#the medicine has actually also been helping my ADHD some as my brain feels more....put together if that makes sense | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

moschiola · 10 months

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ADHD+feedback=agony

This is going to be a long and possibly boring text post about art and posting art online, with some self-reflection on top. I don’t usually do these and it’s been ages since I’ve actually written any kind of a longer text, but I really need to put these thoughts onto imaginary digital paper. I’d appreciate if you read it through and if you could give me any form of feedback on this! Your own experiences and etc. I do art because it’s a part of my ADHD-ridden personality, this desire to create always buzzing inside, it’s neither and both work and hobby for me, something I love and hate the most in life, because it tortures me as much as it fills me with joy. So if you ask me ‘hey, what’s your purpose for drawing? What’s your goal, your endgame?’ the answer is really ‘there’s none, it’s more of a curse, it’s just something that makes me alive so I can’t help but continue, cause if I stop it feels like I’d vanish or lose myself completely’. I can’t say I’ve done all other forms of media to express myself, but I’ve tried a lot of things (poetry, photography, music, cosplay, crafting and so on and so forth) and nothing comes close to drawing. And I’m not even sure if ‘expressing myself’ is a right way to put it because it’s not that my art is any kind of deep and meaningful, I just illustrate plots and characters I find appealing in some way or another, for the most part. Now, I don’t consider myself to be a professional, but I also have 20+ years of experience at this point so I might as well be, depending on how you look at it. All self-beating aside, I like to think that my art is at somewhat plausible level at the moment? I am proud of how far I’ve come despite everything and I can still see a lot of progress happening, and god knows I work my ass off to continue improving. The main thing I want to address here is how erratic and incomprehensible my online feedback has been recently and how it makes my brain perform loops of dissociation. I wish I didn’t care for feedback at all, but sadly I do, it’s what gives me the most dopamine. I’ve recently discovered it’s yet-another ADHD thing. Nothing else in life makes me as fulfilled as seeing other people enjoy my pictures, it’s just pure joy without any downsides to it. It’s really not about financial gain from art or fame and popularity, but just creating something new and then seeing people have a positive emotional response to it is what lights up my life and helps to get through all the shit it throws at me. And considering that my family is mostly completely disinterested in what I create (which has been hurting me more than I can describe since I was a little baby), and my paranoia makes it hard to accept compliments from friends and partners, online feedback has been the best medicine for me. I used to tell myself one day I will get good enough to have some following that would be excited about my art and give me constant feedback in return, because that’s what I always saw happen to other artists. I never aimed to be the most popular or to achieve certain numbers of likes, just being ‘good, on average’ was the ideal for me as long as I’ve had a constant crowd behind. I thought, a lot of musicians of the past don’t really make any more new hit songs, but they still can gather a crowd of long-term fans at a concert, right? Once you make it to some level of popularity you never really go into a complete oblivion, as long as you’re still working your craft and putting it out there? And there have been times in my life where I thought that the moment has finally happened and was now my reality, that my art was finally well enough to climb into ‘popular post’ tiers, and that I have gathered enough audience to have a stable interest in my publications, but it never lasted too long. I understand how social media work, how people change hobbies and fandoms, and how the world around us changes altogether, but recently the ride has been too wild for me to comprehend. Although I have a significant number of followers on all my main social media (tumblr, twitter, IG) (and a lot of those followers are fresh newcomers too), the feedback has just been... all over the place. I understand that I’m dipping into different fandoms here and there (then again, the vast majority of them are extremely popular on their own, so you’d think that should help the situation too?) and I’m experimenting with my art styles, but no matter how hard I try there’s just no consistency. I post something that I’m sure will do well and it does. I post something I’m sure will do well again and it completely flops. I post some scribes for fun and it goes super high. I post another funny thing and there’s no response. One post gets 10k likes, the next one gets 30 likes. Then the next one gets 5k. Then 15. I feel like I have no control over it at all, no understanding. It feels like playing a roulette. Just up to chance every time. It’s the same on all social platforms so I don’t think I could attribute it to algorithms only. How can I ever try to invest time and energy into bigger projects if I can’t even estimate if it has a chance of being any sort of likeable? Is my art just extremely non-consistent on its own and I just don’t notice? What’s going on??? I’m entirely grateful for big numbers but I’d really rather have them spread through most things I post? Of course some publications are going to be more popular than others, it’s perfectly fine, but while 300 likes on some posts and 600 likes on other is understandable, the gaps between 10k+ and less-than-30 are just too extreme? Especially when they happen one after the other? I swear I never see this with other people and it just makes my brain intolerable. For all those of you who have reached the bottom of this rant, thank you! If you have any thoughts to share or similar experiences, please do let me know! My main concern here is how to battle this feeling of am-I-going-insane-or-what, and not the numbers of likes. Finding any way out of this would be good because it has really interfered with my art process lately and I hateeee it!

#big text post

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blackmoonrose13 · 1 year

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I just wrote a long rant post, then deleted it...I regret that. TLDR US MEDICAL INSURANCE SUCKS

I am sick of taking pills...they hurt, I don't know why but I assume due to how big my pills are due to how high the dosage is, and for some reason one of them is a fucking rectangle it hurts my throat, I don't like the feel of them going down my throat any more, it just hurts. (and also having memory issues taking them but like ugh thats a different rant)

I asked the doctor who prescribes me my brain pills as I call them...yes for some reason my insurance wanted me to do that. I get why, but the doctor isn't even my therapist they are just in the same damn building. Its stupid and complicated and us medical is dumb some days.

Anyway I asked him if there is a liquid option. I remember folks talking about that. He doesn't look up if my medicines are available for that, just goes. "If they are your insurance wont cover it" I go. "Okay how about another medicine that does the same as my current pills just in liquid form?" He again, doesn't look up, doesn't check the computer which is in the office. Just waves his hand and goes. "Your insurance wont cover it." To be honest I don't think this man knows, or cares to look it up, or even know what my insurance is...it has changed a couple times and he thinks I am on an older one. Also I am technically already taking a generic of a generic so its not like my body aint used to generic options.

I also don't think he cares period and just I don't know. Any time I ask for like an alternative he goes no...but not in a flat out no we cant do this. He does this like hand waving dismissal.

Due to many friends I know who also have adhd, anxiety and depression who also take medical mary jane...listen I can't spell the name right and spell check gave up on helping me. I thought, hey a good alternative, I can take a chocolate laced with the stuff, that shouldn't hurt. I think I can do this. I asked them about it, did a bit of research on my own. Ready to talk to him about this...he once again waves it off going. "It takes a long time to get approved," I can wait if it will make me not take a lot of pills. "it will cost a lot of money." Around 600 bucks and most of that money is for the card according to mom who has helped me research. "It might not even work." That last one irked me the most because he had no issues putting me on new pills which had a slim chance of working. And him going, "We wont know till you take them for a while"

I am just tired of him doing this it seems like he doesn't care or something. I am also scared to be more assertive because the last time I got assertive with a psychiatrist (not the one I am with now), he threatened to call security on me. All I did was point out the hypocrisy he said to me and how rude it was to say what I did was frivolous when he told me I should pursue the thing.

Fun fact about that asshole he asked me why I wear so much black and when I responded honestly. "It's my fave color and things I like come in black." He told me I was deflecting and using sarcasim as a barrier. While yes my autism can make me come off like Daria, or Wednesday addams with bluntness and monotone, I was actually being honest there and open with him, when he said that comment I did clam right up again on him. You know being vulnerable and made fun off when you do that kinda makes you wanna not socialize with that person.

I am off topic.

Any way so I am just really annoyed about my situation...fun fucked up fact only reason I am ranting all this shit, is because my mom knew how in the brain fog I have been as of late and knew my issue with pills and suggested a medication she is on that does the job of two of my pills, while yes not no pill, it is one less and smaller pill for me. And while I love this idea...I remembered all the shit my doctor currently has shot down, and think that is going to happen again...I wont know till june.

Now before anyone asks me this. No I can't go to the same person my mom sees, for 2 reasons, one insurance doesn't cover her, and 2 I don't feel the most comfy sharing the same doctor as my mom. Which I think is understandable.

I just really wish living in a small town wasn't so...annoying. Hard to find good medical people near me who take my insurance...good news can find a oral surgeon that covers me...4-6 hours away.

If I have a hospital emergency I swear the hospital I go to is going to the ground, because how the fuck they treated me the last few times, sexist doctors calling me sweetie, doctors commenting on my weight when that is not why I came to the emergency room, oh the dismissal of my issues, going "I am in pain" yet go "You seem fine to me" The covid deniers oh the list goes on.

I need a drink...or something.

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ganymedesclock · 3 years

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These are questions I've had for some while and it's hard to find someone who'll answer with grace. This mostly relates to disabilities (mental or physical) in fiction.

1) What makes a portrayal of a disability that's harming the character in question ableist?

2) Is there a way to write a disabled villain in a way that isn't ableist?

In the circles I've been in, the common conceptions are you can't use a character's disability as a plot point or showcase it being a hindrance in some manner. heaven forbid you make your villain disabled in some capacity, that's a freaking death sentence to a creative's image. I understand historically villains were the only characters given disabilities, but (and this is my personal experience) I've not seen as many disabled villains nowadays, heck, I see more disabled heroes in media nowadays.

Sorry if this comes off as abrasive, I'd really like to be informed for future media consumption and my own creative endeavors.

Okay so the first thing I'm going to say is that while it IS a good idea to talk to disabled people and get their feedback, disabled people are not a monolith and they aren't going to all have the same take on how this goes.

My personal take is biased in favor that I'm a neurodivergent person (ADHD and autism) who has no real experience with physical disabilities, so I won't speak for physically disabled people- heck, I won't even speak for every neurotype. Like I say, people aren't a monolith.

For myself and my own writing of disabled characters, here's a couple of concepts I stick by:

Research is your friend

Think about broad conventions of ableism

Be mindful of cast composition

1. Research is your friend

Yeah this is the thing everybody says, so here's the main bases I try to cover:

What's the story on this character's disability?

Less in terms of 'tragic angst' and more, what kind of condition this is- because a congenital amputee (that is to say, someone who was born without a limb) will have a different relationship to said limb absence than someone who lost their limb years ago to someone who lost their limb yesterday. How did people in their life respond to it, and how did they respond to it? These responses are not "natural" and will not be the same to every person with every worldview. This can also be a great environment to do worldbuilding in! Think about the movie (and the tv series) How To Train Your Dragon. The vikings in that setting don't have access to modern medicine, and they're, well, literally fighting dragons and other vikings. The instance of disability is high, and the medical terminology to talk about said disabilities is fairly lackluster- but in a context where you need every man you possibly can to avoid the winter, the mindset is going to be not necessarily very correct, but egalitarian. You live in a village of twenty people and know a guy who took a nasty blow to the head and hasn't quite been the same ever since? "Traumatic Brain Injury" is probably not going to be on your lips, but you're also probably going to just make whatever peace you need to and figure out how to accommodate Old Byron for his occasional inability to find the right word, stammers and trembles. In this example, there are several relevant pieces of information- what the character's disability is (aphasia), how they got it (brain injury), and the culture and climate around it (every man has to work, and we can't make more men or throw them away very easily, so, how can we make sure this person can work even if we don't know what's wrong with them)

And that dovetails into:

What's the real history, and modern understandings, of this?

This is where "knowing the story" helps a lot. To keep positing our hypothetical viking with a brain injury, I can look into brain injuries, what affects their extent and prognosis, and maybe even beliefs about this from the time period and setting I'm thinking of (because people have had brains, and brain injuries, the entire time!) Sure, if the setting is fantastical, I have wiggle room, but looking at inspirations might give me a guide post.

Having a name for your disorder also lets you look for posts made by specific people who live with the condition talking about their lives. This is super, super important for conditions stereotyped as really scary, like schizophrenia or narcissistic personality disorder. Even if you already know "schizophrenic people are real and normal" it's still a good thing to wake yourself up and connect with others.

2. Think about broad conventions of ableism

It CAN seem very daunting or intimidating to stay ahead of every single possible condition that could affect someone's body and mind and the specific stereotypes to avoid- there's a lot under the vast umbrella of human experience and we're learning more all the time! A good hallmark is, ableism has a few broad tendencies, and when you see those tendencies rear their head, in your own thinking or in accounts you read by others, it's good to put your skeptical glasses on and look closer. Here's a few that I tend to watch out for:

Failing the “heartwarming dog” test

This was a piece of sage wisdom that passed my eyeballs, became accepted as sage wisdom, and my brain magnificently failed to recall where I saw it. Basically, if you could replace your disabled character with a lovable pet who might need a procedure to save them, and it wouldn’t change the plot, that’s something to look into.

Disability activists speak often about infantilization, and this is a big thing of what they mean- a lot of casual ableism considers disabled people as basically belonging to, or being a burden onto, the able-bodied and neurotypical. This doesn’t necessarily even need to have an able neurotypical in the picture- a personal experience I had that was extremely hurtful was at a point in high school, I decided to do some research on autism for a school project. As an autistic teenager looking up resources online, I was very upset to realize that every single resource I accessed at the time presumed it was talking to a neurotypical parent about their helpless autistic child. I was looking for resources to myself, yet made to feel like I was the subject in a conversation.

Likewise, many wheelchair users have relayed the experience of, when they, in their chair, are in an environment accompanied by someone else who isn’t using a chair, strangers would speak to the standing person exclusively, avoiding addressing the chair user.

