks just because i tried to order it A DAY EARLY. The system flagged it as "fuck this guy in particular" i guess and no matter who i called they all just told me "well its says in the system that it cant be filled" YEAH I KNOW WHO FUCKING CARES JUST FILL IT DUDE. its a joke and insurance companies love punching down.
The pharmacy calls made me roll my eyes so damn hard. I’ve made those same calls about 500 times since I’ve been on Vyvanse. Pharmacy people have even told me to just “skip a few days” and I have to explain that I have narcolepsy in addition to ADHD and without it, I can’t drive and can’t go to work. It’s insane.
They shouldn’t be telling you to skip a few days, but you have to understand that they can’t do anything. They are just poorly paid workers who don’t control everything like the supply of things
@@andy2641 of course, I’ve never been rude to them or anything, I’ve just been like “hey so I really can’t skip days, do you know where there’s a pharmacy I might be able to get it at” and if they don’t know, they don’t know.
@@andy2641 Yes, and all because the DEA screwed up and failed to notice the opioid epidemic sooner and refuse to allow one of the major factories making one of the stimulant medications to go back to doing that. There were some minor compliance issues, but there weren't missing doses out there as a result, it was stupid BS like failing to write "canceled" along with the line through the line indicating a cancellation. And people aren't having fatal overdoses on Ritalin and adderall in any particularly alarming numbers. Off the top of my head, I can't recall the last time I heard of anybody asserting it as a cause of death.
I hate the shame i feel when others only think im only doing a good job because im high on 'meth' or 'speed' and i always got the ' ya well if i was on speed id get all my chores done and be energetic at work all the time too' like i take a stimulant so i can get out of bed and make myself food to eat, shower, etc. but the shame from others is too much. i havent been on a stimulant for several years, and my life has slowly unraveled and i lost everything.
This sucks. I’m sorry. Fuxk what anyone else is thinking and you are certainly not alone. Def encourage you to give this another try. These meds changed my life 💯 You deserve to feel better
This Peer Specialist is going to ask you, "why do you care so much about what others think? Does what others think actually matter?" Then I will say this, if you are honest with yourself, you have to admit you are living with being high on some kind of Methamphetamine. I was diagnosed as being Hyperactive in 1967 at age 8, and from my experience no real solution comes in PILL FORM. It is something you have to learn to deal with somehow. I grew up smoking weed to deal with it, and it worked for me, but that being said, I wasn't ever high while at work, nor did I NEED to smoke weed to be able to function.
You shouldn’t feel ashamed about needing a prescription medication to be a functional adult. If anyone judges you unfairly they just don’t understand the struggle. If you truly feel like your life is unraveling get back on meds. You don’t even have to inform others that you take adderall or vyvanse or concerta, it’s none of their business ❤.
Just to add to this, not only does locating the prescription take a full time job's effort, requesting a prescription for your treatment in several states will get you some very sideways looks from doctors and psychiatrists who immediately assume you are drug seeking. I had to be rediagnosed because my new doctor just didnt believe me that i had a childhood diagnosis even with the documented proof of that diagnosis, and then after all that, i have to take a quarterly urine test to ensure I'm actually taking the medication as prescribed and not selling it or abusing it. Even if you manage to get your hands on the medication meant to enable you to live easier, there is not a single step in the process that comes with trust that you can treat yourself. I'm an adult with ADHD, not a child who needs to be monitored for my own safety.
I’m sorry you have to go through that, I’ve never had that experience and I have a diagnosis for substance use disorder. My doctor has always been nonchalant about it. I have had one lady over the phone sound a little weird, but that was it. The medication is very helpful for me, although I do have to take occasional breaks because it stops working if I take it for too long.
I also had those semiannual urine tests, thankfully my state didn’t think four of them a year was necessary but it did think having quarterly check ins with my primary care doctor was necessary. Thankfully I stopped needing to do them every three months and now can do every six months since I’ve been on my meds as an adult for so long, just in time for me to be the one paying for them. I have to do blood tests now though, because of the side effects forcing me to now be on blood pressure medication. I thought the piss tests were embarrassing enough, seeing as most stimulants are in the form of a salt that makes you retain water and pee less, making it really hard to pee in command for the urine tests. But now I, a person with a well documented low blood pressure reaction to blood draws, have to do annual blood tests because of my high blood pressure being medicated for. Worst part is the next one the doctor wants me to do as a fasting lab, so I can’t even take any of my medications that morning until I get home. None of that sounds good.
@GuiSmith check with your dr again, call and leave a message with the nurse, ask about taking your morning meds, because you should be able to with water. I had an endoscopy with orders to eat and drink absolutely nothing after midnight, but I got the ok to take my anxiety and blood pressure medication with a sip of water. I have fasting labs done multiple times a year and I can have my meds, water, even coffee as long as there's no sugar or creamer in it, just straight black coffee.
It's so frustrating. In order to keep up with my medications, I'm forced to display "drug seeking tendencies" because of all the hoops they force me to jump through.
What a shocker a person seeking medically necessary drugs exhibits "drug seeking tendencies." It's like the criteria for that term is so broad and nuance-less it's worthless at best and harmful at worst.
Not an ADHD med but my doctor retired, didn't email me and then I couldn't pick up my blood pressure meds. Kids in high school have an easier time getting drugs than regular people doing their due diligence.
Not to lessen your valid struggles to get important meds. But I also take blood pressure medications and I can pick them up or get them shipped to me a few days before I run out of them. For ADHD meds, they are listed as a controlled prescription, so we can not get my child's ADHD meds shipped, we have to pick them up at a pharmacy (closest one is 40 minute drive) and we receive a 28 day supply, the doctor wants to see my child before he prescribes a refill, so we pay to see the family doctor every month, the specialist every 3 months, and the therapist weekly. and even if the doctor writes a prescription before the 28 days, we can't pick up that prescription until it's been 28 days since the last. so my child takes her last pill in the bottle and I have to get to the pharmacy that day in order for her to have her pill for the next morning and sometimes the pharmacy doesn't have the medication or doesn't have 28 pills so we get a partial supply till they get more. It's not easy, the media makes it sound easy but getting the ADHD meds is soo much harder than it is for any other prescription that anyone else in our family is on.
@@kaw8473 I'm sorry but you're just a normal healthy person and just like me it's very selfish of us to consider us getting a drug or anything when there's all these other people with all these defects birth defects developmental defects self-inflicted defects post-traumatic stress disorder for things they did lined up to get psychiatric medicine. I expected you to survive your blood pressure medicine problem as did everybody else because the last few healthy people like us would be selfish to even think we needed something we only want something it's all the ADHD people the autistics the schizophrenics the manic depresses the developmentally disabled the post-traumatic stress disorder every single one of them needs your place in line you just want to have lunch or something.
Imagine being in excruciating pain and not being able to get medication. After years of trying to get a pain management doctor you find someone who is trying to prescribe the medication that you need and then the pharmacy won’t let you get your prescription. This is the reality of pain patients all across America.
Here's a fact, proper pain medication usage for chronic pain suffers improves the quality of life, Improves the healing process and outcomes and Lengthens life expectancy!! There's something more dastardly going on thats not being mention.
@ much worse. If things get worse there are going to be a lot of deaths due to biting the bullet. It’s a sad state of affairs. The overdose percentage was much much lower when heroin was legal which is crazy
Same issue add oddly enough in the name of stopping Fentanyl they decided that my use of 1 to 2 oxys once a month to get through a degenerative joint issue when it gets bad was enough to label me as having addiction potential whatever the hell that is😂😂.
They could always put the tax rates back where they used to be. Much of this wouldn't happen if the rich were actually thrown in real prison for tax evasion and bribing politicians. If after your 10th million dollars of income you have to pay back $9.5m it would greatly reduce the incentive to earn so much.
America, from its moment of inception, has always been built on the foundations of enslavement and murder. Adolf Hitler was literally inspired by the United States in their genocide against the natives and their eugenics programs against ethnic minorities and the disabled.
Just a minor correction: ADHD cannot be reliably viewed through MRI or other brain imaging techniques alone. Brain imaging and neurobiology in regard to ADHD is currently only valuable for research. Studies have been conflicting and have only concluded that ADHD is multifaceted in presentation of symptoms and results from brain imaging. Kindly note that I'm not discounting the efforts of the scientists nor saying ADHD doesn't exist (I was diagnosed several years ago). Just that it infact CANNOT be viewed in scans.
Ya the neuroscience branch of pop psychology will post any shitty study with a headline "we found the gene that causes depression/ADHD/etc" and it's always fake upon further investigation. They have no idea what's going in peoples brains in regards to mental health causes, it's all just research and hypothesis. Which Is fine, that's how you do science I suppose, but the reporting that comes out to regular folks is always just pop science garbage usually designed to sell some drugs
This is such a frequent claim of all kinds of mental/emotional disabilities and differences - "they can see it in the brain!" I don't think that is actually true of anything as of yet, except for gross damage to the tissues or obvious malformations. Not to deny the reality of these things, but as you say, we ain't there yet.
Yes. There are still not biological factors to distinguish and its been this way for a while. Symptom based treating can be ineffective and actually leave people in a more vulnerable spot where the problem is there but they need whatever solution to manage the symptoms.
I was recently diagnosed at 41 years old. I feel like it’s explained a lot of things, including my marriage troubles, and my inability to focus at work or complete goals.
I signed up to get my ADHD treated in college, and it took OVER 2 YEARS TO GET INTO THE FIRST APPOINTMENT on their 'free' medical care. The only way a person could get to the front of that list was to express their desire to not be alive anymore. It's insane how I have to word things differently for the sake of TH-cam's terms of service to even talk about this and the frustration over the whole experience. It's insane how many people make the decision to end it all while in college, so it makes me wonder how many of those people chose to do so because "HELP IS COMING IN...2 Years".
I had to medically withdraw because waiting and waiting for treatment for my depression in college allowed it to get so much worse, and by the time I got to "skip the line" by expressing how bad it had gotten, it was past the point of their help being able to do all that much to "fix" such a severe issue. Glad I withdrew and got actual help instead of staying inside a pressure cooker.
I self-medicated myself into jail, and got kicked out with 109 credits completed towards a bachelor degree (120 credits req’d). I even had a decent GPA, all things considered. Mental healthcare hasn’t improved much since the last real reforms that ended the practice of giving “hysterical” women shock treatment and/or partial lobotomies-and that was embarrassingly recent. Free services are, as you say, limited to imminent harm. But even paid options are limited in a lot of significant ways, and for a lot of people with conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the entire system is deeply flawed in its ability to keep patients stable. The rest of society is almost perfectly designed to thwart those efforts, and the first encounter with professionals for those patients when the treatments fail-when they’re at their most vulnerable and in critical need of care-will most likely be an encounter with police, rather than therapists. I’m sure dozens of people’s lives are ended unnecessarily every day, either by death or prison, because of how unbelievably cursed the American healthcare system is. Hope the people here are doing well ☮️
@@silverXnoise my experience was a bit different, in that the mental health facilities seem to be built more like asylums for people with schizophrenia or other severe mental health disorders and if you're there just trying to get help for autism or executive dysfunction type stuff they really do practically make you feel like a total psycho. Not that it's entirely their fault, people like that really do need help too and probably more so. But there really should be specialty inpatient treatment facilities for people in emergency situations for more of this kind of thing.
Genuinely shocked YT even let you comment this. The censorship just in the last two to three months has been out of control. I would say the majority of my comments, almost always completely innocuous and ordinary, are getting removed bc of some unknown keyword they don't like. All in their effort to maintain ad-friendly "positivity". I don't know why I even comment anymore.
It's embarrassing to call different pharmacies over and over! Many times the pharmacist will be rude, treat me like a drug addict, and quickly slam down the phone receiver while saying they don't carry Adderall. I'm just trying to get a doctor prescribed medicine so I can concentrate at work and not get fired! UGH!
Hey I found this pharmacy startup called findrx that finds medications on shortage for patients. I've picked up mine few hours after signing up. It seems like they are operated by pharmacy students, and I am actually very thankful of them. You should give them a try.
I'm not on Adderall or have ADHD, but I am on painkillers because of accident 10 years ago which damaged my sciatic nerve in my left leg and my hip is filled with 18 titanium pins and 7 chains, so I'm living with pain for the past 10 years. It's very similar with the painkillers and how sometimes pharmacists look and act with you, that's why I don't go in big chain pharmacies anymore and use a local mom and pop style. Not only the pharmacist are super nice, but they prepare the medication in like 3-4 minutes while at Walgreens I had to usually wait 30+ min even up to an hour in some instances. Last time I went to Walgreens, I went to ask 1 day earlier at 8pm if I can pick up my new prescription (typically the insurance allows you to pick it 1-2 days before the 30th day) because I had to travel the next day early in the morning and the pharmacist started telling me how I'm a drug addict because I was trying to get it "4 hours" earlier before my next supposed to refill and I tried to tell him that I'm just asking because I have to get up and travel at 6am so not to delay my trip if I can get it a day before, but he said I need to seek rehabilitation center to help with my addiction (not even a joke or exaggeration)... I just told him "dude, I think you have more issues than me" and I just left.
They ALWAYS assume we’re addicts. I worked in a CVS pharmacy when I was younger and we were actually taught to be skeptical of people calling about availability of C2s and not to even say if we had it in stock if they’d never filled it at CVS before.
In the very red state I live in, it took nearly a decade and 4 different doctors before I was treated like a human being with a mental illness instead of some drug seeking street urchin. Now I'm afraid if I move that it'll be like starting over again; if not worse due to the manufactured shortage. To add insult to injury, most of the pharmacies in my immediate area have switched to what I lovingly call Temu Adderall. This manufacturer has to be either using a different compound, or shrinkflating because while the side effects are prominent, the effectiveness falls short. Yet, my copay for this prescription doesn't seem to equate to the lowered value of the meds. Funny how that works...
When i was looking for a different pharmacy that could fill my Vyvanse script- at the time I was trying to find the newly released generic version and it wasn’t commonly available yet- I encountered the same attitude. Multiple pharmacy techs told me they can’t discuss the availability of schedule II drugs with patients. At that point I hadn’t even asked if they currently HAD any vyvanse in stock (I could understand not wanting to say if it was in stock or when they expect shipments to come in, because they don’t want to be robbed); I just wanted to know if it was worth my time and my doc’s to send them my prescription, and they couldn’t even answer that. It took months to get my prescription filled. Only to then discover that the generic Vyvanse sucks complete ass, at least for me personally compared to the name brand version. 😵💫 lmao
When I moved to Kentucky having had my diagnosis for 24 years at that point, I was warned that schedule 2 drugs are REALLY hard to get a dr to prescribe. I got on my insurance's website and set up the list of in-network drs from nearest to furthest away. It was call #11 before I found a dr that would continue my adderall prescription. My dr is a 45 minute drive from my house.
@@notorioustorithere is a generic of Concerta that’s a structured differently than the original. So instead of it releasing slowly over 12 hours it basically releases half of it in the first three hours and then slowly releases the remainder over the rest of the day. There’s even a statement from the FDA about how the formulation isn’t a true generic since it doesn’t match the original efficacy and method of release. They said that the manufacturer should voluntarily remove it from the market but they won’t force them to. So yeah, I figured that out after a year of feeling weird and confused.
As someone who's been diagnosed with ADHD at the age of like 8 or 9, I am grateful to be living in Germany, where prescriptions are free until the age of 15 and cost a maximum co-pay of 5€ per box after that. I know we Europeans (especially Germans lol) get absolutely f'd by taxes, wages and electricity prices. But they have allowed me - someone from a rather poor former east German family - to go to school, take part in school trips, get food and educational tools payed for, get my medication, go to university for basically free (the actual cost of a semester is something like 70€ and often goes to about 280€ when including the public transportation ticket for the entirety of germany), and be on my way to become a teacher next year. I am appalled that a country with such immense wealth and influence in the world makes their citizens jump trough so many hoops to get basic medical assistance. I hope and pray for the U.S. to change for the better, as I know you guys do have the means to do so in theory and are not the kind of folk to give up easily.
The USA puts a lot of their taxes into the military since they are the worlds superpower. it's beneficial to Europe too, since we're allied, so a lower expense to us. THOUGH, that doesn't excuse their terrible healthcare system. That you want people to pay for their own school or retirement is fine, but healthcare should be accessible to everyone when you're living in the "number 1 nation on the planet". I'm always shocked to see how they treat their new mothers too - literally the source of creation, back to work the moment the stitches are healed. In a first world nation, disgusting!
Here is the ultimate problem. We are the cash cows, we are the crop, we are the assets. Keeping us sick and borderline surviving is not just the results, it was the plan.
lol how can you not realise how nonsensical that is. So if what your saying is true, then your own model is contradictory, it’s so ridiculous that so many people repeat this line yet they never follow the logic through and realise that IF THIS WERE TRUE THEN THEYRE DELIBERATELY MAKING LESS MONEY BY STARVING SUPPLY, ok that’s possible, extremely unlikely but possible, so why don’t you provide an explanation? I’ll tell you why, cuz you never even realised the contradiction, you’re just repeating something you think sounds good.
@Vgallo but it does. Look at insulin and epinephrine for example. Lifesaving insulin being produced for as little as 2 dollars a vial is being inflated in price by around 30%. Meanwhile epipens have increased in price by 545% since 2007. If that's not an increase in price, I don't know what is.
I like how USA has a gargantuan problem with fentanyl, but they decided to fight something much less dangereous and possibly beneficial against heavy drugs. Great job!🎉😅
It’s not though. Many people who get prescribed stims who don’t actually have ADHD later go to meth. I hate the DEA too but that is a reality those on RX stims have to accept.
And how did the fentanyl problem begin again? Oh that's right people taking prescribed heroin. Almost like the same thing that's happened now with Adderall. Just wait til the chinese start shipping designer meth like they did with the fent.
I've been screaming all this at full volume for two years. I've worked with pharmacies, doctors, insurance agencies and patient advocates and things have gotten progressively worse. I'd do anything to be normal. I'm so tired of feeling like I'm doing something wrong when I take the medication that allows me to function in society. I'm tired of the scrutiny, hoops and red tape. Why add a bunch of extra steps for people that are clinically inconsistent? It doesn't make any sense. It's so frustrating, this video literally brought me to tears. Thank you for speaking out for us.
Yeah i dont know who thought a condition thats marked by difficulty with menial repetitive tasks should have treatment locked behind a literal jungle gym of obstacles
@@therideneverends1697 honestly, I think it's neurotypicals who take our needed meds recreationally who do it. I'm talking about lawmakers btw. They do so many substances that the military had to stop testing for drug residue. Plenty of them take it illicitly and then decided everyone must be using it like they do and punish us.
Ditto. I really want to see what's going on with the quality now too, half of these batches are weird or make me feel sick. Or! They do absolutely nothing 😢
12:32 That is such a 5d chess move to get ahold of a company. Buy of share of their company so that you can attend their exclusive shareholder meetings 😂
This shame shit is the reason people with CHRONIC pain (I have constant joint inflammation from Crohn’s Disease, in addition to frequent abdominal cramping) have a ridiculously difficult time getting opiates/opioids for pain relief in the USA. To resolve that problem I had to move to another country!
Opioids are only considered safe and effective for acute short lived painful events. Enjoy your addiction though. Long term reliance on pain killers and this need to reach for a magic pill to every problem. That's the issue in the USA. If you've been on painkillers for longer than 3 months you're developing hyperalgesia which means the pain is just going to get worse and worse over time, because you're fucking up your mind and bodies ability to properly control and fire pain receptors. www.medsafe.govt.nz/Profs/PUArticles/June2021/Paradox-of-opioid-induced-hyperalgesia.html here's a reputable source for proof. The goal should always be to reduce reliance and amount of opioids over time. Not going to extreme lengths to continue getting them.
@jippalippa yes. Mostly an issue of prescribing too many and too high of a dose to acute patients like those with an injury. Now it has swung the other way and it's very hard to get them at all. Unfortunately the legitimacy of your pain isn't protective against opioid addiction.
The problem here isn't that you can't find the medication, though - it's that your doctor won't prescribe it. Too many laws restricting access. I know it can be dangerous, but when used correctly, it can be life-altering. Too many people misused it because the drug companies were pushing it like candy. Because of that, now it's hard to get for legitimate purposes.
Missing is when the pharmacies get sassy with you during the phone calls. I've had multiple instances of them getting upset that I called to ask if a prescription is in stock and telling me I'm not allowed to know. Like dang, I'm not calling you for funsies. I'm calling because I have to be the one to tell my prescriber which pharmacy to send their form to and if the prescriber sends the form out too many times the insurance thinks I'm ordering all the drugs in the city instead of trying to find the one pharmacy that happens to have my prescription in stock. Also during the shortage myself and two roommates were forced to hop to different prescriptions. It is extremely exhausting to stop taking one medication because 'oops it's out' and start another med like stratera or ritalin only to find out that the side effects are an absolute nightmare and have them be next on the shortage block, forcing another change.
!!!! "Big Corp Pharmacy, this is Pam, how can I help you? 😄🥰😇 "Hi, I'm Matt and my pharmacy has been out of my medication for a few weeks, can you check if it's in stock?" 😡 ...."What's the medication?" 😐😐😐😐
Pharmacies aren't allowed to tell you what they have in stock as far as I know. So the only way to find out what if they have your Adderall is to make your doctor call it in, and it leads to exactly what you described. It's a dumb system lol
Had this exact problem trying to find a cheaper pharmacy for my Vyvanse. Ended up just staying with my current pharmacy and in the course of a month the price jumped 20 dollars. Fun times.
