I will indulge my inner pendant and point out that there are a couple of non-stimulant treatments for ADHD that have their place, but they all have in common that none of them are as effective as stimulants are.

There's a reason stimulants have been first line treatment for what we call ADHD now since some dude first gave some hyperactive kids Benzedrine in the 1930s. I'll dig out the study if I can find it. They work, they're well tolerated, and they're safe. Even if they weren't, I'd rather be able to function and take them than have fucking RFK or whoever tell me I can't for my own good.

And there's another point to make here: we only know stimulants work for ADHD because some dudes decided to give them to kids and see what happened. There's a lot of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks in psychopharmacology, or used to be. Moving away from that model hasn't made treatments any better, either. I have a psychopharmacology textbook from the 1950s in my collection that treats serotonin's presence in brain tissue as a mere curiosity. Everything was adrenergic then, and only a fool would think serotonin does anything but affect bowel function and platelet aggregation, according to this textbook. No one even knew dopamine was found in human brain tissue at that point, either, and it would be decades before its function as anything but a metabolite of noradrenaline would be recognized. I see today the same imperious tone being taken towards serotonin in the literature now that it's had its moment in the sun, just as other neurotransmitters got sidelined when there was big money in serotonin. BDNF and tPA are sexy in the literature right now. In 10 years it will be something else entirely.

None of this has anything to do with what works, or what doesn't. Potentially safe and effective treatments for various conditions have been mothballed because there's not enough market share for their development to be profitable. Shit, "cries a lot" is on the depression screening because SSRIs are great at suppressing the ability to cry, irrespective of whatever else they do. It's true that drugs are big business, but the supplement industry and the crunchy granola "holistic" fascist wellness shit are also absolutely raking in the cash. We don't hear about that enough in these discussions. Supplement dudes see the opportunity to get their bag, and they're taking it.