I would love to see a study on how banning social media impacts ADHD symptoms.
The current wisdom is as soon as a diagnosis is made: go straight on the meds because there is minimal side-effects. So environmental modifications as treatment are not explored. Plus, once meds are involved, you now have a stimulant dependence to deal with too involving a afternoon crash, and increased anxiety, etc. Then your on anti-depressants to counteract these side-effects, etc. etc.
I was listening to the All-In podcast and Chamath's child got a diagnosis recently, and they said: absolutely no meds. Then took his iPad away and symptoms decreased dramatically.
Sure, in light cases it might help, but mostly you see news/social media amplifying ableistic "look at <other people with>, they're managing, why aren't you? it's obviously your lifestyle choices"
But talk to any people who actually have ADHD and you'll realize that this doesn't help anyone: ADHD doesn't mean "easily distracted", it means "inability to maintain control over focus", and taking distractions away doesn't make this even marginally less impactful.
You might be more likely to come back to a task instead of getting lost in distractions, but it's never gonna be enough for anyone but the lightest cases and misdiagnoses.
Just stop trying to decide how people should treat their disabling medical conditions. You've got millions saying "stimulants are the only thing that helped", and yet every time the topic of ADHD comes up, someone goes "hmm but maybe we shouldn't give people stims, and force them to use self-control they don't have to stop having ADHD ??"
If someone had a broken arm you wouldn't tell them to exercise that arm more and that it's fine. Or that back in time people didnt had casts and they were fine.
I don't understand why so many people act otherwise when it does come to issues you can't see.
I don't have ADHD but I have friends who do. And no it's not a question of willpower they need meds to function. So I'm very sensitive when it comes to people saying it's on them like poster before you somewhat implies.
> Once you start taking meds you develop dependence and so your definitely need them.
In this generality, this statement is plain false folk tale. It certainly applies for some conditions and treatments, but without a study to back it up you should not be making this statement in regards to ADHD and its medications.
> If you tried everything and nothing worked, then go for the meds, and take on the risks and side-effects. But no one does this. They get diagnosed and then straight on meds for the rest of their life.
This is equally untrue. I can't make statements about other places and health care systems, but where I live they throw the kitchen sink at you for about a year or two before they progressively walk you up to the more "extreme" medication if nothing else helped.
May I ask: when you say you "tried everything and nothing worked"...was this before you knew about the existence of ADHD?
The tragedy I find is that people first discover ADHD and then go straight on meds. They don't use this new realization and understanding of their condition to try to solve it without medication. And once you begin medication, your brain starts to change, and you really can't isolate whether a behavioral change is actually working independent of your medicated state. So begins a long journey of decreasing efficacy of the meds to the point that you will end up worse than where you started.
Also curious what you did try? What was the longest time you disconnected from the internet and social media? How much did you exercise?
> May I ask: when you say you "tried everything and nothing worked"...was this before you knew about the existence of ADHD?
No, this was after I knew about the existence of ADHD, and from the structure of the comments this should have been obvious to you. I was referencing my previous comment: "they throw the kitchen sink at you for about a year or two before they progressively walk you up to the more "extreme" medication if nothing else helped." It is quite clear that this refers to the early treatment phase after diagnosis.
> Also curious what you did try? What was the longest time you disconnected from the internet and social media? How much did you exercise?
To answer all 3 questions: enough, enough, and enough.
I have ADHD. I don't medicate because I don't want to.
Do I still struggle? Yes, a lot.
For me, I keep getting stuck down rabbit holes despite what systems I put in place to avoid it. It is a constant whack-a-mole.
My theory is that people with ADHD are just more creative. Their brains are designed to explore and push boundaries.
But the invention of internet, smart phones, social media, online video is simply too much for a brain of this calibre. Our brains evolved in the natural world, and we live in an extremely unnatural world now.
But one thing I found about the ADHD community is that they feel like meds are the only answer, to the point they get angry when people criticise them.
> Wow
So I genuinely am interested in what is "enough".
It's incredibly difficult to get anyone to tell you what they tried and to confront any alternative hypotheses. They take it as an affront.
Your posting behavior has none of the hallmarks of unmedicated ADHD and all of the hallmarks of Asperger's/ASD. I would highly recommended you investigate the possibility you have been misdiagnosed. It would explain a lot of things.
Anything not matching the world view is clearly somehow wrong. Very impressive reality distortion field there. Except it's scary because it's the same mechanic that also makes people vote for populists that throw "great" rhetoric but act against their interests.