I just experienced this bs for the first time after changing insurance and pharmacies. I just called my dr office a bunch and said the pharmacies are bull shitting me and tall me to call somewhere else. Took a month to sort out, turns out the pharmacies didn’t want to fill my prescription because I didn’t use them to fill anything.
My brother had severe ADHD but wasn't diagnosed or treated. Back in the 70's they only said he was a "trouble maker" because he kept getting bored in school and getting kicked out, but his IQ was 165 in the exceptionally gifted range (the judge got him tested). He went in and out of detention homes and committed minor crimes because he had no direction, no father figure (our parents divorced). He eventually self-treated with drugs, because that was the only thing that made him feel normal but he overdosed, and died at the age of 31. Now my son has the same diagnosis, and we got him treated very early, before the age of 5, since his was severe as well. I remember going to 7 different pharmacies and none would agree to stock his medication. I was a nervous wreck. Finally one pharmacy agreed, as the manager had a heart and knew I was in turmoil as no one would help my son. If it wasn't for him, my son wouldn't be where he is today and his life may have taken a different path.
I think you conflate the your care and effort for the drugs. Fighting hard for the drugs bc its what you thought would help is a sign of love, and love makes a bigger impact than meds. From another comment I just read: "I want to mention that “treatment” isn’t simply getting your kid on pills and calling it job done. I was diagnosed and medicated in middle school, and that changed my life in a massive way. But medication is temporary, and when I got home from school, I was still a kid with ADHD. Treatment doesn’t stop at medication and I wish my parents knew that. I’m 32 now and I still deal with a lot of anxiety (working on it in therapy). I’ve gone through many phases of alcohol and cannabis abuse. Treatment is adjusting my lifestyle to be able to tackle daily life"
@@slashing_SI got diagnosed around '90. Lucky because few were at that time. Put me on ritalin but offered no other treatment help, eventually just gave up. My single mom did what she could, I cant fault her, we even tried homeopathy. Im so glad vids like this exist for people now.
@@slashing_S Trust me, our love for our son has gone way beyond just the drugs. We have provided our son with all of our love and time; taught him good manners, how to save money, how to cook, how to write cursive (which was a struggle, but it paid off). We taught him discipline and order, how to treat others, so please don't judge. You know nothing of our struggles. I didn't think anyone wanted to read a novel here. Funny how people will automatically jump to conclusions.
@@TheOriginalMarimoChan You completely misunderstood what I said. I literally said your love was as important if not more than the drugs. You ought to read fully before being so judgemental
33 here, and same. I feel so damn heartbroken to think of everything I've lost in my life that I could have triumphed in if I'd had the right medication, and so much rage at knowing that this life-changing medicine just isn't reliably accessible for me. Every time I need to renew I have to prepare myself not just for the withdrawals of losing access to my medicine for weeks or months at a time, but of losing *myself* until I can get more. I am disabled without my medicine. I cannot function at a normal level. And it's so hard seeing the number of pills in my bottle shrinking as every pharmacy in the city says out of stock and knowing that the version of me that's capable of functioning as an adult and meeting my basic responsibilities is going to fade away.
@@ChadAV69 try to find another solution, allot of people struggle in todays society, we were not all made to be academics, and can learn better from doing things than studying them. i have the diagnosis, i have been medicated. (medicine) is a double edged sword, it has it positives, but also negatives. personally i dont believe humans have a disease where amphetamines are the medicine. almost anyone who takes amphetamines will be enhanced, ADHD or not. you might not realise how bad it is until you have been on amphetamine based meds for 5-10 years. then it is harder to quit. and you are worse of than when you started, ADHD meds has success stories and sad stories.
I was undiagnosed during the entirety of my undergrad degree and struggled a lot. When I started grad school, a friend who had ADHD recommended I seek a diagnosis. When I was diagnosed, even without meds, the resolution to my internal struggle with my performance in school, chores, relationships, made a huge impact. When I took my first dose of Ritalin I sat down to read a book and could actually sit and read. I nearly cried when something so simple that was difficult before my diagnosis became possible for me. For me it was like something clicked and I felt what I assumed was “normal”. Being able to live without constant brain fog is amazing.
@@NajsnwjsbdnI'd like you to imagine you're driving down the highway. Up ahead, suddenly you see a sharp left turn. You put your foot on the brake to make sure you can reach it, but it doesn't work at all, even with your foot all the way down. In fact, even as you push on the brakes, the car just speeds up. You find yourself careening over the barrier and find yourself upside-down off the road. In this analogy, your car is your unconscious mind. Through whatever efforts it took, you got your unconscious mind moving in the direction you needed it to go, at the speed you needed it to go in. But when circumstances changed and you needed to change gears, your subconscious mind wouldn't respond to your will. As a result, you find yourself completely out of control, and eventually your wheels aren't even touching the road. No amount of skill or maneuvering or better leg strength would have changed the fact that your brakes didn't work. What stimulants do in the ADHD mind isn't drive the car - they just reconnect the brake line. While there are absolutely non-medication treatments that can improve ADHD outcomes, and while it's incredibly valuable for everyone suffering from the disorder to seek such treatments either without or in addition to medication, amphetamines are able to provide to those with ADHD some crucial cognitive-structure functions that they were born without - functions so crucial, in fact, that the ADHD is protected as a disability under the ADA. Nothing wrong with using thoroughly tested, ostensibly safe drugs to treat ADHD, my friend.
Ha, sounds like me trying to do any homework in school. Too easy, but still takes an hour because I can't focus. Ended up doing absolutely _no_ homework in high school and still passed lol I don't have ADHD as far as I know, just have trouble doing things I don't care about. If I really get into something, it'll be all I can think about
You gotta love how the USAs response to every health crisis involving psychoactive drugs in any way is “Hmm we must pay the police more. War on Drugs is back on everybody”
People with high IQ don't get into law enforcement... that's honestly why they keep getting outsmarted and needed to pass the federal analogue drug act.... pricks
Once gvnt organizations like the DEA are formed, they are literally impossible to disband. These orgs operate on an interesting paradox: If illicit drug use goes down, the DEA is succeeding and its budget is increased. If illicit drug use goes up, the DEA needs more resources and its budget is increased. Same thing with the ATF, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc, etc.
I have ADHD, was diagnosed at 17. Just recently starting to take medication again after 12 years. Literally life changing, I am no longer depressed and suicidal. Living in Norway getting the medication was as easy as just saying I have ADHD to my psychiatrist, I got it that day, he even told me ;"you can just text me when you need a refill."
You're fortunate. The US has been going downhill exceptionally fast since the maga RW and their corporate boosters have amped things up. I'm hoping things improve if we get Harris/Walz in. If we don't, or it doesn't, I'm looking to leave. It's a damn shame that a minority of well positioned people can do so much damage. Reminds me of 1930's Germany.....
I think the American Healthcare system is so messed up that I'm convinced that either right-wing reforms (de-regulation) or left wing reforms (cheap nationalized insurance) it would reduce costs dramatically The insurance (brokers) middlemen are bureaucratic parasites that serve only to gatekeep treatments to keep prices high
The DEA needs to be disbanded. They are an unmitigated disaster- fake research, fake testimony, undue influence, etc. we already have an abundance of federal cops, there’s just no reason for them to exist.
Spent 8 years as a pharma tech. It left me with an extreme dislike of insurance agencies. Where do these greedy pricks get off thinking they have better knowledge on what medications work for someone vs another. It's completely insane that they can revoke coverage of a medication a patient needs when they aren't doctors or pharmacists.
My mother didn’t believe the teachers something was wrong. Not only did it ruin a lot in my own life, it ruined a lot of those in my path that I didn’t even notice I basically came into like a fucking bomb. I couldn’t do anything that required doing things. My hygiene… what hygiene. When I was finally diagnosed, I had a lot more issues than untreated ADHD, which could have been prevented by treating my ADHD.
@@nonenone7761 you're absolutely right there was a perfect path a perfect drug a perfect everything in the past according to your perfect hindsight that's always perfect 20/20. Then is a wonderful person who was treated in perfectly by his parents you went out and you were a rotten bastard to everybody you found out you could be a Christian and get forgiven and it poisoned your mind and now it's everybody else's fault that you did all that stuff. If only they made money treating you for ADHD you would have been a regular saint.
@@labbeaj ADHD can lead to a lack of accomplishment, academic or vocational underperformance. Self-criticism or external condemnation can produce chronic self-esteem issues that manifest as clinical depression which presents as rage, sadness, and fatigue. You and I experience the fatigue part when we get the flu. We feel like doing absolutely nothing. Maybe watching TV day in day out. We excuse ourselves because it's only a few days. A week at most. Clinically depressed people have no fever to blame it on and the problem does not go away because the underlying ADHD may not get treated. Even after ADHD gets treated, the lag before the fix is found leaves patients behind classmates and it can be difficult to not internalize their disadvantage as an personal failing. ADHD has comorbidities that may in some cases be directly causative. It ain't pretty.
Try calling your insurance company to get them to lift the requirement to buy from a specific pharmacy. At my last job the insurance insisted that I buy from a pharmacy that was 45 minutes away. I called the insurance company and they gave me a waiver to shop locally. I had to call once every year to get it renewed.
I spent half my life being a total ADHD mess, and finally got treatment as a young adult. It changed my life, and now I can't get a refill to save my life.
If you're in a larger metropolitan area, find a smaller community pharmacy and talk to them, a good pharmacist should make it pretty easy to get your meds consistently, unfortunately most pharmacists aren't good, to elaborate Im a pharm tech and we try out absolute best to keep ADHD meds in stock even if we don't have anyone filling anytime soon, we also don't fill for people out of the county so our # of PTs is smaller and more personal so we know when they pick up their meds and can keep track of when their refills are coming and if god forbid a shortage comes up we usually have a decent backlog of stock/willing to call MD if we need them to send an alt, we also have a site that finds and compares RX Prices before we recommend alternatives so we can get the lowest price for our pts. Main reason we can actually manage this is because we are a smaller more personal community pharmacy, also communicating with your prescribing doctor to send prescriptions for 2-3 months in advanced, they can't write refills but they can write prescriptions with effective dates so that they're only valid a month from when written or two months out ect. Also lots of insurances have their formularies(the list of drugs they cover&how much they cost/whether or not they require doctors prior authorization first) on their website so you can also cross reference prices of alternative RXs. I know this is a bit long but just keep this in mind
I have PTSD, and my medication is only partially covered by my Canadian health care. When I found out how much it was in the US I couldn't believe it. I thought my $17 co pay sucked, the same bottle down there is like $300.
As someone who spent a few (three) years in Canada as an adult, ... you're correct. Y'all genuinely have no idea unless you ask around, do some research, etc. There are innumerable people in my life, friends I care deeply about, who would gladly offer up a limb to walk into a Shoppers, go back to the pharmacy counter, and simply ask the pharmacist/tech for a bottle of generic Tylenol-3. Doctors here are actively pressured not to prescribe a medication on the WHO Essential Medicines List.
I'm taking clonazepam and mirtazapine at the moment. And my disability was recently recognized so I actually don't pay at all now 💪 Edit: Klonopin and Remeron for my murican brethren
The system also treats you like an addict the entire time by making you go through the following: -Random drug screens at your doctor's office -Pharmacists questioning when you last saw a doctor to obtain your prescription -You can only get a 30-day supply, so that means at some point you're going to have to go without your medication because that 30th day will fall on a Sunday or holiday -Your doctor can not prescribe refills beyond the 30-day prescription -Some pharmacies won't even tell you if they have the medication available
Holy shit, I am a recovered addict and I know that all controlled substances require a drug test, but I get five refills on my controlled substance on top of being in a methadone program so maybe you’re not considered stable enough yet to get refills and less frequent drug tests? But I also get drug tested monthly at my methadone clinic. Therefore, my doctor doesn’t need to do it. But he doesn’t need to see me monthly either.
My doctor doesn't make me take random drug tests. But I've been seeing the same doctor for 20 years. I'd hope by now he understands I just have ADHD, and I act weird at times lol.
This is how it feels to have chronic pain. The medication is available, you just can't have it because others abuse it. It ruins lives as people are forced to eother live in crippling pain, or turn to illegal substances to get relief. Makes me sick.
yes! i have both ADHD & a disability the comes with extreme pain. i was on meds for both and functional, like a normal human being. pain still obviously but functional & made so much better when my ADHD symptoms were being treated too. then here come the crackdowns on problems *we* didn't create and bam! no more treatment for either, doctors hands are tied and just getting thru every day is a battle and I'm just tired. so f-ing tired
Dude, you literally just heard just ONE cause of drug addiction from just ONE undertreated disorder out of THOUSANDS. *Addiction is a medical problem resulting from self-medication which requires medical treatment.* *_Blaming people for "abusing drugs" just lets our system off the hook for mistreating people._* Like healthy people do NOT just become drug addicts my guy. 😑 It annoying AF to hear people try and turn medical problems into a hierarchy of those who are "deserving" of respect and treatment _and those who aren't,_ but then complain when they're place on the latter end by someone else who also thinks they're better than everyone else. People need to quit playing into ableism already. 🙄
Dude, you literally just heard just ONE cause of drug addiction from just ONE undertreated disorder out of THOUSANDS. *Addiction is a medical problem resulting from self-medication which requires medical treatment.* *_Blaming people for "abusing drugs" just lets our system off the hook for mistreating people._* Like healthy people do NOT just become drug addicts my guy. 😑 It annoying AF to hear people try and turn medical problems into a hierarchy of those who are "deserving" of respect and treatment _and those who aren't,_ but then complain when they're place on the latter end by someone else who also thinks they're better than everyone else. People need to quit playing into ableism already. 🙄
Been diagnosed since 2011. Never had issues getting my meds until around 2022. All of a sudden they were always out of stock and the pharmacists acted like I was there getting oxys every week. It was embarrassing. As of now I have been out of my script for over a month with no answers. So many parts of my life suffer when this happens.
I am so sorry you are going thru this. I know what that feels like. I do not have ADHD but I was an addict for 12 years of pain pills. I have been clean for 5 years now only with the help of suboxone. Let me tell you about that experience! I am also treated like a piece of garbage by pharmacist. The hoops I’ve had to jump through just to get my script filled are terrible. I go every 28 days to my Dr. appointment and I have to be drug tested and all. No problem there, it’s when they send the script into the pharmacy. I was using CVS until they did what they did to me. So I have now switched to a mom and pop pharmacy. CVS belittled me and made me feel terrible in front of many people. I called corporate and they gave me no answers either.
I switched to IR and found that---because it's 2 daily doses---I would forget the second dose often enough to be left with enough to float me several days if they're out (and it can be cut in half). Just, if you ask your doctor to switch it, don't bring up that last part, just say the second daily dose makes it a lot more flexible and you can time it around your lunch, and be hungry for a change.
If you can, get your prescriptions in paper form and try some smaller compounding pharmacies. That or Costco, i have a membership because they seem to always have medication in stock. If not, small pharmacy. It's crazy
Here’s some interesting info that may provide a bigger picture, I must be vague for it to be seen but long story short - a major name brand went generic summer last year, meaning that any pharmacy can sell virtually the same type of it and rake in the profit. So what happened is, the name brand hiked their price from $20~ to about $350 to maximize the profit before they go generic, especially since there’s a shortage and you have no choice. It’s $10 per dose and anecdotally many insurances are too stingy to cover it, so the only discounts you get are pharmacy membership ones which are 5-10% max. It’s 2024 and they not only didn’t return the price to normal but also increased it further.
I was officially diagnosed in 2009 (as an adult, during my time in the US Army) and it answered a lot of questions from my childhood. I had been treated with stimulants since my original diagnosis. In 2021 it was required to get ‘the vaccine’ to keep my job. Less then 3 months later I was diagnosed with an inflamed artery requiring a stent. Since then I have tried pretty much every non stimulant the VA is willing to prescribe and have yet to find anything that helped with my symptoms in the way that stimulants did.
"Help me with something else" is the magic phrase to cut to a person (Walgreens) - just repeat it until dropped into queue. THEN you get to listen to that diabolical, torturous, maudlin, minor piano loop hold "ditty" that NEVER EVER RESOLVES...which always ensures I'm in the very worst mood, stressed, when someone finally picks up. It's intentional, psychological torture. The water boarding of music.
IMPORTANT! If you have a coupon directly from Adzenys or Xelstrym you need to have the pharmacy enter the 'coupon' as a secondary insurance. That's why they never seem to work - pharmacies enter them as coupons bc they are called coupons. It's a nightmare. I am grateful that the only stimulant that works for my ADHD isn't commonly prescribed - all of the common meds make me sick.
@@GardenGrownGreensI was on Xelstrym (dextroamphetamine patch) but I became allergic to the adhesive - I am now on dextroamphetamine tablets. This med has been around since the 1930s but it apparently has a stigma associated with it so old school psychs are reluctant to prescribe it. It's the same drug in Adderall minus the amphetamine salts (which I can't even tolerate)!
Sometimes they will kick it back saying pharmacy benefit not established meaning they won't cover it at certain pharms. It's crazy to me when I saw that "can't be used at Walgreens, rite aid, etc" that's some bait and switch
It's really frustrating. I know why they are doing it. because it forces us to go into the store to speak to a real person, then we end up buying crap on our way out. Home Depot and Lowe's also do not answer their phones. More and more places don't care anymore.
This is just another step toward "efficiency." That is, doing more with less to compete at lower cost. It's also far more efficient to form larger organizations that service larger customer bases, hence the move to national and international companies, and shifting everything online. This is how we get from one-on-one sales, with a person who will help you resolve any problems, to an online system that has no contact information and no way to venture outside of the proscribed path. Everything is being centralized, and that has made me anxious for a while now. It started years ago, when I made a mistake registering a Google account for a local club, wanted to hand it off to them to maintain, and realized there was literally no way to do it -- the account would die if I relinquished control, and it would never be available for the new owners to resurrect it. There was nobody to contact to explain the situation. I was completely stonewalled. I realized at that moment, that that was intentional, it was a glimpse into our future, and this was just the beginning. When you are an entry in a massive database, there is no empathy. We have not evolved for our "local village" to be the whole population of the world.
Which might be a decrease in money overall. It's not very profitable in the long run if your customers decrease in numbers because more of them are deceased.
The problem isn't a for-profit company trying to maximize profits. The problem is that the U.S. is the only 1st-world country on the planet that has decided that health care should be a for-profit enterprise. Capitalism, under perfect conditions (which never occur in the real world, but in many circumstances we get close enough that it still works pretty well) maximizes efficiency. That's it. It doesn't maximize happiness, or fairness, or ensure that everyone has at least a minimal standard of living, or literally anything other than maximizing efficiency. The reason we have child labor laws is because without them, capitalism rewards companies that maximized their profits by paying children very low wages to toil under brutal conditions for very long hours. The reason we have workplace safety laws is that without government intervention and policing, capitalism will reward companies that cut corners and ignore expensive safety measures altogether, and simply allow workers to die on the job, as they can quickly be replaced with other workers. In both of these examples, as well as endless others, the long-term consequences of businesses being rewarded is that they put their competitors, who are voluntarily choosing to not mistreat children and not make laborers work in dangerous conditions, etc., out of business-- they have the profit margins to be able to temporarily undercut their ethical competitors, for long enough to bankrupt them. When society has a scarcity of resources-- i.e., most people are poor, and the rich aren't even mega-rich-- it turns out that valuing efficiency very often results in something approximating the best possible outcome for the most number of people. But as society gets richer and richer, the need for efficiency diminishes, and a healthy culture will pick and choose where it makes sense to tolerate inefficiency-- using up some of those excess resources a rich society has-- in order to maximize things other than efficiency, such as happiness, or a minimal standard of living for all citizens, or whatever. Health care should be one of the first things every wealthy country decides to move partly or wholly away from capitalism, and indeed we see that happening literally everywhere other than the U.S. So I'm not mad at drug companies or hospitals for maximizing shareholder profits, even at the expense of human death and misery. That's the system performing exactly as it's designed to, and achieving the exact goals the system is designed to achieve. On the other hand, I'm furious with half the country and three-quarters of our politicians for insisting that we keep using capitalism for health care, when both straightforward theorizing, as well as overwhelming evidence from a century of data from dozens of countries, tell us that we'd get much better medical outcomes for many more people if we created a system that sought to maximize health, instead of profit.
I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was really young and everyone treated me well until I moved to a rural school system in a fundamentalist part of the country. I was yelled, threatened with physical abuse, and put in special needs classes. I had to pull myself out by anger and sheer will. I was able to get through college with a comp science degree. I feel like everything would have been a lot easier with healthcare and easy access to meds. I also felt stigma with some artists when I was more involved with music due to a couple of people stating that the drug would hurt creativity and the ability to perform
you would think that in this time of easily available high quality research on ADHD patients, that harmful attitudes like this would cease to exist. and yet so many assholes are so committed to the bit of "actually you are just making your problems up, and because i have the empathy of a fish i'm not going to give your OWN experience of this hell even a moment of real consideration"
Well yeah, adhd meds do make you less creative. I become halfway a Zombie with my correct medication, but damn I can go to work, school, everything and be fine, I can handle it, I can keep things in order. It makes me a little less creative but my life is in order. Without my meds I can't even sit still for 60 seconds. It's pretty awful
@@TheScrubmuffin69 I am currently unmedicated and while I am very creative I don't have the patience or ability to actually finish anything I create. Its a double edged sword
I finally got diagnosed at 52. Being diagnosed and medicated has completely changed my life - it’s like wearing “life glasses” after a half-century of squinting and working extra-hard just to move through the world the way neurotypical people do with far more ease. Fortunately I’m in Canada, so the situation here isn’t the dumpster fire it is down there. Sending you all strength to navigate the situation.
