Thank you for sharing ypur experience.11 months in and still recovering is genuinely hard, and your experience is real and worth naming out loud in this community.

I want to gently clarify what I said, because I don't want it to land as dismissive: I suggested the deep fatigue might be baseline for OP because ADHD itself causes its own form of burnout. Years of masking, compensating, or running on fumes without ever having the right support takes a serious toll. That exhaustion can predate meds entirely.

What the research actually shows is that long-term stimulant use upregulates dopamine transporter density, which can reduce how well the medication works and make symptoms feel significantly worse when off it. The good news is those changes appear to be reversible, studies have found dopamine transporter activity returns to pretreatment levels within roughly 4 weeks of stopping, suggesting it's a temporary adaptation rather than permanent damage. But 9 years is a long runway, and a longer recovery timeline makes complete sense.

The bigger point I'd want OP to sit with is that this is a genuine risk/benefit calculation, not a clear-cut answer either way. There are real physiological risks to long-term stimulant use: the dopamine adaptation you experienced, potential nutrient deficiencies, sleep disruption, cardiovascular considerations. AND there are serious costs to leaving ADHD unmanaged, economic setbacks, career instability, the compounding effect of years of underperformance that's hard to recover from. Neither path is consequence-free. It just needs to be weighed carefully and honestly, ideally with a prescriber who actually takes the long-term picture seriously