Doctors prescribe ADHD pills because they are incredibly effective for most cases (at the correct dose, managed well). They are some of the most effective psych medicine we know of (antipsychotics are another example), strongly effective meds are actually very rare in mental health - consider antidepressants or anti anxiety meds for instance - honestly, the best you can say is they're a bit better than placebo.

When compared with behavioural interventions and talk therapy, ADHD meds blow them out of the water. In fact ADHD is famously resistant to behavioural intervention because the executive functioning problems prevent people implementing good strategies when they actually need them.

yeah, pretty much ruined my life as my mum was a complete borderline antivax hippy who would never allow me to get a script as a kid. People have this misconception that acute adhd just means you cannot concentrate on tedious, work related stuff. Truth is even as a kid I could never ever enjoy videogames, cartoons, really do anything for longer than 5 minutes except go outside and daydream in the dirt.

To this day, can barely sit through a movie and find videogames like a form of chinese mind torture to tolerate for more than a few minutes.

We went though this trend in Australia like the USA where so many kids had ritalin chucked at them who were just hyperactive normal kids.

Now in typical Australian regulatory fashion; we have gone to the other extreme. Ritalin is such a controlled prescription that I only took it for a few months as an adult because the dosage was so limited it only half worked, and the requirements to get it here requires one to renew it from scratch every month... aka extremely onerous. Also medicare always tries to chuck you to behavioural therapists these days, who are pretty much useless for acute adhd sufferers for the aforementioned reasons.