My adult ADHD drugs felt like a lifeline. Then came the scary side-effects …

It was a relief when a person was first diagnosed with the disorder. Maybe I wasn't lazy after all, I cried in the doctor's office. He gave me pills that gave me a glimpse of what atypical person's brain might look like, like a game of leisurely tennis.

The drug felt like a bullet. I was able to plan ahead, follow meetings, and pack a bag. For most of my 34 years, I had felt like I was being bullied into moving. It took more time to listen, absorb and think. I didn't want to hit people in the back of the head when they were blocking my way in the store.

Things began to fall apart after a year on Stimulants. I had a lot of headaches and was impatient. When I decided to quit, I was stuck in a daze and confused. I wondered if I had ever felt this foggy before using the drugs. Was it the drugs, or was it something else?

I used to be restless. I rolled on the floor nine times in the first night of sleeping in a bed. I was always wriggling and climbing things. The Winnie-the-Pooh character made my parents nickname me Tigger. My mother says that you were cute and charming but very annoying.

The idea that I might have attention deficit disorder didn't come up. It was seen as a disorder of naughty boys who struggled at school in the 90s. I was well-rounded and successful.

When I left home to go to university in London, my life began to fall apart. My rhythms became unpredictable because of the lack of structure. I couldn't sit and study if I was tired. I set myself unrealistic goals, like training for a half-marathon, two part-time jobs, and a rule that I couldn't eat anything I hadn't cooked myself. I drank to get a good night's sleep.

You are left desperately trying to stem the flow of thoughts and feelings when you have a brain like mine. Even though my muscles are tired and my mind is begging for peace, I feel like I have to move even though I am sick.

At first, Ritalin seemed to fix … everything. I had to take my pills with food, so I began eating regular meals. I even slept better

I don't know if it's because I don't have a regular sleep rhythm or if it's because I don't have an ability to conserve energy for large events. I didn't care how many habits I tried to build. I was either manic, sleepless and obsessive or catatonic.

My career in journalism and research has been characterized by boom and bust cycles, where I get a job and then burn out so badly I can't work for months. I moved to the Netherlands in hopes of having a quieter life. I ran myself into the ground on a four day work week as a researcher. I did not work as a full time employee.

A friend sent me an article about women who hid their diagnosis until the end of their lives. I used to be against the idea of doling out stimulants to people who didn't really need them. When a therapist suggested I have attention deficit disorder, I wrote a letter to a friend saying I was upset and angry. The article had touched many people. I decided to get a diagnosis.

I was not the only one who saw a huge increase in referrals for adult ADHD assessment. Psychiatry-UK, a private company contracted by the National Health Service, recorded a quadrupling of referrals between 2020 and 2022. In the year of 2015, 161,584 adults were given medication, an increase of more than 50% from the year before.

He began me on Ritalin. Everything seemed to be fixed during the early weeks. I started eating at regular times because I had to take my pills with food. I didn't need to drink coffee to sleep. My hypersensitivity to light, noise and sensation ceased to bother me. There was no sense of frustration or impatience anymore. I was able to focus on what was important and not worry about trivial things.

My doctor said it sounded great on our first call. Insomnia and rapid heartbeat were brought up. He told me that the side-effects would diminish if I took it on a daily schedule.

I did a lot of work on Ritalin and it was calm. The hyper focus could be frightening. It created a piercing beam of attention that latched on to whatever I was looking at for the next few hours. I could be in the middle of a boring conversation, but I just couldn't let it get to me. I would have waited until later to fix my ceiling.

Ritalin made me sad. I sent a text to a friend that said I felt emotionally dark. It's not easy. Not interested in anything. It feels like everything is gray. I've been pacing the apartment. I had a heart rate of over 120 bpm while doing the washing up. I wanted to switch to a different medication.

I’d tried meditation, acupuncture, running, handstands, CBT, cold showers, blue-light-blocking glasses … nothing came close to medication

The beam of attention was more diffuse and allowed me to focus on one task at a time. I didn't think I was depressed. I landed a commission for an article and a full-time research project after starting on amphetamine. I began working long days, marvelling at my focus. I was able to work like other people. I wanted to be on this for a long time.