Funny thing is that when I got my ADHD diagnosis, it was, for adults, very "fresh" conceptually. Which means everything got reviewed, retested, rechecked multiple times. Two professors and several doctors were involved. I'm pretty sure even medical professionals would find it hard to poke holes in either my diagnosis or treatment plan. I even got to be a "demo patient" for medical students multiple times, for them to learn.
But, they read a bunch of papers (without training in the field), so clearly they know better, eh?
Think what this means though. You fit a criteria. Then ask why do we use this criteria? Trace the history of this criteria through the DSM. The criteria is arbitrary. There is no basis for it.
The field of ADHD began when stimulants were shown to help make kids calmer. And since then it has been a matter of: how to find other people that this medicine (that no one else is allowed and is highly controlled) will help.
There was never an investigation into maybe it is caused by environment/society.
The unquestionable commonality of ADHD is an impairment that impacts the ability to live/work.
No one starts here, and then looks at the potential causes. They see if you fit the criteria, and if you do then you medicate.
Medication is premised on it being a neurodevelopment disorder from birth, hence why ADHD people can take stimulants and no one else can. But this is not proven in any way.
My biggest gripe is that every ADHD person will tell you its okay for only them to take stimulants because their brain is different for normal people and hence they are immune to the negative side-effects. Which is not proven. The risks are under-stated, and the investigation of the true cause is cut short for convenience and revenue.
> Medication is premised on it being a neurodevelopment disorder from birth, hence why ADHD people can take stimulants and no one else can. But this is not proven in any way.
From your very own source in another thread:
> Molecular genetic studies have identified several genes that may mediate susceptibility to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
> You just go back to the absolutely disfunctional state you were in before when you stop taking them.
Your brain adapts by creating more dopamine transporters...meaning you need more dopamine for same effect. This happens in an effort to maintain homeostasis. There is no free dopamine unfortunately...what goes up must come down. The brain's homeostasis system is hard-wired.
> but the normal of people with ADHD is different.
This is probably the biggest misunderstanding people have.
They are told that their brain doesn't produce as much dopamine as a normal brain, which is why they can take the meds and normal people cannot.
But this is not the case. Each brain produces the right amount for itself, and if you dope it with more, then it will counteract this, and you will build tolerance.
There is no evidence about the dopamine theory of ADHD. It's total conjecture with a couple of papers here and there. There are no biomarkers or imaging for diagnosing ADHD.
The end result is you are going to end up morphing people's brains to the point that they need to take the meds to attain their original state.
But whatever, no one seems to care, too much money to be made.
I spent 25 years of my life without medication, it crippled my life and I couldn't get anything done unless absolutely, totally hyper focused on it. I don't even have high school. I failed at every job I had even though I won national programming competitions and everyone described me as the best programmer they ever met (and said that my technical knowledge is excellent but I'm just not doing the job so they have to let me go). I was homeless for some short time.
Up until I got diagnosed and medicated. First I had therapies, nothing. Then I had non-stimulant medication - worked but I had terrible side effects. Now I'm on methylphenidate and everything works like clockwork now.
Frankly I don't care about the theory behind it. It turned my life around and that's all I need to know.
I'm in a similar boat. But I am resisting meds. I always think I can pull it together with the right system and discipline.
I wouldn't trade the creativity and hyperfocus for anything. I feel I am on a journey and the one trick is to figure out how to beat this thing. But I am desperately struggling to get things done versus endless ideation/dreaming.
So I am very curious as to what you tried and why it didn't work. And of course, I hope there is something you didn't try that will work for me.
I have such a delicate balance at the moment and I cannot afford to disrupt it with meds, and could not afford to have med tolerance build after a few years leading me worse than when I started. EVERYONE tells me I should just take meds. The pressure is high. But I never will.
> So I am very curious as to what you tried and why it didn't work. And of course, I hope there is something you didn't try that will work for me.
You have an extremely stubborn, single-minded response to this subject, as evidenced by your posting history. I don't expect this will budge -- but someone ought to outright say it:
The painful truth for you may be that medication is what would help you.
The testimony of people with your same condition is overwhelmingly "this medication helps me", if you refuse outright to ever try it then you are wilfully opting into struggling and suffering. It does not seem like anything you've tried so far has worked.
The ultimate irony in this comment thread is listening to someone say "I tried so many things for years and years, but eventually medication helped" and you skip right over what worked because you want to try the list of things that failed.
> mostly you see news/social media amplifying ableistic...
It's actually the opposite.
It is now practically forbidden to criticize anything related with ADHD.
After reading all the literature I concluded there were huge problems with almost every aspect of it. Then you go try to tell people and you are tarred and feathered.
