Adam Conover Talks ‘Unmedicated’ ADD Standup Comedy Special on Dropout

Adam Conover returns to his CollegeHumor roots this week with new standup comedy special, “Adam Conover: Unmedicated,” which delves into the comedian’s history with ADD and his subsequent Adderall addiction.

The show, which launched Wednesday, is streaming on Dropout (the indie platform owned by the rebranded CollegeHumor company) as part of its new “Dropout Presents” series of standup specials, which debuted earlier this year with Hank Green’s special in June.

Conover told Variety he’s been wanting to do this project for the past 15 years. After all that time, what made the “Adam Ruins Everything” star pick the niche streamer as the place to house his first standup special over a Netflix, Hulu, Max or Amazon — apart from the ties that bind him to Dropout CEO Sam Reich and the old CollegeHumor crew whom he began his career with?

First, the subject matter.

“A lot of people know me as an informational comedian, right? I do comedy about important topics,” Conover told Variety. “They don’t know me as a standup comedian. And standup comedy is my first love, so I wanted to do a straight standup show, I didn’t want to do information. I didn’t want to do, here’s how you could change the world. I just wanted to do jokes about myself, about my life. It’s a really personal story. The entire special is about my childhood diagnosis with ADD. I was probably one of the first people in the country to be diagnosed with ADD, or at least very early on.”

Bringing the “very personal” special to Dropout over a big streamer gave Conover “the chance to do it, to do it on my own terms, to have it come out the way that I want.”

“To be able to care about every single detail, and to have it come out on this incredible platform where people are going to watch it and give a shit about it, that’s very rare to be able to do that as a comedian now,” Conover said. “To not have to throw your special up on YouTube for free and hope that people watch, or do it on a big streamer and hope that their algorithm is going to show it to people.”

In “Unmedicated,” Conover goes into detail about how Adderall affected him “the same way speed would” when he was taking it as a child and into adulthood.

“It made me grind my teeth and it made me want to smoke cigarettes, and it reduced my appetite, and I had trouble sleeping and stuff like that,” he said. “They don’t tell you that and it’s not clear that, ‘Hey, your nine year old, we’re giving them amphetamines. So keep an eye on them.’ If we’re a little bit more honest about what we’re doing here, and that medication is not the end all, be all, and that there are other paths that one can explore and you can do so mindfully — then that would be my hope. And if you are medicated and start, I don’t know, drinking four shots of whiskey every night to fall asleep, which is what I was doing, then, hey, maybe reevaluate.”

During the special, Conover makes a point of not taking a stance one way or another about how to treat ADD with or without medication, but rather explain what he says the drug Adderall did to him specifically.

“The special is called ‘Unmedicated,’ not because I’m against prescription treatments for ADD, but simply because they never worked for me and they caused me problems,” Conover said. “I felt addicted to them for a while, and they caused me to have other addictions as well. And I turned out fine, but other people, maybe not. And I do think there’s overmedicalization and overprescription in our society a lot — but at the same time, so many people benefit from these drugs in really genuine ways. Friends of mine do, people I love do; and so I’m not against them. I just want us to have a little bit more of an open conversation about this.”

It’s also important to Conover his audience knows the actual ingredients in Adderall by the end of his special: “One of the jokes that I make is they prescribed me Adderall, and they don’t tell you that that’s amphetamines, right?” Conover said. “Even on the bottle, they put ‘amphetamine salts.’ And I think you’re supposed to go, ‘Oh, salts. That’s not quite amphetamines. There’s salt in there, so it’s like something different.’ It’s straight up amphetamines.”