It’s important to always remind yourself that at no point do disabled people stop being people. Yes, even people who have facial deformities; yes, even people who need help using the bathroom; yes, even people who drool; yes, even people whose conditions impact their ability to communicate, yes, even people with cognitive disabilities. They are people, they deserve dignity, and they are not “a child trapped in a 27-year-old body”- a disabled adult is still an adult. All of the “trying to learn the right rules” in the world won’t save you if you keep an underlying fear of non-normative bodies and minds.

This also has a modest overlap between disability and sexuality in particular. I am an autistic grayromantic ace. Absolutely none of my choices or inclinations about sex are because I’m too naive or innocent or childlike to comprehend the notion- disabled people have as diverse a relationship with sexuality as any other. That underlying fear- as mentioned before- can prevent many people from imagining that, say, a wheelchair user might enjoy sex and have experience with it. Make sure all of your disabled characters have full internal worlds.

Poor sickly little Tiffany and the Red Right Hand

A big part of fictional ableism is that it separates the disabled into two categories. Anybody who’s used TVTropes would recognize the latter term I used here. But to keep it brief:

Poor, sickly little Tiffany is cute. Vulnerable. How her disability affects her life is that it constantly creates a pall of suffering that she lives beneath. After all, having a non-normative mind or body must be an endless cavalcade of suffering and tragedy, right? People who are disabled clearly spend their every waking moment affected by, and upset, that they aren’t normal!

The answer is... No, actually. Cut the sad violin; even people who have chronic pain who are literally experiencing pain a lot more than the rest of us are still fully capable of living complex lives and being happy. If nothing else, it would be literally boring to feel nothing but awful, and people with major depression or other problems still, also, have complicated experiences. And yes, some of it’s not great. You don’t have to present every disability as disingenuously a joy to have. But make a point that they own these things. It is a very different feeling to have a concerned father looking through the window at his angel-faced daughter rocking sadly in her wheelchair while she stares longingly out the window, compared to a character waking up at midnight because they have to go do something and frustratedly hauling their body out of their bed into their chair to get going.

Poor Sickly Little Tiffany (PSLT, if you will) virtually always are young, and they virtually always are bound to the problems listed under ‘failing the heartwarming dog’ test. Yes, disabled kids exist, but the point I’m making here is that in the duality of the most widely accepted disabled characters, PSLT embodies the nadir of the Victim, who is so pure, so saintly, so gracious, that it can only be a cruel quirk of fate that she’s suffering. After all, it’s not as if disabled people have the same dignity that any neurotypical and able-bodied person has, where they can be an asshole and still expect other people to not seriously attack their quality of life- it’s a “service” for the neurotypical and able-bodied to “humor” them.

(this is a bad way to think. Either human lives matter or they don’t. There is no “wretched half-experience” here- if you wouldn’t bodily grab and yank around a person standing on their own feet, you have no business grabbing another person’s wheelchair)

On the opposite end- and relevant to your question- is the Red Right Hand. The Red Right Hand does not have PSLT’s innocence or “purity”- is the opposite extreme. The Red Right Hand is virtually always visually deformed, and framed as threatening for their visual deformity. To pick on a movie I like a fair amount, think about how in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the title character is described- “Strong. Fast. Had a metal arm.” That’s a subtle example, but, think about how that metal arm is menacing. Sure, it’s a high tech weapon in a superhero genre- but who has the metal arm? The Winter Soldier, who is, while a tormented figure that ultimately becomes more heroic- scary. Aggressive. Out for blood.

The man who walks at midnight with a Red Right Hand is a signal to us that his character is foul because of the twisting of his body. A good person, we are led to believe, would not be so- or a good person would be ashamed of their deformity and work to hide it. The Red Right Hand is not merely “an evil disabled person”- they are a disabled person whose disability is depicted as symptomatic of their evil, twisted nature, and when you pair this trope with PSLT, it sends a message: “stay in your place, disabled people. Be sad, be consumable, and let us push you around and decide what to do with you. If you get uppity, if you have ideas, if you stand up to us, then the thing that made you a helpless little victim will suddenly make you a horrible monster, and justify us handling you with inhumanity.”

As someone who is a BIG fan of eldritch horror and many forms of unsettling “wrongness” it is extremely important to watch out for the Red Right Hand. Be careful how you talk about Villainous Disability- there is no connection between disability and morality. People will be good, bad, or simply just people entirely separate from their status of ability or disability. It’s just as ableist to depict every disabled person as an innocent good soul as it is to exclusively deal in grim and ghastly monsters.

Don’t justify disabilities and don’t destroy them.

Superpowers are cool. Characters can and IMO should have superpowers, as long as you’re writing a genre when they’re there.

BUT.

It’s important to remember that there is no justification for disabilities, because they don’t need one. Disability is simply a feature characters have. You do not need to go “they’re blind, BUT they can see the future”

This is admittedly shaky, and people can argue either way; the Blind Seer is a very pronounced mythological figure and an interesting philosophical point about what truly matters in the world. There’s a reason it exists as a conceit. But if every blind character is blind in a way that completely negates that disability or makes it meaningless- this sucks. People have been blind since the dawn of time. And people will always accommodate their disabilities in different ways. Even if the technology exists to fix some forms of blindness, there are people who will have “fixable” blindness and refuse to treat it. There will be individuals born blind who have no meaningful desire to modify this. And there are some people whose condition will be inoperable even if it “shouldn’t” be.

You don’t need to make your disabled characters excessively cool, or give them a means by which the audience can totally forget they’re disabled. Again, this is a place where strong worldbuilding is your buddy- a handwave of “x technology fixed all disabilities”, in my opinion, will never come off good. If, instead, however, you throw out a careless detail that the cool girl the main character is chatting up in a cyberpunk bar has an obvious spinal modification, and feature other characters with prosthetics and without- I will like your work a lot, actually. Even if you’re handing out a fictional “cure”- show the seams. Make it have drawbacks and pros and cons. A great example of this is in the series Full Metal Alchemist- the main character has two prosthetic limbs, and not only do these limbs come with problems, some mundane (he has phantom limb pains, and has to deal with outgrowing his prostheses or damaging them in combat) some more fantastical (these artificial limbs are connected to his nerves to function fluidly- which means that they get surgically installed with no anesthesia and hurt like fuck plugging in- and they require master engineering to stay in shape). We explicitly see a scene of the experts responsible for said limbs talking to a man who uses an ordinary prosthetic leg, despite the advantages of an automail limb, because these drawbacks are daunting to him and he is happier with a simple prosthetic leg.

Even in mundane accommodations you didn’t make up- no two wheelchair users use their chair the exact same way, and there’s a huge diversity of chairs. Someone might be legally blind but still navigate confidently on their own; they might use a guide dog, or they might use a cane. They might even change their needs from situation to situation!

Disability accommodations are part of life

This ties in heavily to the previous point, but seriously! Don’t just look up one model of cane and superimpose it with no modifications onto your character- think about what their lifestyle is, and what kind of person they are!

Also medication is not the devil. Yes, medical abuse is real and tragic and the medication is not magic fairy dust that solves all problems either. But also, it’s straight ableism to act like anybody needing pills for any reason is a scary edgy plot twist.

(and addiction is a disease. Please be careful, and moreover be compassionate, if you’re writing a character who’s an addict)

3. Be mindful of cast composition

This, to me, is a big tip about disability writing and it’s also super easy to implement!

Just make sure your cast has a lot of meaningful disabled characters in it!

Have you done all the work you can to try and dodge the Red Right Hand but you’re still worried your disabled villain is a bad look? They sure won’t look like a commentary on disability if three other people in the cast are disabled and don’t have the same outlook or role! Worried that you’re PSLT-ing your main character’s disabled child? Maybe the disability is hereditary and they got it from the main character!

The more disabled characters you have, the more it will challenge you to think about what their individual relationship is with the world and the less you’ll rely on hackneyed tropes. At least, ideally.

Ultimately, there’s no perfect silver bullet of diversity writing that will prevent a work from EVER being ableist, but I hope this helped, at least!

#disability #writing ruminations #readmore

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thevirgodoll · 4 years

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hi! i was wondering if you have any tips to stay organized and stay on task? i’ve been doing a short online course this year and have really struggled to ACTUALLY bring myself to do the work, as assignments and lessons are not under any time constraints i just don’t do it. i also have adhd so get bored or distracted easily. do you have any tips for me?

This is really close to me because I also have ADHD. I have both inattentive and hyperactive type. *As a result, this academic tip guide will be a guide for people with ADHD and not neurotypical people, without disability. There is a difference.*

I am doing online as well this semester.

1. I create a schedule. If I do not create a schedule, I will be unproductive the entire day. So, what will help you is to do things in orderly fashion.

For example, at 12p - I will do this assignment/watch this lecture. You have to dictate what time you’re doing everything. Then, you also have to block out technology distractions while you are working.

-> Even if you’ve gotten halfway through the day with no schedule, write down or block off times on your digital calendar for what you are going to do at each time. ADHD is easier to tackle if you break things down into smaller tasks.

*Pro tip that I almost forgot: before you do anything, wear your day clothes. Don’t wear pajamas. Actually getting dressed or even doing hair/makeup changes things.

2. Download the Forest app after you have created your schedule. I consistently recommend this because it works in increasing productivity. It allows you to set it for however long you’re doing this task, say 30 minutes.

-> Why?: It will block all apps on your phone for (insert time here) to plant a tree, and if you leave the app your “tree” will die. Eventually, the more sessions you do, the more points you will gain to plant different plants, and eventually plant real trees around the world.

3. Have a list (& a planner) as well. Not only is the schedule creating structure, but the list creates even more structure so you know what you need to get done for the day. It also helps you not fall victim to the classic symptom of forgetting. Each day, you should write down what you WANT to get done and create your own times to look at lecture and assignments. Have goals for the day.

For example: complete assignment 2.

If you do not have expectations with yourself before the day begins, your ADHD will kind of take over and do something else. I have structure to my day. I set a timer to wake up at the same time. I take my ADHD medicine 90 minutes before my final wake up time, and I do my morning routine once it kicks in. Having the same routine helps.

-> Focus on your goals. Don’t be super harsh about the times.

-> Don’t overwhelm with how many things on to do list. Again, break it up into small tasks. For example, one part being: Wash dishes or fold laundry. It makes it less overwhelming to your brain and gives you a choice of which task. Typical non ADHD people just tell you to prioritize tasks but that doesn’t work for us. Do it in a random order and it gets the job done.

4. TAKE BREAKS! The other side to this is making sure that you give yourself adequate breaks.

*For hyperfocus, wait til your hyperfocus has started to wear off. Use it to your advantage for peak productivity. It is no joke.*

-> The misconception is that some people with ADHD are lazy and as a result, some ADHDers won’t take breaks. You can take a break. Healthy, long breaks do more for you long term.

-> Have a timer set. For example, after a 45 minute session or an hour session, I will take a break to do another task that has nothing to do with studying, like laundry, eating a snack, or stretching. Then after that task is done, I will go back to studying.

5. Have a workspace. Only do work at this space. I do schoolwork at my living room table and it is perfect. I do not study in my room because that is my sanctuary for relaxation and rest, not productivity. Make an effort to make the workspace clean, with your supplies - laptop, notebooks, pens, etc - readily available.

-> Once I get to my workspace, everything for the morning is already done. I’ve done my morning routine, so all there is left to do is hydrate while I study.

6. Recognize if you have adequate energy to do the task. Sometimes, with ADHD you may neglect your needs. If you are not getting enough rest, here are some tips:

•Bed should be for rest only.

•Blackout curtains

•Lavender essential oil, I have a diffuser but you can also put it on your pillow

•Background noise: pick what you want, lo fi music, rain sounds, binaural beats, singing bowls

•If all else fails, ADHD is often comorbid with other illnesses, meaning you could have a form of depression causing insomnia for example. This should be considered if you are having long term issues and symptoms.

7. Don’t overdo it. We are not neurotypical. Executive dysfunction is real - meaning our brains actually shut down when it perceives a task to be mundane.

-> You do not have to fit everything into one schedule for the sake of being “productive”. Each day should be what you know you can do, and there are different days to tackle different goals.

-> When you feel like you cannot continue, which is literally a symptom of ADHD, sit still for a few minutes.

8. Have a “What I Did Today” List. Because of how ADHD actually makes us feel, we don’t realize how much work we have put in. ADHD actually can be explained easily, we have about 2 dopamine workers showing up to work while most people are at maximum capacity. We are working overtime to do our best, even on medicine. So, acknowledging what we did today is good and encouraging, or at least reflecting in a journal.

9. Play music. It’s recommended to play study music without words because with ADHD we will submerge ourselves into the playlist of nostalgic 90s R&B. I recommend lo fi hip hop on YouTube, video game instrumentals, classical music, or jazz instrumentals. Whatever gets you going just do it!

General ADHD tips:

•Rewrite lecture notes and type the lecture notes.

•Color code with bright colors and pretty drawings or calligraphy

•Instead of telling yourself “I need to take notes” which usually leads to procrastination say “Rewrite lecture notes and emphasize main points” ... this is useful in your to do list but in everyday goals

•Generally try to get your assignments done ahead of time if there is structure to certain courses, if not, again, stick to the schedule. If you slip one day off your schedule then don’t beat yourself up. Breathe!!!

•Side effect of most ADHD meds is that you’re not hungry so buy easy things to eat like muscle milk or yogurt and granola or smoothies so you can sustain yourself

•Get a dry erase board to show what you need to do for the day and put it on the fridge with command strips

•To avoid forgetting things, put them at a table near the door where you leave your apartment/dorm/house.

•Don’t overthink the time it takes to get ready, often that’s why ADHDers are late. Better to be super early than late though - have a routine set so you know how long each task takes - for example “I know a shower takes me 15 mins, washing my face takes 60 seconds and a few more including sunscreen/moisturizer, etc...”