I'm not American, I'm from Canada, but I was diagnosed with ADHD at 18 in early 2021. My main barrier to medication access is financial. I'll probably lose my dad's insurance in the next year or two since insurance in Canada cuts off when you either leave post-secondary education or turn 25, whatever happens first. My Ritalin is 500 dollars for a 6 month supply, and the type of Ritalin I take doesn't have a generic. I am terrified of what will happen if I can't get a job after I graduate, which is really quite likely since the job market is a dumpster fire in Canada. I was unemployed for 2 years while sending out job apps to McDonald's, IT helpdesk jobs, and jobs in my field (network engineering & cybersecurity) while hearing nothing back. These meds are what keeps me alive.
Was untreated until I had my own health insurance because my parents didn’t believe in treating ADHD. Always yelled at for moving constantly and interrupting and losing things and not being able to focus for more than five k inures. I don’t remember to eat if I don’t have meds. I can’t even focus on things I want to focus on without meds, or drinking 5-6 energy drinks a day. I wouldn’t be able to do my current job without meds and it’s always a panicking situation when refill time comes around.
Am much the same way, instead of looking into solutions for a very clear and obvious adhd problem, my mother would yell at me and hope that would fix the issue. I've never been medicated so i wouldnt know what "normal" is but forgetting to eat, losing focus, and the constant nonstop noise. I wish all that would just go away like fuck. It's frustrating but it's what I gotta deal with
My parents refused my treatment, too, but years later I noticed many of my peers who WERE treated as kids had drug issues, had to go on serious psych meds, etc. Definitely a serious need but the developing brain is vulnerable. Just another perspective. 🙏🕊️
You can lower the amount of energy drinks you need by regularly fasting from caffeine to reset your tolerance. You're damaging your heart and giving yourself adrenaline fatigue by drinking that many.
As an Aussie with ADHD it's tough to hear that this is going on over there in the US. I would hate to be put in a position where I have to constantly fight to get treatment for my condition and my heart goes out to everyone who has to deal with that. I really hope y'all find a way to get this resolved soon.
Aussie pharnacist here. While over the last couple of years there have been a lot of frustrating Vyvanse and Concerta shortages, the US system just sounds so miserable to navigate. It's $31.60 or $7.70 here, no insurance nonsense needed. No faffing around with different coupons and companies
Let’s not talk about getting a diagnosis in Australia though. Year wait times and up to $1000 fees. Also anyone who isn’t specifically an ADHD specialising psychiatrist will refuse to talk about it with you. Overall pretty effective in scaring people off from even trying.
@@ManyAGiggle In Australia it is still bad, while the medications are reasonable to attain, getting a diagnosis while being in a regional area will cost you $700 AUD a pop to speak to even a Tele-psychiatrist every 6 to 12 months.
Agreed. My friend has it and because of his ADHD he can't get organised enough to organise to see a specialist and wait one to two years for a test and diagnosis.
Glad to see people shedding light on this. I was diagnosed early in life and have been taking ADHD medications since I was 7 years old. Dealing with insurance, doctors, and pharmacy’s is a huge pain in the ass, and most people with ADHD are probably taking multiple medications with different refill dates, which become very difficult to manage.
This is exactly the situation I run into, along with long pre- authorizations from insurance, fluctuating supplies, and a persistent distrust of pharmacy staff when trying to get medications sorted out. I take two prescriptions and have had them in sync two times in the past 3 years due to shortages. I have to constantly moderate use carefully because I'm almost always going to run short.
I take 3 controlled meds for Narcolepsy. Getting them all the same day is nearly impossible. It makes planning any out of town trips very difficult and I have missed out on being able to go with my boyfriend 75% of the time because I can't get all my meds. There's no sense in going if I'm going to be miserable battling severe sleepiness and ruining everyone elses time.
"Best $2.49 I ever spent" freaking killed me. I love it. Excellent coverage of this topic and hell yeah to the depths of your strategies! Extra points for all the sourcing
The short/technical description of ad(h)d: In contrast to everbody else your cortecies (pl. of cortex) for *task mode* and *default mode* work *together* instead of alternating, so when you do a task you also realize everything around it, and if you're doing something on "autopilot" you're realizing all the tasks/ideas you could derive from it. It also explains why you have about 2x the dopamin usage/need and why you can't let a date in a few hours rest until then (in your task mode cortex) but instead either see it permanently before your eyes until its done or completely forget about it if not remembered about it. It is (unproovenly) said that people with adhd were hunters in older ages, because (in contrast to farmers) they had to come up with tactics/plans/traps WHILE running behinding their prey. adhd is not a disease - its a different (more active/interconnected) way of using your brain and seeing things from more sides simultaniously than others, at a higher runtime cost and the annoyence of people who can't keep up or don't get it / can't do it.
@@kyle9401Yes, I work as a top security researcher at a FAANG and every reverse engineer that has stood out to me over my decade long career has had some form of neurodivergency including ADHD. ADHD gives you a larger context window in your neural networks, but without proper medication your body simply doesn't produce enough of the right chemicals to keep the engine running as it were (compared to a neurotypical). I have Inattentive ADHD and didn't get diagnosed until I was 30 because of being homeschooled and chemophobia. I tried everything, I eat healthy, I exercise, I meditate and been to therapy (which should all be done too), but the only thing that ended up making a perminant impact was proper medication. Treating my ADHD also made my anxiety better because I was actually able to focus.
Thank you for your post. Could you send me a keyword to search for more information about this theory(e.g. its name?)? If you dont give a source its hard to believe, even though it sounds plausible. If there is evidence for it I would really like to see it, as this theory would change my view on my diagnosis quite a lot.
Benn, Your snarky journey down the medication rabbit hole made me laugh, and brightened my day. :) Also, the dog in your photo looks like mine, very cute. I just wanted to say, I've been working on material related to this matter, but I'm very happy to see you giving a voice to one of the biggest problems our home, the US, is facing: The medical system is failing. Doctors can't diagnose, prescribe, or treat anymore, and malpractice due to the multi-disciplinary split is higher than ever before (reported and un-reported). What you've just done is an expose, albeit with a curbed bit, but the likes of which have effected me also, and my family, who all have hereditary (and life-threatening) chronic pain syndromes (multiple). Though the need for medication is slightly more dire, we too have been forced to come up with creative ways of not just obtaining pain medications, but also finding the herbs to keep our inflammation under control (herbs are another issue). This creates the phenomena where people in dire need of medical care are essentially forced into "addict behavior", despite not being addicts or having any form of drug abuse history. My work-around was to seek "addiction treatment therapy", in which certain addiction meds can relieve pain, albeit not nearly effective enough for me to live a functioning life like before; just enough for me to tolerate it about half the time. I'm house-bound, and struggle to function through the pain every day since I was 21 (I'm nearly 30 now), and cannot work. I wouldn't wish my situation on anyone, but it has given me deeper insight into the inner-workings of our failing medical system. I want to ask you, because I can't always function through the pain, to keep at it. Keep digging and keep talking. And maybe someday, some of us will have the luxury of feeling comfortable in our own bodies again as a result.
My proposed solution is what you are already doing but on a much larger scale. We need to make this video viral so Dateline or 20/20 picks it up. Thanks for bringing this huge problem to more people's attention Benn.
Everyone knows about this. Literally everyone, whether you're on scripts or not. What we need is for people who don't NEED these drugs to stop taking them. If you're taking these to get through your day but spending hours on FB, insta, TT and phone games and REALLY want to make a difference, stop one. Stop the drugs or the dopamine apps. If you can't stop the apps while you're taking dopamine fixing drugs the "chemical imbalance" isn't your problem.
The problem with that kind of direct government action is the wrong people can also use it for the wrong reasons. Imagine an anti-abortion campaign operating with the authority to instantly nationalize huge corps, or a warmongering cabinet ready to steal any company that participates in voluntary sanctions.
or you have all medication bought by the government and they a forced to sell low or sell none at all, thats what Australia does. Thats why 30 days of Vyvanse is $100 without medicare, $8 with it and not $500+ like in the US
Get into having systems for everything immediately and research some easy mindfulness exercises. Clean your physical and mental spaces from distractions. There's no space for desperation. Drugs help immensely, but you can help yourself by making little (then larger and larger) changes to the chaos.
2:55 I have adhd and autism , and am so tired of explaining this to people. Especially because once they understand they start listing off 10 people they think could be neurodivergent and they’re honestly probably right.
I'm physically disabled & in chronic debilitating pain 24/7 and too many patients like myself were just cut off of our pain meds. I can't tell you how many committed suicide or hit the streets and OD on meds cut with fentanyl. I was lucky to have found a Dr but had my dose decreased so much that now I'm in a wheelchair and homebound. The DEA, LOBBYIST & DRUG MANUFACTURES DON'T CARE HOW MUCH SUFFERING IS HAPPENING. I had no idea basically the same dilemma was happening to ADHD patients. Great video!! Kudos!! Wish you and all patients best of luck. God Bless 🙏
as husband to an ADHD sufferer and father to 2 others thank you for posting this. You calling every pharmacy is literally my monthly chore at this point. People don't understand that missing days of medicine isn't just a cloud but a reset. With my wife it can take over a week to get back to "normal" after missing her dosage for a day or two.
yeah people forget that stimulant tollerence resets VERY quickly compared to almost all other drugs. too many days off and people can end up stuck feeling wired until their body settles in
As someone who was in the middle of calling 21 pharmacies to try and find *anywhere* that had Vyvanse in stock (and ultimately failing) at the exact moment you released this video, thank you for making this. It’s been two years of this shit now, and I am so so tired of having to deal with it.
I hate calling the pharmacy. They always treat you like you are a fiend and half the time when you finally get ahold of someone you might sound like one too. Then half the time they will be like you are supposed to call in... like what?! WHAT AM I DOING RIGHT NOW?! Or they will be like well it should fill automatically... oh that would be amazing to never have to talk to you on the phone again, but unfortunately.
Same exact problem for Chronic Pain patients. Life is very very hard, the rate is even higher than that of those with ADHD. May We work together against this.
@@johnnylego807 no chronic pain patients can't work with ADHD people no one can work with ADHD people. As soon as you help them get ADHD meds they'll become paralyzed and they won't be able to do anything for you ADHD paralysis It only kicks in when you have to bring back something you borrowed.
Please read if your pharmacy doesn't have your prescription(s): I don't know if this is necessarily related to these issues, but I've taken Vyvanse for about 19 years now. A few months ago, CVS and other pharmacies could no longer fulfill my prescription. I had to hound them about it before I finally got an answer that it was "on backorder." A nurse I know told me about the local hospital's pharmacy, which actually is also a normal pharmacy with better prices, and they never run out of anything. It's cheaper and, even if there is a "shortage," the hospital always has it. I encourage others to seek out a local hospital pharmacy to get their medications if a brand name pharmacy has your stuff "on backorder." Not sure if this is just local to my area or hospital, but it has been a life saver.
I mean, I don’t know people that are going without it to be honest with you, I know soccer mom type people that get their Adderall commonly each ones for narcolepsy and someone who is in a methadone clinic and recovering addict trying to get their children back, who also gets their Adderall refilled monthly at CVS And one Indiana and one is in Williamsburg, Virginia
Chiming in because the shortage is also ruining my life. I stopped having steady access to Adderall in November, had to carefully ration afterward. I've been completely without ADHD meds for about 4 months. In recent weeks I've noticed myself forgetting my point before finishing a sentence. It's so frustrating and heartbreaking. I've always been a high achiever with a zest for life, but it's become near impossible to complete work without hours of self soothing in between. My audience is one of my greatest blessings, but I can't perform for them the way I know I'm capable of when I'm medicated. I have so much potential that has been effectively locked away due to the shortage. It's beginning to eat away at my soul. My heart hurts that a significant portion of the population is suffering so needlessly. When's the class action lawsuit?
The irony is that untreated ADHD often leads to drug abuse. I had substance abuse issues (not stimulants) for years but never thought I had ADHD because my grades were above average and I was a calm person. Getting treatment allowed me to be where I am today, happy, productive, clean, although still a bit intense.
Hey Benn - I don't know where to start, other than thank you for making this video. I grew up in a household that thought ADHD was a made-up diagnosis to get kids on meds to take away their "personality". I had to grow accustomed to masking my symptoms, which presented less hyperactive, and more internally in my thoughts and executive function. My life, looking back now, hits every checkmark of ADHD, including the terrible effects of not getting help. I had unplanned children out of wedlock, got addicted to hard drugs, got into extreme music (punk, metal, noise, etc), became an alcoholic that got into terrible car crashes, barely finished high school, etc. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't keep up with my peers, even when I should have been able to. I had cycles of anxiety and panic attacks, depression, etc. All of this dopamine seeking behavior became clear as I learned more about what ADHD really is (not some funny, "oh look squirrels", thing). As I've learned more, put in the work, and began taking medication, I realized with certainty, had I been properly treated as a young adolescent, the entire trajectory of my life would have changed. I'm in a healthy place now, clean and sober, have a loving wife and kids and great job, but the scars remain, and the challenges, even with meds, to function. It needs to be called out, over and over again, that mental health is not made up. Just because you don't have a cast on your arm for the eye to see does not mean folks are not dealing with very real neurodivergences. Growing up in the Christian church, it was even worse for me, as far as the condition being considered real, or due to a lack of faith (don't want to get into that right now). Anyways, thank you thank you and keep up the good work - there needs to be real access to real treatment for everyone affected by this condition, and we need to DELETE the stigma surrounding these issues.
As someone diagnosed at 21, started taking meds, now 7 years later-- to be completely fair, that is exactly what happens to a lot of kids. It basically IS a made up diagnosis of "this *child* can't sit still in class" and then they give them drugs that absolutely change how your brain works and does exactly that. Dulls their personality. It should be an *absolute* last resort in my opinion, and even though I struggled in school I'm glad I wasn't on stimulants from a young age. A child should develop w/o the use of incredibly strong stimulants. It's a decision that SHOULD NOT be made lightly. That child will NEVER ever be able to function w/o those drugs. They will experience a SEVERE depression if or when they became a young adult and made THEIR OWN choice to STOP being a slave to this medication that they never had the decision to take. It was made for them. And I think that's a SIGNIFICANT decision to make for a kid. Clearly there are cases which merit it, but I think they're actually pretty rare. I think we are overprescribing to make kids compliant in a school setting that has never been tailored to children's natural behaviors. Honestly, I can think of absolutely no reason that a prepubescent child should be on amphetamines, and if they're having significant trouble in high school then they can be more included in the decision to take them at that point. It's very analogous to another debate about medical interventions on children. Again, I've been on Adderall for over 7 years, so I'm WELL aware of how much it affects you overall. You are a different person if you take it every single day. It's just true. I have to take breaks and be very careful w/ it. If I'm too reliant on it, I feel like I'm lost my "spark." I'm not as enthusiastically curious about things. I'm burnt out. I'm asocial. There is *no such thing* as a medication w/o side effects. Not when you're taking it every single day. Not when it significantly changes how your brain WORKS.. I had 3 close friends as a kid who were diagnosed and prescribed Adderall all around 4th and 5th grade. Fast forward to after high school, and we're all experimenting w/ other drugs just the same. The Adderall certainly didn't as something to ward off desire to experiment further. A diagnosis is different than a prescription, and Adderall isn't the only treatment.
I’m proud of you. I’m also an ex addict, my Vyvanse is the thing that keeps me sober and has completely changed my life. Just like you I was an absolute trainwreck and destroyed my life with hard drugs. Now I’m finally a functioning responsible human being in college full time after dropping out 4x and also working full time and I’m able to balance everything bc of my meds. This shortage is absolutely horrible and the way that pharmacists treat us simply for asking if they have our medication is insane. ADHD medication SAVES LIVES. It absolutely saved mine, I would still be a chronic relapser if my doctor hadn’t listened to me and viewed me as more than an addict and understood that treating ADHD can actually get rid of substance abuse problems. The DEA treats us like a bunch of drug addicts for taking our medication, but we will easily turn to drugs if we DON’T have access to our medication
The same for me. The quiet I experienced in my head for the first time in over 50 + years almost made me cry. At first, it was scary as hell because I couldn't remember a time when I didn't have the cacophony of ideas, thoughts, rabbit trails, distraction, and sleepless nights from it was exhausting. I found out quickly that there was such a thing as adha. I ignored the dx I was given of adhd for 40 yrs. My first dose of ritalin made me tired, but the side effects for me were not ideal. Constant gritted teeth, dry mouth so bad I could spit cotton. My fist dose of Adderall knocked me out. I slept like I could never do in the past. I feel calm, can focus as long as I remember to take it. The problem was that I'll forget or get distracted and lose track of time with the distractions. My brain would wake up full throttle as if there were dozens of meetings that took place in my brain while I was sleeping that the anxiety to catch up with these meetings was a daily experience every morning. I now set alarms to remind me to take the medication. This mostly works, but, it is easy for me to get distracted within minutes of the alarm, and I still forget from time to time. I still have a house full of unfinished projects and regular tasks left half done, but I'm working on it. I was diagnosed with Aspergers in my 40s, over 20 yrs after the ADHD dx. I had takenmy youngestin for evaluationand the psychiatrist asked if he could interview me, then asked me to take a few tests. We both walked out of there with the same diagnosis. I didn't tell anyone until 3 yrs ago. So this could have some to do with me not being able to get through things my mind finds mundane or of little interest. I have a hyper focus that will set me into patterns that though seem harmless, can freeze me in my tracks from doing anything else...
I know what you mean about the quiet feeling in your head. My head feels like there's a crowd of people perpetually trying to get my attention at once, all wanting different things. I've cried of relief before when I took Adderall and it finally quelled the chaos that runs rampant in my brain at all other times.
I resonate with being frozen, I'm like that when I research some topic. I call in "juicing". I have to tell myself out loud to stop, go play with your kids😅
Oh. My. God. You have succinctly summed up all of my frustrations with the pharmaceutical industry in regard to treating my ADHD so well. It almost felt like you were narrating my experience. Thank you so so so much for making this. I'm definitely sending this to several people to help understand my situation. The worst part is that you didn't even touch on the rampant exploitation occurring now that generic Vyvanse is available. It's absolutely horrendous.
I had ADHD as a child, then found out it was all a ruse to get kids on drugs. I was 23 when I finally took my last pill and managed it on my own after that. Never had substance abuse or unwanted pregnancy. Sometimes people use pills as a crutch to their problem.. "I have ADHD, I'm sorry" or whatever which is a shame, because ADHD didn't slow me down when I lost my job, or started a new career path, or whatever. I just kept working and eventually got to where I am today.
You "had" adhd? So you don't anymore? Why would you accidently end up pregnant then Dj Joe. Idk why you think you can look into peoples minds and assume they use their pills as a crutch, because of your own experience.
I got ADHD, I don’t take medication. But I’d never ever deny anyone else there right to that medication. We need to learn to be more empathetic. Some have it REALLY BAD and require it. This is rather tone deaf.
If a politician wanted to fix this problem, they would propose a law making it legal for pharmacists to obtain foreign made medications if they can’t obtain generics from a United States manufacturer. It’s actually interesting that insurance companies aren’t fighting for this… though if you can’t get the generics that they cover, they don’t need to pay their portion.
The majority of generic medications are manufactured overseas already. I work in a pharmacy and you’d be surprised how many are made in India, China, and Indonesia among other countries. Dextroamphetamine/amphetamine (Adderall), Methylphenidate (Ritalin), etc come from all over the world. They are shipped into the US and sold by drug wholesalers to pharmacies across the country to then be sold to you, the customer.
@@Elquequ3my favorite example was a particular generic lovaza that plain as day said manufactured in Wuhan, China. I was always surprised at how readily available it was throughout the entire pandemic 😂
Same. I try not to feel sad or resentful at how effective the treatment is for me to live. I hate to "have to be medicated" but it's the difference between calmly getting things done and having my life in order vs existing in chaos and internalized hate and stress. Life is exhausting without it unfortunately. I was diagnosed at age 5 and age 12 but never medicated. Finally as a professional adult I was sick of gaslighting myself saying "you just aren't trying hard enough". I got my adult diagnosis and "surprise" , I definitely got it. I was done killing myself to be "normal" and barely making it. On the outside I look "successful" and on the inside it's all duct tape and super glue without it. Benn saying he feels cracked out without it is spot on.
Thank you for making this video. I’ve said this in another video, we need someone like you to start go fund mes to start a lawsuit against these companies. Planet fitness should be sued for not allowing online cancellation
Thank you for summarizing what ADHD is so well, my family stigmatized it all my life and as an adult I got help and now have a much more professional career and life is way more in check. I walk 2.5 miles daily etc. Edit: if you know someone who interrupts a lot can’t withhold their thoughts and or feel like they’ll explode if they don’t get it out, imagine this being able to be put into check with treatment and actual work on yourself. Sometimes people aren’t being interruptive on purpose but for people with ADHD it feels like if you don’t say it you’ll forget it or explode from holding it in.
