For what it's worth, I remember coming across this claim a couple years ago about AWS on HN. I don't think it's fiction, it's possible that their PR has scrubbed these allegations from the internet.
Well, to be blunt, it's because there are billion dollar pharmaceutical companies that want to keep making money off of these drugs, with around 20% of adults taking anti-depressants at any given time.
Irving Kirsch, psych professor at Harvard, wrote a book called "The Emperor's New Drugs" which argues that antidepressants are basically just placebos. I haven't read the book but I have seen a lot of interviews and articles on his research and it's pretty damning.
They're only subject to large fines if those laws are in place and actually being enforced, though. Companies keep getting away with these huge data breaches in the United States with almost no real consequences.
Internal Family Systems therapy is a form of therapy that uses the idea of different "parts" of ourselves, and postulates that we can heal these different parts of ourselves by accessing an inner source of compassion underneath all these "parts" - suppressed emotional pain, defense mechanisms, coping mechanisms, etc. I've found it to be the most effective form of therapy for healing anxiety, depression, and childhood trauma, when combined with other mind-body practices.
I don't think this is true about brain chemistry or that ADD is a life-long disability. Just speaking from experience here, I was diagnosed with ADD as an adult in my mid-20s and then started using IFS therapy (parts work) a couple years later for childhood trauma. After two years of IFS therapy my ADD is pretty much non-existent and my executive functioning is better than most people I know.
My hunch is that for a lot of people, ADD is a result of growing up in a home that felt unstable so they never gained a basic internal sense of stability that you need for things like task switching or staying focused.
Those hyper-competent nice devs can turn incompetent engineers into competent ones, though, and have such a huge impact on work culture that they bring everyone else up with them too. A lot of incompetence can just be inexperience, not understanding what the priorities are and getting overwhelmed.
Well fucking said. For a lot of kids, their teacher is one of the few stable adults in their life. There's a ton of social and emotional things kids learn from good teachers beyond just book knowledge.
Something that helped me dramatically in this area was picking up a new hobby, purely for fun, with no expectations about getting "good" at it or winning any praise or accolades - for me, this was dance. It's taught me how to be creative and where creative energy actually comes from, and i've been able to take this skill and apply it to other hobbies, like music, where my approach used to be more technical. Extrinsic motivation and having expectations seem to kill creativity.