•In that same grain, set timers for going to the bathroom, showering, etc just in case you one day hyperfocus and push yourself too far

•Open the blinds!!!!

•Clean your room and tidy up your space. A cluttered space impacts your mental health in a really negative way. Your space reflects your mental state at times as well, so check in with yourself. Have a specific day where you know you’re going to clean, but ADHD sometimes gives us bursts of cleaning so take advantage of that as well.

•Anytime your water bottle empties refill it. Have your water bottle or mason jar next to your workspace, and drink 5-10 gulps. Seriously. ADHD depends a lot on hydration, especially if you are on medicine which naturally dehydrates you. If you do not stay hydrated, you’ll get that massive headache mid day and crash sooner. A lot of times, lack of productivity can be due to not drinking enough water.

•If you don’t take medication, then sometimes you may notice you love coffee, and that’s because it’s a stimulant. Too much of anything is not good, but balance it with water. If you’re going to use coffee to kinda “medicate” then do it close to when you’re going to be productive.

•Setting yourself up to do a task rather than envisioning the overwhelming act of doing the entire action. “Okay, lets just get up and get the first step down, such as opening the laptop or wetting the toothbrush.” Baby steps.

•Take advantage of accommodations! Your college more than likely has an Office of Disability Services. Also, email your professors...they’re actually just as stressed as you about classes being online.

•Remember that you’re already trying as hard as you can, so don’t listen to the narrative of “try harder”, “you’re *r word*”, “you’re cheating by using medication”, “just do it,” “it’s easy,” “what’s so hard about it?” or “you’re lazy”. Anyone telling you that, even yourself, is wrong. And DO NOT allow anyone to be ableist, even yourself.

•Validate yourself. Don’t let anyone to do the “I experience that too”/“I know what you mean”/“we ALL have trouble with this!” and they don’t have ADHD. No. It’s our experience, it’s valid, and unlike anything on the planet. If you’re reading this and you don’t have ADHD - no, you do not experience any of the things in my next bullet point.

•Don’t be hard on yourself if you stumble along the way getting this right. ADHD completely changes your executive functioning.

We see the task, but our brain blocks it.

We have something marked down as “important” but our brain tosses it out in the “trash”.

We watch an entire episode of a show, but our brain ignored the entire thing. Our brain picks and chooses what is stimulating, our brain changes our interests.

We have sensory overload, we have no dopamine, we have bursts of curiosity that cannot be contained (often inconvenient) and if interrupted, our brains cannot take it.

People often discount how many things ADHD actually changes because it’s widely misunderstood. I want to take the time to acknowledge that ADHD, formerly known as simply ADD, has different types: primarily inattentive, primarily hyperactive-impulsive, or combined which is what I have. So it’s not “hyper” and “relatable”. It is also not a buzzword to use to describe things. I must put stereotypes and misrepresentations of ADHD to rest.

It impacts us emotionally as well, which most people don’t know... such as rejection dysphoria — extreme sensitivity to being criticized to where our brains self destruct. Our brains don’t regulate emotions well.

ADHDers - do not fall victim to how everyone else operates and call yourself a failure. We have to work twice as hard and the results actually come out brilliant especially with our determination and imaginative ideas that are also seen in autistic individuals, honorable mention!

There’s good days and bad days. There’s literal changes in thinking that other people do not experience. We all collectively know wouldn’t be who we are without ADHD, but we all recognize the challenges. However, it makes me happy to see messages like this so that I can make a difference and hopefully help one person with ADHD, especially of color, at a time stop being so hard on themselves. 💗

#answered #mental health #adhd #actuallyadhd #studyblr #save

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mrjat396 · 3 years

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THE MANY HEALTH BENEFITS OF METH

In low, pharmaceutical-grade doses, methamphetamine may actually repair and protect the brain in certain circumstances. But stigma against the drug could be harming patients and holding back research.

TROY FARAHMAY 15, 2019

D-methamphetamine is what generally appears on the street—although it's often cut with other chemicals—whereas l-meth provides a less addictive, shorter-lived high that is less desirable among drug users.

(Photo: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)

Ask your doctor about methamphetamine. It's not a phrase you'll ever hear on TV or the radio, but here's a secret: Meth is an incredible medicine. Even the Drug Enforcement Administration admits it, and doctors are known to prescribe it for narcolepsy, obesity, and ADHD. Historically, meth has been used to reverse barbiturate overdoses and even raise blood pressure during surgery. Some preliminary research suggests that meth can be neuroprotective against stroke and traumatic brain injury, even stimulating the growth of brain cells.

Yet we're constantly warned never to try meth—"not even once," goes the refrain—or it will instantly cause addiction and ruin your life. Before fentanyl was the demon drug du jour, meth was seen as the worst, most destructive, most evil chemical you could find on the streets. Even of late, if you ask the New York Times or NBC, you'll learn that meth, "the forgotten killer," is back with a "vengeance." Other outlets, from Rolling Stone to CNN to The Daily Beast, have raised the alarm about meth use in the context of the opioid overdose crisis.

Stimulant-related deaths are indeed on the rise in North America—in some regions, meth is even more prevalent than heroin. Surveying drug overdoses in America from 1979 through 2016, researchers wrote in Science in September of 2018 that "Methamphetamine deaths have increased most dramatically in the western and southwestern United States."

Meth poisonings accounted for an estimated 14,845 hospitalizations in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and another 15,808 emergency room visits. In 2016, around 7,500 people died from overdosing on stimulants, including meth. If you ask most people, including policymakers, you'll hear that meth is a scourge that can do no good.

But if you've ever used something like Vicks VapoInhaler, you've experienced the healing benefits of meth firsthand. That's because the over-the-counter nasal decongestant contains levomethamphetamine, the levorotary form—or "mirror image"—of the same stuff from Breaking Bad. Procter & Gamble tries to obscure this fact by spelling the active ingredient "levmetamfetamine." Selegiline, a drug for treating Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, also metabolizes into levomethamphetamine.

There is a significant difference between these two opposing molecules. D-methamphetamine is what generally appears on the street—although it's often cut with other chemicals—whereas l-meth provides a less addictive, shorter-lived high that is less desirable among drug users. But people can and do use it recreationally. Abuse is rare, however, in part because the high is shitty, but also because d-meth is so widely available. It's easier to buy a more powerful form of the drug on the street than it is to try to extract it from over-the-counter medications.

Other Americans are prescribed actual, pure meth by their doctors. It happens less frequently these days, but in ADHD, obesity, or narcolepsy cases where nothing else has worked, a drug called Desoxyn (methamphetamine hydrochloride) can sometimes help. It can even be prescribed to children as young as seven.

It's important to make these distinctions. Meth didn't make a "comeback"; it never left. It can't return with a "vengeance" and it can't be "evil" because we're talking about a chemical compound here. It has no personality, no feelings, no intentions.

Thus it does a disservice to science and to medicine, as well as to the people who use these drugs responsibly, to treat a molecule with dualistic properties purely as a poison. And as recent research has shown, we're still uncovering some of the potential therapeutic benefits of methamphetamine. Confronting the stigma associated with meth and highlighting its benefits can better inform drug policy and addiction treatment.

(Photo: HO/Royal Thai Navy/AFP/Getty Images)

'IT'S JUST A STIMULANT, LIKE ANY OTHER STIMULANT'

For Jordan*, the meth he's prescribed works better against his ADHD with fewer side effects than the Adderall he'd been on for 20 years. About five years ago, Jordan asked his doctor if he could try methamphetamine. The doc said sure.

"The first time I brought it to the pharmacy, the pharmacist actually said to me, 'Oh, your doctor wrote this prescription wrong, this is the stuff that they make in meth labs,'" Jordan tells me by phone. "I told him to type 'Desoxyn' into the computer, and he did. He kind of backtracked, [but] he obviously had no idea."

Jordan, a middle-aged man from North Carolina who works in clinical research, now switches every three months between Adderall and Desoxyn to prevent building a tolerance to either stimulant.

Methamphetamine and amphetamine (one of the active ingredients in Adderall) are almost identical chemicals. The main difference between the two is the addition of a second methyl group to methamphetamine's chemical structure. This addition makes meth more lipid-soluble, allowing for easier access across the blood-brain barrier. Meth is therefore not only more potent, but also longer-lasting.

"The medications have definitely been important for me, to be productive, to be successful, not just at work but also in my personal life," Jordan says. "I've been on the medications for years, but I can take Adderall or methamphetamine and take a nap afterwards. I don't have any noticeable side effects."

Jordan also doesn't feel "high" from the doses he takes—approximately 10 to 15 milligrams of meth per day. Doses at this level are well tolerated by most people. It's very difficult to estimate the typical dosages of illicit meth taken on the street, but they are generally many times higher and taken every couple of hours. Further, the route of administration—typically, users smoke or inject illicit meth—allows for more of the drug to enter the bloodstream than taking a prescription pill.

At high doses, meth gives a rush of euphoria, boosting attention span, zapping fatigue, and decreasing appetite. Intense sexual arousal, talkativeness, and rapid thought patterns are also common. Body temperature and heart rate shoot up, which can cause irregular heartbeat, increasing the risk of seizures. If taken repeatedly over long periods, street meth can be highly neurotoxic, inducing paranoia and psychosis.

But illicit meth is also often used to self-medicate, according to Mark Willenbring, an addiction psychiatrist from St. Paul, Minnesota, with over 30 years of practice treating substance-use disorders. In Willenbring's experience, most of his patients who use illegal meth are treating undiagnosed ADHD.

"There's a high degree of comorbidity between substance-use disorders and ADD," Willenbring says. "They used meth for years in a controlled way, they never over-used it, they just used enough to get an effect, and then they stopped. One misconception is that it's always very addictive."

With most people who are addicted to meth, Willenbring says, you can't tell it just by looking at them. Carl Hart, a neuroscientist in Columbia University's Department of Psychology, agrees that the image of a snarling meth addict with bad teeth is a false stereotype. The dental damage so prevalent in anti-drug propaganda, he says, is more likely due to poor nutrition and lack of sleep—not to the drug. "There is no empirical evidence to support the claim that methamphetamine causes physical deformities," Hart wrote in a 2014 co-authored report.

"It's just a stimulant, like any other stimulant," Willenbring says. "It's a marketing issue."

Part of the reason Jordan asked to try Desoxyn in the first place was to see if he'd develop any of the "stereotypical meth addict problems," as he puts it. He hasn't.

"Those of us that know the reality have a responsibility to say, 'Hey, not that shooting up meth isn't bad, but the chemical itself isn't bad,'" Jordan says. "It's just misuse of the chemical that's bad."

For Joan*, a 66-year-old grandmother living off the grid in northern Georgia, Desoxyn makes her feel normal. "Not high, not hyped up, just normal," she tells me. She's been taking prescription meth since 2006, but first tried many other ADHD meds, such as Ritalin and Concerta, with poor results. But Desoxyn has not only helped her socialize, manage bills, and finish her master's degree in social work; it's also helped with Joan's depression and self-esteem.

"The only downside is the cost," she says. "It's one of the oldest drugs on the market, but even generic, it is outrageously expensive."

Still, meth isn't for everyone, of course. Kevin*, a 31-year-old artist from the Midwest, was first prescribed Desoxyn at age 15 to treat extreme fatigue and trouble focusing. But misdiagnosed mental-health issues—his doctors thought he had bipolar disorder, when in fact he had post-traumatic stress from childhood abuse—led to worsening symptoms.

"Being able to just take a bunch of pills that made the exhaustion go away for a while felt like a blessing, but it was just a Band-Aid on the problem," Kevin says. "I became completely dependent upon Desoxyn to function, and any lapse in taking my dose would result in a terrible energy crash."

"In retrospect, my neurologist at the time would have done well to consider the effects of intense stimulants on someone already prone to mania, insomnia, and hallucinations," he says. "I think Desoxyn has its merits as part of a treatment plan for attentive disorders, but that's the thing—it needs to be part of a larger understanding of how and why it might have a negative impact upon the patient's overall health, and should remain closely monitored throughout."

"Stigma is the lens [through] which we see all drug issues. It keeps us from making the best decisions. It is fear-based, not rational, not creative. Because of stigma, we have not fully addressed the opioid crisis."

(Photo: Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images)

HOW METH CAN TREAT BRAIN INJURY—AND MUCH MORE

Street doses of meth can be extremely damaging to your health. The purity of such drugs is often unknown, and repeated, high doses of meth have been proven to be neurotoxic. But in low, pharmaceutical-grade doses, meth may actually repair and protect the brain in certain circumstances.

This was first discovered in 2008, when researchers at Queen's Medical Center Neuroscience Institute in Honolulu, Hawaii, analyzed five years of data on traumatic head injuries. They unexpectedly found that patients who tested positive for methamphetamine were significantly less likely to die from the injuries. The authors suggested that meth could have neuroprotective benefits.

To learn more, in 2011, a different team from the University of Montana applied meth to slices of rat brain that had been damaged to resemble the brains of stroke victims. Then they induced strokes in living rats, using a method called embolic MCAO, and injected them with methamphetamine. At low doses, the meth gave better behavioral outcomes and even reduced brain-cell death. At high doses, the meth made outcomes worse.

Because meth stimulates the flow of important neurotransmitters—dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine—the Montana researchers theorized that methamphetamine may provide neuroprotection through multiple pathways. David Poulsen, one of the researchers involved, says this was a "serendipitous discovery."

"So we decided, well, if it worked in stroke, it's probably going to work really well in traumatic brain injury," says Poulsen, now a neurosurgeon at the University of Buffalo who specializes in treatments for protecting the brain after severe damage.