That's me. And amazingly I can have two different conversations at once with two people simultaneously while the other person thinks that I'm not listening... but then I can repeat what they said while still talking to another person. "But for people with ADHD it feels like if you don’t say it you’ll forget it or explode from holding it in." written in your edit says a lot about how I actually function. I do this naturally and it is both a curse and a blessing. The focus is amazing and natural for me, but most of the time when alone I am constantly distracted by my own constant-thinking and "visualizing solutions" about things that I never follow-through to completion. I wish that I could function like "normal people", but to me it seems boring and lame. Am I wrong? Thanks for your comment, it says a lot of what I cannot explain to the people around me. I just found this channel today- and I'm glad because I thought it was alone.
I am over the moon seeing people finally give attention to the lack of treatment given to patients who are diagnosed and clearly need it, ive had my entire family fall apart over these terrible regulations and it'll likely kill us, I hear about close friends with chronic pain and other illnesses that die weekly.
And yet it's actually the reverse, legally--at least in the US. Any publicly traded company's first responsibility, always, is to their shareholders. This simple fact is single-handedly responsible for a lot of the country's ills.
@@erinm9445 People misunderstand that. A company's primary responsibility is seeking a profit within the regulations and laws that are in place. That does not mean that other considerations are required to be ignored in pursuit of profit. Treating customers like garbage is malpractice and isn't excused by seeking to maximize profits. There is no requirement that a publicly traded company "maximize shareholder equity," revenue, profit or any such nonsense. That is what they say to try and excuse their psychopathic behavior.
Here in Europe we don't have such severe problems. But I am basically playing the lottery for which dose of my medication is available any given week. and beeing on the wrong dosage SUCKS!
I worked in a medical office for a while and I hated every time someone called in for ADHD meds because there was often nothing we could do to help. Sometimes, we could fix it by calling the pharmacy for them, but that didn't guarantee to help.
OK, I missed the boat when one of my favorite electronic musicians started a popular TH-cam channel! I was like "is this...THE Benn Jordan of Flashbulb fame" and it totally is. How cool is this. I love your music and saw you live in Detroit in the early 00s when a friend, Mikey Woo, got you to come out and play for us. So cool to see you here making really informative and interesting videos.
I went on one of the nonstimulant ones after backing into a car in a parking lot, having a minor freakout, and leaving the scene. I got a visit from the police and thankfully no charges, but it was just a capper on several years of struggling more with my ADHD due to a new disability.
I had to spend three months on Elvanse Adult in the UK and it absolutely ruined my first attempt at my masters degree. My normal medication is Elvanse. Every doctor I’ve told this to didn’t believe there was any real difference but it was night and day to me. I’m so sorry to hear this shortage is _still_ going on over there. I hope it gets better as soon as possible.
1. If you have an evolved stance on this topic, such as "you just need to exercise more" or "you're all mind-controlled meth addicts", do me a favor and drink your own pee instead of enlightening us in the comment section. Maybe even read up on the differences between ADHD drugs and meth. After all, the term "meth" comes from a chemical reaction called "methylation".
2. If you've been suffering as a result of the shortage, your story is important and needs to be heard. At some point, someone in the FDA or a large class action firm will do something about this situation, because it is proven to be putting people into unnecessary harm.
3. I've mispronounced a few company names. It wasn't an accident. I don't want people cutting clips of the Aytu Pharma part and reposting this without context, because it's an industry-wide problem, not one small drug company's behavior.
As for the solution: Do like Europe. It's the American insurance based system that messes most things up. Bernie Sanders recently wrote a Danish newspaper about Ozempic price differences, ignoring there are an additional 2-4 middle steps in the US, all expecting to make money off of the same product, whereas all prescription medication in Europe has fixed national prices. In Denmark there's a national database of pharmacy stock, so everybody knows where to find anything. France and Germany have a hub-and-spoke system, where you can order most things from a local pharmacy in the morning, and have it in the afternoon.
There are plenty of ready available multi-drug test kits, e.g. Markee or even simpler - just a regular urine test strps (it works on water-solutions as well).
It's the same old story unfortunately...
Similar thing with antidepressants.
You have to face off your parents saying "when I was your age I didn't have the time to be sad", "kids these days are just spoilt an don't know discipline" and other bullshit (very funny coming from a generation that popped barbiturates like skittles).
The stigma is being eroded, but too slowly...
Man thank you so much. I'm 45 and and have experienced every detail you mentioned. Feels like I have to hide being ADHD due to how people view this medication. And the hold music... you nailed it. Every painful, irritating bit of it.
@@rasmis Most of the time you don't need to order! It's just available.
I can only remember one time the drug I was prescribed wasn't available, and I was assured it would have been the next morning.
You have simultaneously convinced me that I should get a diagnosis, and that getting a diagnosis is pointless.
As an adult with ADHD (among other things) that is basically exactly what my psychiatrist said. They pretty much said "yes, you have lot's of symptoms of ADHD, but stimulats are not a good solution, so let's just figure out what works for you personally."
@@N8Dulcimeryup, that’s what happened with me.
Funnily enough my doctor at the time was trying to put me on antipsychotics for my adhd symptoms bc they’re more “obtainable” than adhd meds.
Worst time of my life, I have a new doctor now after that.
I can get my ADHD meds but discovered after a year they caused constipation and urinary retention. So I could be treated, if I never wanted to pee again.
I've been on and off ADHD meds my entire life. I believe I do have ADHD, but at this point I think that being someone who runs a business, and the amount of crazy things I have to focus on in a day, ADHD untreated actually is a beneficial trait. ADHD with meds actually causes me to not focus on the important priorities. I will lock onto something that is not crucial.
ADHD untreated I think, at least for myself, allows me to madman handle more tasks then an average person can achieve.
Its a shit show. I do think that when on ADHD medication that I am able to handle things better in personal life when I have the time to do so. That being said i take them in that way. If I think that ADHD medication will be good for me on a certain day because of the certain tasks ahead of me, I will take one. If I know its just going to be complete chaos, I will usually not take one, because the ADHD in me is what allows me to handle that type of chaos like not many other people can.
Its weird to type this out, but its truly how I feel. I'd rather use ADHD medication as a tool, rather then making it 100% of my life. Edit: But then this starts to feel more like recreational drug usage then a treatment.
Healthcare in America: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ guess I'll die. Or in this case just live miserably until I do.
Nothing is more cruel then having someone with ADHD jump through a thousand hoops and navigating such a process to get the medication that would assist them in completing such a task...
Fucking truuuuuth. Once I run out of medicine, my ability to navigate the weeks of hurdles to get it back basically vanishes.
This is one of the primary sources of my depression, especially also being on the spectrum it just feels like the whole world is against me AND expects me to function without assistance
Imagine not even being able to afford a doctor.
@JaceFalcon not very difficult for most americans
ME RN
I love how genuine human problems are not being solved because human-created problems are getting in the way. What a time to be alive.
Yes it's complete madness
The American Medical system is SO good and SO reliable 😂😂
Psychiatric disorders are in large part human created problems themselves. There is no physiological evidence of their existence, its more of a political phenomena to sort and normalize human behaviour. There probably is something there, but the idea that it’s unchanging and permanent is just completely baseless.
@@Morpholigical thats some high tier bullshite right there lmao
Capitalism is pretty quickly destroying just about everything in pursuit of short-term profit.
Turning health issues into profit is disgusting, mental health or otherwise. This greedy dystopia is so exhausting.
If you didn't expect to make a profit would you still go to work? If not, why do you expect others to do so?
@@KRAMITDFROGprice gouging medication is not the same as selling an apple fan and expensive laptop. One is to function and one is a luxury. Medications and surgery should not be something fucked with when lives literally depend on it, hence why the government needs to step in and stop this madness.
Hey, pharmacy technician here. We’re not tired of you guys calling, just tired of short staffing. I’ll be helping a line of 10 people by myself when 10 calls come in. When the phone re-rings that sound is me hitting the hold button in the middle of checking somebody else out. Ik you were probably joking but I wanted to reassure you guys we do care and aren’t playing on our phones most of the time when you call us. That whole annoying call robot trying to get you not to speak to a live person WE go through 30+ times a day when calling other pharmacies and hate it probably more than the customers. Yet, they put that in place to take calls instead of hiring more staff. I LOVE MY JOB
It might be time for pharmacy techs to unionize and demand better staffing, as well as the usual things like proper hours and adequate pay.
I used to work the CVS front store myself. We were ALL being short staffed as much as possible. Oftentimes, during the night, we had only two people in the front store and three in the pharmacy. It's insane how many people are looking for jobs and now and how little employers want to pay their workers. It was so bad I was looking up possible unions or thinking of trying to form one, but I'm in Texas so that would be difficult. The only thing we got was a little less than 15 dollar per hour pay, but they also cut everyone's hours and were incredibly stingy with giving more.
And this is just for the front store, the pharmacy has it way worse.
@@majormissile5596 yeah I’m in Texas too at a super busy successful store, we’re all doing fine and they’re like hmmmm what if we did this with 2/3 the hours
Thanks. This will fall on deaf ears but I understand.
My partner works at a pharmacy and I have so much respect for the underappreciated pharmacists and pharmacy techs working their butts off
The worst part of "the hunt" for my meds was being treated like an addict.
I can generally assure you unless you NEED a specific manufacturer of the generic. Especially the one that's known to be hot on the drug market. We don't think twice.
It is really like that sometimes… even in my own place, these little “mean girl” cultures develop. Or maybe it’s a way of coping with not being able to help someone? to just pretend they don’t actually need it. Idk, the answer is probably gonna be the same either way, the medicine is allocated to X per week and I already have to take care of Y patients that have trusted me with their care for years. So no I cannot take anyone new… but I don’t blame you, I just wish I could help more. You’re not an addict.
In most instances the doctor is a guy who shows up for 5 mins out of you hour appointment reads some papers prepared by others and follows a predetermined rigorous procedure. Medicine has become very very impersonal, ofc that guy thinks your addict he barely knows your name. Doctors, especially generalists, have far too many patients and gaps are filled by subordinate less trained staff.
@@Zippyserit doesn't matter what you think. It matters about the fact that every doctor right now that you try to get to prescribe you ADHD medication will do almost everything in their power to not prescribe it to you and will act like you're an addict if you say that garbage like Vyvanse doesn't work for you
I had a terrible pharmacy for the longest time that treated anyone with a controlled substance prescription as a drug seeker. My life is so much easier now that I changed pharmacies. It’s so unprofessional for a pharmacist to basically scold you for needing a medication and violates so many boundaries and codes of conduct. That’s like implying someone with chronic pain who needs painkillers is a drug seeker. Report them and find another pharmacy
The absolute irony of so many facets of this requiring executive function is disgusting.
you're telling me man. 😭😭😭😭😭😭
Exactly!
It shouldn't be this way but it's not particularly ironic. Everything in life requires executive function.
@@johnk6757 it is quite ironic lol
The number of times that dealing with the insurance company, doctor, pharmacies, following correct protocols nearly causing a panic attack? Too many to count. It's such a cruel irony sundae.
My recovery journey was greatly enhanced by the therapeutic benefits of mushrooms. Other psychedelics like DMT and LSD have also proven to be remarkable.
Psilocybin mushrooms,DMT and LSD has been quite therapeutic for me.
I was diagnosed with severe depression and mental health issues, not until a friend recommended golden teachers mushroom for spiritual and mental gratification. I’ve been well ever since for about 4 years now.
Hey mate, Can someone help me with the source?
doctorcyruss is your guy, got all kinds of psychedelics, and the most knowledgeable that I know.
He’s on Telgram?
Yes, and TikTok, highly recommended.
I was diagnosed at 11. I am now 27. Vyvanse changed my life and turned me from a gifted student who couldn’t sit still and focus to finish her homework, to a national merit scholar/graduated uni summa cum laud in STEM/now in molecular biology PhD program.
This shortage is ruining my life. Disruptions in medication have tremendously affected my personal, academic, and professional relationships/outlook. My mental health has deteriorated, and I have felt increasingly more desperate, alone, frustrated, and anxious. I have had anxiety attacks, lost sleep, been condescended to by pharmacists, spent thousands out of pocket covering my medication, hundreds of cumulative hours on hold/driving around, jokingly considered black market drugs, etc.
I feel like my life has been forcibly put on hold. If I end up giving up on my dream to make the world a better place in science, the ADHD drug shortage will be the reason. Not that the drug corpos or DEA will care.Don’t worry though, I’ll probably just lose my job/stipend or die in a car accident first!
Anyway. Thanks for making this video. It’s very validating. Wish our complaints could actually do something. Or that anyone in power cared.
Time to join the working class struggle against capitalism, then. Or languish I suppose
@@Nobody-00000 Oh please. ADHD meds are safe and effective. People with ADHD need their medication to have a normal quality of life. That’s it. The hysteria over these medications is what’s causing the shortage in the first place.
Amphetamine withdrawal
I don't know if this will help, but I switched to getting my meds in the middle of the month instead of around the 1st. It's not perfect but it has considerably improved my success in filling my prescription. Be well my friend.
@@Nobody-00000 You're part of the problem.
Yeah I had to pay $170 for a month of name-brand Vyvanse due to shortage of the generic, which was still a fraction of what my insurance paid. The normal copay is like $5.
Most of these generic meds cost pennies to manufacture at-scale and are affordable outside of the United States.
The price of generic Vyvanse in my area is about $300/month for the generic. It’s bad. The good news is I’ll hit my deductible early.
Hey Tay -- just thinking about you the other day. Hope you're doing well these days. Normal bureaucratic nonsense notwithstanding...
oh my god it's tay zonday
The government literally rations production.
I had to pay $450 😢
I'm narcoleptic, and these stimulants are one of the most common treatments (although usually at higher doses). This is *literally* a life saving medication, preventing us from falling asleep at the wheel etc, not to mention dramatically improving quality of life (not to diminish people with ADHD). The fact that this is still a problem 4 years later is terrible.
Literally *life saving* medication is honestly how I have described it as well. I was diagnosed with ADHD in addition to living w/hypersomnia, and after I was prescribed Adderall XR, quality of life became *measurable*. After decades, I finally understood what it meant to thrive without having to disengage from everyday life.
Looking back, it’s difficult to comprehend how I survived as long as I did. This shortage is criminal, and the DEA is operating like they want the black market to grow just so they can make more arrests.
Investigative journalism, grass root protests, and publicity will light a fire.
I’m not going back to living a life operating at only 50-60% compared to those with “normal” energy levels.
I have ADHD but was also diagnosed several years ago with progressive MS that mainly impacts my life with chronic fatigue. Without stimulants I am not able to keep conscious for more than a couple hours a day, and I have tried everything WITH the help of many different health professionals. It absolutely is life saving, because I can’t actually live a life without the help of something that at least, for now, is what works while I continue pumping thousands of dollars into testing and experimental medicine and doctors appointments. I hate our health care system and I hate the pharmacies in America so. much.
Not to mention whatever is being produced as adderall and vyvanse in the last couple of years I genuinely do not think is the same formula or quality as what was produced 10 years ago.
Oh, with driving it makes me a lot safer too. Undiagnosed, for me, driving was a tricky situation. I didn’t drive for much of my adulthood because if it. My mind would wonder so much I wouldn’t see a bend. Or I’d start speeding because I was off thinking about a few other things and forgot to keep an eye on it. I have inattentive type, obviously. I’m now medicated and I can concentrate on driving so much more easily. It’s absolutely a life saver.
I have ADHD and severe obstructive sleep apnea, I wouldn’t be safe to drive without my Vyvanse.
Im in the same boat, though fortunately there are other medications that can help instead but none of them have worked quite as well as stimulant medications.
Hearing all of this said out loud, made me cry. The validation, knowing that I truly am not alone in my struggles with getting medication for my condition
❤❤❤
Meth is better
I honestly would have never known there was a shortage without hearing about it on the news. I have zero issues getting my prescriptions filled and I'm in the US.
@@switchdeck9164 Likely depends on location since some states are more restrictive than others, or higher density of people treated with it.
It really is fucking madness. Sometimes it takes 2 weeks to get my meds, and I feel like a fucking criminal when dealing with pharmacists. You have no idea how comforting this video is for me. No idea. Thank you Ben.
I used to feel the same when asking for PRESCRIBED opiates due to horrible tooth aches (fortunately I solved the issue, eventually).
Some Pharmacists address you like you're a criminal trying to score stuff to get high.
Well ppl should be able to get off adhd and not be on it forever
i second this
I don't have diagnosed ADHD, but I take a stimulant that's prescribed for something else, but I've noticed that it helps me focus a little bit. Because it does help some people focus, it's being used, off-label to treat ADHD. I take this other medication because of a separate, serious health condition. I have had trouble finding my non-adhd medication because so many people have resorted to taking this inferior stimulant to treat their ADHD. It's a bit depressing that people are resorting to taking whatever stimulant they can get prescribed just to seek treatment, and it's frustrating that other drugs are now having a shortage because of this drug shortage.
@@dayanaclaghornmodafinil
I really appreciate how this video effectively demonstrates two essential concepts of living with ADHD for people who don't have, or don't understand the condition:
* The practical experience of having ADHD as an adult, and how much extra work goes into just being a "functional" person in work and personal life.
* The absolutely insane emotional toll of living in a modern advanced society with the capacity to help people live equitable lives - but instead seeing the greed and anti-drug moral campaigns of a few thousand people dictate the quality of life for the rest of us.
That last point is especially important because although this specific situation is aggravating, it isn't unique.
The opiate crisis contributed to the deaths of so many people, and now those who have been responsibly taking opiates for pain management are treated liked addicts instead of medical patients.
Even public housing policy often comes down to "that just isn't affordable or convenient for us" - but those who decide what is "affordable", don't have to worry about homelessness, and instead worry about their next vacation home.
It seems the average American is unable to empathize with another person's life and advocate for that person, until something similar happens to them. I hope we grow beyond that.
amen
In my early 20s, I met a person with chronic pain, and saw how the medical system deals with people like that. My takeaway: You can either live with pain, or .... well, we don't an answer for you.
I had a pretty good childhood, with no major trauma to report. That experience (above) was one of the hardest life lessons I have ever had to learn, because it was the first time I was confronted with the harsh reality that sometimes life really really sucks and there's no appeal process. Losing my dad was the second. I guess I'm lucky to have gone that long in ignorance.
Yep, my observation is Americans [Edit: as a generalization of emergent behaviour] blame the less well-off for their situation and refuse to do anything to help level a playing field that intentionally favours the privileged in a society that's mistakenly believed to be "classless".
@@unclemick-synths That's more of the American right wing. The left wing is criticized for being "bleeding hearts" that "enable the welfare state." Presumably the majority of Americans are somewhere in between, but the most vocal minority have bifurcated into those extremes, and those are the points of view that get the most airtime.
I've known that I have ADHD or something similar for 15 years, and only just decided to try and get it diagnosed because I didn't want to deal with... all the stuff this video is talking about.
For those who are curious what the life of a functional but untreated (probable) ADHD patient looks like here it is:
- I work on my computer (programmer). Any time I reach the end of a page, or file, or a document, or something like that, I have to open up an unrelated application, let the application load, click at least one button on that new window, and then close it before I can go back to the task I'm trying to focus on. This is a little brainhack I developed about 10 years ago to "self medicate" my work focus. If I don't do this, I will no longer be able to read. This is not hyperbole, if I don't reset my focus in this way, I lose the ability to comprehend written language. I recognize all the letters and words but they become meaningless.
- I cannot sit in the same position at work for more than 15 minutes. Currently, I deal with this by standing up, walking to a different space, and then returning to my seat without doing anything. This also resets my focus, and takes about 15 seconds, but that's only if I can remain undistracted the entire time. Often, I will be completely unable to focus unless I stand up, leave the room, and fiddle on my phone doing something else (often something that I don't find interesting in the first place) for about 5 minutes. The sheer amount of time that this takes reduces my ability to work by at least 25%.
- I have over 1000 tabs open in my browser at any given time. This is mainly because I cannot trust myself to remember and come back to something unless it is already there for me to see.
- Related to remembering things, I have dozens of spots around my house where specific things are supposed to be left, because I know they are the first places I will look for those things. It is not the same as remembering I left it there, when I go to look for it I cannot remember whether I left it in the spot. I just know these are the first spots I will look for it when trying to find it. Most people leave things in their spot, and then go look in that spot first. I have to do the opposite. I learn where the first place I will look is in any given space, and then learn to leave my things there.
- I have to set alarms for almost anything that I want to do which is not an ingrained habit, or does not occur at the exact same time every single day/week. This includes things like brushing my teeth (every day, but not necessarily at the same times every day), taking showers (same), anniversaries/birthdays/events, meetings, errands/trips to the store, meals (if it doesn't occur at the same time, my hunger signals do not get through the noise in my brain until I am extremely hungry), or many other things that are extremely common and simple to do.
