I have heard of stimulants being used off-label to treat depression.
Among people who have ADHD and don't have depression, stimulants often cause euphoria (feeling happier than you're supposed to), and it kind of makes sense that depression + euphoriant drug = normal mood.
My only concern would be whether it continues to work for more than a couple weeks at a time, if you need it to.
I have also found that many care providers will consider you to have depression just because you are terribly sad about ADHD-related life difficulties. Plus, there is a problem common among ADHD people (initiation impairment--just this weird urge to not do things) which is not widely recognized as an ADHD symptom but sounds really similar to certain depression symptoms depending on how you describe it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rose76
After decades of being prescribed all kinds of psychotropic drugs, I've concluded that the process doctors use to select psych drugs for any given patient is, basically, "throw stuff up against the wall and see what sticks." Yeah, they can give you an organized sounding rationale for what they choose. But it's so, so not like choosing an antibiotic for a specific infection.
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Indeed. They mostly go by which drugs have been shown in the most studies to benefit the highest percentage of people with a particular diagnosis, but the diagnostic labels are based on symptoms (or worse yet, behaviors) not the biological cause. So Antidepressant #34630 might help 60% of people with "depression," but your depression might not even be the same thing as their depression. And some drugs don't get enough studies for certain conditions (e.g. there are some ideas that amantadine might help with ADHD, but there aren't many studies). So it's hard to tell what will work.