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me, to myself, for too many years: "your ADHD is made up"
substack commie: "your ADHD is made up"
https://twitter.com/_pem_pem/status/1357356561178492928
substack commie: "your ADHD is made up"
https://twitter.com/_pem_pem/status/1357356561178492928
it took me so many years to stop telling myself "you just need to man up" and to recognize that it's possible to have a problem with my brain in the same way I might have one with any other part of my body and that seeking treatment is the same as seeking help with anything else.
I never got over that hangup until after I started taking medication in my late 20s.
I was never suicidal, but sometimes I felt so hopeless about being so unable to focus on anything or do the things I wanted to do that I often found myself indifferent to living or dying at all.
I was never suicidal, but sometimes I felt so hopeless about being so unable to focus on anything or do the things I wanted to do that I often found myself indifferent to living or dying at all.
Maybe ironically, one of the things that kept me from treatment for the longest time was the fact that I had made it as far as I did without it - by then I had a career, benefits, degrees, enough money to live, and people who cared about me, so why couldn't I make myself better?
But as I realized after talking to more people about ADHD (instead of brushing it off as something weak people make up for themselves) I'd been coping with ADHD symptoms for my whole life.
Many of my terrible habits - caffeine overdosing, carb overdosing, staying up for ungodly hours in the night until the panic of failure overcomes the fog of constant distraction - were just ways I had worked out from a young age to cope with the same problems I had always had.
Eventually though, after several sleepless years, all of this obviously unhealthy stuff stopped working, to the limited degree it had ever really "worked" at all - my ADHD symptoms went from being a miserable companion to a source of what felt like genuinely crippling depression.
I only went to a doctor about it because I was worried I would eventually be unable to represent my clients to the best of my ability.
It took me two months to get a doctor to see me. And the first one I went to just smirked at what I said and told me "I don't prescribe speed."
It took me two months to get a doctor to see me. And the first one I went to just smirked at what I said and told me "I don't prescribe speed."
I eventually found a doctor who was willing to treat me with therapy and medication (Vyvanse) and within about a month I felt like I was a new person.
The therapy helped me think through things, but the medication made the difference. It felt like the lifting of a long fog.
The therapy helped me think through things, but the medication made the difference. It felt like the lifting of a long fog.
I tried diet and exercise to relieve my symptoms - sometimes it helps, and it's worth doing either way. But it didn't help me with ADHD.
Medication doesn't make my symptoms go away, but it alleviates them to a point where I feel like if I do my best, I can often overcome them.
Medication doesn't make my symptoms go away, but it alleviates them to a point where I feel like if I do my best, I can often overcome them.
So reading a thread full of pseudoscientific nonsense about how ADHD is really just a reflection of late capitalism, how it's just proof that we're not meant to stare at screens all day - that sorta set me off. It's just a reskinned version of the old line that it doesn't exist.
Not everyone has ADHD and not everyone needs treatment. Even with medication, there's still no way around often having to shape your life around preempting your symptoms. And it's true that society sometimes makes medical disorders more challenging than they would otherwise be.
But it took me too long to recognize that some people have ADHD, that I was one of them, and that asking someone to help is no different than asking for help with anything else.
It's not an admission of weakness, it's a recognition of reality, which is itself a kind of strength.
It's not an admission of weakness, it's a recognition of reality, which is itself a kind of strength.