Traumatic brain injury, or TBI, occurs after a violent smash to the skull. Its consequences include concussions on the mild end and coma or death on the severe end. TBI kills around 50,000 Americans annually, according to the CDC, while about 2.8 million of us visit the emergency room for TBI-related injuries every year. There is currently no Food and Drug Administration-approved treatment for TBI.

So, Paulson and his team reasoned, if meth can already be prescribed for children, why not to adults with TBI?

To test the proposition, Poulsen and colleagues gave TBI to rats. Giving an animal brain trauma isn't easy, but for more than two decades, there's been a trick called the rat lateral fluid percussion injury model: Simply cut a hole in the skull of a rat and apply water pressure to the brain.

About half the rodents—19 male Wistar rats—were given this treatment, and eight of these were then given meth. The rats given meth performed better at a task called the Morris water maze, a widely used experiment that involves plopping a rat into a pool of water with a hidden platform. By tracking how long it takes the rodent to find the platform, scientists can measure many different aspects of cognitive function.

"By the third day of training, there were no statistically significant differences between the uninjured control rats and the injured rats that had been treated with methamphetamine," Poulsen and his colleagues wrote.

But the team also found that low doses of meth were protecting immature neurons, while also promoting the birth of new brain cells that are important for learning and memory. The same was also true for rats that were given meth, but not injured.

"We see not just little, but very significant improvements in cognition and behavior," Poulsen says. "Their memories improved, functional behavior is improved.... It's not a trivial difference."

"In light of the fact that low-dose methamphetamine is FDA-approved for use in juveniles and adults, we see no valid reason why it cannot be utilized in human clinical trials for stroke and TBI," Poulsen and colleagues concluded in 2016.

But those clinical trials, considered the gold standard for testing medication, have yet to materialize, even while a 2018 retrospective study found similar results to the Hawaiian neuroscience report: Out of 304 patients with TBI, those who also tested positive for meth had better recovery results than those who did not. "The potential neuroprotective role of meth and other similar substances cannot be ignored," the authors wrote in Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery last July.

There are limited conclusions that we can draw about these rodent and retrospective studies, and it's probably unlikely that nurses will soon start giving meth to people who have cracked their skulls. Still, a wide variety of stimulant therapies for TBI is being explored, with positive results. These include trials with modafinil, a narcolepsy drug; amantadine, a Parkinson's drug; and dextroamphetamine, one of the components of Adderall. But there's still no indication of a single clinical trial for methamphetamine for TBI registered with the National Institutes of Health.

Methylphenidate, also known as Ritalin, seems to be the stimulant most popular in these trials. For example, in 2004, researchers at Drucker Brain Injury Center at MossRehab Hospital in Pennsylvania gave methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin, to 34 patients with moderate to severe TBI. They reported significant improvements in information processing and attention.

Twelve years later, in Gothenburg, Sweden, another 30 patients suffering from prolonged fatigue following TBI were given methylphenidate and observed for six months. They also showed improved cognitive function and reduced fatigue. But a 2016 meta-analysis of 10 controlled trials found the main benefit of giving methylphenidate for TBI was increased attention, "whereas no notable benefit was observed in the facilitation of memory or processing speed," the authors wrote. They encouraged more research into appropriate dosages and length of prescription.

Birgitta Johansson, a neuroscientist at the University of Gothenburg and lead author of the Swedish study, suggests caution whenever treating someone with a brain injury. "With methylphenidate, it is important to be aware about possible side effects, [such] as increased blood pressure and heart rate and also risk of anxiety," she says. "It is always very important to prescribe medication with care and follow the patient carefully."

But the reason meth isn't studied more rigorously—for TBI, for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, for stroke—could also come down to money. Methamphetamine is off-patent, meaning there may be less financial incentive for pharmaceutical companies to explore the drug's potential uses. Consider Vyvanse, a drug first marketed in 2007, with a new formulation introduced in 2017, that racked up $2.1 billion in sales in 2017. Desoxyn, which is sold by three companies, only earned about $9.3 million in 2009.

While Methamphetamine may not be widely recognized as medicine, it clearly has potential to heal as well as harm. Recognizing the duality of meth is arguably all the more essential in the face of a rising stimulant overdose crisis.

"Stigma regarding any substance use or substance use disorder is counterproductive," says Dan Ciccarone, professor of family medicine at the University of California–San Francisco. He says the overdose crisis is shifting from opioids to stimulants and that we are not prepared for the next wave. "Stigma is the lens [through] which we see all drug issues. It keeps us from making the best decisions. It is fear-based, not rational, not creative. Because of stigma, we have not fully addressed the opioid crisis."

That stigma remains a major hurdle, and until doctors and public-health officials counteract this kind of messaging, it seems unlikely that a multinational pharmaceutical company would risk marketing a substance only believed to be toxic and deadly.

"Everything will kill you, if you take enough of it," Poulsen says. "Some things don't require a lot to do that. Meth is one of those things. But just like any drug, the difference between a poison and a cure is the dose."

*These names have been changed.

TAGSALZHEIMER'SADDERALLTRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURIESFEATURES & INVESTIGATIONSMETHAMPHETAMINEMETHTOPIC: HEALTH CARE

BY TROY FARAH

Troy Farah is an independent journalist and photographer in California. His reporting on science, health, and narcotics has appeared in Wired, Ars Technica, Smithsonian, Discover, Vice, and elsewhere. He co-hosts the drug policy podcast Narcotica.

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marvinhasadhd · 4 years

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Okay, so I got my prescription about two weeks ago and since then I have already tried Ritalin a few times.

I started with half a pill (so 5mg) and didn’t feel anything. My doctor advised me to do my next attempt on the next day, but I am chronically bad at listening to medical professionals, so I tried a whole pill (or 10mg) on the afternoon of the same day I tried the first one.

I decided to take it, because our work had been cancelled (I currently work as a security at events which are hosted by our city) and so someone had to wait until the security who worked the night shift arrived. I really need the money, so I volunteered to sit around for a few hours and I decided to take the full pill and try reading for a bit, as thats something where I often struggle with being inattentive and getting distracted by just about everything.

And it kinda helped. I just sat down and read for over an hour without looking at my phone or getting distracted in any other way. I used to read a lot as a child, but since the age of 12-13 I slowly stopped reading as much because I could rarely ever focus on the book for longer times, so reading became a bit frustrating, as I now took days, weeks or sometimes even months to finish books which would have taken me hours when I was younger (one of my biggest achievements as a child was that I finished the whole HarryPotter-Series in just one weekend).

So yeah, that was a nice experience. I tried it again two days later, as I wanted to try studying for university, but this time I tried 1,5 pills (so 15mg) and I didn’t feel much difference to the 10mg. I still couldn’t quite focus on the stuff I had to learn and I kept getting distracted by things around me, especially by the clutter on my desk. I really felt the need to do something about that and so I cleaned my desk. And once my desk was finally free of everything that didn‘t belong there, I cleaned the floor, the kitchen, the bathroom, I did my laundry and I collected all the cat toys and also cleaned all the places my cats like to hang out in of their hair. Once that was done, I tried to learn again and I noticed that I could focus a bit better, but most importantly I noticed that I just managed to keep my focus on doing a cleaning of the whole flat without making any breaks to watch youtube or check twitter or anything. I didn’t even think about my phone, while I did all that. That was kinda crazy, as just about everyone who knows me would describe me as a perfect example of a smartphone-addicted person.

The next day, I tried to learn again and I took two whole pills (aka 20mg or the maximum dosis my doctor allowed me to do before I visit her again) and I noticed that while I could actually focus better, I would also focus very strongly on anything that distracted me. I found one of my cats toys (a self-made mouse) had been ripped and while I was already trying to focus on learning, I just had to get my sewing kit and repair the mouse before I could even think about anything else. So my focus became much better, but also I would focus very strongly on any possible distraction.

The next day my girlfriend arrived and so I didn‘t take Ritalin for a few days, as I know that she isnt too big of a fan of it (that one Netflix-documentary apparently made Ritalin seem like its pure crystal meth) and also I think I shouldn’t need stimulants to be able to focus on my girlfriend. I love her and I always try to give her my fullest attention, so I let the pills in my medicine-cabinet.

Once she was gone again (she has a summer-job in another state, so we only see each other for a few days each week), I tried studying again and so I took two pills in the morning, cleaned my whole learning environment before the effects kicked in and then I actually was able to focus nicely on cell-biology. And ya know, what can I say about that except „The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell“?

Later that day, when the effects already had worn off, I noticed that I also experienced the so-called rebound effect (=symptoms being a bit stronger than usual once the effects of the medication wore off), but as I wanted to continue studying, I decided to take two more pills. So I went to the bathroom, took one, noticed that I had to clean the cat-toilet, cleaned it, forgot that I had already taken one and took two. So I was at 3 whole pills or 30mg of Methylphenidate, which was 1,5 times the maximum dose my doctor told me to take. And then I remembered that I had made plans with a friend to come over and catch up, as we hadn’t seen each other since the whole pandemic started.

So yeah, once he arrived two hours after my accidental intake of 3 pills, I was really focused on what he said and I must say, I felt a mental clarity I usually never felt in normal situations. I also felt a bit more energetic than usual and I experienced the suppressed appetite (which apparently is a rather common side-effect) much stronger than I did with lower doses. Besides that my head felt very warm and I noticed that my pulse was much stronger, so I put on my old smart-watch, just so I could regularly check my pulse (it was constantly over 90, when my usual average it between 60 and 70). Also I told him about my medication and the dosage I had taken, so if I experienced anything bad (the high pulse made me a bit anxious about that) he could inform a doctor. But yeah, nothing bad happened and for two hours we just talked about a lot of things and I just really listened to what he said, which was nice, as I‘m someone who often gets lost in thought while people talk to me, and being able to focus on what he said without getting distracted made me feel like I managed to be a better friend than I‘m usually am.

But nothing lasts forever and so once the effects wore off (took about 4,5 hours) I really couldn’t focus on stuff and I really felt the effects come back much stronger than they usually are. Luckily he is a pretty understanding dude, so he suggested that we just cook until I felt a bit better, which was quite nice, as my appetite also came back and I remembered that I hadn’t eaten anything that day. So we cooked and just played with the cats until I felt a bit better. I noticed that playing with the cats made me quite a bit calmer - maybe it’s the dopamine-boost my tiny fluffy boys give me, or maybe I just overinterpret something. Idk.

(Short break. I know, this post is already pretty long and as it’s about ADHD, I assume that some people reading this also have it. If you managed to read this that far, I‘m really amazed and I really thank you for your attention. Also I made this another text-style, so if you want to take a short break, you could find this spot easier. If you have any tips on how to write so that it’s more suitable for ADHDers to read, please feel free to send me a message, as I would really like it, if I could improve my writing so that my posts are easier to read for other people. Also I promise that this post will be finished soon.)

Okay, so lets continue: once the friend was gone, I washed the dishes, cuddled the cats and went to sleep. Or at least I tried to do so. I just couldn’t fall asleep. It was really impossible for me to close my eyes without having my brain full of thoughts that would keep me awake. I tried to put in calming music, as that helped me to fall asleep back when I was in school, but that didn’t work. I tried to make myself a nice sleeping-environment by putting on nice sounds to pretend that I‘m on the Hogwarts express (I used ambient-mixer for that) and lit small fairy lights, but that also didn’t help. I tried to do a brain-dump and wrote down all the thoughts that kept me awake, but that also didn’t help much. I tried to read all these thoughts out to my cats and talk about all the feelings I had that were linked to the thoughts, but that also didn’t help. (Also the cats kinda decided to run around and play catch after I talked to them for a few minutes. I think they have about the same attention span as I do). At about 5:30 in the morning my girlfriend texted me because she just got up to go to work and I was still awake to answer her. So yeah, at about 6 in the morning I fell into a very light sleep and I can tell you, working a 7 hour shift after that wasn’t fun. So a nice advice of mine: don’t do a higher dose than your doctor allowed you at 6 in the afternoon. Or generally. Listen to your doctors, chances are they know what they are talking about.

And here’s finally the last experience I wanna write about: Today I woke up at 8 and decided that I will use my day productively to learn. So ensured that my desk and everything around it was nice and clean and then I took two pills. And guess what. Now it’s half past 10 and I spent the last 1,5 hours focusing really intensely on writing a tumblr-post about my experiences with Ritalin because I remembered that I wanted to write such a post and I couldn’t focus on anything else while I had this thought. So yeah. Overall I really like the effects it has on me, as I didn’t experience any bad side-effects by now and it really helps me focus, but now I also know that maybe I should make a check-list of things I want to have done before I take it, as these things could be mayor distractions down the line.

I hope these reports could be interesting or helpful to someone out there, but always remember: the experiences of different people can vary vastly, so always remember that such meds can have very different effects on you or people you know. Always consult a doctor or pharmacist if you have medical questions and always remember that taking meds or not doing so is both completely valid, as long as it fits for you.

If you made it this far, I really wanna thank you for taking the time and focus to read this and I hope you found it to be at least somewhat interesting. Feel free to text me if you want to talk about your own experiences, ask questions, give criticism on the way I write or just ask for pictures of my cats. I hope you have a really nice day and yeah. I‘ll post again once something post-worthy happens or a topic which I think to be deserving of a post comes to my mind.

#adhd #adhd story #adhd university #adhd stuff #adhd things #adhd inattentive #adhd meds #adult adhd #adhd problems #adhd post #ritalin #methylphenidate

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cozycryptidcorner · 4 years

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Here is a monster match for the wonderful @rofax!

