wait i’m very stupid is there rly nothing like. apparently different abt adhd brains? don’t coffee and stimulants like act different. this is a genuine question i’m dumb
you're not stupid! what you're referring to is a very common myth that's still circulating in the pop psychology literature and on social media. i'm not sure where/when it originated, although my speculation/guess would be that as part of the push to put more children on rx stimulants, an unholy game of telephone ensued in which pharma reps, medical practitioners, and education specialists picked up and amplified this type of misinformation to reassure concerned parents that medicating children was safe and 'scientific.' wherever it came from, this myth has become especially prevalent among people professionally diagnosed with adhd who seek to distinguish themselves and their drug use from those they consider less 'deserving' (read: addicts, poor people, people of color, etc).
like all psych diagnostic labels, adhd is a term applied to a group of behaviors/tendencies ('symptoms') that the psychiatric establishment considers to be linked. many people take the presentation of 'symptoms' in conjunction with one another as evidence that these 'symptoms' are causally linked, and that the cause is some physical or biological 'defect.' this is the reasoning that usually underlies the prescription of psychoactive substances, and adhd is certainly not the only diagnosis where you can see this happening. consider the use of the thoroughly debunked 'chemical imbalance' theory to explain/justify the use of ssri's in the treatment of 'depression.' in fact the search for biomedical explanations of mental/moral states goes back very far. on french psychiatry in particular, you might be interested in ian dowbiggins's "psychiatrizing madness" (see esp. introduction, chs. 1–3).
you've probably seen some buzzy headlines about 'brain scans' showing indisputable biological/anatomical differences between 'normal' and 'disordered' brains. you should be aware that fmri imaging interpretation is extremely fuzzy and subjective, and different researchers looking at the same images come up with wildly different conclusions (nature study, article). the linked article includes some specific discussion of a disgraced 2017 study on 'brain differences' with adhd (article includes an unfounded bioessentialist claim in the last line re: 'intelligence,' but the main point stands).
to the extent that there is any truth to the idea that 'adhd brains' respond 'differently' to stimulants, i would be inclined to interpret such a statement as a value-neutral observation of normal variation between different people's environments, personality traits, and enjoyment of psychoactive substances. difficulty focusing, sitting still, etc are things that everyone deals with in varying degrees, and for some of us these things become more disruptive to our lives when we are expected to conform to arbitrary social rules and norms that were not designed with our needs in mind. this is a real experience, but naming it 'adhd' is a socially mediated response and not a reflection of an immutable or objective biological reality.
as joanna moncrieff has pointed out, psychoactive substances do something, whether or not we understand exactly what that is. sometimes that something can be therapeutic, whether by placebo effect or some other mechanism. also, drugs are fun and nobody ever needs to apologize for that. i emphatically believe drugs should be fully legalized (this is also a cornerstone of prison abolition, obviously) and i don't deny that drug use may help people, including those diagnosed with 'adhd,' to function. so please understand that my critique here is of biomedical mythology, not people seeking treatment or drugs. like i said earlier, use whatever drugs you want—there's no need to appeal to biomedicine to 'justify' drug use, and doing so throws a lot of other people under the bus.
i'll leave you with That One Mark Fisher Quote:
The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.
and a couple of further reading suggestions on psychiatry generally:
the emperor's new drugs by irving kirsch
manufacturing depression/the book of woe by gary greenberg
mad in america by robert whitaker
madness and civ by foucault (sorry)
"the functions of the brain" by bob young (1968 paper)
console and classify by jan goldstein