When I took my pills, my friend's boyfriend asked what they were. He launched into a rant about how technology had shortened our attention spans, and how I just needed to train my focus after I told him.

He wanted to know if you had tried juggling.

I left angry and upset. It was my diagnosis that gave me an explanation for why things felt so hard. I had low self-esteem and I had never been able to stay in a job because of my emotions.

The diagnosis silenced the cruel inner voice that told me these problems were personal failures caused by a lack of effort. My hackles were raised because they implied that my initial conviction was correct, that I was lazy and incompetent, and just needed to try harder.

I had spent my entire life trying harder. I had tried a lot of things, but none came close to medication.

I couldn't deny that the side-effects were bad. The mouth was dry and thirsty. I was so thirsty I felt like a horse. I could feel food passing through me. I lost a lot of weight.

My doctor told me that I couldn't blame the medication for the problem. Reduced appetite is a side-effect, but it's your responsibility to eat more and to lose weight. I tried to eat more food. They serve Pastries for Lunch. Food was uninteresting. It had become something to use.

Managing two intense projects at the same time started to take its toll. When I was working, I felt sharp and focused, but the rest of the time, I felt empty.

The worst thing was the rebound. I was able to focus my attention into a laser beam by using dexamphetamine. The strands came loose again when it wore off. I would get a throbbing head that made me confused and unable to think straight. It made me feel bad to look at things. I became sensitive to sounds. I would be forced to lie in bed with an eye mask on.

Some women benefit from increasing their medication in the week before their period. But that just made me feel spun-out

My doctor told me to take another dose later in the day. The rebound can be avoided by timing it with when you go to sleep. I woke up at night because of my increased dose.

On the days before my period, the rebound was worse. I was told by my doctor that he didn't know much about the interaction between hormones and medication, but he did send me a presentation showing that women with attention deficit disorder are more likely to suffer with depression. Some women benefit from increasing their dose in the week before their period. The rebound was made more acute by that. I stopped taking it on the worst days of my cycle because I couldn't get any work done.

I took weekends, days, or whole weeks off the drugs at a time this year. My Psychiatrist advised against this, but some prescribers say drug holidays can be beneficial, allowing the heart and kidneys a break and preventing desensitisation. I ended up going back to the pills because I was so tired from the withdrawal.

I thought I would have to stop taking the medication for the rest of my life. I began to fear that I was causing myself long-term damage. Is it possible that I damaged my body's ability to feel ok if I didn't take the pills?

The medication was safe thanks to decades of clinical research. When I searched for scientific papers, I found that there wasn't a lot of evidence about how Ritalin and other amphetamines affect the body.

Longitudinal studies looked at the quality of life rather than the neurobiology of children. Even if a child stops taking it, research shows that it can help their brain grow in a way that makes it easier to concentrate. The research did not show the same effect on the brains of people who began taking the drug when they were young.

There is evidence that chronic amphetamine abuse can cause permanent brain damage, but not much research has been done into how amphetamines affect the brain over the long-term. There has been a study done on monkeys. It was found that prescription-level doses damage the brain's system for delivering dopamine, making it more likely that there is an underlying problem with attention deficit disorder.

Why aren't women getting diagnosed with a mental illness?

I don't know what that means for humans. Some psychiatrists think that the long-term consequences could be significant, and that the amount of Adderall being prescribed is vastly overprescribed.

A professor in Psychiatry at University College London has spent her career challenging the use of drugs to treat mental disorders. Moncrieff, who recently published a controversial review paper stating that there was a lack of evidence for depression being caused by low levels of Serotonin, does not believe that attention deficit disorder is caused by an impaired dopamine system.

Mental disorders are not more than clusters of symptoms. She says there isn't a definitive link between abnormality and disease. The expression of symptoms is altered by the abnormal state of the drug.

