Take Your Pills
Take Your Pills
| 09 March 2018 (USA)
Take Your Pills Trailers

In a hypercompetitive world, drugs like Adderall offer students, athletes, coders and others a way to do more -- faster and better. But at what cost?

Reviews
Rational_Skeptic

I liked most of the documentary. It was poorly edited though. Also, this "documentary" doesn't even try to hide the fact that its shilling for that Optimind crap. And thise dudes were totally on Rx Stimulants.

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jessejrutherford

Thank you Netflix for having the courage to say what needs to be said, and for not wimping out toward the end with some kind of maybe-this-drug-is-OK-after-all cop-out. There are plenty of people in the world who will tell you that your child with ADHD should be medicated. There are very few voices that have the courage to point out that if millions of kids need medication to "succeed" in our education system/society, then maybe it's the system and society that has a problem, not the kids. I appreciated the context and history of how Adderall and Ritalin were developed and how the rates of prescription have grown in recent years. It was also interesting to see the role of social class bias toward prescription methamphetamines, and I would have liked a few more minutes' discussion of this topic, as criminalization of lower social class behaviors is important, and the high socioeconomic status of most of the people in this movie was evident. I would have also liked to have a little more insight into how people with ADHD were treated before high rates of prescription, although that's a little off the topic of the movie.I watched this with my 13-year-old who was diagnosed with ADHD at age 8 and has never been medicated. This movie came at just the right time as she becomes more self-aware and uses introspection to begin taking control of her own self-management. We learned a lot and it was the basis for several conversations. Super-uplifting movie for a kid who believes, deep down, that there is nothing "wrong" with her and galvanized her determination to forge her own path rather than become a medicated zombie (references to The Matrix were quite apropos). We especially liked and identified with the artist kid who has been on Adderall most of his life, wants to quit, and struggles with anger at his mom for having medicated him for so long. Incidentally, the movie does a nice job of empathizing with the mom and other parents who choose to medicate, rather than demonizing them. Who should watch this movie? Parents of kids with ADHD, adults with ADHD, teens with ADHD, teens in general. Note: if you have a competitive teen who is driven to succeed, stay one step ahead of them and have them watch this.My only complaint was that the added graphics, while well done, were too flashy and jittery for my taste; this was a minor aggravation and when I joked to my daughter that they were designed to keep the attention of someone with ADHD, she replied that it worked.

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denisecrodriguess

This movie shows how healthy people use prescribed medication due to social demands. It does not focus on ADHD disorder and its treatment. Taking that in consideration, the documentary brings an interesting discussion to the table, which is about how the American society encourages its young adults to seek unrealistic high levels of performance.

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icesismoody

This documentary, while edited well, is a very shoddily written one. Not only is it incredibly repetitive, with the interviewed individuals all saying some iteration of "I don't have ADHD but wanted to perform better so I abused a substance and voila, I became amazing," but it also does its best to downplay the significance and necessity of the drug it fails to demonize. Very few times in the documentary do they acknowledge that they're talking about substance abuse, not the evils of a perfectly helpful medicine, and they keep describing it as some miracle drug that makes literally every person who takes it ever hyper-productive and jittery instead of a drug that has harmful affects if abused, just like any other medication on the market. Fun fact: people with ADHD have trouble sitting still or paying attention because their frontal lobes aren't as active and may even be physically smaller than people who don't have ADHD. Stimulants help "wake up" their frontal lobes so that they can perform basic tasks like homework, hygiene, driving, and even just taking out the trash sometime in the next six months. A lot of folks with ADHD who don't have access to medication often self-medicate by consuming large amounts of caffeine, a less effective but more accessible stimulant, and when they DO have access to medication, INCLUDING Adderall, they behave and perform like "normal" people, not like people on meth or speed. If this documentary had done more to provide a cautionary tale to those who wish to abuse the drug while also highlighting its usefulness to those who actually need it, it would have been a more rounded and less irrelevant documentary. Unfortunately, it failed to provide, and many MANY people who have ADHD will continue to be stigmatized due to scare tacticians like the folks who put this documentary together.

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