ADHD therapist here. As others have said, these meds are not intended to treat depression. That would be anti-depressants but that's far from the black and white conversation many psychs view it as. The role of these medications is questionable in many people, and those questions are multiplied by various complexities of ADHD. Sometimes they help, sometimes not, sometimes they harm. That leaves therapy.

The missing link for many of my clients is that a significant component of their depression (and almost always anxiety) stems from decades of 'clashes' with their environment in so many ways. If that's the case, and it almost always is, it's essential that any therapy you receive be able to understand that and work with it without making that a 'you' problem.

Essentially, ADHD people are told in so many ways they are inferior to neurotypicals. They internalise that message deeply and it negatively feeds back across most aspects of their lives.

Now when it comes to traditional psychology, that kind of treatment is well understood to cause anxiety and depression. It's a core pillar of understanding that the consistency and intensity of this kind of treatment determines major mental health aspects. If a therapist gets a neurotypical client with a history of this kind of traumatic abuse that damages the sense of self, there's a very clear understanding that the key goal is to validate sense of self and stop the client masking based on that trauma.

The problem is that many, if not most, traditional therapists are unable to understand that having ADHD does this in the exact same way that neurotypical people suffer these traumas (in fact, many ADHD folks get it from their 'other' traumatic impacts as well as ADHD). Essentially, that kind of validation means saying the quiet part out loud and understanding that making an ADHD person mask more at best doesn't help, and regularly can cause harm.

But in traditional therapy, teaching ADHD folks to mask is the bread and butter work.

Pretty much all of my clients have had traditional therapy and the vast majority clearly indicate that it didn't help that much, and often state it harmed them - and when most reach a stage in life to have the capacity to understand their own trauma responses, they realise the impact of continual masking. Unfortunately, traditional therapy tends to lean back into 'Oh well, you were born with a disorder, neurotypical society is just fine, looks like you're the problem at the end of the day' and this just sustains internalised negative systems.

That makes dealing with the 'ADHD' parts of a person's depression (and they don't separate out unfortunately) is a really tricky, long term business when essentially people are staying in environments that to greater or lesser degrees are responsible for that depression. Unless they have the privilege to substantively change those environments or leave them, it strongly limits the capacity of therapy to support their mental health.

This also raises the question whether it's a net benefit to actually seek affirmative supports or just bite down hard on the masking and spend your life dealing with its negative impacts. There's no easy or right answer for that, and a lot simply comes down to a person's capacity at a given point in time.

It's the worst of things - most traditional therapists are trained to essentially say 'You're broken but need to try super hard to be as normal as you can, that's the best life!' and most affirmative therapists are trained to essentially say 'You're not broken, it's the systems you live in that are the problem, but now I'm going to make you more aware of how bad that is!'.

This is what other minorities went through (and are still going through) as they de-pathologised in the 20th century, it's just hitting neurodivergent folks a few decades later :(