Moncrieff doesn't agree with all of her views, but she does agree with some of them. The pills don't normalise my brain like the drugs do. I don't know if I want to stay in that state for ever, with all the short-term side-effects as well as the potential for unknown long-term consequences.

I decided to stop in March. I said that this time it was over. I hunkered down to survive. I felt like my head was made of cotton wool. I told myself just a few days ago.

It wasn't completely gone away. I was late at work because I didn't know what my tasks were. Everyone was speaking in Greek on the video call. While my hand was moving, no information was coming in from the notes I had written.

I had reached my limit after a week. The pill was broken in half.

I felt a quiet calm after an hour. The muscle pain that had been throbbing in my head for the past few days was not visible to the naked eye. The words flowed out easily when I began to write. I was amazed that I only had a third of my dose.

The nadir came when I took a bump of speed instead of my prescription, to try to feel some energy and blast the fog out of my head

The same amount was taken the next day. It was better than my unmedicated state. I began taking the pills as needed, rather than on the regular schedule that my Psychiatrist had urged me to adhere to, and in far smaller doses than I'd been prescribed.

Having exhausted my psychiatrists suggestions, I found a post on the internet that suggested dissolving the tablets under my tongue. I found the forum for "tweakers", or people who use amphetamines as "smart drugs" to improve their cognitive and efficiency. I saw people going through the same struggles as I did, loving what the drug made them capable of, struggling with its side-effects, and trying to find a way to keep taking it.

I was worried that I was a speedaholic. I sneaked back to get my fix after telling everyone that I was off the drugs.

My doctor asked if I'd ever taken speed. When people with attention deficit disorder take ecstasy or speed, they experience a different effect to what most people do: it calms them down.

I have never tried drugs like amphetamines. I decided to try it while in Berlin in May. I took our drugs to a drug testing center in Amsterdam that was funded by the Dutch government. They like to keep an eye on the purity and prices of drugs. The tester said there was a difference between street and amphetamines.

She said that street amphetamines give more of an "up" feeling and less of a calm concentration than Adderall does. It is possible that you have a higher tolerance for speed than other people. I need to take more to get the same effect as I have had with my attention deficit disorder.

I was tired and achy when I arrived in Berlin after taking my medication for a few days to be safe. On the day of our big night out, I was in bed crying because of my headaches and fatigue. I waited at 10pm to see what would happen.

Having ADHD means that, even more than the average person, you have to find out what makes you tick and pursue it – even if it changes weekly

I found speed made me feel confident but not histrionically so. I had to get past the bouncers at Berghain by the time we got there.

A girl just emerged from a cubicle and I spoke to her in the toilets. She said that sometimes all you need is a big line of speed. I talked to her about my drug of choice. She wondered what it was like to be on medication. My doctor won't give me a prescription because he thinks I speed too much on the weekends.

After returning from Berlin, the exhaustion and headaches returned. The drug made me sleepy. I wondered if amphetamine would work better than it already did.

The nadir came when I took a small piece of paper and put it in my freezer to try and get some physical energy. Where do you think this ends? I wanted to know.

I decided to take street amphetamines instead of prescription pills in order to see what a slippery slope I was on. Pro-drug psychiatrists like to maintain an illusory boundary between Adderall and amphetamines, which is why they sell them on the street. There is a line between prescription and recreational speed.

It isn't going to solve everything if you take a Stimulus to get your psychological distress under control. Not only do the side-effects mean that I don't want to be on it every day and have to resort to old strategies, it also can't give me anything. I have to accept that I may not fit in with society's idea of productivity or normality.

Even more so than the average person, you have to find out what makes you tick and pursue it even if that changes weekly with attention deficit disorder. The drugs can sometimes help the worst of my symptoms in a way that feels necessary. Sometimes I can't get half an hour of work done without medication. Before the drugs, that was the case as well. This article would never have been written if it weren't for amphetamine.

I keep making my deal with the devil. I can go days without the drugs, but then I will have days that are chaotic and foggy, and I will go back to the pills. I will stop using drugs one day.