- If there is something I need to accomplish that cannot be accomplished in a single task, like for instance getting a medical diagnosis which may require multiple appointments and visits, it takes me months to actually do it after I have decided I want to do it. I cannot think of a good way to describe this problem to someone who is neuro-typical. It is not that I am unaware of the steps I need to take, it's that... you know that feeling of sitting there in the dentist chair with your mouth open while the dentist pokes and prods inside your mouth? That's the way my brain feels about working on task that is "the next step" instead of "the last step". My wife has been instrumental in this part of my life in ensuring I remain a functional person.
- The quality of things that I do is almost always far below my capability, because I am always looking for the shortest way to get something done. This is not because I don't care about the quality of my work, it is because the shorter I can make the task, the more likely it is to actually get done. This is true in my professional work, and well as personal goals, so it's also not something where I care about my job less or something like that. This leads to shortcuts, mistakes, etc., which I KNOW will happen, but fixing mistakes is a "separate task" in the way my brain works, so doing something badly the first time is actually an intentional strategy for me that is one of the only ways I can actually get something done at all.
- I get anxiety attacks and have anxiety about encountering things which exceed my coping mechanisms I have described. For instance, a task which I cannot do wrong the first time and then fix in follow up tasks often leads to anxiety attacks. The fear that at any moment I might unexpectedly encounter one of these kinds of tasks gives me General Anxiety Disorder, which I actually HAVE be diagnosed with, and also gives me insomnia, which I have ALSO been diagnosed with.
These is more, but writing this comment has been exhausting. It's taken my almost 2.5 hours to write this comment up to this point, I've had to get up twice, and I've opened a different tab in my browser in the middle of writing this comment at least 5 times to reset my task saturation and focus. I have no idea if medication would help me, and if so WHAT medication would help me. But I cannot do this any more. I'm 37 years old, and I have been living like this my entire adult life. In my 20s these problems were not less severe, they just screwed up my life to a greater extent and more frequently.
I want to keep my job and continue contributing to society. I want to be able to afford the mortgage for the house my wife and I bought. But I am reaching the point where I am not sure I can do that any longer because my brain will not let me do the things that I want to do.
It’s not just ADHD meds, it’s also meds for sleep, for pain, and then there is the whole mess with PBMs and specialty pharmacies. It’s a nightmare and I am stuck in it.
Are you able to go to a privately owned pharmacy? I am on opiates for pain and couldn’t get them ANYWHERE. I started at a small privately owned pharmacy and they’re ready the day after my monthly doctor appointment.
True, the government is literally causing an opiate crisis right now by limiting production below what is necessary for chronic pain patients to not live in absolute agony, and to anyone who thinks I'm just some sort of addict I've never used more than HALF of what I'm prescribed for my chronic neuropathy pain and thank God I'm able to control my pain with that low level of medication because otherwise I would be hospitalized to cope during the months that every pharmacy in my large city is out of stock and unable to order any more due to the government's increasing restrictions each year on how much they allow pharmaceutical companies to produce, for sure there was most definitely a problem 20 YEARS AGO with doctors prescribing it too many people who didn't need it for minor pain but the corrective actions have gone WAAAAY TOO FAR in restricting it's production for the people who ACTUALLY NEED IT to survive chronic pain
@@xp7575 i don’t think you’re an addict. I think you’re just like me. Someone who follows all the rules, jumps through all the hoops and uses the least amount of medication necessary to function. I don’t have ANY joy in my life. I can barely function let alone have fun. I have been on opiates for over 15 years. I’ve been forced to taper down to 1/8 of what I was on when i felt “okay.” Every month I have to pay to see a doctor who takes away more of my necessary meds. Every month my activity level decreases more. I have to ration my energy & ability to just clean and cook for myself. At some point I won’t get any medication. I will have ZERO will to live at that point.
I understand. ❤️
@@emmyali920 thank you for your reply, it helps knowing that I'm not alone at least, the first 3 years I was on them I didn't have any issues getting my scripts filled but this past year has been a disaster, I used to refill my months supply only every other month because I only needed half of what I was prescribed but I've started to attempt refilling my script every month now so that I have enough to survive when another delay comes up, and while I was always good about tracking my usage and making it a point to use the least amount I could to avoid developing a tolerance to them I now find myself using even less and just trying to get through as much pain as I can handle without them so that I can stock up on any many as I possibly can because when the pharmacy does run out they never know when they'll actually be able to get them back in stock and I suffer from crippling anxiety at times worrying about what will happen if there is ever a shortage so bad that I might run out and not have anything left to make my chronic pain tolerable, the darkest thoughts I have (which I have quite often lately) is wondering how many of my meds it would take to end my life in the event that WW3 or a Civil War broke out in this country and cut off all access to getting a refill because if that happened it would be terrible to find myself not having any left once I ran out and I would want to know how many I had to have left to make sure I ended my life so that I could make that choice before my supply got too low, and omg the thought of reaching the day where I had to make that choice terrifies me, sorry for rambling and I hope I didn't trigger any depression or anxiety in you by being this open but it's hard having to live every day alone with these thoughts bouncing off of the walls of my mind so that all just kinda came pouring out once I started talking, and again thank you for your reply because it does feel good to feel heard and understood and to know that I'm not alone, wishing you the best
@@buckodonnghaile4309🙄
I had to wait 3 years for an evaluation for ASD and ADHD, and what frustrates me to no end is they had no problem pumping my body full of prescribed medications that I did not need (antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, SSRI’s, etc), and as a result it left me with Tardive Dyskinesia. Now that I have access (inconsistent of course) to stimulant medications, like you said I feel able to just get through the day at a baseline that is workable. Thank you for putting all these thoughts and this information into a succinct video!
Yep! They have no issue with hardcore mental health meds that give us tics and TD. God forbid if we want to restart on our old ADHD med dose after finding a new provider. Gotta try 3 antidepressants to full titration first.... yay
In addition to this, Pharmacies are being closed in droves. Not because of lack of demand or usage; but because they're being bought by the big pharmacies that just close any local competition so that we get have fewer choices and receive poorer service. Not just that, but the entire industry is set up to basically bankrupt all but the largest pharmacies. I've had to switch pharmacies because of closure 3 times in the last year.
And once the big pharmacies have bought up and closed all the small ones, they close and leave the area too. Capitalism is just so great, isn't it?
Wow
I managed a small pharmacy for several years. The owner closed 5 of the 7 he owned this year due to insurance companies not renewing our contracts, distributors like Cardinal and McKesson drastically raising our prices, and the insurance company's PBM (pharmacy benefit managers) barely reimbursing us costs on many of the prescriptions we filled. Sometimes, they won't even reimburse our cost, so we frequently lost money.
@@alvatoredimarco Free-market forces at work baby. We don’t have it much better over the other side of the pond, but it’s dystopian in the US.
@@BnFGProductions Well, except for the part of the "free" market where customers are free to switch where they purchase goods.
My doctor moved to a different office recently. I called there and asked to get my 30-day prescription, one that I’ve had for 4 years, refilled. I was told that since he is in a new office I am now considered a new patient. Because of this, I have to go through the entire screening process to see if I actually have ADHD. The earliest I can be seen was in 3 months. This appointment also couldn’t be a virtual one (my doctor is now 45 minutes away from my house). I work from home and without these meds it’s nearly impossible to stay on task because of the distractions of being at home. When I asked how any of this makes sense, I just got told by multiple people that “this is just how the system works.” None of them could actually justify any of this. Thats all they could say. I’ve gone months now without my medication and I feel like I’m slipping back into the deep depression I was in before I got diagnosed.
I'd hint that this sounds like extortion and that you're considering contacting a lawyer. Your medical records are on file for 4 years saying you have adhd
I don't know about America but that sounds absolutely horrible. I'm sure there are lawyers or public offices that'll hear you out and help you. As the person above said, your diagnosis is on record and as valid as the day you got it. Keep asking for YOUR meds until they give them to you, I wish you the best of lucks!
Your doctor wants the extra billing codes to cover the new building/moving cost. That IS extortion. I’d fight it honestly
The system will always have prejudice. Medical/insurance facilities treat "the system" like a deity, a holy entity that shall never be crossed. I once had my biologic (a drug my body NEEDS TO HAVE OR ELSE IT WILL START TO FAIL) be postponed by 2 weeks just because i tried to order it A DAY EARLY. The system flagged it as "fuck this guy in particular" i guess and no matter who i called they all just told me "well its says in the system that it cant be filled" YEAH I KNOW WHO FUCKING CARES JUST FILL IT DUDE. its a joke and insurance companies love punching down.
Can you call your doctor's original practice and get a refill from a covering doctor there?
The pharmacy calls made me roll my eyes so damn hard. I’ve made those same calls about 500 times since I’ve been on Vyvanse. Pharmacy people have even told me to just “skip a few days” and I have to explain that I have narcolepsy in addition to ADHD and without it, I can’t drive and can’t go to work. It’s insane.
They shouldn’t be telling you to skip a few days, but you have to understand that they can’t do anything. They are just poorly paid workers who don’t control everything like the supply of things
@@andy2641 of course, I’ve never been rude to them or anything, I’ve just been like “hey so I really can’t skip days, do you know where there’s a pharmacy I might be able to get it at” and if they don’t know, they don’t know.
@@andy2641 Yes, and all because the DEA screwed up and failed to notice the opioid epidemic sooner and refuse to allow one of the major factories making one of the stimulant medications to go back to doing that. There were some minor compliance issues, but there weren't missing doses out there as a result, it was stupid BS like failing to write "canceled" along with the line through the line indicating a cancellation. And people aren't having fatal overdoses on Ritalin and adderall in any particularly alarming numbers. Off the top of my head, I can't recall the last time I heard of anybody asserting it as a cause of death.
@@andy2641"You don't get it. I should be the exception . So please call your supervisor and get this sorted."
What part of the country are you in? 30mg brand and 40mg generic haven't been an issue where I live for the most part.
I hate the shame i feel when others only think im only doing a good job because im high on 'meth' or 'speed' and i always got the ' ya well if i was on speed id get all my chores done and be energetic at work all the time too'
like i take a stimulant so i can get out of bed and make myself food to eat, shower, etc. but the shame from others is too much. i havent been on a stimulant for several years, and my life has slowly unraveled and i lost everything.
Spin it any way you like. You were a junkie
This sucks. I’m sorry. Fuxk what anyone else is thinking and you are certainly not alone. Def encourage you to give this another try. These meds changed my life 💯
You deserve to feel better
@@katkatkat5 thank you! after talking with my therapist, im getting back on a stimulant, or at least going to try. i appreciate your kind words.
This Peer Specialist is going to ask you, "why do you care so much about what others think? Does what others think actually matter?" Then I will say this, if you are honest with yourself, you have to admit you are living with being high on some kind of Methamphetamine. I was diagnosed as being Hyperactive in 1967 at age 8, and from my experience no real solution comes in PILL FORM. It is something you have to learn to deal with somehow. I grew up smoking weed to deal with it, and it worked for me, but that being said, I wasn't ever high while at work, nor did I NEED to smoke weed to be able to function.
You shouldn’t feel ashamed about needing a prescription medication to be a functional adult. If anyone judges you unfairly they just don’t understand the struggle. If you truly feel like your life is unraveling get back on meds. You don’t even have to inform others that you take adderall or vyvanse or concerta, it’s none of their business ❤.
Just to add to this, not only does locating the prescription take a full time job's effort, requesting a prescription for your treatment in several states will get you some very sideways looks from doctors and psychiatrists who immediately assume you are drug seeking. I had to be rediagnosed because my new doctor just didnt believe me that i had a childhood diagnosis even with the documented proof of that diagnosis, and then after all that, i have to take a quarterly urine test to ensure I'm actually taking the medication as prescribed and not selling it or abusing it. Even if you manage to get your hands on the medication meant to enable you to live easier, there is not a single step in the process that comes with trust that you can treat yourself. I'm an adult with ADHD, not a child who needs to be monitored for my own safety.
I’m sorry you have to go through that, I’ve never had that experience and I have a diagnosis for substance use disorder. My doctor has always been nonchalant about it. I have had one lady over the phone sound a little weird, but that was it. The medication is very helpful for me, although I do have to take occasional breaks because it stops working if I take it for too long.
I also had those semiannual urine tests, thankfully my state didn’t think four of them a year was necessary but it did think having quarterly check ins with my primary care doctor was necessary. Thankfully I stopped needing to do them every three months and now can do every six months since I’ve been on my meds as an adult for so long, just in time for me to be the one paying for them.
I have to do blood tests now though, because of the side effects forcing me to now be on blood pressure medication. I thought the piss tests were embarrassing enough, seeing as most stimulants are in the form of a salt that makes you retain water and pee less, making it really hard to pee in command for the urine tests. But now I, a person with a well documented low blood pressure reaction to blood draws, have to do annual blood tests because of my high blood pressure being medicated for. Worst part is the next one the doctor wants me to do as a fasting lab, so I can’t even take any of my medications that morning until I get home. None of that sounds good.
@GuiSmith check with your dr again, call and leave a message with the nurse, ask about taking your morning meds, because you should be able to with water.
I had an endoscopy with orders to eat and drink absolutely nothing after midnight, but I got the ok to take my anxiety and blood pressure medication with a sip of water.
I have fasting labs done multiple times a year and I can have my meds, water, even coffee as long as there's no sugar or creamer in it, just straight black coffee.
Blame the government government for breathing down doctors' necks. And for rationing the production of medications.
Oh good, you get to feel like ur on probation.
It's so frustrating. In order to keep up with my medications, I'm forced to display "drug seeking tendencies" because of all the hoops they force me to jump through.
EXACTLY
What a shocker a person seeking medically necessary drugs exhibits "drug seeking tendencies." It's like the criteria for that term is so broad and nuance-less it's worthless at best and harmful at worst.
Exactly the same with pain medications.
Mentioning a drug by name is considered drug seeking behavior. As though none of us can read an online article related to our disorder.
The only thing that matters is YOU are displaying "drug seeking tendencies."
Not an ADHD med but my doctor retired, didn't email me and then I couldn't pick up my blood pressure meds. Kids in high school have an easier time getting drugs than regular people doing their due diligence.
Not to lessen your valid struggles to get important meds. But I also take blood pressure medications and I can pick them up or get them shipped to me a few days before I run out of them. For ADHD meds, they are listed as a controlled prescription, so we can not get my child's ADHD meds shipped, we have to pick them up at a pharmacy (closest one is 40 minute drive) and we receive a 28 day supply, the doctor wants to see my child before he prescribes a refill, so we pay to see the family doctor every month, the specialist every 3 months, and the therapist weekly. and even if the doctor writes a prescription before the 28 days, we can't pick up that prescription until it's been 28 days since the last. so my child takes her last pill in the bottle and I have to get to the pharmacy that day in order for her to have her pill for the next morning and sometimes the pharmacy doesn't have the medication or doesn't have 28 pills so we get a partial supply till they get more. It's not easy, the media makes it sound easy but getting the ADHD meds is soo much harder than it is for any other prescription that anyone else in our family is on.
@@vm1776it isn't that the doctor wants to see him at such intervals, he must by law do so for these types of meds.
@@kaw8473 I'm sorry but you're just a normal healthy person and just like me it's very selfish of us to consider us getting a drug or anything when there's all these other people with all these defects birth defects developmental defects self-inflicted defects post-traumatic stress disorder for things they did lined up to get psychiatric medicine. I expected you to survive your blood pressure medicine problem as did everybody else because the last few healthy people like us would be selfish to even think we needed something we only want something it's all the ADHD people the autistics the schizophrenics the manic depresses the developmentally disabled the post-traumatic stress disorder every single one of them needs your place in line you just want to have lunch or something.
Imagine being in excruciating pain and not being able to get medication. After years of trying to get a pain management doctor you find someone who is trying to prescribe the medication that you need and then the pharmacy won’t let you get your prescription. This is the reality of pain patients all across America.
Here's a fact, proper pain medication usage for chronic pain suffers improves the quality of life, Improves the healing process and outcomes and Lengthens life expectancy!! There's something more dastardly going on thats not being mention.
@ much worse. If things get worse there are going to be a lot of deaths due to biting the bullet. It’s a sad state of affairs. The overdose percentage was much much lower when heroin was legal which is crazy
Same issue add oddly enough in the name of stopping Fentanyl they decided that my use of 1 to 2 oxys once a month to get through a degenerative joint issue when it gets bad was enough to label me as having addiction potential whatever the hell that is😂😂.
It depresses me to no end how the shareholder system creates a kind of greed that kills people.
They could always put the tax rates back where they used to be. Much of this wouldn't happen if the rich were actually thrown in real prison for tax evasion and bribing politicians. If after your 10th million dollars of income you have to pay back $9.5m it would greatly reduce the incentive to earn so much.
If I may get radical, it is simply a symptom of a larger disease. Profit being the only end goal
93% of all market shares are owned by the top 10% richest americans.
America, from its moment of inception, has always been built on the foundations of enslavement and murder.
Adolf Hitler was literally inspired by the United States in their genocide against the natives and their eugenics programs against ethnic minorities and the disabled.
Replace "shareholder" with "capitalist" and it's correct
Just a minor correction: ADHD cannot be reliably viewed through MRI or other brain imaging techniques alone. Brain imaging and neurobiology in regard to ADHD is currently only valuable for research. Studies have been conflicting and have only concluded that ADHD is multifaceted in presentation of symptoms and results from brain imaging.
Kindly note that I'm not discounting the efforts of the scientists nor saying ADHD doesn't exist (I was diagnosed several years ago). Just that it infact CANNOT be viewed in scans.
Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Ya the neuroscience branch of pop psychology will post any shitty study with a headline "we found the gene that causes depression/ADHD/etc" and it's always fake upon further investigation. They have no idea what's going in peoples brains in regards to mental health causes, it's all just research and hypothesis. Which Is fine, that's how you do science I suppose, but the reporting that comes out to regular folks is always just pop science garbage usually designed to sell some drugs
This is such a frequent claim of all kinds of mental/emotional disabilities and differences - "they can see it in the brain!" I don't think that is actually true of anything as of yet, except for gross damage to the tissues or obvious malformations. Not to deny the reality of these things, but as you say, we ain't there yet.
Yes. There are still not biological factors to distinguish and its been this way for a while. Symptom based treating can be ineffective and actually leave people in a more vulnerable spot where the problem is there but they need whatever solution to manage the symptoms.
Thanks for explaining that. I was wondering about why we can "see" it but don't use the scan to diagnose.
I was recently diagnosed at 41 years old. I feel like it’s explained a lot of things, including my marriage troubles, and my inability to focus at work or complete goals.
I signed up to get my ADHD treated in college, and it took OVER 2 YEARS TO GET INTO THE FIRST APPOINTMENT on their 'free' medical care. The only way a person could get to the front of that list was to express their desire to not be alive anymore. It's insane how I have to word things differently for the sake of TH-cam's terms of service to even talk about this and the frustration over the whole experience. It's insane how many people make the decision to end it all while in college, so it makes me wonder how many of those people chose to do so because "HELP IS COMING IN...2 Years".
I had to medically withdraw because waiting and waiting for treatment for my depression in college allowed it to get so much worse, and by the time I got to "skip the line" by expressing how bad it had gotten, it was past the point of their help being able to do all that much to "fix" such a severe issue. Glad I withdrew and got actual help instead of staying inside a pressure cooker.
I self-medicated myself into jail, and got kicked out with 109 credits completed towards a bachelor degree (120 credits req’d). I even had a decent GPA, all things considered. Mental healthcare hasn’t improved much since the last real reforms that ended the practice of giving “hysterical” women shock treatment and/or partial lobotomies-and that was embarrassingly recent. Free services are, as you say, limited to imminent harm. But even paid options are limited in a lot of significant ways, and for a lot of people with conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the entire system is deeply flawed in its ability to keep patients stable. The rest of society is almost perfectly designed to thwart those efforts, and the first encounter with professionals for those patients when the treatments fail-when they’re at their most vulnerable and in critical need of care-will most likely be an encounter with police, rather than therapists.
I’m sure dozens of people’s lives are ended unnecessarily every day, either by death or prison, because of how unbelievably cursed the American healthcare system is.
Hope the people here are doing well ☮️
@@silverXnoise my experience was a bit different, in that the mental health facilities seem to be built more like asylums for people with schizophrenia or other severe mental health disorders and if you're there just trying to get help for autism or executive dysfunction type stuff they really do practically make you feel like a total psycho. Not that it's entirely their fault, people like that really do need help too and probably more so. But there really should be specialty inpatient treatment facilities for people in emergency situations for more of this kind of thing.
Genuinely shocked YT even let you comment this. The censorship just in the last two to three months has been out of control. I would say the majority of my comments, almost always completely innocuous and ordinary, are getting removed bc of some unknown keyword they don't like. All in their effort to maintain ad-friendly "positivity". I don't know why I even comment anymore.
Almost like FREE means rationing care and wait lists or something. FREE isnt a real concept.
It's embarrassing to call different pharmacies over and over! Many times the pharmacist will be rude, treat me like a drug addict, and quickly slam down the phone receiver while saying they don't carry Adderall. I'm just trying to get a doctor prescribed medicine so I can concentrate at work and not get fired! UGH!
Some Pharmacies don’t want to answer if they have any because they don’t want to be robbed. At least that’s one answer I got from one Pharmacist.
Hey I found this pharmacy startup called findrx that finds medications on shortage for patients. I've picked up mine few hours after signing up. It seems like they are operated by pharmacy students, and I am actually very thankful of them. You should give them a try.