“Aquarius Sun/Virgo Moon/Taurus Rising. Little bit of an astrology nerd. I like to learn about it. I also think it’s totally made up and makes no logical/scientific sense, but is also right basically 100% of the time. Idk how much you know about astrology but basically I am an eccentric bitch who wants to save the world, is emotionally precise and perfectionist, and seems to really like material things and food! WAHOO. People say my sense of humor is the best thing about me and/or I make them laugh the most, big old bleeding heart, especially for animals. Easily overstimulated ): Anxiety and ADHD are a bitch lol. No self esteem to speak of. I am an atrocity before god. Speaking of: very quiet convert to and practitioner of old (would now be considered) pagan faith. Multiple gods, ancestor worship, local spirits, etc.”

You have been matched with a Huldrekall, the shy, beautiful male counterpart of the alluring Huldra. Contrary to popular belief brought to you by the patriarchy, the Huldrekall are not, in fact, shriveled and disgusting to look at, it’s just that straight men don’t like feeling sexually threatened, not even by forest spirits that they don’t ever see. Like the females, the Huldrekall are almost intangibly beautiful, with soft, glossy hair and large, innocent eyes, and have mossy, hollowed out backs. While they might easily cover up their backs with clothing, the tails are a bit less easy to hide, as the Huldrekall and Huldras use them for balance, and thus must shift them about while moving.

Like other forest spirits, the Huldra and Huldrekall can be found among the trees at a reasonable distance from human society. Oh, they do sometimes come out of their hiding places, put on a dress, and mingle, in the guise of a mysterious visitor or a passing traveler, but their home will always be back in the forest, no matter how many broken hearts they might leave behind. Besides the occasional affair, the Huldra and Huldrekall have a symbiotic relationship with coal burners, as they are willing to watch over the kilns at night in exchange for human food and the occasional piece of clothing. The coal burners don’t get the privilege of seeing their helpers, though, but sleep easy knowing their equipment is being cared for.

Shockingly, the Huldra and Huldrekall seem to respond well to things like good manners, polite exchanges, and positive interactions, almost like they are people with thoughts and opinions of their own. Though, when crossed, the Huldra and Huldrekall are terrifying when they want to be, merciless, cold, just as a human who has been horribly slighted might act. You think that their kind are, well, people, though that’s not what the fear-mongering, power-hungry humans would have anyone believe. Despite the lower, working-class people out in the country knowing better, the city folk are quick to think that what is unknown must be evil.

You met your Huldrekall while you were out gathering herbs and flowers, deep within the forest. He was laying out in the sun on a large tree root, back towards the sky, face nestled in his arms. It takes you exactly three seconds to realize what you’re looking at before you manage to step on a stray stick, the noise snapping loud enough to make your hair stand on end. Your Huldrekall sits up like a shot, his wide, sparkling eyes a light, dusty magenta, and he looks at you, fear dancing across his face, but something else, too. Curiosity? Fascination? You can’t tell before he scampers his tall but lithe body up the tree and through the leaves, hiding from you in the greenery, yet still clearly present as you try to go about your day.

Your Huldrekall follows you as you try to focus on the herbs you need, clinging to the bark of the trees like a child might hang on their mother. At first, you try ignoring him, thinking that he’s only keeping an eye on you because of fear, but there doesn’t seem to be a single essence of tenseness in his body as he slides down from one branch to another. While you focus solely on pretending to not notice his movements, he slowly, tentatively approaches, you can feel his unabashed stare burning through your back. Still, you don’t turn around, nor give him any hint that you know that he is there, because a part of you is just as interested in him as he seemingly is in you, and you don’t want to scare him off.

While you can hear him stiffen every time you accidentally make a move too sudden for his comfort, you don’t realize how close to you he really is until you risk a glance over your shoulder. He’s right there, balanced carefully on a low hanging branch, watching you work with fascinated eyes. He also doesn’t run when he catches you looking at him, either, which you suppose is a step in the right direction, he only flinches back ever so slightly. But he’s still there.

You have to go back home eventually, even though you would like for a moment so magical as this to continue on. As you walk back to the forest’s edge, your friend disappears along the way, slinking back through the trees. You don’t even know that he’s gone until you turn around to look for him, finding nothing more than the grass and leaves, and you feel… well, disappointed, you suppose, but unsurprised. Still, your work will have you back in the forest to forage again soon enough, and a part of you hopes that you will see him when that time comes.

He finds you when it does come, in the dusty rose of the early twilight sky, looking for the petal of a particular flower that only blooms during the first light of dawn. Your Huldrekall approaches with more openness this time around, no longer poised and ready flee. There are times when he is… very close, looking over your shoulder, cheek almost touching yours, becoming more and more difficult to ignore. Almost as though he’s suddenly decided to demand attention, yet is still too shy to put anything to words.

You’re on your knees, fingers digging through the ground in search of certain roots. He’s mirroring you, sitting across the thicket, hands carefully to the side as he watches you work. Absentmindedly, you begin speaking, not really sure what to do with yourself or the strange silence. “This is used for joint pain, you grind it up into a paste, then rub it in the inflamed areas.”

“Really?” He asks, the first thing he ever says to you. His voice is smooth, soft, like a sip of cool water on a hot day, and a little tingle runs down your spine.

“Y-yes,” you manage to gain your footing again, “it can ease stomach pains too if chewed and swallowed in low quantities.”

He’s a quick learner, you’ll give him that. It probably helps that his curiosity seems insatiable, and once he starts talking, he shows no signs of stopping. The chatting isn’t unwelcome, though, and you find him to be a good conversationalist, despite his immediate lack of knowledge of anything outside the forest. Well, he actually has much information when it comes to the ancient magic of the trees themselves, even showing you how to gently tease a bit of energy from the bark if needed. Prayers must be said before and after, as the spirits of the forest don’t take kindly to pillaging.

Your Huldrekall is remarkably bright, too, able to pick up your tips and tricks with little to no trouble, able to remember just about everything that comes out of your mouth. All the little remedies and medicines you make don’t seem to matter much to him or his kind, though, because of their little magic tricks that seem to do the same, just in a different manner of execution. Still, though, he’s interested in “human way of things,” as he calls it, copying your work as you forage and search for different plants. One day, though, you go home and find a little bouquet of plants tied together with a vine, a collection that you don’t remember assembling.

You’ve started making a pretty penny selling roots and herbs from the deeper center of the forest since your kind doesn’t like going very far passed the outlying trees. Thanks to your magical guide, though, you’re able to venture out much deeper than you might risk by yourself, without having to worry about finding your way back. You could blindfold your Huldrekall, shake him about, and drag him through the trees and vines for miles, and he’d still be able to lead you back to the village where you live. It’s rather convenient, you suppose, but you don’t let anyone know just how easy it is for you, people pay you more if you act like you almost died by some giant, carnivorous flower mere hours before.

The gifts keep appearing. No longer in your basket, sometimes you find a pretty stone or dried blossom in your pockets, now, too, and though you try to figure out how he managed to slip them there without noticing, you can’t. You keep everything in a little box, pressing any flowers carefully between books of medicine, and polishing the stones if you get the chance. After letting the gifts pile up a bit, you decide to return the favor, getting a little knick-knack that you’ve kept lying around your home. You don’t really have anything you can slip it in since your Huldrekall is… well, naked, so you cut out the third party and give him the gift point-blank.

He’s enthralled by it, and by the seeming lack of shyness on your part. Even though it’s just a little cheap object you’ve managed to pick up sometime in your past, he acts like it might be worth its weight in gold. While you don’t really know what he does with it, you suppose that he must have a nest of some kind, but after that day, you begin to see more of his kind out of the corner of your eye. Up in the trees, hiding between leaves, watching with careful, weary eyes. Like him, though, they warm up to you eventually, some taking longer than others.

You fell asleep, perhaps by accident, one evening. Last night and the night before had been late ones, so your brain is clouded and your movements sluggish. In your head, you only meant to lay among the flowers for a few moments, just to restore a bit of your strength, but after you open your eyes, the sun is in an entirely different position in the sky. Your Huldrekall is nearby, sitting atop a log, his vulnerable back facing you as he plays lookout. He looks back when he hears you stirring, offering a reassuring, sweet smile. You lay your head back down and continue resting, feeling the warmth of safety emanating from him.

Sometime after that, he started to gently tug at your hand when you leave the forest, a little, reassuring squeeze, one that you don’t find unwelcome. Once, he follows you through the town, wearing fairly clean clothes from god knows where, and spends the night at your home. People look and people talk, but no one’s whispers bother you or your business, and they sure as hell don’t bother your Huldrekall. His spirit is free and magnetic, those same people who would demonize you for fraternizing outside your species soon become enthralled in his stories and words. Maybe you are a little jealous of all the attention he gets, but he makes it clear that he only has eyes for you.

The old gods in the forest are long forgotten by man, but not by your Huldrekall or his kind. They do a sort of worship that must have existed since the dawn of time, dancing and singing towards the moon whenever it is full. You get invited soon after your acceptance by his people, and even though you are nothing more than a quiet, interested viewer at first, that is quick to change. Eventually, you end up holding hands with other Huldra, aiming your face towards the sky and singing a hymn made with a language so old that the words themselves hold power.

#exophilia #monster match #huldra #huldrekall

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kantuck · 5 years

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ADhD, something to think about.

A friend sent me this: (I’m copy/pasting, mistakes are the authors.)

“Kan, saw this on FB, thinking of you.”

I was asked a while ago by a friend to share my thoughts on ADHD, and what I believe about this unique neuro-diversity that we all seem to have. It has taken me some time to put it into words, but here is the basic gist of it and I hope it can help someone to understand the “why” behind what we all experience.

ADHD is not a curse, It is not broken, it is NOT a malfunction of the brain or a “Mis-wiring”. It is not from your mother smoking cigarettes when you were in utero, and it is NOT from too much television as a child. ADHD is a Nuero-diversity. It is a different wiring of the brain as it relates to the body and to information collection AND most importantly it has a purpose! Before I get to that piece though, let me share with you what I KNOW about ADHD.

ADHD is a label that we have assigned to individuals that present with a specific set of symptoms associated with a diagnosable neuro-diversity. These symptoms can include things like distractibility, forgetfulness, inattention, hyper-focused attention, emotional storms, irritability, feelings of worthlessness, active or overactive imagination, tardiness or skewed senses of time, imposter syndrome, out of control thoughts, and severely low self-esteem.

Recently, research studies have identified three (3) aspects of ADHD that are experienced by almost everyone with this neuro-diversity and not experienced by almost none without it.

Interest-based nervous system: Not just interest-based attention, but your entire nervous system functions differently based on your level of interest. When you find something truly interesting it will actually energize you. Sleep is irrelevant, Food is a fleeting thought. You are sustained by interest. Have you ever found yourself up way past time to go to bed, forgot that you had to go to the bathroom, or didn’t eat, just because you were so interested in something? Yeah, me too.

Emotional Hyper-Arousal: Imagine this like you have a volume knob for “Emotions” and yours is turned up 5 notches higher than the neuro-typical people around you. Your highs are higher, your lows are lower. Merely funny is hilarious and mildly sad is sorrowful. Everything is extreme. Not worth humor is funny and not worth heartache is indeed sad. Every emotion felt is more-than.

Rejection-sensitive-dysphoria: Basically, we are hypersensitive to rejection, from anyone. It doesn’t really matter if we consciously care about the individual or group that is enacting the rejection. We are just hyper-sensitive to being rejected by anyone for any reason. Even if we don’t want to be part of the club, we are sensitive to the club not wanting us as a member kind of thing.

Now if we combine these symptoms and aspects we begin to see some pretty obvious and reoccurring traits that cause problems in daily life.

Imposter syndrome: Minimizing our accomplishments and maximizing our failures or faults. If we succeed, then it was easy or luck, but if we fail it is because we are flawed or broken and we are totally responsible.

Hyper-focus: I can be focused on something that I am interested in, but cannot manage to pay attention to a board meeting. I am all about the next book coming out, but forget my anniversary.

Emotional storm: I have a thousand thoughts running through my head and each one has an emotion that I have to feel as it passes and therefore I feel a thousand emotions in the span of a few seconds and cannot differentiate between them.

There are many many more that I don’t think that I need to list. You can see the patterns I am sure.

What if…..?

What if ADHD was natural?

What if ADHD was not ADHD, but something else?

What if ADHD was NOT a Deficit or a Disorder, but an adaptation?

Scientific research now suggests that what we know as ADHD is actually an evolutionary adaptation to a Hunter/Gather lifestyle.

In a natural environment, where there are predators and prey, where the rustling of leaves, or the flash of game in the periphery, or the trickling of water heard, could mean the difference between life or death, it is actually an extreme benefit to have an overabundance of involuntary attention. It is a bonus to be hyper-aware (distractable).

This is why so many that have ADHD wired brains find solace in natural environments. There is so much to “Pull” our attention, but so little to “Pay” attention to. We find ourselves recharged by walks in the forest or sitting near a babbling brook. This is our natural born element and so it invigorates us.

So why so few of us then? Well, let's look at that. Darwin’s theories of evolution state that: If there is a mutation in an individual that is part of a species that makes that individual more likely to survive, then that mutation will be passed along to its offspring and therefore make the offspring more likely to survive than it’s counterparts of the same species and thus, the mutation will eventually, though the process of natural selection, be distributed to the entire species and will no longer be a mutation, just part of the species. For example: if a bird has a mutation that increases its beak size and that increases its survivability, then eventually the entire species will have larger beaks. So, let's look back at 20,000 years into our human history. Everyone that existed on the planet were hunter/gathers. It is very likely that at that time, the majority of individuals were also what we call today, ADHD. Then one day, someone decided that it would be a good idea to plant & farm & build walls & raise livestock & stay in one place.

