Dr. Joy Kong describes how chronic Adderall use damaged her brain so severely that at 22, her SPECT scan resembled an 80-year-old's with dementia. She explains that amphetamines work like methamphetamine in the brain, and high doses in a metabolically compromised system cause neurotoxic damage comparable to advanced neurodegeneration.
So Adderall is an amphetamine, for those people that don't know. So as far as mechanism, it's chemically identical as far as like how it interacts with the nervous system as meth. You know, methamphetamine has an extra methyl group attached to it, so you like— it just deteriorates your life very quickly. Adderall can actually be more dangerous. It's such a controlled amount of amphetamine, it's still degenerating the body. It's very, very bad for the nervous system. Um, you lose a lot of your ability to kind of zoom out and have access to all parts of your emotional framework? Absolutely. But also, it's, it's pretty degenerative in the way that it works. So, you know, you're putting amphetamines in a system that's pretty badly— that already has an energy deficit, that's metabolically compromised. It's like putting jet fuel in an engine that's already about to burn out, you know. But it was like the thing that just A-bombed my nervous system, and it just— it basically completely broke. Cognitive deficits and all kinds of metabolic damage was in place. I got a SPECT brain imaging scan, and You know, the radiologist, I'll never forget, you know, came back and said like, this scan is pretty comparable to like a lot of 80-year-old patients I have with dementia, you know.
