Find a therapist to treat psychosis

A 2024 study revealed a clear association between certain ADHD medications and psychosis.

The phenomenon of amphetamine-induced psychosis was known since the 1950s.

Psychiatry repeatedly loses sight of this well-documented side effect of amphetamine-based ADHD drugs.

In 2024, a highly publicized study in the American Journal of Psychiatry (Moran et al. 2024) showed that people taking drugs like Adderall for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were more than five times more likely to experience psychosis.

At high clinical doses (around 30 mg of dextroamphetamine, or 40 mg Adderall), amphetamine-based drugs were associated with hallucinations and persecutory delusions. The study estimates that 81 percent of such cases could have been avoided at lower doses.

The study didn’t just find a risk at very high doses. Even those taking moderate doses have a higher likelihood of developing psychosis compared to people not taking them.

The media treated the study as a shocking, even scandalous, discovery. Psychiatrists were quick to assure the public that such side effects are rare. But the link between amphetamines and psychosis isn’t new. It is one of the oldest findings in modern psychiatry.

In 1967, a doctor even used amphetamines to deliberately induce psychosis in ordinary volunteers.

So how do we keep forgetting this lesson? And how can knowing its history help us shape the future?

Discovering Amphetamine Psychosis

Amphetamine psychosis was first named by the British doctor P. H. Connell in 1953. A patient came to........

© Psychology Today