Now we have these sedentary people that are NOT hunting or gathering in dangerous environments. They are protected by walls and removed from danger.

However, we still have all these ADHDers that cannot stand being still, so they are still hunting and gathering and putting themselves in danger.

Who is more survivable now?

Fast forward 20,000 years…..97% of all humans are sedentary and only 3% are ADHDers.

ADHD is not new, it is not made up by Pharma, it has always been here, just never called the same thing. The first mention of an individual that appeared to display ADHD symptoms that I found was from the writing of Hippocrates, also known as the father of modern medicine, he stated: The patient has quickened responses to sensory experience, but also less tenaciousness because the soul moves on quickly to the next impression.

Back then, “soul” was the word for mind and “impression’ was the word for thought. So what he was saying is ...The patient has heightened responses to external stimulation but has less follow-through because the mind moves on quickly to the next thought.

If that is not ADHD I don’t know what is.

This is not a bad thing though. All we need to do is look throughout history to see ADHDers in action. We can take the symptomatology that we know now and apply it to historical figures and we see that the most innovative and influential individuals in history were probably ADHDers.

Socrates Leonardo Da Vinci Mozart Benjamin Franklin The Wright Brothers Salvadore Dali Walt Disney Nikola Tesla Thomas Edison Albert Einstien John F. Kennedy And if those names don’t do anything for you then how about these names of self-professed ADHDers:

Justin Bieber Simone Biles David Blaine Terry Bradshaw Richard Branson Andre Brown Jim Carrey James Carville Jim Caviezel Wendy Davis Katherine Ellison Josh Freeman Ryan Gosling Viglil Green Ed Hallowell, M.D. Woody Harrelson Mariette Hartley Cameron Herold Paris Hilton Christopher Knight Solange Knowles Adam Kreek Jenny Lawson Greg LeMond Adam Levine Howie Mandel Audra McDonald Alan Meckler Rep. Kendrick Meek Matt Morgan David Neeleman Paul Orfalea Ty Pennington Michael Phelps Pete Rose Michele Rodriguez Louis Smith Leigh Steinberg Payne Stewart Shane Victorino Bubba Watson Henry Winkler Brookley Wofford

ADHD is not the “fault” it’s the exception. We have always been here and we have always been the ones that are changing the world.

There is statistically a higher percentage of ADHD in America than in Europe. Researchers believe that this is because our founding fathers and the immigrants that are our heritage had the out-of-the-box impulsiveness to pack up and go across an entire ocean to make a better life!

ADHD is not a curse, it is not a disorder, society has the disorder because as much as it touts individuality, it is only acknowledged once an individual complies with the obligation of normalcy. You cannot be creative unless you can get to work on time. You cannot be innovative unless all your bills are paid. Blah Blah Blah….

Being born with ADHD is like being born with a beautiful pair of raven black angel wings. Imagine for a moment how that would be. You would be shunned as a freak. Called an abomination. You would try to hide your birthright if only to “Fit in” or be “normal”, and always throughout all of the insults and put-downs, through all of the pain and sorrow, all you would have to do is spread those beautiful black wings and soar….

We are not the problem. We are the solution. We are the R&D while everyone else trudges on the assembly line. We are the inventors and the visionaries, while the neuro-typical are content with the status quo. We take the risks and run the chance….sometimes to our detriment, but also sometimes to glory.

Doubt yourself all you want. Tell us all that “your” ADHD is a disorder or a disability, but make no mistake…..You are amazing.

#ADhD

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adhdisgay · 5 years

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helloo ive been thinkin lately of finally getting a diagnose for adhd cos everytime i read about it my brains like “dats us !” so ive thought for a while that thats what i have and honestly the posts where u talk about not needing a diagnose to have like “the right” to say u have adhd are so encouraging and nice i love them. anyways i really want a diagnose so i can get some meds so i can actually focus and get shit done and i wanted to knwo how has ur experience been with taking meds? thanks 💚

aw omg, I’m glad my posts help! I know when I was on the diagnosis journey I often felt like I couldn’t even like adhd posts bc it wasn’t confirmed, so I want to make sure others don’t feel the way I did

my experience with meds has been an interesting one, that’s for sure! i started with meds about two and a half years ago. they weren’t adhd meds, but before I was diagnosed I was originally put on anti-depressants and anxiety meds since my undiagnosed adhd gave me killer anxiety. they mostly just made me sleepy and I would miss class because I was knocked out, so I stopped taking them.

once my adhd was diagnosed, I was put on 20mg of Adderall XR (the XR lasts all day vs. IR which is the more short-term medicine). it definitely helped me focus, but I had TERRIBLE dry mouth and lack of appetite at first. luckily those symptoms eventually went away for me! the other thing I didn’t like was that it wasn’t a consistent boost of energy. I would get a mild euphoria about an hour in and be ON TOP OF MY SHIT for the afternoon. I would get everything done. I was unstoppable. I could kick the sun. but then 5pm hit and I would crash, hard.

so I asked to be taken down to a lower dosage, and they put me on 15mg Adderall XR. that one worked much better for me! I still got a small rush an hour or so in and would still hit a small crash later on, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the stronger dose. I also rarely took my meds on the weekend, so I had a break from the effects every now and then.

this past winter I was switched to a different insurance that only covered generic Adderall, and I did NOT like that. I don’t remember the manufacturer, but I have read online that people react differently to different manufacturers, so don’t take my experience with generic as everyone’s experience. while I didn’t have a rush/crash, the effects just… didn’t end. I could not sleep on generic. I stopped taking medication because 1) I literally wasn’t sleeping, which was making me anxious and causing me to get sick, and 2) I finished college classes.

now I’m not taking any, though I would like to be. my need for medication isn’t as strong now that I’m out of classes, but even working full-time was rough without them after a few weeks. I think potentially trying Adderall IR might help me if I’m still stuck with generics.

so it’s up to you! medication isn’t for everyone, and it also causes different reactions for each person. I know some people hate how Adderall makes them feel, but it worked very well for me. on the other hand, some people love the generic stuff that was The Worst for me.

I would recommend being upfront about your concerns/questions with your provider! they will have a lot of answers, and in my experience are more likely to believe you if you already come prepared. I had some providers accuse me of trying to just ‘get drugs,’ and being upfront about how I just wanted to see how medications worked for me helped ease that tension (hopefully you don’t experience that, though!).

Definitely stick with any medication you’re trying for at least two weeks, unless the side effects are so bad that you can’t. it took a long time for my appetite suppression and dry mouth to go away, but once they did I felt amazing and productive on my meds. it was still difficult for me to eat, but not impossible, and I was able to make it work.

that was an EXTREMELY long answer, but I hope that was able to help! if you have any more questions since this was asked forever ago, or anything specific that I didn’t touch on, feel free to send another question or send me a message! I’d love to help

#anonymous #ask #long post #meds #personal tag

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riviae · 5 years

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just venting abt my own indecisiveness lmao:

i’m so stressed rt now :/

i’m graduating which is great, but i honestly don’t know what to do next. i’ve got a few viable options but i’m frozen at the crossroads of my education out of sheer indecisiveness. what’s the right choice?? is there such a thing as a ‘right’ choice?? should i fight for the hardest path or should i take the easier path, the one with the least remaining schooling? if i make a standard cost-benefit analysis then of course the easiest option is the best--but it feels like i’m giving up on my original dream.

option 1: med school. that’s what all this work’s been abt--there needs to be doctors that are knowledgeable & supportive of lgbt+, neurodivergent, and disabled ppl as well as poc & understand how these identities intersect/overlap. the state of biomedical ethics is absolutely awful right now--it’s not a required course/topic in the majority of medical schools & so doctors are never really challenged to think past their inherent biases or how they should treat their patients or how knowing a patient’s background can aid in the patient-doctor relationship. patients aren’t a commodity, yet i can count on 1 hand the amt of doctors who know the 4 established virtues of medical ethics or can even explain them: beneficence (you must do what is best/good for the patient), maleficence (”do no harm”), justice (i.e., appropriate rationing of health care, services, supplies, & actively keeping historically-targeted groups of medical malpractice from harm), & autonomy (arguably the most important imo--the patient has their own autonomy & a doctor can /never/ take that away/do things against the patient’s will, which, by definition, makes mental health institutions unethical but i digress).

rt now i’m interested in working as either a neurologist, psychiatrist, pathologist, or specializing specifically in rural medicine (i.e., underserved populations/small towns), but can i really devote the next 8 yrs of my life to an occupation wrought w/ sky-high suicide rates, 36 hr shifts, & all the emotional trauma that comes w/ a field so intertwined w/ death?? idk if i’m strong enough for the demands. i don’t have any interest in money or prestige (i’d prefer to have no attention at all honestly), but i just wanna use my love of science to do some good, no matter how small.

option 2: PhD in neuro. makes logical sense since i’m getting my MSc in a month & also neuro is my fave science of any subfield. i could do a lot of good w/ my research interests (that being of neurodivergent populations--seeing as i have adhd myself). understanding the neurological mechanism(s) behind neurodevelopmental disorders, for instance, can help in reducing harmful symptoms of certain disorders ((note: i do not mean wanting to ‘cure’ autism or anything that obtuse. more like providing pharmacological or genetic-based approaches to therapies. so for instance, i’m a big supporter of the cortical excitability hypothesis of autism which basically states that difficulties in sensory processing, insofar as being especially attentive to stimuli i.e., hypersensitivity/hyposensitivity is concerned, is due to the cortex’s inability to mitigate excitatory signals. so an ASD individual will experience sound or touch/texture aversion bc their brains are truly experiencing the sensory inputs at an incredibly high or low signal, as if their brain is a radio stuck continuously at a volume of either 100 or zero. it’s also why ASD & epilepsy are so often found to be comorbid--hypersensitivity to stimuli is more common & cortical excitability/excess firing of neurons outside of phase synchrony can explain the mechanics behind epilepsy too. oh, & this could also explain adhd symptoms since adhd and autism have considerable overlap both in symptoms as well as brain structure pathology). long story short, academia is great for me bc i love teaching, learning, and putting my brain to use (studying other brains). it’s a good fit & i’d be happy......... but i still have my own hesitations bc academia, esp science, is historically a field wrought w/ misogyny, racism, classism, u name it. it’s a mess™

option 3: pathologists’ assistant. the easy road. i could matriculate in jan (assuming i’d be accepted) & complete the degree in 2 yrs. i’d be able to teach, do clinical stuff (tissue sample analysis, post mortem autopsies, etc.), all w/o having to do all the paperwork, patient-juggling, & long hours that doctors do. i could specialize in pediatric pathology (by applying for a job at a children’s hospital) and really feel like i’m doing good work, helping to make accurate diagnoses of samples & leave it to the docs to tailor their treatment to my diagnosis. i love puzzles/solving things. this would give me a lot to do & it’d be good, honest work. it’d be behind-the-scenes so i wouldn’t need to overextend my naturally shy personality too much either. & the starting salaries are a real nice bonus (insofar as paying off my current student loans are concerned). but idk if i’m as passionate abt tissue sampling as i am abt the brain. i don’t wanna settle for a job simply bc it’s arguably easier than my other academic pursuits and makes good money or is ‘safe.’ ughhh can someone make the decision for me lol?

& all this doesn’t even touch upon my own inferiority complex/inability to recognize my achievements as actual achievements. like sometimes i wonder if i’m even smart or capable of reaching any of my academic goals :/ as they say, u are always gonna be ur biggest critic. 2019 was supposed to be the yr i learned to love myself (or at least my brain), but i fell off at some point & i’m struggling to see my self worth as more than what i ascribe by default to myself & others (since all humans have intrinsic value no matter what imo).

#hannah rambles into the void #// don't rb pls #just a casual thursday night vent post explaining my current job-based woes #these are the thoughts that i struggle w/ on an everyday basis ://///#will likely delete later bc this is just an emotion-fueled post abt nothing #full of sound and fury signifying nothing <-- me & my bs #congrats to anyone who manages to read thru all that & doesn't get a headache cause that's where i am rt now #not tw3

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ricresin · 5 years

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What are some common things people get wrong about adhd in fanfics? Just curious to hear from a person who actually has it

Hi, nonnie. Thanks for asking.

People have made a lot of mistakes with ADHD, but I do blame the media sometimes. Characters with it tend to be the butt of the joke, anybody loud or awkward who makes mistakes, and they never fully go into the whys and hows. There have been a few guides to writing them properly, which I will link at the bottom, but here are the main problems that always make me cringe while reading. And just to start with, this is less so speaking on the predominantly hyperactive-impulsive or the predominantly inattentive, but more on the common combination of the two types, which is what I deal with.

ADHD, as much as any other neurological condition, is not something that ever goes away. And where some mental disorders ebb and flow, get better and get worse, until you grow out of it (if you’re lucky enough) ADHD and it’s symptoms don’t subside. Sometimes medicine does help to control the symptoms, but even then you are susceptible to falling back into them if you don’t focus - which is an ability that the medicine itself gives you.

Impulsivity/Impulsiveness. People use impulsivity in their writing as a way to further a plot, and then promptly ignore it the rest of the story. But it’s something that is damaging to your every day life. It’s jumping to do something innocuous, even though you’re supposed to be doing something much more important. It’s suddenly acting a certain way or asking a certain question to others because your gut and heart tell you to do it, and missing any social clues that may say you shouldn’t. It admitting things you’re not supposed to admit, or starting sentences that are secrets and not realizing until you’ve already half said them. It’s talking too loudly and too closely, or jumping into the fray of situations whether you are welcome there or not. It’s riding your bike down a hill even though you can’t remember how to use your brakes. It’s breaking things before you realize they are breakable. It’s making facial expressions that you don’t even truly intend to make, and having people get mad at you because every part of your heart is on your sleeve.