Then look at incentives: on one side is: "a citizen concerned that maybe taking stimulant meds is going to cause greater problems" vs "drug companies and psych industry making huge money from increasing lifetime prescriptions of stimulants".
The people on the "hang on a minute" side of things are concerned about health and safety of society. They stand to make ZERO money from raising the alarm. On the other side its billions of dollars.
> trying to decide how people should treat their disabling medical conditions.
Trying to raise awareness of risks. I think people don't understand the risks. They see a smart pill with no side-effects.
> After reading all the literature I concluded there were huge problems with almost every aspect of it. Then you go try to tell people and you are tarred and feathered.
Now that I've commented on these papers in the sibling post, I can complain that you do not seem to understand what a citation is. What you provided are sources. Citations are references to sources. You're not referencing anything, just throwing them around implying they prove your point. To make them proper citations, you'll need to be clear on what you're actually pointing at.
A very nice summarization paper on ADHD. You do not seem to have read the summary at the end, as it does not support your points of argument. It primarily suggests a wider approach using additional medication, as well as DNA based diagnosis and treatment. The latter does not seem to be available yet.
This suggests the brain adapts to long-term medication with methylphenidate, but does not go as far as establishing a causal relationship, or show that the dopamine transporter alterations are to the detriment of the patient.
In fact, this meta-study seems to be a contribution to the field of establishing the origins of ADHD; its argument is that these dopamine transporter changes may not be useful in understanding ADHD as they are caused by the treatment. However, there's this:
"It is, however, also possible that lower dopamine transporter density and lower dopamine release in medication-naive ADHD patients reflect prefrontal pathology, well demonstrated in neuroimaging results for ADHD (5), since frontostriatal glutamatergic circuits regulate striatal dopamine release."
It's hinting at a possibility that, in reverse, the unmedicated state without the long-term effects may be a key contributor to ADHD itself.
This discusses distinctions between ADHD diagnostic criteria in DSM-IV vs. DSM-5. The ones in DSM-5 cast a wider net than DSM-IV. The study comes to the conclusion that the net is still not wide enough, particularly in adults. I don't know why you believe this paper supports any of your points.
I suggest you read the paper (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.81476) which you dismissed. I have found that it summarizes most of the realizations I had from my own research. Otherwise it takes too long for me to explain.
Assistant professor, lecturer, reviewed by post doc. It's an article that summarizes stuff nicely referencing papers.
> but does not go as far as establishing a causal relationship
I love how the attitude is: here is a drug that you would think would cause side-effects and tolerance...which is does...and then the onus is on everyone to conclusively prove that it's bad. Smoke until we realize it causes cancer. Take opiates until we realize they are extremely addictive in certain packaging.
It's very much carefree experimentation on the world, rather than being risk-averse and acknowledging what we don't know.
It is common sense that the body will seek homeostasis to deal with this artificially increased dopamine levels. Which this study seems to indicate.
But it comes down to risk-appetite.
> DSM-IV vs. DSM-5.
We changed the diagnosis criteria and got: surprise, 27% increase in expected prevalence. How convenient.
The diagnosis criteria are just made up. The cause is not proven at all. There is no biomarker or imagery that can diagnose the condition successfully.
So patients present with an impairment...then you look at who has the impairment and craft the criteria such that it explains the impairment. Its a circular definition and extremely broad.
My dismissing that first paper was to your benefit. It is directly contradicted by the second source you link, which quite clearly points at genetic distinctions and markers in ADHD patients. Meanwhile that first paper argues ADHD may be "unreal" because current diagnostic criteria are ambiguous, redundant and arbitrary; and how we socially build it up.
I have no idea how you reconcile that in your head, but apparently you do. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs and opinions.
> There is no biomarker or imagery that can diagnose the condition successfully.
This, equally, is contradicted by the 2nd paper you link. It seems it's just too expensive (for the time being) to use DNA analysis in ADHD diagnostics.
Anyway, this discussion is no longer productive. These arguments are made, researched, exchanged, and resolved between medical experts. You are at odds with the current consensus of the medical community. It is your right and privilege to have your own well-researched opinion on this topic. However, when you then take this and argue for changes affecting a whole bunch of people across all of society, it becomes my right to call you out for the conflict of your opinion vs. medical consensus. I can see quite clearly why you believe "It is now practically forbidden to criticize anything related with ADHD." You expect people to agree with you, and you argue these things even in the face of people negatively affected by it.
You have two choices here. Study medicine (or pharmacology, or biochemistry), go into this field, and move the consensus. Or consider your belief exactly that: a belief, researched as it may be, that is still likely to be wrong because consensus is against you.
Sure, consensus is sometimes wrong. The way you're going about it is not how you change it, it's how you make an ass of yourself.