@@jo-vf8jx I thought they had to be smart
I'm not on Adderall or have ADHD, but I am on painkillers because of accident 10 years ago which damaged my sciatic nerve in my left leg and my hip is filled with 18 titanium pins and 7 chains, so I'm living with pain for the past 10 years. It's very similar with the painkillers and how sometimes pharmacists look and act with you, that's why I don't go in big chain pharmacies anymore and use a local mom and pop style. Not only the pharmacist are super nice, but they prepare the medication in like 3-4 minutes while at Walgreens I had to usually wait 30+ min even up to an hour in some instances.
Last time I went to Walgreens, I went to ask 1 day earlier at 8pm if I can pick up my new prescription (typically the insurance allows you to pick it 1-2 days before the 30th day) because I had to travel the next day early in the morning and the pharmacist started telling me how I'm a drug addict because I was trying to get it "4 hours" earlier before my next supposed to refill and I tried to tell him that I'm just asking because I have to get up and travel at 6am so not to delay my trip if I can get it a day before, but he said I need to seek rehabilitation center to help with my addiction (not even a joke or exaggeration)... I just told him "dude, I think you have more issues than me" and I just left.
They ALWAYS assume we’re addicts. I worked in a CVS pharmacy when I was younger and we were actually taught to be skeptical of people calling about availability of C2s and not to even say if we had it in stock if they’d never filled it at CVS before.
I tried switching doctors for my ADHD medication, and was treated like a drug addict by almost everybody I spoke to.
In the very red state I live in, it took nearly a decade and 4 different doctors before I was treated like a human being with a mental illness instead of some drug seeking street urchin. Now I'm afraid if I move that it'll be like starting over again; if not worse due to the manufactured shortage.
To add insult to injury, most of the pharmacies in my immediate area have switched to what I lovingly call Temu Adderall. This manufacturer has to be either using a different compound, or shrinkflating because while the side effects are prominent, the effectiveness falls short. Yet, my copay for this prescription doesn't seem to equate to the lowered value of the meds. Funny how that works...
When i was looking for a different pharmacy that could fill my Vyvanse script- at the time I was trying to find the newly released generic version and it wasn’t commonly available yet- I encountered the same attitude.
Multiple pharmacy techs told me they can’t discuss the availability of schedule II drugs with patients. At that point I hadn’t even asked if they currently HAD any vyvanse in stock (I could understand not wanting to say if it was in stock or when they expect shipments to come in, because they don’t want to be robbed); I just wanted to know if it was worth my time and my doc’s to send them my prescription, and they couldn’t even answer that.
It took months to get my prescription filled. Only to then discover that the generic Vyvanse sucks complete ass, at least for me personally compared to the name brand version. 😵💫 lmao
When I moved to Kentucky having had my diagnosis for 24 years at that point, I was warned that schedule 2 drugs are REALLY hard to get a dr to prescribe. I got on my insurance's website and set up the list of in-network drs from nearest to furthest away. It was call #11 before I found a dr that would continue my adderall prescription. My dr is a 45 minute drive from my house.
My doctor just stopped giving it to me one she said she lost her license or something, had no luck getting it since, just live life without meds.
@@notorioustorithere is a generic of Concerta that’s a structured differently than the original. So instead of it releasing slowly over 12 hours it basically releases half of it in the first three hours and then slowly releases the remainder over the rest of the day. There’s even a statement from the FDA about how the formulation isn’t a true generic since it doesn’t match the original efficacy and method of release. They said that the manufacturer should voluntarily remove it from the market but they won’t force them to. So yeah, I figured that out after a year of feeling weird and confused.
As someone who's been diagnosed with ADHD at the age of like 8 or 9, I am grateful to be living in Germany, where prescriptions are free until the age of 15 and cost a maximum co-pay of 5€ per box after that.
I know we Europeans (especially Germans lol) get absolutely f'd by taxes, wages and electricity prices. But they have allowed me - someone from a rather poor former east German family - to go to school, take part in school trips, get food and educational tools payed for, get my medication, go to university for basically free (the actual cost of a semester is something like 70€ and often goes to about 280€ when including the public transportation ticket for the entirety of germany), and be on my way to become a teacher next year.
I am appalled that a country with such immense wealth and influence in the world makes their citizens jump trough so many hoops to get basic medical assistance. I hope and pray for the U.S. to change for the better, as I know you guys do have the means to do so in theory and are not the kind of folk to give up easily.
The USA puts a lot of their taxes into the military since they are the worlds superpower. it's beneficial to Europe too, since we're allied, so a lower expense to us. THOUGH, that doesn't excuse their terrible healthcare system. That you want people to pay for their own school or retirement is fine, but healthcare should be accessible to everyone when you're living in the "number 1 nation on the planet". I'm always shocked to see how they treat their new mothers too - literally the source of creation, back to work the moment the stitches are healed. In a first world nation, disgusting!
I'd rather pay high taxes and actually get services than pay low taxes and pay high private costs and not get services.
Here is the ultimate problem. We are the cash cows, we are the crop, we are the assets. Keeping us sick and borderline surviving is not just the results, it was the plan.
lol how can you not realise how nonsensical that is. So if what your saying is true, then your own model is contradictory, it’s so ridiculous that so many people repeat this line yet they never follow the logic through and realise that IF THIS WERE TRUE THEN THEYRE DELIBERATELY MAKING LESS MONEY BY STARVING SUPPLY, ok that’s possible, extremely unlikely but possible, so why don’t you provide an explanation?
I’ll tell you why, cuz you never even realised the contradiction, you’re just repeating something you think sounds good.
@@Vgallothe lower the supply and higher the demand, the higher the price. Like what DeBeers does with diamonds.
@@blargithonify except the price doesn’t go up.
oh but the prices have gone up, lil bro. You were just too busy licking boots to notice
@Vgallo but it does. Look at insulin and epinephrine for example. Lifesaving insulin being produced for as little as 2 dollars a vial is being inflated in price by around 30%. Meanwhile epipens have increased in price by 545% since 2007. If that's not an increase in price, I don't know what is.
I like how USA has a gargantuan problem with fentanyl, but they decided to fight something much less dangereous and possibly beneficial against heavy drugs. Great job!🎉😅
It’s not though. Many people who get prescribed stims who don’t actually have ADHD later go to meth. I hate the DEA too but that is a reality those on RX stims have to accept.
@@JacobLuxford-Nicholson there is absolutely no evidence to support that.
Adderall is awful for you. It's controlled meth. You want to take that until you're 80? I'm sure your dopamine and heart will thank you if you stop
@@MNhockeydude35no evidence? Do you now know what Adderall is?
And how did the fentanyl problem begin again? Oh that's right people taking prescribed heroin. Almost like the same thing that's happened now with Adderall. Just wait til the chinese start shipping designer meth like they did with the fent.
I've been screaming all this at full volume for two years. I've worked with pharmacies, doctors, insurance agencies and patient advocates and things have gotten progressively worse. I'd do anything to be normal. I'm so tired of feeling like I'm doing something wrong when I take the medication that allows me to function in society. I'm tired of the scrutiny, hoops and red tape. Why add a bunch of extra steps for people that are clinically inconsistent? It doesn't make any sense. It's so frustrating, this video literally brought me to tears. Thank you for speaking out for us.
You’re not alone.
Yeah i dont know who thought a condition thats marked by difficulty with menial repetitive tasks should have treatment locked behind a literal jungle gym of obstacles
@@therideneverends1697 honestly, I think it's neurotypicals who take our needed meds recreationally who do it.
I'm talking about lawmakers btw. They do so many substances that the military had to stop testing for drug residue.
Plenty of them take it illicitly and then decided everyone must be using it like they do and punish us.
Ditto. I really want to see what's going on with the quality now too, half of these batches are weird or make me feel sick. Or! They do absolutely nothing 😢
please continue spreading the word
12:32 That is such a 5d chess move to get ahold of a company. Buy of share of their company so that you can attend their exclusive shareholder meetings 😂
I am pretty sure that was also a plot-device used in the movie "Mr. Deeds". 😂
This shame shit is the reason people with CHRONIC pain (I have constant joint inflammation from Crohn’s Disease, in addition to frequent abdominal cramping) have a ridiculously difficult time getting opiates/opioids for pain relief in the USA.
To resolve that problem I had to move to another country!
Opioids are only considered safe and effective for acute short lived painful events. Enjoy your addiction though. Long term reliance on pain killers and this need to reach for a magic pill to every problem. That's the issue in the USA. If you've been on painkillers for longer than 3 months you're developing hyperalgesia which means the pain is just going to get worse and worse over time, because you're fucking up your mind and bodies ability to properly control and fire pain receptors. www.medsafe.govt.nz/Profs/PUArticles/June2021/Paradox-of-opioid-induced-hyperalgesia.html here's a reputable source for proof. The goal should always be to reduce reliance and amount of opioids over time. Not going to extreme lengths to continue getting them.
Didn't the us have a severe problem with excessive oxycontin prescriptions?
Not trying to counter your point; just trying to understand.
Thanks!
@jippalippa yes. Mostly an issue of prescribing too many and too high of a dose to acute patients like those with an injury. Now it has swung the other way and it's very hard to get them at all. Unfortunately the legitimacy of your pain isn't protective against opioid addiction.
You should have moved to Colorado instead.
The problem here isn't that you can't find the medication, though - it's that your doctor won't prescribe it. Too many laws restricting access. I know it can be dangerous, but when used correctly, it can be life-altering. Too many people misused it because the drug companies were pushing it like candy. Because of that, now it's hard to get for legitimate purposes.
Missing is when the pharmacies get sassy with you during the phone calls. I've had multiple instances of them getting upset that I called to ask if a prescription is in stock and telling me I'm not allowed to know. Like dang, I'm not calling you for funsies. I'm calling because I have to be the one to tell my prescriber which pharmacy to send their form to and if the prescriber sends the form out too many times the insurance thinks I'm ordering all the drugs in the city instead of trying to find the one pharmacy that happens to have my prescription in stock.
Also during the shortage myself and two roommates were forced to hop to different prescriptions. It is extremely exhausting to stop taking one medication because 'oops it's out' and start another med like stratera or ritalin only to find out that the side effects are an absolute nightmare and have them be next on the shortage block, forcing another change.
!!!!
"Big Corp Pharmacy, this is Pam, how can I help you? 😄🥰😇
"Hi, I'm Matt and my pharmacy has been out of my medication for a few weeks, can you check if it's in stock?"
😡 ...."What's the medication?" 😐😐😐😐
Pharmacies aren't allowed to tell you what they have in stock as far as I know. So the only way to find out what if they have your Adderall is to make your doctor call it in, and it leads to exactly what you described. It's a dumb system lol
Had this exact problem trying to find a cheaper pharmacy for my Vyvanse. Ended up just staying with my current pharmacy and in the course of a month the price jumped 20 dollars. Fun times.
I just experienced this bs for the first time after changing insurance and pharmacies. I just called my dr office a bunch and said the pharmacies are bull shitting me and tall me to call somewhere else. Took a month to sort out, turns out the pharmacies didn’t want to fill my prescription because I didn’t use them to fill anything.
My brother had severe ADHD but wasn't diagnosed or treated. Back in the 70's they only said he was a "trouble maker" because he kept getting bored in school and getting kicked out, but his IQ was 165 in the exceptionally gifted range (the judge got him tested). He went in and out of detention homes and committed minor crimes because he had no direction, no father figure (our parents divorced). He eventually self-treated with drugs, because that was the only thing that made him feel normal but he overdosed, and died at the age of 31. Now my son has the same diagnosis, and we got him treated very early, before the age of 5, since his was severe as well. I remember going to 7 different pharmacies and none would agree to stock his medication. I was a nervous wreck. Finally one pharmacy agreed, as the manager had a heart and knew I was in turmoil as no one would help my son. If it wasn't for him, my son wouldn't be where he is today and his life may have taken a different path.
I think you conflate the your care and effort for the drugs. Fighting hard for the drugs bc its what you thought would help is a sign of love, and love makes a bigger impact than meds.
From another comment I just read:
"I want to mention that “treatment” isn’t simply getting your kid on pills and calling it job done. I was diagnosed and medicated in middle school, and that changed my life in a massive way. But medication is temporary, and when I got home from school, I was still a kid with ADHD.
Treatment doesn’t stop at medication and I wish my parents knew that. I’m 32 now and I still deal with a lot of anxiety (working on it in therapy). I’ve gone through many phases of alcohol and cannabis abuse. Treatment is adjusting my lifestyle to be able to tackle daily life"
Pharmacy being able to refuse a legit prescription should be illegal.
@@slashing_SI got diagnosed around '90. Lucky because few were at that time. Put me on ritalin but offered no other treatment help, eventually just gave up. My single mom did what she could, I cant fault her, we even tried homeopathy. Im so glad vids like this exist for people now.
@@slashing_S Trust me, our love for our son has gone way beyond just the drugs. We have provided our son with all of our love and time; taught him good manners, how to save money, how to cook, how to write cursive (which was a struggle, but it paid off). We taught him discipline and order, how to treat others, so please don't judge. You know nothing of our struggles. I didn't think anyone wanted to read a novel here. Funny how people will automatically jump to conclusions.
@@TheOriginalMarimoChan You completely misunderstood what I said. I literally said your love was as important if not more than the drugs. You ought to read fully before being so judgemental
I love when you said you feel cracked out without your meds! I do too! With them, I'm finally normal ❤
Diagnosed at 39, an entire life of misery, failure and heavy masking and meds changed my life for the better
Barely passed high school, and I thought I was a failure. Adderall helped me pass college with a 3.5 GPA
33 here, and same. I feel so damn heartbroken to think of everything I've lost in my life that I could have triumphed in if I'd had the right medication, and so much rage at knowing that this life-changing medicine just isn't reliably accessible for me. Every time I need to renew I have to prepare myself not just for the withdrawals of losing access to my medicine for weeks or months at a time, but of losing *myself* until I can get more. I am disabled without my medicine. I cannot function at a normal level. And it's so hard seeing the number of pills in my bottle shrinking as every pharmacy in the city says out of stock and knowing that the version of me that's capable of functioning as an adult and meeting my basic responsibilities is going to fade away.
@@ZacharyZacharyZwhich meds do you take for adhd? I know I have it but I’m scared to take medicine
Damn you idiots are really getting tricked into taking pills for the rest of your life.
@@ChadAV69 try to find another solution, allot of people struggle in todays society, we were not all made to be academics, and can learn better from doing things than studying them. i have the diagnosis, i have been medicated. (medicine) is a double edged sword, it has it positives, but also negatives. personally i dont believe humans have a disease where amphetamines are the medicine. almost anyone who takes amphetamines will be enhanced, ADHD or not. you might not realise how bad it is until you have been on amphetamine based meds for 5-10 years. then it is harder to quit. and you are worse of than when you started, ADHD meds has success stories and sad stories.
I was undiagnosed during the entirety of my undergrad degree and struggled a lot. When I started grad school, a friend who had ADHD recommended I seek a diagnosis. When I was diagnosed, even without meds, the resolution to my internal struggle with my performance in school, chores, relationships, made a huge impact. When I took my first dose of Ritalin I sat down to read a book and could actually sit and read. I nearly cried when something so simple that was difficult before my diagnosis became possible for me. For me it was like something clicked and I felt what I assumed was “normal”. Being able to live without constant brain fog is amazing.
Amphetamines are not the answer to your problems brother, get off that shit
@@Najsnwjsbdndid you literally not watch the video?
@@NajsnwjsbdnRead a book.
@@NajsnwjsbdnI'd like you to imagine you're driving down the highway. Up ahead, suddenly you see a sharp left turn. You put your foot on the brake to make sure you can reach it, but it doesn't work at all, even with your foot all the way down. In fact, even as you push on the brakes, the car just speeds up. You find yourself careening over the barrier and find yourself upside-down off the road.
In this analogy, your car is your unconscious mind. Through whatever efforts it took, you got your unconscious mind moving in the direction you needed it to go, at the speed you needed it to go in. But when circumstances changed and you needed to change gears, your subconscious mind wouldn't respond to your will. As a result, you find yourself completely out of control, and eventually your wheels aren't even touching the road.
No amount of skill or maneuvering or better leg strength would have changed the fact that your brakes didn't work. What stimulants do in the ADHD mind isn't drive the car - they just reconnect the brake line. While there are absolutely non-medication treatments that can improve ADHD outcomes, and while it's incredibly valuable for everyone suffering from the disorder to seek such treatments either without or in addition to medication, amphetamines are able to provide to those with ADHD some crucial cognitive-structure functions that they were born without - functions so crucial, in fact, that the ADHD is protected as a disability under the ADA.
Nothing wrong with using thoroughly tested, ostensibly safe drugs to treat ADHD, my friend.
Ha, sounds like me trying to do any homework in school. Too easy, but still takes an hour because I can't focus. Ended up doing absolutely _no_ homework in high school and still passed lol
I don't have ADHD as far as I know, just have trouble doing things I don't care about. If I really get into something, it'll be all I can think about
You gotta love how the USAs response to every health crisis involving psychoactive drugs in any way is “Hmm we must pay the police more. War on Drugs is back on everybody”
Because it worked so well before /s
People with high IQ don't get into law enforcement... that's honestly why they keep getting outsmarted and needed to pass the federal analogue drug act.... pricks
Worked great for the people who benefited, and they are the ones in charge because they can use their profits to stay in charge and keep profiting.
Once gvnt organizations like the DEA are formed, they are literally impossible to disband. These orgs operate on an interesting paradox: If illicit drug use goes down, the DEA is succeeding and its budget is increased. If illicit drug use goes up, the DEA needs more resources and its budget is increased. Same thing with the ATF, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc, etc.
@@_GOD_HAND_I noticed US supply shortages when we took China off our freindly importer list. The same for Piracetams.
Opiates are very very similar currently. Thank you for covering this
I have ADHD, was diagnosed at 17. Just recently starting to take medication again after 12 years. Literally life changing, I am no longer depressed and suicidal. Living in Norway getting the medication was as easy as just saying I have ADHD to my psychiatrist, I got it that day, he even told me ;"you can just text me when you need a refill."
That's really really sad, I wish you understood what you are doing to yourself. Disgusting
You're fortunate. The US has been going downhill exceptionally fast since the maga RW and their corporate boosters have amped things up.
I'm hoping things improve if we get Harris/Walz in. If we don't, or it doesn't, I'm looking to leave.
It's a damn shame that a minority of well positioned people can do so much damage. Reminds me of 1930's Germany.....
Nice. Meth on tap!
How's the waiting lists for diagnosis currently in Norway? In Denmark it's 2-3 years currently
@@simonjensen596If you go privately you can have it done in a couple of days. It will cost say 200-300€.
Pharmacist for 42 years here. I got out of traditional pharmacy 20 years ago because of insurance companies and the tyrannical DEA. Never happier.
Pharm tech and pre pharmacy. Quit due to insurance. They are 99% of the problem and 1% is corporate management
I think the American Healthcare system is so messed up that I'm convinced that either right-wing reforms (de-regulation) or left wing reforms (cheap nationalized insurance) it would reduce costs dramatically
The insurance (brokers) middlemen are bureaucratic parasites that serve only to gatekeep treatments to keep prices high
The DEA needs to be disbanded. They are an unmitigated disaster- fake research, fake testimony, undue influence, etc. we already have an abundance of federal cops, there’s just no reason for them to exist.
Spent 8 years as a pharma tech. It left me with an extreme dislike of insurance agencies. Where do these greedy pricks get off thinking they have better knowledge on what medications work for someone vs another. It's completely insane that they can revoke coverage of a medication a patient needs when they aren't doctors or pharmacists.
@@mandolorian1176 it's completely insane that the USA can't get their shit together and riot for change. You guys accept so much bullshit it's crazy.
My mother didn’t believe the teachers something was wrong.
Not only did it ruin a lot in my own life, it ruined a lot of those in my path that I didn’t even notice I basically came into like a fucking bomb.
I couldn’t do anything that required doing things.
My hygiene… what hygiene.
When I was finally diagnosed, I had a lot more issues than untreated ADHD, which could have been prevented by treating my ADHD.
@@nonenone7761 you're absolutely right there was a perfect path a perfect drug a perfect everything in the past according to your perfect hindsight that's always perfect 20/20. Then is a wonderful person who was treated in perfectly by his parents you went out and you were a rotten bastard to everybody you found out you could be a Christian and get forgiven and it poisoned your mind and now it's everybody else's fault that you did all that stuff. If only they made money treating you for ADHD you would have been a regular saint.
So, you blame ADHD for not showering, brushing your teeth, wiping your butt, and trimming nails???
@@labbeaj ADHD can lead to a lack of accomplishment, academic or vocational underperformance. Self-criticism or external condemnation can produce chronic self-esteem issues that manifest as clinical depression which presents as rage, sadness, and fatigue. You and I experience the fatigue part when we get the flu. We feel like doing absolutely nothing. Maybe watching TV day in day out. We excuse ourselves because it's only a few days. A week at most. Clinically depressed people have no fever to blame it on and the problem does not go away because the underlying ADHD may not get treated. Even after ADHD gets treated, the lag before the fix is found leaves patients behind classmates and it can be difficult to not internalize their disadvantage as an personal failing. ADHD has comorbidities that may in some cases be directly causative. It ain't pretty.