Caffeine and Adderall. ADHD is treated through stimulant therapy, because the brain of people with ADHD processes stimulants that activate the nervous system differently than other brains. Caffeine represses adenosine receptors and normalizes dopamine does cool shit. While most people drink caffeine to stay awake, people with ADHD are given a different outcome - an alert ability to focus and handle the unbalance in the brain easier. You don’t need a million things happening at once, you don’t have to constantly be moving. If it wasn’t for the potential kidney disease and migraine headaches it could cause, as well as stunting your growth and stimulating anxiety, it could be used as a treatment. Similarly, the medicines commonly used to treat ADHD, are all stimulants of some sort. Adderall itself is amphetamines in different forms, used to affect the central nervous system. It can be used to treat narcolepsy, it’s so strong, but with me it had a very different effect. It made me calmer, and gave me the ability to focus on the task at hand, finishing one thing at a time rather than bouncing around and letting things fall through the cracks. (Ultimately, I couldn’t handle the side effects.)

RSD. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is a very common symptom in ADHD. As the name would suggest, people with ADHD are far more likely to perceive being teased, rejected, or criticized, whether that is the truth or not. RSD causes people to expect criticism and rejection, even when the likelihood is small. Even small types of denial are enough to emotionally trigger them into believing they’ve mucked everything up. When these feelings are internalized, they can lead to cycling depression and suicidal ideation. When they are externalized, they come off as anger, which is more so directed at themselves, but comes off as directed towards other people. People who experience RSD will sometimes be suddenly set apart from a social situation that they were just immersed in because it suddenly occurs to them that they are going to mess it up. The symptoms like these morph people with ADHD into people pleasers - they try to see what a person wants and needs, and gives them anything to achieve that, so they can be proud of themselves.This creates a hazardous situation where people with ADHD accidentally surround themselves with takers, and they are the only ones who give. People with ADHD often require a lot of reassurance - not to be confused by praise or attention.

Stimulation. People with ADHD don’t just move spastically or have shots of energy go through their arms and legs. It’s all about stimulation that their brain craves. It’s clicking pens or tapping fingers. It’s using fidget spinners. It’s reaching out to touch bumpy walls, tall fence posts, and soft couches. It’s not controllable. Smart phones are both a hindrance and a savior - I am never bored, always having fifteen accounts on fifteen different platforms, as well as games and messages, but I also have trouble putting down my phone once I have hyper focused on the stimulation it gives me - even when the situation changes and suddenly my attention is needed somewhere else. And on the other hand, my attention is torn between so many accounts, I can rarely keep communication on any of them active. Don’t even get me started on over stimulation - sometimes I’m in a crowded place, and I feel alive and awesome and 100%, and then two seconds later too many things happen at once and my brain comes to a crashing halt and I go flying off the merry-go-round. Not being able to process things goes both ways - small amounts, and large amounts.

So, as an adult with ADHD who has had it since the day he was born (I could tell you some stories of how much of a demon child I was...) these are just some of the things I wish people would take into account more when writing characters. But if you want to read more, there are some awesome guides here, here, and here that go into even more detail than my brain can sometimes organize.

#adhd #cw suicide #mental health #depression #writing guides #stiles stilinski #adhd rsd #rsd #nonnie #text post #fanfiction #fandom #fanfiction writing #attention defecit hyperactivity disorder #add

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queengeekrose · 5 years

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Setbacks and Mental Health

As some of you know, I started streaming on Twitch last summer, in July, as a way to help me manage my mental health and deal with some of my issues that I have because I'm almost completely housebound. Being housebound like I am means I have very little interaction with other people, except online, and what I do have tends to be limited to doctors and other people who are also ill, or to people who are seeing me in a very limited set of circumstances, most of which are not positive, and people tend to judge me rather harshly for, for a variety of reasons. It makes my introverted nature and extreme shyness and social anxiety a lot harder to deal with, especially since I hear a lot of very rude comments whenever I go out, because I have very good hearing, and sadly, I am far too used to hearing this type of thing. I've been hearing abusive comments thrown at me since I was old enough to understand words, from one person or another. Most of them I can just let roll off my back, but some bother me, a lot. I get triggered, in the true meaning of the word, by some of the comments and I start to backslide into mental health issues that are scary and it can take days, week, or even longer to pull myself back out of those pits. I haven't really talked about it with anyone online, honestly, but maybe I should. Maybe I should bare my soul and be honest about what happened to me over time, instead of just hinting at things and letting people draw their own conclusions. It might help me deal with things too. I'm not really sure.

Some of the things I've taked about in my writing, extensively, happened to me. Others I drew from experiences I helped others get through. All of them however do have more than a large helping of truth to them, when I was describing the hardships of abuse, mental torture, rape, violence, kidnapping (someone I knew in college was grabbed by an ex and held against her will for about six days, she was extremely traumatized and had to leave school because of it by the end of the semester and ended up moving in with me for a few weeks before that, because she felt safer around me than anyone else), eating disorders, anxiety and panic attacks, and painful shyness. I have even talked a bit about PTSD in my stories, and ADHD. All of these things I'm pulling from my own experience, to make my writing as real and human as possible, even though I'm trying to write a character other people can relate to as well. What I'm trying to do is flesh out enough realism to give 'you' a backstory without taking over whatever headcannon you are creating for yourself in the story, when I do that, so I borrow very heavily from my own experiences to keep the experience geniune and grounded. I want thing to be so real you can picture them vividly in your head and immerse yourself, not get lost because something seems inauthentic or wrong, so I tend to pour myself into the writing, more and more, as time goes on. And it's somewhat cathartic too, to a degree, to write about some of the issues I've been through. Don't misunderstand me in anyway please. It's still extremely hard to think about to talk about with anyone and still feels like an open and bleeding stab wound most days, but maybe now it feels like the knife has been removed and the bleeding has slowed a bit, to the point it's not so dangerous anymore. I can cope with things a lot better, most of the time. My writing gave me a lot of my mental piece of mind back.

And then I found streaming and the online communities on Discord and Twitch. This really turned around a lot more then. I had suffered a major mental setback when my father died, even though we were estranged, for a variety of reasons, and mental health had reached an all time low. I went to a doctor and started some new medicines, which helped, slowly, and after about four months on them, I was able to function somewhat normally again a bit. That's when I found Twitch and really threw myself into streaming, modding, and Discord, communicating with people that way. It helped me pull myself back out a lot faster and basically reset my mental health meter to normal much more quickly and stay balanced, with fewer slips. I still had a few day to day struggles with things, like remembering to eat, something I had gotten out of the habit of doing much of, or really at all, when my mood swung started to slip. It had been nearly a year, really, since I had eaten normally, if I'm being honest. That means, as of writing this, in February of 2019, it's been over two years of me having little to no appetite, often skipping meals or forcing myself to eat just one meal a day. I had a lot of medical treatments in there too that made me nauseated and I threw up anything I did eat. Sadly, I never lost a large amount of weight and I am still rather overweight. I did lose some, not that I was really trying to at any point, I just haven't had the appetite or desire to eat anything and facing for often seems like too much for me.

Twitch helped me find people with similar interests and helped me find new areas I was able to absolutely shine in. It didn't matter that my legs didn't work normally, I had a natural talent for keeping communities in line as a moderator on streams for other people. So what if I was a bit overweight? I could make badges and emotes that people liked. Who cared if I struggled with shyness in person? The internet was a great buffer and it meant I never actually saw who I was talking to directly in my streams. I was just talking to names. And yes, sadly I did get trolls. But not that many really, compared to a lot of women I've talked to. I figured it was just soemthing I'd have to live with. Mostly I got them early in my streaming career and they came in and heckled me about my weight, I kicked them out and it was over, I moved on, no harm no foul. I mostly even forgot about them pretty immediately. They didn't leave any lasting impact on me because as I said, I've been hearing that kind of comment, or ones like it all my life.

The trolling I got last week on Wednesday night was different though. For the first time ever it was very sexual in nature. It made me extremely uncomfortable. There were three trolls involved as well. The first was fairly harmless, just egging the second on, who I warned several times, then timed out and eventually banned. The third crossed several lines and has caused me so much emotional and mental distress I have been struggling with severe relapses of my major depressive disorder, PTSD, and even dissociating, which my family doesn't know about. I don't know how to tell them about it. They think it's just me spacing out or my mind wandering, not that I'm literally unable to answer and I lose chunks of time, even if I've answered. I didn't even realize I had been dissociating again until a friend told me he had said things to me and I couldn't recall any of those conversations, nor most of the evening really. I realized I had large gaps in my memory of what had been going on with small breaks in the fog that were clear, what usually happend when I'm having my episodes, and I knew I had to do something. I had to take a step back. I don't dissociate unless something is seriously wrong, obviously.

Now, I'm sure all of you are wondering just what happpened that triggered me so badly that night. I'll explain. First, those two trolls shook me up pretty badly. Like I said, I'm extremely introverted and streaming is already a struggle for me a lot of the time, even if I put on a good front and can act like it's no big deal. Inside, I'm terrified. It wears be down and wears me out. Dealing with trolls in my own stream is hard on me. (On other people's channels, I have no problems, when I'm the mod. I know it's my job and they trust me to handle things.) Secondly, there was a later troll who came into the stream who sent me a direct message, without ever addressing the stream, asking me personal questions like what I was wearing, then trying to buy my panties for insanely large amounts of money. That triggered my PTSD very badly. In college, I had had a guy attempt to sexually assulat me and call me a whore, offering me increasing large amounts of money, much the same way. I only got away because I kicked him off me and screamed for campus security, who heard me and hauled him off. I never told my family about it, mainy because I hate talking about it and don't want to bring it up. I will say though, I don't think he was getting up quickly from my kick at the time. It was before I was in a wheelchair and I had a very powerful set of legs and actively practiced kickboxing. But regardless of that, it triggered me very, very badly the other night, and I'm still suffering occassion episodes. I have a doctor's appointment scheduled very soon, and I intend on talking to her about what to do then, if things haven't gotten back to normal by then, but in the mean time, I'm immersing myself in my usually stress relieving activities and taking a short break from Twitch and twitter to get my mental health back in order.

Sadly one of the side effects of all the mental health issues I struggle with is terrible insomnia. It means many nights I'm unable to sleep, or sleep only a few hours. I know it makes my friends and family worry, but I can't help it. It's all my brain is letting me get. I nap when I can. If I try to sleep more, I have horrible, terrifying nightmares and sleep paralysis. I also just can't sleep. I'm really trying to do my best here everyone. Please know that. I appreciate the worry. Just know I'm still here, struggling on, one day at a time. That's the real meaning behind #PMA (Positive Mental Attitude) after all. Just doing my best, moving forward a day at time and not giving up. It's also why I try to pay it forward as much as I can and make sure everyone else is happy and taken care of too. Stay safe and happy everyone. I love you all!

QueenGeekRose

#pma #real life struggles #dissociation #ptsd #mental health #major depressive disorder #coping #handling setbacks

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icallhimthesun-blog · 5 years

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The Dangers of Energy Pills

It's 10:30 on a Friday night, and Amanda*, a magazine proofreader in New York City, is the last one in the workplace. Once more. Not that she's whining. Actuality is, the 30-year-old has ridden progressive floods of advancements in her concise profession, generally in light of the fact that she has a mix of ability, smarts, and stamina that is difficult to find. Be that as it may, she has something different in her excel weapons store: a mystery reserve of minimal blue-and-white pills.

Amanda got the medications about a year back, after those 60-hour work filled weeks started to leave her rationally disentangled. "I visited my family over the occasions, and they saw I was battling," she says. By some coincidence, her sibling had quite recently been recommended an amphetamine to treat his a lack of ability to concentrate consistently issue, and he offered her five pills as a stocking stuffer, advising her, "Trust me, they'll give all of you the vitality you'll require."

Days after the fact at the workplace, she gulped one part of the way through a ruthless evening that included composition two a minute ago stories, planning meetings with marketing experts, and orchestrating a forthcoming photograph shoot. The outcome: "My capacity to center was crazy," Amanda says. "I wiped out my inbox, which had been flooding for quite a long time, slammed out pages of duplicate, and conceptualized a lot of thoughts. Indeed, even due dates, which normally made me on edge, were no counterpart for my efficiency."

Throughout the following couple of months, Amanda spent her unlawful reserve and afterward mooched two or three dozen additional pills from a companion who wasn't utilizing his remedy. She currently has one pill left and is attempting to adhere to a meaningful boundary on her utilization. All things considered, she's holding tight to the telephone number of a companion of-a-companion who arrangements in underground market pharmaceuticals. "It's an inward battle not to consider him and submit a request," she concedes.

Salvation in a Bottle

It used to be that medication was for improving wiped out individuals. Presently, exhausted vocation ladies and overpowered mothers are fiddling with "corrective nervous system science," a developing (and dubious) field that manages brain and execution improving medications—now and then acquired lawfully, now and again not. These medicines, state advocates, help them surpass associates, push them through their at-home plan for the day, and give them allure in social circumstances. In any case, what these ladies may not understand is that each time they pop a "wonder pill," they're likewise exploring different avenues regarding their wellbeing.