You could have taken this advice for the opioid epidemic, and then it still would have affected you via family/friends. We've already been through this once.
Not nearly the same thing. You're not going to get addicted to ADHD prescription stimulants unless you take much, much, much more (several orders of magnitude at least) than the prescribed dose. Not the case with opioids.
1. You cannot reasonably ban social media at this point.
2. Where are antidepressant coming from?
3. Non-stimulating meds exist. Feeding amphetamines to a kid isnt smart.
4. Would you tell someone who got an organ transplant to not take immunosuppressors because he will be dependent on them? ofc you wouldnt.
> You cannot reasonably ban social media at this point
You can block it and measure consumption. This is easy.
> 2. antidepressant
Originally stims weren't suppose to be used if someone is depressed. But now heaps of people are on both. If you are spiking dopamine you are bound to have a crash and the symptoms of it. There is a lot of reports of this. This crash can feel like depression. So its like a cycle of one drug covering for another.
> 4. Would you tell someone...
What is the _organ transplant event_ analagous to in an ADHD scenario? Does not fit.
Measuring consumption is NOT easy for someone with adhd.
You are mixing different mental problems in a random garble of words that mean nothing. Also how does that not fit? its literally the same thing.
> Measuring consumption is NOT easy for someone with adhd
There are ample tools like screen time.
Imagine being on meds for 10 years and then realizing that what you really needed was to just block distractions more judiciously and set more deadlines.
> its literally the same thing.
The cause was the acute organ transplant. What is the acute cause for ADHD?
The cause for adhd is literally a disfunction of the dopamine receptors in your brain. You dont understand what adhd is like. "just block distractions lol". Like telling someone who is depressed "just be happy" or someone with anxiety "just dont worry about it".
Symptoms most likely didn't decrease dramatically, it's just no longer as visible and easily recognizable to the parents; they also likely started to spend more time with their child, helping them keep attention to tasks that need it.
Parents are notoriously unreliable witnesses if you're looking out for signs of neurodivergency. It's just as likely that the symptoms aren't gone at all, they're just less visible now that they have excluded the one marker they had noticed.
I used to be the same. But I find it just keeps me up more because there is so much potential for it to become interesting...even the most boring pods. Now I remove my bed from the bedroom and if anything I use a Calm sleep story.
ASMR? There's a woman called yang haiyang who doesn't mean to do ASMR, which is probably why this works for me. I put on a video of her making yogurt or drawing or talking about some trip to a local museum and pass put. Whenever I can't get to sleep I toss one of the dozens of videos she's uploaded that day on.
> people with ADHD...because their brains don't work like this.
You might be surprised to find out that there is actually no proof of this.
The biggest thing impacting people with ADHD symptoms is the diagnosis. It implies they have a brain disorder, and cuts short any exploration into environmental causes of their symptoms.
And an environmental cause may in fact be, simply not trying some simple advice from this article. Resolved by education.
I would be very surprised because that's complete nonsense. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder with changes in both neurochemistry and structural development of the brain [1]. This is why drugs like Adderall are highly effective in treating the symptoms of ADHD. You cannot cure disorders of the brain by reading blogs on the internet, and it is this kind of ignorance that has given people with neurological issues a lot of grief and shame in the past.
You will find a lot of research, but there are no meta-analyses of brain imaging or gene studies showing any correlation to those diagnosed with ADHD. Even the diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, explicitly states that no biomarkers for diagnosis exist. The descriptive diagnostic criteria for ADHD were simply made up by a group of psychiatrists in the 1980s from their observations. So the definition of ADHD is entirely recursive.
So all we know is people have some basket of symptoms, and an impairment in their ability to live their life, but an entirely unknown cause.
You may also be surprised to find that there is no proof of the link between depression and serotonin either - which is the main theory for treatment.
100%. Started this recently. It works perfectly if you can withstand the withdrawals!
The moment you start doing this, is the moment you have to confront how incredibly addicted you actually are to your phone and the internet.
It will feel like you are being tortured. And it's very easy to give in because the immediate consequences are quite tame (getting to sleep a bit later, little less energy the next day). But over time they add up.
I highly recommend trying it and observing your mind go crazy. You can truly start to understand addicts and what they go through.
The biggest revelation was that cold turkey doesn't work too well. Instantly cutting off access to your phone can cause you to be consumed by the desire to have access to it (moreso than you even felt before), and you lose a lot of mental energy fighting against this. Which can disrupt your work, and disrupt your sleep even more so than if you allowed yourself access to it.
I think this is the reason most people don't do it even though its such a simple and obvious advice.