@@labbeaj Nice reading comprehension
@@Anoonymuss1 Thanks for the strange compliment!
Try calling your insurance company to get them to lift the requirement to buy from a specific pharmacy. At my last job the insurance insisted that I buy from a pharmacy that was 45 minutes away. I called the insurance company and they gave me a waiver to shop locally. I had to call once every year to get it renewed.
I spent half my life being a total ADHD mess, and finally got treatment as a young adult. It changed my life, and now I can't get a refill to save my life.
If you're in a larger metropolitan area, find a smaller community pharmacy and talk to them, a good pharmacist should make it pretty easy to get your meds consistently, unfortunately most pharmacists aren't good, to elaborate Im a pharm tech and we try out absolute best to keep ADHD meds in stock even if we don't have anyone filling anytime soon, we also don't fill for people out of the county so our # of PTs is smaller and more personal so we know when they pick up their meds and can keep track of when their refills are coming and if god forbid a shortage comes up we usually have a decent backlog of stock/willing to call MD if we need them to send an alt, we also have a site that finds and compares RX Prices before we recommend alternatives so we can get the lowest price for our pts. Main reason we can actually manage this is because we are a smaller more personal community pharmacy, also communicating with your prescribing doctor to send prescriptions for 2-3 months in advanced, they can't write refills but they can write prescriptions with effective dates so that they're only valid a month from when written or two months out ect. Also lots of insurances have their formularies(the list of drugs they cover&how much they cost/whether or not they require doctors prior authorization first) on their website so you can also cross reference prices of alternative RXs. I know this is a bit long but just keep this in mind
When I had brain surgery recently the hospital gave me fentanyl like it was going out of style, I was like, “ah can you maybe chill with that stuff?”
Same
@@ruthie8785 medical grade isn’t an issue . Surprising they gave you anything at all.
I have PTSD, and my medication is only partially covered by my Canadian health care. When I found out how much it was in the US I couldn't believe it. I thought my $17 co pay sucked, the same bottle down there is like $300.
damn. which med it may ask ?
Are you factoring in health insurance? I have ADHD, not PTSD, but my medication costs me about 60 cents for a months worth
As someone who spent a few (three) years in Canada as an adult, ... you're correct. Y'all genuinely have no idea unless you ask around, do some research, etc. There are innumerable people in my life, friends I care deeply about, who would gladly offer up a limb to walk into a Shoppers, go back to the pharmacy counter, and simply ask the pharmacist/tech for a bottle of generic Tylenol-3. Doctors here are actively pressured not to prescribe a medication on the WHO Essential Medicines List.
It's also 300$ here not sure why you think it isn't, you just have really good coverage that 95% of Canadians don't have.
I'm taking clonazepam and mirtazapine at the moment. And my disability was recently recognized so I actually don't pay at all now 💪
Edit: Klonopin and Remeron for my murican brethren
The system also treats you like an addict the entire time by making you go through the following:
-Random drug screens at your doctor's office
-Pharmacists questioning when you last saw a doctor to obtain your prescription
-You can only get a 30-day supply, so that means at some point you're going to have to go without your medication because that 30th day will fall on a Sunday or holiday
-Your doctor can not prescribe refills beyond the 30-day prescription
-Some pharmacies won't even tell you if they have the medication available
Holy shit, I am a recovered addict and I know that all controlled substances require a drug test, but I get five refills on my controlled substance on top of being in a methadone program so maybe you’re not considered stable enough yet to get refills and less frequent drug tests? But I also get drug tested monthly at my methadone clinic. Therefore, my doctor doesn’t need to do it. But he doesn’t need to see me monthly either.
@@emilyannamandanope that’s just literally the law with adderall. no one is allowed more than 30 days worth
What is the motivation for random drug tests?
@@loganmedia1142 to prove you're taking the medication and not selling it.
My doctor doesn't make me take random drug tests. But I've been seeing the same doctor for 20 years. I'd hope by now he understands I just have ADHD, and I act weird at times lol.
The relief i feel that this is being shared and my silent suffering is in vein; its indescribable. Thank you!
This is how it feels to have chronic pain. The medication is available, you just can't have it because others abuse it. It ruins lives as people are forced to eother live in crippling pain, or turn to illegal substances to get relief. Makes me sick.
yes! i have both ADHD & a disability the comes with extreme pain. i was on meds for both and functional, like a normal human being. pain still obviously but functional & made so much better when my ADHD symptoms were being treated too. then here come the crackdowns on problems *we* didn't create and bam! no more treatment for either, doctors hands are tied and just getting thru every day is a battle and I'm just tired. so f-ing tired
Living this now. It absolutely sucks.
Dude, you literally just heard just ONE cause of drug addiction from just ONE undertreated disorder out of THOUSANDS.
*Addiction is a medical problem resulting from self-medication which requires medical treatment.*
*_Blaming people for "abusing drugs" just lets our system off the hook for mistreating people._*
Like healthy people do NOT just become drug addicts my guy. 😑
It annoying AF to hear people try and turn medical problems into a hierarchy of those who are "deserving" of respect and treatment _and those who aren't,_ but then complain when they're place on the latter end by someone else who also thinks they're better than everyone else.
People need to quit playing into ableism already. 🙄
Dude, you literally just heard just ONE cause of drug addiction from just ONE undertreated disorder out of THOUSANDS.
*Addiction is a medical problem resulting from self-medication which requires medical treatment.*
*_Blaming people for "abusing drugs" just lets our system off the hook for mistreating people._*
Like healthy people do NOT just become drug addicts my guy. 😑
It annoying AF to hear people try and turn medical problems into a hierarchy of those who are "deserving" of respect and treatment _and those who aren't,_ but then complain when they're place on the latter end by someone else who also thinks they're better than everyone else.
People need to quit playing into ableism already. 🙄
I would blame more the system that is supposed to get you the drugs than people suffering from drug addiction but yeah
Been diagnosed since 2011. Never had issues getting my meds until around 2022. All of a sudden they were always out of stock and the pharmacists acted like I was there getting oxys every week. It was embarrassing. As of now I have been out of my script for over a month with no answers. So many parts of my life suffer when this happens.
I am so sorry you are going thru this. I know what that feels like. I do not have ADHD but I was an addict for 12 years of pain pills. I have been clean for 5 years now only with the help of suboxone. Let me tell you about that experience! I am also treated like a piece of garbage by pharmacist. The hoops I’ve had to jump through just to get my script filled are terrible. I go every 28 days to my Dr. appointment and I have to be drug tested and all. No problem there, it’s when they send the script into the pharmacy. I was using CVS until they did what they did to me. So I have now switched to a mom and pop pharmacy. CVS belittled me and made me feel terrible in front of many people. I called corporate and they gave me no answers either.
That’s because u are an addict
weird how the war in ukraine invasion started in 2022
good thing they dont feed soliders ADHD medications to keep em awake for war.
I switched to IR and found that---because it's 2 daily doses---I would forget the second dose often enough to be left with enough to float me several days if they're out (and it can be cut in half). Just, if you ask your doctor to switch it, don't bring up that last part, just say the second daily dose makes it a lot more flexible and you can time it around your lunch, and be hungry for a change.
If you can, get your prescriptions in paper form and try some smaller compounding pharmacies. That or Costco, i have a membership because they seem to always have medication in stock. If not, small pharmacy. It's crazy
Here’s some interesting info that may provide a bigger picture, I must be vague for it to be seen but long story short - a major name brand went generic summer last year, meaning that any pharmacy can sell virtually the same type of it and rake in the profit.
So what happened is, the name brand hiked their price from $20~ to about $350 to maximize the profit before they go generic, especially since there’s a shortage and you have no choice. It’s $10 per dose and anecdotally many insurances are too stingy to cover it, so the only discounts you get are pharmacy membership ones which are 5-10% max.
It’s 2024 and they not only didn’t return the price to normal but also increased it further.
Let me guess - Vy? It became generic in Aug 2023
I was officially diagnosed in 2009 (as an adult, during my time in the US Army) and it answered a lot of questions from my childhood. I had been treated with stimulants since my original diagnosis.
In 2021 it was required to get ‘the vaccine’ to keep my job. Less then 3 months later I was diagnosed with an inflamed artery requiring a stent. Since then I have tried pretty much every non stimulant the VA is willing to prescribe and have yet to find anything that helped with my symptoms in the way that stimulants did.
"Help me with something else" is the magic phrase to cut to a person (Walgreens) - just repeat it until dropped into queue.
THEN you get to listen to that diabolical, torturous, maudlin, minor piano loop hold "ditty" that NEVER EVER RESOLVES...which always ensures I'm in the very worst mood, stressed, when someone finally picks up. It's intentional, psychological torture. The water boarding of music.
Or keep pushing 4 after you've reached the pharmacy
I think I freak out and press zero when I’m on the phone with Cvs
sometimes telling the bot that you're a prescriber gets you through pretty quick.
TALK TO PHARMACY.
TALK TO PHARMACY.
TALK TO PHARMACY!
Call Verizon or a major medical insurance provider and you will get the same music that urges you to hang up. How's that for customer service
IMPORTANT! If you have a coupon directly from Adzenys or Xelstrym you need to have the pharmacy enter the 'coupon' as a secondary insurance. That's why they never seem to work - pharmacies enter them as coupons bc they are called coupons. It's a nightmare.
I am grateful that the only stimulant that works for my ADHD isn't commonly prescribed - all of the common meds make me sick.
which medication is it ??
@@GardenGrownGreensI was on Xelstrym (dextroamphetamine patch) but I became allergic to the adhesive - I am now on dextroamphetamine tablets. This med has been around since the 1930s but it apparently has a stigma associated with it so old school psychs are reluctant to prescribe it. It's the same drug in Adderall minus the amphetamine salts (which I can't even tolerate)!
Sometimes they will kick it back saying pharmacy benefit not established meaning they won't cover it at certain pharms. It's crazy to me when I saw that "can't be used at Walgreens, rite aid, etc" that's some bait and switch
@@GardenGrownGreenswtf would you ask in a yt comment section? Ask your doctor.
In the midst of all of this, CVS has moved to a voice mail only policy. You can no longer speak to the pharmacist at all.
and tonight, a computer took my order at the Taco Bell drive-thru. they're taking our JERBS!!!
It's really frustrating. I know why they are doing it. because it forces us to go into the store to speak to a real person, then we end up buying crap on our way out. Home Depot and Lowe's also do not answer their phones. More and more places don't care anymore.
@@TheOriginalMarimoChan Of course the difference is life and death vs. a drill at Lowe's. They're treating us like we are drills! :)
@@TheOriginalMarimoChanI just answered four or five calls from customers this morning (at the orange store).
This is just another step toward "efficiency." That is, doing more with less to compete at lower cost. It's also far more efficient to form larger organizations that service larger customer bases, hence the move to national and international companies, and shifting everything online.
This is how we get from one-on-one sales, with a person who will help you resolve any problems, to an online system that has no contact information and no way to venture outside of the proscribed path.
Everything is being centralized, and that has made me anxious for a while now. It started years ago, when I made a mistake registering a Google account for a local club, wanted to hand it off to them to maintain, and realized there was literally no way to do it -- the account would die if I relinquished control, and it would never be available for the new owners to resurrect it. There was nobody to contact to explain the situation. I was completely stonewalled. I realized at that moment, that that was intentional, it was a glimpse into our future, and this was just the beginning.
When you are an entry in a massive database, there is no empathy. We have not evolved for our "local village" to be the whole population of the world.
Thanks for letting us know about this black market. I had no idea. Now I can finally get my meds!
BioPharma basically saying "We are laying off any job and department that doesnt bring shareholders an increase in money" is beyond fucked.
"... an *short* *term* increase in money"
Which might be a decrease in money overall. It's not very profitable in the long run if your customers decrease in numbers because more of them are deceased.
"Technological advancement isn't nearly as important as short term quarterly gains."
-Quark, DS9
The problem isn't a for-profit company trying to maximize profits. The problem is that the U.S. is the only 1st-world country on the planet that has decided that health care should be a for-profit enterprise.
Capitalism, under perfect conditions (which never occur in the real world, but in many circumstances we get close enough that it still works pretty well) maximizes efficiency. That's it. It doesn't maximize happiness, or fairness, or ensure that everyone has at least a minimal standard of living, or literally anything other than maximizing efficiency. The reason we have child labor laws is because without them, capitalism rewards companies that maximized their profits by paying children very low wages to toil under brutal conditions for very long hours. The reason we have workplace safety laws is that without government intervention and policing, capitalism will reward companies that cut corners and ignore expensive safety measures altogether, and simply allow workers to die on the job, as they can quickly be replaced with other workers. In both of these examples, as well as endless others, the long-term consequences of businesses being rewarded is that they put their competitors, who are voluntarily choosing to not mistreat children and not make laborers work in dangerous conditions, etc., out of business-- they have the profit margins to be able to temporarily undercut their ethical competitors, for long enough to bankrupt them.
When society has a scarcity of resources-- i.e., most people are poor, and the rich aren't even mega-rich-- it turns out that valuing efficiency very often results in something approximating the best possible outcome for the most number of people. But as society gets richer and richer, the need for efficiency diminishes, and a healthy culture will pick and choose where it makes sense to tolerate inefficiency-- using up some of those excess resources a rich society has-- in order to maximize things other than efficiency, such as happiness, or a minimal standard of living for all citizens, or whatever. Health care should be one of the first things every wealthy country decides to move partly or wholly away from capitalism, and indeed we see that happening literally everywhere other than the U.S.
So I'm not mad at drug companies or hospitals for maximizing shareholder profits, even at the expense of human death and misery. That's the system performing exactly as it's designed to, and achieving the exact goals the system is designed to achieve. On the other hand, I'm furious with half the country and three-quarters of our politicians for insisting that we keep using capitalism for health care, when both straightforward theorizing, as well as overwhelming evidence from a century of data from dozens of countries, tell us that we'd get much better medical outcomes for many more people if we created a system that sought to maximize health, instead of profit.
@@andrewgr144 Well you should be mad at the system itself. Every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it gets
I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was really young and everyone treated me well until I moved to a rural school system in a fundamentalist part of the country. I was yelled, threatened with physical abuse, and put in special needs classes. I had to pull myself out by anger and sheer will. I was able to get through college with a comp science degree. I feel like everything would have been a lot easier with healthcare and easy access to meds. I also felt stigma with some artists when I was more involved with music due to a couple of people stating that the drug would hurt creativity and the ability to perform
you would think that in this time of easily available high quality research on ADHD patients, that harmful attitudes like this would cease to exist. and yet so many assholes are so committed to the bit of "actually you are just making your problems up, and because i have the empathy of a fish i'm not going to give your OWN experience of this hell even a moment of real consideration"
Well yeah, adhd meds do make you less creative. I become halfway a Zombie with my correct medication, but damn I can go to work, school, everything and be fine, I can handle it, I can keep things in order. It makes me a little less creative but my life is in order. Without my meds I can't even sit still for 60 seconds. It's pretty awful
@@TheScrubmuffin69 I am currently unmedicated and while I am very creative I don't have the patience or ability to actually finish anything I create. Its a double edged sword
Oh duude, the anger is a real power. it sucks, but it gets you through sometimes.
Conservative people showing how much they care about conserving, once again
I finally got diagnosed at 52. Being diagnosed and medicated has completely changed my life - it’s like wearing “life glasses” after a half-century of squinting and working extra-hard just to move through the world the way neurotypical people do with far more ease. Fortunately I’m in Canada, so the situation here isn’t the dumpster fire it is down there. Sending you all strength to navigate the situation.
This gives me hope that there's a silver lining somewhere for me. Thank you for sharing.
So you found drugs. Got it.
@@mattmarzula do you also have a valid argument or do you just like spouting your (harmful and unscientific) political opinions?
@@mattmarzula I think you might need drugs to treat that lack of empathy you seem to have.
@@mattmarzulaHell yeah
I'm not American, I'm from Canada, but I was diagnosed with ADHD at 18 in early 2021. My main barrier to medication access is financial. I'll probably lose my dad's insurance in the next year or two since insurance in Canada cuts off when you either leave post-secondary education or turn 25, whatever happens first. My Ritalin is 500 dollars for a 6 month supply, and the type of Ritalin I take doesn't have a generic. I am terrified of what will happen if I can't get a job after I graduate, which is really quite likely since the job market is a dumpster fire in Canada. I was unemployed for 2 years while sending out job apps to McDonald's, IT helpdesk jobs, and jobs in my field (network engineering & cybersecurity) while hearing nothing back. These meds are what keeps me alive.
This is so cathartic to watch. Seeing you call the pharmacies is so relatable. I literally recognized the pharmacy just based on the automated menu.
I know every number to push, I start shouting down the robot before it can even start talking, lol.
Same!
Was untreated until I had my own health insurance because my parents didn’t believe in treating ADHD. Always yelled at for moving constantly and interrupting and losing things and not being able to focus for more than five k inures. I don’t remember to eat if I don’t have meds. I can’t even focus on things I want to focus on without meds, or drinking 5-6 energy drinks a day. I wouldn’t be able to do my current job without meds and it’s always a panicking situation when refill time comes around.
Am much the same way, instead of looking into solutions for a very clear and obvious adhd problem, my mother would yell at me and hope that would fix the issue. I've never been medicated so i wouldnt know what "normal" is but forgetting to eat, losing focus, and the constant nonstop noise. I wish all that would just go away like fuck. It's frustrating but it's what I gotta deal with
I can relate to you both so much. Sorry your parents were like mine. 🙁
Did not expect to see Lexi here
My parents refused my treatment, too, but years later I noticed many of my peers who WERE treated as kids had drug issues, had to go on serious psych meds, etc. Definitely a serious need but the developing brain is vulnerable. Just another perspective. 🙏🕊️
You can lower the amount of energy drinks you need by regularly fasting from caffeine to reset your tolerance. You're damaging your heart and giving yourself adrenaline fatigue by drinking that many.
As an Aussie with ADHD it's tough to hear that this is going on over there in the US. I would hate to be put in a position where I have to constantly fight to get treatment for my condition and my heart goes out to everyone who has to deal with that. I really hope y'all find a way to get this resolved soon.
Aussie pharnacist here. While over the last couple of years there have been a lot of frustrating Vyvanse and Concerta shortages, the US system just sounds so miserable to navigate. It's $31.60 or $7.70 here, no insurance nonsense needed. No faffing around with different coupons and companies
Let’s not talk about getting a diagnosis in Australia though. Year wait times and up to $1000 fees. Also anyone who isn’t specifically an ADHD specialising psychiatrist will refuse to talk about it with you.
Overall pretty effective in scaring people off from even trying.
@@ManyAGiggle In Australia it is still bad, while the medications are reasonable to attain, getting a diagnosis while being in a regional area will cost you $700 AUD a pop to speak to even a Tele-psychiatrist every 6 to 12 months.
Agreed. My friend has it and because of his ADHD he can't get organised enough to organise to see a specialist and wait one to two years for a test and diagnosis.
I'm falling apart here fam
Glad to see people shedding light on this. I was diagnosed early in life and have been taking ADHD medications since I was 7 years old. Dealing with insurance, doctors, and pharmacy’s is a huge pain in the ass, and most people with ADHD are probably taking multiple medications with different refill dates, which become very difficult to manage.
This is exactly the situation I run into, along with long pre- authorizations from insurance, fluctuating supplies, and a persistent distrust of pharmacy staff when trying to get medications sorted out. I take two prescriptions and have had them in sync two times in the past 3 years due to shortages. I have to constantly moderate use carefully because I'm almost always going to run short.
I take 3 controlled meds for Narcolepsy. Getting them all the same day is nearly impossible. It makes planning any out of town trips very difficult and I have missed out on being able to go with my boyfriend 75% of the time because I can't get all my meds. There's no sense in going if I'm going to be miserable battling severe sleepiness and ruining everyone elses time.
"Best $2.49 I ever spent" freaking killed me. I love it. Excellent coverage of this topic and hell yeah to the depths of your strategies! Extra points for all the sourcing
The short/technical description of ad(h)d: In contrast to everbody else your cortecies (pl. of cortex) for *task mode* and *default mode* work *together* instead of alternating, so when you do a task you also realize everything around it, and if you're doing something on "autopilot" you're realizing all the tasks/ideas you could derive from it. It also explains why you have about 2x the dopamin usage/need and why you can't let a date in a few hours rest until then (in your task mode cortex) but instead either see it permanently before your eyes until its done or completely forget about it if not remembered about it.
It is (unproovenly) said that people with adhd were hunters in older ages, because (in contrast to farmers) they had to come up with tactics/plans/traps WHILE running behinding their prey. adhd is not a disease - its a different (more active/interconnected) way of using your brain and seeing things from more sides simultaniously than others, at a higher runtime cost and the annoyence of people who can't keep up or don't get it / can't do it.
Appreciate this explanation
So wait, what you're telling me is ADHD people tend to be big picture type folks?
@@kyle9401Yes, I work as a top security researcher at a FAANG and every reverse engineer that has stood out to me over my decade long career has had some form of neurodivergency including ADHD. ADHD gives you a larger context window in your neural networks, but without proper medication your body simply doesn't produce enough of the right chemicals to keep the engine running as it were (compared to a neurotypical). I have Inattentive ADHD and didn't get diagnosed until I was 30 because of being homeschooled and chemophobia. I tried everything, I eat healthy, I exercise, I meditate and been to therapy (which should all be done too), but the only thing that ended up making a perminant impact was proper medication.
