It’s taken me four months (possibly five?) to write this article. I wish I was kidding, but I’m not. It has truly taken me that long to do this ONE thing.
Why, you may ask?
Well, because right now my ADHD is completely unmanaged.
How did this happen? There is no generic Adderall available. None. Anywhere.
CVS is out. Walgreens is out. Walmart is out. In fact, I’ve called 37 pharmacies trying to find it, with no luck at all.
WHERE has all the Adderall gone?
This may seem inconsequential to some, especially to those who think Adderall is just a drug used by college students when they need to stay awake to finish a paper at the last minute. I can assure you, though, that it’s a BIG deal to countless adults and children who use it properly to treat their sometimes debilitating ADHD symptoms.
Consequently, our unmanaged ADHD then creates problems for the people who count on us to successfully complete routine tasks in our everyday lives. Whether it’s school pickup on Monday, show and tell on Wednesday, remembering to buy the “correct” kind of pickles, or submitting a high-stakes proposal by a certain date and time, I wish my fellow ADHD moms the best of luck.
We are OFF our game.
For children, this impacts their teachers’, daycare providers’, babysitters’, or camp counselors’ ability to keep them safe, happy, healthy, and emotionally available to learn. Consequently, not being able to focus, follow directions, or control impulses makes life very difficult and can create a lot of unnecessary shame for the child.
For moms, the Adderall shortage is making it difficult to “adult.” It’s harder to be a mom. It’s harder to be a spouse. It’s harder to be an employee.
Are you seeing a theme here? EVERYTHING is harder.
At this point, we can find name brand Adderall sometimes in particular pharmacies if we call around. This is wonderful… if you have an obscene amount of money to pay for it.
The companies that manufacture Adderall are FIRST restocking their name brand version, and THEN they will troubleshoot the generic version that they ALSO make. It goes without saying that they haven’t started to restock their generic version.
There are no vouchers, there is no help from the company, and it’s still expensive with GoodRX. Long story short, if you aren’t willing or able to pay the $100+ dollars for it, you’re just out of luck.
There is no generic Adderall available anywhere, and the name brand version is financially inaccessible.
Now, I’m sure we all have the same questions at this point. Why and how did this happen? How is it still a problem so many months later? When is this going to be fixed?
Next, I’m sure we could all come up with some basic solutions to fix the problem long term and short term. We’re moms — finding creative solutions to hard problems is our superpower. Obviously, the person in charge of fixing this giant problem is NOT a mom.
Between the great baby formula scare of 2022, the Pitocin shortage, the disappearance of children’s Tylenol and all kinds of cough medicine during cold and flu season, and now this ongoing issue with Adderall, we are TIRED. We don’t have time for this.
Moreover, the irony of making people with ADHD jump through hoops to get the medication that enables them to focus and complete complex tasks in the first place is not lost on me. It feels like a cruel joke at this point.
So here we are, in the same position we’ve been in for months now.
As time goes on, the carefully crafted systems we use to function as moms with ADHD continue to unravel and get harder to maintain. We still can’t find Adderall at a reasonable price, if we can find any at all. Nobody can even tell us definitively when this issue will resolve. So what do we do now? Your guess is as good as mine.