If you’re that addicted you’ve got real problems and you should absolutely be following through with this and other things to break that addiction. I question how many people would really react like that. I use my phone in bed at times I shouldn’t but it’s a complete non issue to not have it in bed.
The biggest problem of our modern age is the removal of agency.
We are being pathologized by pseudo-science all around us.
When people mention "willpower", everyone today is looking for a diagnosis as an excuse instead.
Some things really are as simple as articles like this.
The failing is education. People don't understand the way they have re-shaped their brains from pretty much everything spawning from the internet and tv.
>When people mention "willpower", everyone today is looking for a diagnosis as an excuse instead.
>People don't understand the way they have re-shaped their brains from pretty much everything spawning from the internet and tv.
Sounds like people are looking to understand, but maybe according to you they are looking in the wrong places?
Also, who is everyone? I think a ton of Westerners and especially Americans have been conditioned into believing various convenient lies that advertisers and cultural mythology tells, along the lines of "you can have everything you want without doing hardly anything at all as long as you belong to the right groups and spend your money 'correctly.'" As I think you correctly identify, this is further exacerbated by modern tech which treats attention span as a commodity and tries (often very successfully) to hack and hijack it for the benefit of advertisers and data miners.
It seems to me the above is far more damaging to everyone's ability to execute plans involving willpower than any increasing awareness and expanding diagnostic criteria for various physical and mental health disorders.
What diagnoses are we talking about here exactly that everyone is looking for that are totally bunk and pseudo-science? Depression? ADHD? Autism? Anxiety disorders? It's true that as awareness spreads there will be more people who incorrectly think "maybe this is totally me, and it's why I haven't been able to achieve what I want..." But identifying this as the reason people don't have any willpower, I think puts the cart before the horse. People already didn't have much willpower (and also don't know how to use what they have effectively)... so they are looking for reasons for that and end up looking in the wrong places.
Also, just because something can be explained in simple terms does not mean it is simple for everyone nor that it is easy. If it is easy for you, great. You're probably lucky in more ways than you realize.
I think that's legit. Given the entire panorama of experience, the sights sounds, smells, feelings, thoughts, etc. People are moving into thoughtland and becoming alienated to all else. The office job, the tv, videogames, the computer, social media. All push you into living in your head. Our whole population turning into videogame characters, living inside a personal Matrix kind of thing. It's a kind of zombie apocalypse.
Re : willpower.
I think that willpower is applicable if that's your thing, but that's nobody's thing really. Most of us are just a leaf on the wind that way. What really matters is the various localized wind gusts, if you get my meaning. That's temptation. I mean, in the classic sense. Temptation sucking us in to dreams, distorting our perspective. And boy, the #1 product in our culture is temptation. Temptation by the trainload.
Recently I've seen so many people being prescribed around me. And they are high-functioning people.
And you have to question whether they actually need to jump on meds every day. Everyone is so happy to be able to take stimulants. I cannot imagine touching the stuff. I find myself observing a dip from simply caffeine which makes me want more when it will keep me up all night.
Plus you see people on their phones all day, completely addicted.
There are definitely real cases like yours, but as you mentioned, it's becoming way too hyped and you are not allowed to criticize the science. It's dangerous for society. Look where the opioid epidemic took us.
Every medicated person you ask tells you their brain just works differently from birth and doesn't produce enough dopamine so they need meds...but its not proven at all, and there is evidence its not the case.
> and only after centuries or decades or research (if we're lucky), we might pinpoint the exact mechanisms.
We might also create such a broad definition of a condition (that we just thought up), and then unnecessary put healthy people on meds and fuck up society.
Advocates always talk like there are no consequences to taking stimulants every day...but you read story after story. It just doesn't make sense, if its safe, then everyone can have it, if not, then...we just make up definitions of it and people who fit that pattern can have it?
> see if what they have is just them "struggling to focus and procrastinating often"
That's not the point. The definition of ADHD clearly defines them as struggling a lot more than the usual person.
ADHD is simply a grouping of behaviors. 126 different combinations in fact.
How does this make it a singular condition that we just throw meds at?
The whole industry just feels like an excuse to prescribe meds. Meds which help everyone.
The current wisdom is as soon as a diagnosis is made: go straight on the meds because there is minimal side-effects. So environmental modifications as treatment are not explored. Plus, once meds are involved, you now have a stimulant dependence to deal with too involving a afternoon crash, and increased anxiety, etc. Then your on anti-depressants to counteract these side-effects, etc. etc.
I was listening to the All-In podcast and Chamath's child got a diagnosis recently, and they said: absolutely no meds. Then took his iPad away and symptoms decreased dramatically.