Treating my ADHD also made my anxiety better because I was actually able to focus.
this is a great comment
Thank you for your post. Could you send me a keyword to search for more information about this theory(e.g. its name?)? If you dont give a source its hard to believe, even though it sounds plausible. If there is evidence for it I would really like to see it, as this theory would change my view on my diagnosis quite a lot.
Benn,
Your snarky journey down the medication rabbit hole made me laugh, and brightened my day. :) Also, the dog in your photo looks like mine, very cute. I just wanted to say, I've been working on material related to this matter, but I'm very happy to see you giving a voice to one of the biggest problems our home, the US, is facing: The medical system is failing. Doctors can't diagnose, prescribe, or treat anymore, and malpractice due to the multi-disciplinary split is higher than ever before (reported and un-reported). What you've just done is an expose, albeit with a curbed bit, but the likes of which have effected me also, and my family, who all have hereditary (and life-threatening) chronic pain syndromes (multiple). Though the need for medication is slightly more dire, we too have been forced to come up with creative ways of not just obtaining pain medications, but also finding the herbs to keep our inflammation under control (herbs are another issue). This creates the phenomena where people in dire need of medical care are essentially forced into "addict behavior", despite not being addicts or having any form of drug abuse history. My work-around was to seek "addiction treatment therapy", in which certain addiction meds can relieve pain, albeit not nearly effective enough for me to live a functioning life like before; just enough for me to tolerate it about half the time. I'm house-bound, and struggle to function through the pain every day since I was 21 (I'm nearly 30 now), and cannot work. I wouldn't wish my situation on anyone, but it has given me deeper insight into the inner-workings of our failing medical system. I want to ask you, because I can't always function through the pain, to keep at it. Keep digging and keep talking. And maybe someday, some of us will have the luxury of feeling comfortable in our own bodies again as a result.
My proposed solution is what you are already doing but on a much larger scale. We need to make this video viral so Dateline or 20/20 picks it up. Thanks for bringing this huge problem to more people's attention Benn.
?
Everyone knows about this. Literally everyone, whether you're on scripts or not. What we need is for people who don't NEED these drugs to stop taking them. If you're taking these to get through your day but spending hours on FB, insta, TT and phone games and REALLY want to make a difference, stop one. Stop the drugs or the dopamine apps. If you can't stop the apps while you're taking dopamine fixing drugs the "chemical imbalance" isn't your problem.
Dateline and 20/20: the enemy within.
^..^~~
Honestly, I just think that any drug company with a CEO that brags about profiting off a drug shortage should just immediately be nationalized.
Yes because communism will fix it.
Wouldnt even fix the problem
Wait until you hear what the rotating CEOs of the corporation you’re suggesting take it over brag about.
The problem with that kind of direct government action is the wrong people can also use it for the wrong reasons. Imagine an anti-abortion campaign operating with the authority to instantly nationalize huge corps, or a warmongering cabinet ready to steal any company that participates in voluntary sanctions.
or you have all medication bought by the government and they a forced to sell low or sell none at all, thats what Australia does. Thats why 30 days of Vyvanse is $100 without medicare, $8 with it and not $500+ like in the US
This has been disastrous for me. I'm so all over the place now I can't get anything done. My life has become chaos.
Is this an American thing?
What has been disastrous? Going on and off meds or switching between them? Would you have been better off without them?
Get into having systems for everything immediately and research some easy mindfulness exercises. Clean your physical and mental spaces from distractions. There's no space for desperation. Drugs help immensely, but you can help yourself by making little (then larger and larger) changes to the chaos.
@@michealjaymurphy Yes, we Americans have been trained to think we are powerless to our "disorders"
@@michealjaymurphyyes, they all are addicted to adderle
2:55 I have adhd and autism , and am so tired of explaining this to people. Especially because once they understand they start listing off 10 people they think could be neurodivergent and they’re honestly probably right.
I'm physically disabled & in chronic debilitating pain 24/7 and too many patients like myself were just cut off of our pain meds. I can't tell you how many committed suicide or hit the streets and OD on meds cut with fentanyl. I was lucky to have found a Dr but had my dose decreased so much that now I'm in a wheelchair and homebound.
The DEA, LOBBYIST & DRUG MANUFACTURES DON'T CARE HOW MUCH SUFFERING IS HAPPENING.
I had no idea basically the same dilemma was happening to ADHD patients.
Great video!! Kudos!! Wish you and all patients best of luck.
God Bless 🙏
We have chronic pain patients that are not opioid abuse disorder, patients at the methadone clinic for low-dose methadone
@@emilyannamanda I've heard that. I wonder if they in take is different. Honestly, I better check it out in case my Doc retires early. TX! 😘
as husband to an ADHD sufferer and father to 2 others thank you for posting this. You calling every pharmacy is literally my monthly chore at this point. People don't understand that missing days of medicine isn't just a cloud but a reset. With my wife it can take over a week to get back to "normal" after missing her dosage for a day or two.
God bless you for taking such good care of your family. 🙏
yeah people forget that stimulant tollerence resets VERY quickly compared to almost all other drugs. too many days off and people can end up stuck feeling wired until their body settles in
As someone who was in the middle of calling 21 pharmacies to try and find *anywhere* that had Vyvanse in stock (and ultimately failing) at the exact moment you released this video, thank you for making this.
It’s been two years of this shit now, and I am so so tired of having to deal with it.
I hate calling the pharmacy. They always treat you like you are a fiend and half the time when you finally get ahold of someone you might sound like one too. Then half the time they will be like you are supposed to call in... like what?! WHAT AM I DOING RIGHT NOW?! Or they will be like well it should fill automatically... oh that would be amazing to never have to talk to you on the phone again, but unfortunately.
Same exact problem for Chronic Pain patients. Life is very very hard, the rate is even higher than that of those with ADHD. May We work together against this.
My child has both issues. It's exhausting feeling like you are climbing a mountain that you know you never reach the top of.
@@johnnylego807 no chronic pain patients can't work with ADHD people no one can work with ADHD people. As soon as you help them get ADHD meds they'll become paralyzed and they won't be able to do anything for you ADHD paralysis It only kicks in when you have to bring back something you borrowed.
@@markmcgoveran6811 wtf are you on about lol
@@michellewrenn I completely understand and can empathize as I am in that exact position. It’s nightmarish. I will send prayers your way.
Please read if your pharmacy doesn't have your prescription(s):
I don't know if this is necessarily related to these issues, but I've taken Vyvanse for about 19 years now. A few months ago, CVS and other pharmacies could no longer fulfill my prescription.
I had to hound them about it before I finally got an answer that it was "on backorder."
A nurse I know told me about the local hospital's pharmacy, which actually is also a normal pharmacy with better prices, and they never run out of anything.
It's cheaper and, even if there is a "shortage," the hospital always has it.
I encourage others to seek out a local hospital pharmacy to get their medications if a brand name pharmacy has your stuff "on backorder."
Not sure if this is just local to my area or hospital, but it has been a life saver.
Unfortunately hospitals can face the same shortages as other pharmacies. I tried to do this as well but my local hospitals didn't have stock either
H E R O 😮👍😍
I mean, I don’t know people that are going without it to be honest with you, I know soccer mom type people that get their Adderall commonly each ones for narcolepsy and someone who is in a methadone clinic and recovering addict trying to get their children back, who also gets their Adderall refilled monthly at CVS And one Indiana and one is in Williamsburg, Virginia
Chiming in because the shortage is also ruining my life. I stopped having steady access to Adderall in November, had to carefully ration afterward. I've been completely without ADHD meds for about 4 months. In recent weeks I've noticed myself forgetting my point before finishing a sentence. It's so frustrating and heartbreaking. I've always been a high achiever with a zest for life, but it's become near impossible to complete work without hours of self soothing in between. My audience is one of my greatest blessings, but I can't perform for them the way I know I'm capable of when I'm medicated.
I have so much potential that has been effectively locked away due to the shortage. It's beginning to eat away at my soul. My heart hurts that a significant portion of the population is suffering so needlessly. When's the class action lawsuit?
I just don’t understand why it’s being experienced by some people and then not by others 😭😭😭
The irony is that untreated ADHD often leads to drug abuse. I had substance abuse issues (not stimulants) for years but never thought I had ADHD because my grades were above average and I was a calm person.
Getting treatment allowed me to be where I am today, happy, productive, clean, although still a bit intense.
Hey Benn - I don't know where to start, other than thank you for making this video. I grew up in a household that thought ADHD was a made-up diagnosis to get kids on meds to take away their "personality". I had to grow accustomed to masking my symptoms, which presented less hyperactive, and more internally in my thoughts and executive function. My life, looking back now, hits every checkmark of ADHD, including the terrible effects of not getting help. I had unplanned children out of wedlock, got addicted to hard drugs, got into extreme music (punk, metal, noise, etc), became an alcoholic that got into terrible car crashes, barely finished high school, etc. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't keep up with my peers, even when I should have been able to. I had cycles of anxiety and panic attacks, depression, etc. All of this dopamine seeking behavior became clear as I learned more about what ADHD really is (not some funny, "oh look squirrels", thing). As I've learned more, put in the work, and began taking medication, I realized with certainty, had I been properly treated as a young adolescent, the entire trajectory of my life would have changed. I'm in a healthy place now, clean and sober, have a loving wife and kids and great job, but the scars remain, and the challenges, even with meds, to function. It needs to be called out, over and over again, that mental health is not made up. Just because you don't have a cast on your arm for the eye to see does not mean folks are not dealing with very real neurodivergences. Growing up in the Christian church, it was even worse for me, as far as the condition being considered real, or due to a lack of faith (don't want to get into that right now). Anyways, thank you thank you and keep up the good work - there needs to be real access to real treatment for everyone affected by this condition, and we need to DELETE the stigma surrounding these issues.
As someone diagnosed at 21, started taking meds, now 7 years later-- to be completely fair, that is exactly what happens to a lot of kids. It basically IS a made up diagnosis of "this *child* can't sit still in class" and then they give them drugs that absolutely change how your brain works and does exactly that. Dulls their personality. It should be an *absolute* last resort in my opinion, and even though I struggled in school I'm glad I wasn't on stimulants from a young age. A child should develop w/o the use of incredibly strong stimulants. It's a decision that SHOULD NOT be made lightly.
That child will NEVER ever be able to function w/o those drugs. They will experience a SEVERE depression if or when they became a young adult and made THEIR OWN choice to STOP being a slave to this medication that they never had the decision to take. It was made for them. And I think that's a SIGNIFICANT decision to make for a kid.
Clearly there are cases which merit it, but I think they're actually pretty rare. I think we are overprescribing to make kids compliant in a school setting that has never been tailored to children's natural behaviors. Honestly, I can think of absolutely no reason that a prepubescent child should be on amphetamines, and if they're having significant trouble in high school then they can be more included in the decision to take them at that point. It's very analogous to another debate about medical interventions on children.
Again, I've been on Adderall for over 7 years, so I'm WELL aware of how much it affects you overall. You are a different person if you take it every single day. It's just true. I have to take breaks and be very careful w/ it. If I'm too reliant on it, I feel like I'm lost my "spark." I'm not as enthusiastically curious about things. I'm burnt out. I'm asocial.
There is *no such thing* as a medication w/o side effects. Not when you're taking it every single day. Not when it significantly changes how your brain WORKS..
I had 3 close friends as a kid who were diagnosed and prescribed Adderall all around 4th and 5th grade. Fast forward to after high school, and we're all experimenting w/ other drugs just the same. The Adderall certainly didn't as something to ward off desire to experiment further. A diagnosis is different than a prescription, and Adderall isn't the only treatment.
I’m proud of you. I’m also an ex addict, my Vyvanse is the thing that keeps me sober and has completely changed my life. Just like you I was an absolute trainwreck and destroyed my life with hard drugs. Now I’m finally a functioning responsible human being in college full time after dropping out 4x and also working full time and I’m able to balance everything bc of my meds. This shortage is absolutely horrible and the way that pharmacists treat us simply for asking if they have our medication is insane. ADHD medication SAVES LIVES. It absolutely saved mine, I would still be a chronic relapser if my doctor hadn’t listened to me and viewed me as more than an addict and understood that treating ADHD can actually get rid of substance abuse problems. The DEA treats us like a bunch of drug addicts for taking our medication, but we will easily turn to drugs if we DON’T have access to our medication
Lol. I want to read this sympathetically but I can't.
@@crackthefoundation_ why? is it because you are a narcissist or just an asshole? Or are you a narcissistic asshole? It's the latter isn't it?
@@crackthefoundation_ if this happened to you, wouldn't you want some sympathy?
The same for me. The quiet I experienced in my head for the first time in over 50 + years almost made me cry. At first, it was scary as hell because I couldn't remember a time when I didn't have the cacophony of ideas, thoughts, rabbit trails, distraction, and sleepless nights from it was exhausting. I found out quickly that there was such a thing as adha. I ignored the dx I was given of adhd for 40 yrs. My first dose of ritalin made me tired, but the side effects for me were not ideal. Constant gritted teeth, dry mouth so bad I could spit cotton. My fist dose of Adderall knocked me out. I slept like I could never do in the past. I feel calm, can focus as long as I remember to take it. The problem was that I'll forget or get distracted and lose track of time with the distractions. My brain would wake up full throttle as if there were dozens of meetings that took place in my brain while I was sleeping that the anxiety to catch up with these meetings was a daily experience every morning. I now set alarms to remind me to take the medication. This mostly works, but, it is easy for me to get distracted within minutes of the alarm, and I still forget from time to time. I still have a house full of unfinished projects and regular tasks left half done, but I'm working on it. I was diagnosed with Aspergers in my 40s, over 20 yrs after the ADHD dx. I had takenmy youngestin for evaluationand the psychiatrist asked if he could interview me, then asked me to take a few tests. We both walked out of there with the same diagnosis. I didn't tell anyone until 3 yrs ago. So this could have some to do with me not being able to get through things my mind finds mundane or of little interest. I have a hyper focus that will set me into patterns that though seem harmless, can freeze me in my tracks from doing anything else...
I know what you mean about the quiet feeling in your head. My head feels like there's a crowd of people perpetually trying to get my attention at once, all wanting different things. I've cried of relief before when I took Adderall and it finally quelled the chaos that runs rampant in my brain at all other times.
I resonate with being frozen, I'm like that when I research some topic. I call in "juicing". I have to tell myself out loud to stop, go play with your kids😅
Oh. My. God. You have succinctly summed up all of my frustrations with the pharmaceutical industry in regard to treating my ADHD so well. It almost felt like you were narrating my experience. Thank you so so so much for making this. I'm definitely sending this to several people to help understand my situation.
The worst part is that you didn't even touch on the rampant exploitation occurring now that generic Vyvanse is available. It's absolutely horrendous.
Had been taking vyvanse since I was 13. Now I haven't been able to get it in over a year.
I had ADHD as a child, then found out it was all a ruse to get kids on drugs. I was 23 when I finally took my last pill and managed it on my own after that. Never had substance abuse or unwanted pregnancy. Sometimes people use pills as a crutch to their problem.. "I have ADHD, I'm sorry" or whatever which is a shame, because ADHD didn't slow me down when I lost my job, or started a new career path, or whatever. I just kept working and eventually got to where I am today.
You "had" adhd? So you don't anymore? Why would you accidently end up pregnant then Dj Joe. Idk why you think you can look into peoples minds and assume they use their pills as a crutch, because of your own experience.
I got ADHD, I don’t take medication. But I’d never ever deny anyone else there right to that medication. We need to learn to be more empathetic. Some have it REALLY BAD and require it. This is rather tone deaf.
If a politician wanted to fix this problem, they would propose a law making it legal for pharmacists to obtain foreign made medications if they can’t obtain generics from a United States manufacturer. It’s actually interesting that insurance companies aren’t fighting for this… though if you can’t get the generics that they cover, they don’t need to pay their portion.
because manufacturers don't get the bigger cut of insurance money with generics.
The majority of generic medications are manufactured overseas already.
I work in a pharmacy and you’d be surprised how many are made in India, China, and Indonesia among other countries. Dextroamphetamine/amphetamine (Adderall), Methylphenidate (Ritalin), etc come from all over the world. They are shipped into the US and sold by drug wholesalers to pharmacies across the country to then be sold to you, the customer.
@@Elquequ3my favorite example was a particular generic lovaza that plain as day said manufactured in Wuhan, China. I was always surprised at how readily available it was throughout the entire pandemic 😂
@@TheMrWilson Who tf takes Lovaza? Such an expensive drug that does essentially nothing lmao
@@Elquequ3i don’t write the scripts, I just fill them if the patients want them.
It is absolutely unbelievable how much more calm and focused I am when I have my meds than when I don’t.
Same. I try not to feel sad or resentful at how effective the treatment is for me to live. I hate to "have to be medicated" but it's the difference between calmly getting things done and having my life in order vs existing in chaos and internalized hate and stress. Life is exhausting without it unfortunately. I was diagnosed at age 5 and age 12 but never medicated. Finally as a professional adult I was sick of gaslighting myself saying "you just aren't trying hard enough". I got my adult diagnosis and "surprise" , I definitely got it. I was done killing myself to be "normal" and barely making it. On the outside I look "successful" and on the inside it's all duct tape and super glue without it. Benn saying he feels cracked out without it is spot on.
It sounds like I'll never know
Very good description of the condition Benn! Fellow ADHD dude and psychologist from Germany here. Stimulants are absolute game-changers indeed.
except nonstims are even better
Thank you for making this video. I’ve said this in another video, we need someone like you to start go fund mes to start a lawsuit against these companies. Planet fitness should be sued for not allowing online cancellation
Thank you for summarizing what ADHD is so well, my family stigmatized it all my life and as an adult I got help and now have a much more professional career and life is way more in check. I walk 2.5 miles daily etc.
Edit: if you know someone who interrupts a lot can’t withhold their thoughts and or feel like they’ll explode if they don’t get it out, imagine this being able to be put into check with treatment and actual work on yourself. Sometimes people aren’t being interruptive on purpose but for people with ADHD it feels like if you don’t say it you’ll forget it or explode from holding it in.
That's me. And amazingly I can have two different conversations at once with two people simultaneously while the other person thinks that I'm not listening... but then I can repeat what they said while still talking to another person.
"But for people with ADHD it feels like if you don’t say it you’ll forget it or explode from holding it in." written in your edit says a lot about how I actually function. I do this naturally and it is both a curse and a blessing.
The focus is amazing and natural for me, but most of the time when alone I am constantly distracted by my own constant-thinking and "visualizing solutions" about things that I never follow-through to completion.
I wish that I could function like "normal people", but to me it seems boring and lame. Am I wrong?
Thanks for your comment, it says a lot of what I cannot explain to the people around me.
I just found this channel today- and I'm glad because I thought it was alone.
I am over the moon seeing people finally give attention to the lack of treatment given to patients who are diagnosed and clearly need it, ive had my entire family fall apart over these terrible regulations and it'll likely kill us, I hear about close friends with chronic pain and other illnesses that die weekly.
Tbh if its negatively affecting your entire family id recommend all of yall to leave this trash country and seek citizenship elsewhere if possible
Hearing a company say they are gearing their policy toward their shareholders rather than the customers, should lose their business license.
This
I mean, that's every publicly traded company but yeah I agree haha
And yet it's actually the reverse, legally--at least in the US. Any publicly traded company's first responsibility, always, is to their shareholders. This simple fact is single-handedly responsible for a lot of the country's ills.
But this is how they all work
@@erinm9445 People misunderstand that. A company's primary responsibility is seeking a profit within the regulations and laws that are in place. That does not mean that other considerations are required to be ignored in pursuit of profit. Treating customers like garbage is malpractice and isn't excused by seeking to maximize profits. There is no requirement that a publicly traded company "maximize shareholder equity," revenue, profit or any such nonsense. That is what they say to try and excuse their psychopathic behavior.
Here in Europe we don't have such severe problems. But I am basically playing the lottery for which dose of my medication is available any given week. and beeing on the wrong dosage SUCKS!
I hate this.
I love the immense effort and sheer heart and soul put into this video, as always. Thanks again, Benn.
I worked in a medical office for a while and I hated every time someone called in for ADHD meds because there was often nothing we could do to help. Sometimes, we could fix it by calling the pharmacy for them, but that didn't guarantee to help.
OK, I missed the boat when one of my favorite electronic musicians started a popular TH-cam channel! I was like "is this...THE Benn Jordan of Flashbulb fame" and it totally is. How cool is this. I love your music and saw you live in Detroit in the early 00s when a friend, Mikey Woo, got you to come out and play for us. So cool to see you here making really informative and interesting videos.
I went on one of the nonstimulant ones after backing into a car in a parking lot, having a minor freakout, and leaving the scene. I got a visit from the police and thankfully no charges, but it was just a capper on several years of struggling more with my ADHD due to a new disability.
I had to spend three months on Elvanse Adult in the UK and it absolutely ruined my first attempt at my masters degree.
My normal medication is Elvanse. Every doctor I’ve told this to didn’t believe there was any real difference but it was night and day to me.
I’m so sorry to hear this shortage is _still_ going on over there. I hope it gets better as soon as possible.