New Comment
One of the things that just really gets to me is that because my medication is a controlled-substance, I can’t use my pharmacy’s app for refills: I have to call or go in. That little bit of friction has meant the difference between having the medication and not. Without the medication, tasks like this are difficult for me to remember and do. It’s a perverse feedback loop.
Please just let me refill my prescription like everyone else.
1It’s unfortunate that a disorder that makes it already difficult to be organized has one of the more difficult mediations to go out and acquire.
A good article on ADHD by Emma Baker of Tree Number Three from Inkhaven. ADHD can be uniquely debilitating and also complicated to effectively medicate, and this article changed my perspective on how bad it is.
In this post I’ve included some personal commentary from my own experiences on Emma’s article.
On how ADHD is actually terrible
I often observe ADHD romanticized as a quirky harmless disorder or failure of will, but this hurts people with ADHD since thinking it’s good or merely a willpower issue discourage those with the disorder from seeking effective treatment. Meanwhile the disorder can seriously impair life outcomes.
In addition to ADHD being reduced to something simply amusing and not actually deeply impairing, like with the Bart Simpson comparison, I think the notion that ADHD has some set of advantages is also quite harmful. While sometimes successful people say that their ADHD helped them avoid a traditional career path and motivated them to pursue something unique, we 1) have no counterfactual to prove they wouldn’t be successful with treatment, 2) can look at how hurtful ADHD is towards life outcomes statistically (very) — which, in my opinion, strongly suggests this idea is deeply harmful.
I also see things like this:
While I appreciate the sentiment, this kind of rhetoric does not often help people with ADHD. It would be extremely useful to hear more if it were true that ADHD was simply a byproduct of a lack of conviction, but this is a convenience we’re not afforded.
Also, the above does kind of reduce to “the problem with your focus is not your medically diagnosed focus impairment, it’s actually your poor ability to focus.”
On the difficulty of treatment – medication does not work like glasses
As someone who suffers from ADHD myself, I personally have found no long-term sustainable medication for my ADHD despite trialing about six, and find it basically impossible to sit through a book or longer text unmedicated, let alone lecture or class. While I can read without aid, it is typically incredibly frustrating and takes much longer for me than normal people to read the same length of text. I have also learned everything in every class, with close to zero exception, by asking questions during office hours about problem sets (and recently LLMs). This is an effective way to learn ADHD-or-not but I would like to be able to learn from lectures as well.
Others in my family with ADHD have taken nearly eight years to graduate four-year degree programs or otherwise fail classes regularly despite standardized test scores that would suggest better outcomes in college. I personally graduated high school by the skin of my teeth and then failed out of the first college I went to. That led to enormous problems for me and years of shame-induced irritable mood. Reflecting on that time, I feel I treated others badly and though ADHD is no excuse for that, I feel had I treatment during that time, I would have been a better person.
One of my cousins has valid career-related reasons to not seek proper diagnosis or medication, which have made his career progression much more difficult.
If you think you might have ADHD, I’d highly suggest reading Emma’s article for a good framework on how to relate to it, and looking into treatment. Life could be much easier for you (potentially).