My friend it's a false dichotomy: you can keep your talents and maybe ease your struggle too.
Most stimulant medication is something you can try for a day, see immediately if it's effective or not, then never take again in your life if it isn't for you. Don't suffer needlessly because of misguided bigots like the one above.
> Whether self-pleasuring with a hand, or with a vibrating device, the societal factors (of hookup culture, or of cost of rent in cities to own your own place and delay marriage, or everyone getting married later because women now want to focus on their career, while gender age gaps remain similar) matter and should be systematically explored. This article or the nofap movement or women's tacit use of vibrating devices, are all quiet ways to cope with many societal structural changes.
I am raising my eyebrow at this. You want to look upstream at hookups, declining marriage, women's financial independence and their use of vibrators? When that conversation turns to "traditional" gender roles in religion, I win a prize for calling it early.
Anyway, even if there is some tractable upstream problem we can eventually solve, we still have to deal with the people who are already downstream. For them, the diagnosis and treatment of diseases is valuable, even if we deal with the root cause so future generations don't suffer.
> When there is a huge disparity between the USA and other countries (eg on prevalencd ADHD, or on obesity and diabetes) or USA now and before, it is a sign that the problem is upstream — often having to do with corporations, diet, and societal changes.
That is only one possible explanation.
For example an underdeveloped country might appear to have lower prevalence of dementia than a more developed country. Perhaps because the former lacks effective nationwide medical diagnostic abilities, or perhaps because fewer in their population make it to old age where the disease shows up, or perhaps because they have a religious belief that conflates it with devilry so it goes unreported. In all of those situations the ground truth prevalence could be exactly the same in both countries, yet the developed country would report higher rates of the disease than the underdeveloped country.
If your society has you working on a small farm as a child instead of going to school and doing knowledge work, of course ADHD will be underreported. That doesn't mean it's not present.
There may be some causation from ADHD to obesity, I can't say, but otherwise they are categorically different issues.
Your position is both medically disproved and demeaning. Correct it please before you do more harm.
I made it to middle age without any ADHD diagnosis or stimulants, including coffee. My symptoms were present from early childhood and remain to this day, I expect I'll carry them to my grave. The entire time it's been an agonizing struggle, in ways I learned over decades were not normal compared to my friends and family.
I avoided diagnosis and medication due in part to stigma perpetuated by attitudes like yours. I suffered in silence for years that could have been avoided if only my condition were better understood and supported.
When I finally got a professional diagnosis, the stimulant didn't make me high the way it would do for you, it just made my brain act more like your brain on a normal day. My stresses and struggles became simply normal challenges, with the smothering layer of ADHD failings on top removed.
So at least in my adult experience, properly dosed stimulant medication given to people who need it can be life-alteringly effective, as close to a cure as a neurodivergent brain thinking today can hope for.
Having ever been diagnosed with ADHD is disqualifying, as is taking any ADHD/psychotropic medication to mitigate the condition. All you can do is take a day-long battery of psych tests to demonstrate that you never had ADHD in the first place.
> When I was around seventeen I took a Real Analysis class at Columbia University.
How typical.
> When my first-year hallmates were “studying” they were looking out the window, playing with their pencils, talking to their roommates, all sorts of stuff that wasn't studying. When I needed to study I would hide somewhere and study. I think the ability to focus on just one thing for a few hours at a time is a great gift that ADD has given me.
That's the opposite of executive disfunction. (To be fair, the author does describe other hallmarks of executive disfunction elsewhere.)
I didn't want to for decades, despite obvious symptoms, for fear of dependency or being labeled a drug seeker and because of the stigma implied by comments like this. Could be I was the only person those drug education programs worked on.
I'm glad I finally did. That one little pill makes me a better and happier person.
Update: I got it done. Printer ran out of ink at the last minute but I found a spare. When there's no margin for error, little things like that can bring the whole thing down.
It is not normal. I still have not bought christmas gifts for my family, who I love dearly and who I do not want to disappoint, even though I have their wish lists in a different tab and it will only take a few clicks to be done. Instead I have fought my ADHD brain for weeks trying to get myself to do it and failing.
That is different from a neurotypical person who feels gift giving is difficult. Happy christmas.