Seth Gordon (sethg_prime) wrote in little_details,
Seth Gordon
sethg_prime
little_details

medications to induce ADHD in neurotypical people

I am working on a story set in a culture where ADHD is not a disorder, but the norm. People who don’t have it are impaired by their inability to multitask, their deficits in creative and lateral thinking, their difficulty noticing things that aren’t right in front of their faces, their obsession with schedules and routines, and so on. They may of course seek therapy for this condition, and that therapy may involve drugs. Obviously, I could just make something up, but it would be nice if I could refer to actual drugs that would induce ADHD symptoms in real-world-neurotypical people who are trying to get along in an environment designed for the convenience of people with ADHD.

(I don’t have ADHD, but I have relatives who do, and I have been trying to educate myself by reading various books and online resources, and by lurking on the ADHD subreddit.)

Possibilities I have considered include:

  • Alcohol — at least for social-lubricant purposes

  • LSD or related chemicals — I’ve seen claims that low doses of LSD enhance creativity

  • MDMA — makes people more talkative; “improved pattern recognition”, Wikipedia says

  • antipsychotics — affect the dopamine-seratonin balance, a part of brain chemistry that is also implicated in ADHD; I don’t see much related to attention in the description of antipsychotic drugs’ effects, but one side effect that caught my eye was “akathisia”, the inability to sit still

As you can probably tell from the above list, I am leaning towards some kind of LSD/MDMA combo, but I would appreciate input from people who learned psychopharmacology from something other than Wikipedia.
Tags: ~medicine: drugs, ~psychology & psychiatry (misc), ~worldbuilding
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