For what reason would anybody have such a high handed demeanor toward taking pills? "Individuals who grew up in the previous decade are so OK with doctor prescribed medications for ADHD and relief from discomfort they've been named Generation Rx," says Leonore Tiefer, Ph.D., a clinical partner teacher of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. Truth be told, as per information from IMS Health, a human services research firm, the nearness of stimulants alone in American culture has for all intents and purposes significantly increased since 1998, with around 40 million remedies apportioned a year ago. Also, the more pills that buoy around in pockets and prescription cupboards, "the greater open door there is for them to get under the control of individuals they weren't endorsed for," says osteopathic doctor Neil Capretto, restorative chief of the Gateway Rehabilitation Center in Pittsburgh. Today, the consideration deficiency drugs methylphenidate and amphetamine/dextroamphetamine are the most mishandled substances on school grounds. However, coeds don't generally shake free from their dependence after graduation; 11 to 15 percent of grown-ups in their twenties confess to utilizing physician recommended drugs for "nonmedical" purposes.

One sort that is picking up notoriety among postgrads is modafinil (better known by its image name, Provigil), a drug formally endorsed to "improve alertness" in individuals with certain barely characterized conditions, for example, narcolepsy and rest apnea. The blog jabber among high-octane female executives peruses something like this: "Provigil rocks! Plan for the day that used to vex me appear to finish themselves!" It bears noticing that modafinil deals have dramatically increased since 2004 and now approach $1 billion yearly.

Now and again, ladies go to drugs not to be progressively beneficial, yet to quiet down. That is the place well known antianxiety medications like lorazepam, alprazolam, and clonazepam come in. Carrie, a previous individual from the Cornell University swimming club, began taking clonazepam after a panicky minute before the beginning of a significant meet. Her specialist recommended medications despite the fact that she was never determined to have any clinical nervousness issue. Presently 23 years of age and working for a sportswear organization in New Jersey, regardless she uncovers a pill from underneath her tote at whatever point frenzy begins to well up inside her. "When you have a great deal going on and you need to do everything consummately," she says, "it's hard not to look for assistance."

Scoring the Goods

What's more, help is frequently as close as the closest specialist's office. In one investigation, on-screen characters who acted like patients and mentioned explicit solutions were fruitful the greater part the time. Doctors rush to haul out the white cushion, you don't need to go to the inconvenience of inquiring. Emily, a 40-year-old childcare supplier from Traverse City, Michigan, disclosed to her specialist she wished she had more vitality during the day. "Attempt this," he advised her, passing a medicine for an amphetamine.

Ladies who can only with significant effort persuade a M.D. to issue a solution regularly go to the web. A year ago, 33% of endorsers of the science diary Nature who confessed to utilizing drugs for "psychological upgrade" acquired their supply over the Internet. Others, most likely, searched pills from their loved ones. In an investigation discharged a year ago by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 29 percent of ladies confessed to sharing or acquiring physician recommended drugs. In some cases, the loaning happens automatically: "I treated one lady who normally dunked into her 8-year-old child's ADHD prescription," says Capretto.

The Lasting Effect of a Quick Fix

In the event that you sit by an Energizer Bunny like Amanda at work, some portion of you may think about whether a pill is your ticket to having everything. Be that as it may, as childcare laborer Emily found, picking up an edge can have startling reactions. A couple of months in the wake of taking an amphetamine, she saw her heart would race for reasons unknown and she'd break out in dousing sweats. She deserted the medication and the M.D. who offered it to her. "I'd preferably be somewhat rationally fluffy over dead," she says.

Specialists caution of different threats as well. Medications like these are intended for explicit restorative purposes, so in case you're sound, you might tinker with neurological wiring that is as of now working the manner in which it should. "At the point when medications are utilized for reasons other than those that are endorsed, no doubt about it," says general internist Lisa Schwartz, M.D., an educator of prescription at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. "A great deal of these medications are so new, the danger of genuine complexities isn't yet clear. They ought to be utilized distinctly under a specialist's supervision." The demonstrated reactions are disturbing enough: Read the notice mark for Amanda's ADHD medication and you'll discover expressions like heart assault and abrupt passing in little kind.

And after that, obviously, there's the potential for enslavement. "In case you're sound, taking these sorts of medications puts you in a dangerous situation," Capretto says. "In the event that you have an inclination toward habit, you don't have the foggiest idea how dainty your ice is." Even some modafinil fans, ameliorated by the medication's notoriety for wellbeing, were shocked after a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association cautioned it could end up addictive.

Another entanglement: Once you're happy with taking one medication, it's anything but difficult to begin legitimizing popping others. "On the off chance that one pill gives you an ideal impact (say, amps your vitality level), you may attempt another sort to fix an alternate kind of issue (possibly help you rest). Before long, you're depending on a medication to control each part of your life," cautions Capretto. "Be that as it may, know this: Each of these medications brings conceivable reactions, which in blend can be risky. You may end up with a clothing rundown of intricacies—distrustfulness, hypertension, heart palpitations, to give some examples—as more medications are brought in with the general mish-mash. Hurl in a couple after-work mixed drinks, and things could get significantly dicier."

Adding to the risk: You may build up a resistance to your prescription. At first, taking a solitary every day portion of, state, alprazolam may give you genuine feelings of serenity. However, a month and a half later, you may require three pills per day to accomplish a similar impact; a couple of months after the fact, you might down five pills every night to get that warm-and-fluffy inclination. "The medications you initially took to get an edge can move toward becoming something you need just to return to the manner in which you were working before you begun on drugs," clarifies Capretto.

A New Normal

Reactions aside, specialists have different worries about popping pills. One such dread is that medications could reclassify what's "typical" and set a standard of hazardous, pill-helped flawlessness. "When a large portion of your office is pulling artificially helped dusk 'til dawn affairs, your [normal level of] profitability may begin to look insufficient," says Martha Farah, Ph.D., executive of the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. "Will you feel strain to begin stretching out your waking hours just to keep up?"

Also, specialists stress that these medications will turn into a prop that shields you from rolling out significant improvements throughout your life. By settling on a handy solution, you might be enticed to put off finding more beneficial arrangements like making sense of how to deal with your time better, adapting new unwinding strategies, or having that get it-out into the open chat with your person. "On the off chance that medications are something you depend on," says Capretto, "you have to investigate your life."

All things considered, he and others foresee that the fame of remedy enhancers will proceed. For whatever length of time that the medications offer momentary advantages, individuals will be attracted to them. That is the reason a few specialists propose that as opposed to stating whether medications ought to be utilized, we ought to decide how they ought to be utilized. Analysts are now leading trials including crisis room doctors to see whether medications like modafinil could decrease the danger of exhaustion related mistakes.

The worry that it's inappropriate to utilize a medication since it's a medication doesn't bode well, as per Farah. In the event that it encourages you accomplish more work or improves the quality or security of the work you do, she says, "that says something the medication's support. Would we like to be snobby and state, 'Gracious, yet it's deceptive to utilize execution upgrading drugs?' " Use among sound individuals ought to rely upon the medication and the circumstance—as long as everybody is clear about the dangers.

"See, many individuals utilize these medications since they work. In any case, you need to exercise alert and truly consider things," Capretto says. "Before you even hand your drug specialist a medicine to fill, have an arrangement at the top of the priority list. Ask yourself: Where am I going with this? Do I intend to be on these pills for multi week? two weeks? a month? There's a truism: 'Don't lift a plane off the ground except if you realize how to arrive it.' That equivalent cogency ought to be connected to physician endorsed medication use."

* All names and some distinguishing subtleties have been changed.

But energy pills good for helth .

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reasonablywittyatbest · 5 years

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I am going to talk about myself, my issues, and my education in GREAT DETAIL. Long story short, despite battling ADHD, depression, anxiety, trauma, etc I have managed to achieve in academia. I came into my current program with no archaeological background and am graduating with a 4.0 GPA. I’m A W E S O M E.

I recognize academic achievement is not the be all end all of personal achievement, but for me its an important part of who I am. And I am proud of what I have been able to achieve even with my own brain plotting against me, even with an abusive family, even with monetary struggles, I’m still here and achieving something I am very proud of.

Today I am graduating from my Masters Program with a 4.0 GPA from Northern Arizona University. It has not been easy to get here.

School was generally easy for me, and I had some awful teachers. My first grade teacher in particular had a deep hatred of me, and I spent more recesses than not on the bench not allowed to play with my friends. When I was 7 I was diagnosed with ADHD and put on medication for it. It got a little better, but I still had a teacher straight up tell my parents I shouldn’t go into anything math or science related because I was just THAT bad at math. I read at a college level though and my IQ test said I had a very high IQ. My father latched onto this like a leech, to him I was a special child. I was also diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder at this time. When I was 10 my dad decided I didn’t have ADHD and took me off my medication, life got so much harder after that and i failed my way through middle school.

Middle school in general was a hell pit of bad awful bad, I was bullied by peers, teachers, and my own family. Right around this time my father’s abuse started to ramp up. The stories from this time period are really bad. One time my dad tried to help me with my math homework. That ended with me sobbing in the hallway and him screaming that I should stop crying because it wasn’t going to make him stop.

Around sophomore year of high school my grades started to because I just wanted to stop being yelled at all the time. I didn’t have a passion for it. It was years later that I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression age 10 and my dad just refused to believe it and get me any help at all, not even therapy. But I was wildly depressed for most of high school.

Tenth grade bio was special though. I had a very enthusiastic teacher and I fell deeply and irrevocably in love with genetics. Other than journalism it was one of the few things I was actually really good at in school. It awoke a general love of learning in me again, after years of struggle had killed it.

Straight out of high school I went into community college. I actually got into the Kronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, but by that point I had decided I no longer wanted to do a degree in journalism, I wanted to go into Biology.

In community college I took three semesters of calculus. I got As and Bs. So yeah, fuck you third grade teacher who told me I shouldn’t go into anything math or science related. I mean, yeah I’m shit at math but still fuck her. I carried a 3.8 GPA in community college, and I got into Chapel Hill when I graduated. But I was unable to afford to go, so I ended up at the University of Arizona.

I met some of the best people I have ever know there who are still some of my dearest friends. I have no regrets. I survived physics and organic chemistry. Two classes designed specifically to fuck with me. Math and memorization. I struggled with untreated ADHD, depression, and anxiety. Well, untreated bipolar 2 most likely? There was a lot of struggle.

In 2013 I graduated with a degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology with a 3.698 GPA from The University of Arizona. I was very bitter about this because I only graduated with Honors instead of High Honors because they really do round out to three places to determine that shit.. I already knew I didn’t want to work in biological research, and originally thought I was going to go to med school.

I took the MCAT, I got an 8/15 on the physics section, but I got a 14/15 on the verbal reasoning section. They don’t let you use a calculator on the physics section, so honestly that was a good showing for me.

I quickly decided medicine was not for me. The culture of doctors is bad and I don’t like the squishy parts of people very much. After many fights with my dad I finally convinced him that no, really, actually, I do not want to go to med school. He refused to accept it until I gave him another field I was going to go into.

@winterpunk and I talked seriously for anything I could give him. We stumbled upon medical anthropology. I threw it out in desperation.

I worked a shitty grocery store job until I got a job at CaptionCall. I worked there for the majority of time between my undergraduate and graduate degree.

For one semester i was able to live in Canada with @winterpunk and go back to school to take classes in anthropology. I fell in love with this subject I had randomly chosen. In particular biological anthropology. I was able to handle actual human bones, and fell in love.

I came back to the states and worked again at CaptionCall, which by the end made me incredibly suicidal. Between my auditory processing disorder and my ADHD it was my own personal hell.

I lived with another friend of mine who was trying to go back to school, We wne through the process of application, and studying for the GREs. Man fuck the GRE. Just another standard test to tell me I real good with words and real bad with numbers. I scored in the 97 percentile for the reading sections, and the 31 percentile for the math sections.

I applied to four programs. Three PhD programs and one Masters program. I got three rejections. I burned the third one on the porch. I finally got a call, I had been accepted into the masters program at NAU. I got a 20 graduate assistant program. This gave me an income, insurance, and full refunds for my tuition.

I was originally in the anthropology track, decided to switch to archaeology the first day of classes. This was a bit of an impulse but I could feel it in my bones it was the right choice. It is one of the first choices I have ever made independently, by myself, with no input from my father. I am still proud of myself. And I love to tell this story.

This has not been an easy thing. During second semester I was so depressed i was crying myself to sleep every single night and the depression was so bad I near constantly thought about killing myself. I finally broke down and cried in public, at a bar, and realized I needed to GET HELP.

I made an appointment with a psychiatrist for the first time in my life. I was finally getting treatment for my mental health issues. I clawed my way out of depression, clawed my way through the semester, I maintained my 4.0. Despite my own brain trying to kill me, despite having no background, I held my own.

I went into the field with no experience, got limited training, and successfully ran my own excavations. I did my own research.

This year I wrote a thesis, did my job, maintained a 4.0, all while still struggling with mental health issues and ADHD, though I do now have a light dose of Adderall.

Now I am graduating with a 4,0 GPA. And while I recognize academic achievement is not the be all end all of personal achievement, for me its an important part of who I am. And I am proud of what I have been able to achieve even with my own brain plotting against me, even with an abusive family, even with monetary struggles, I’m still here and achieving something I am very proud of.

I think I will now make myself some lunch and get those final edits done.

#fuckyesme

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kalimarswriting · 6 years

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The Email of Controlled Rage

In hindsight, this entire thing equates to a very polite "fuck you." I love it so much.

I appreciate that you were trying to be a good person, so I humored you. Unfortunately, I find our conversation is preventing me from being able to do other things due to not being able to think about anything else. If your true intention was to help me be positive then I'm afraid the only way for that to happen is if I resolve the reason I've been offended for the entire afternoon so I can move on with my day, and by extension, my life. Let's get started.

First of all, your opinion has been filed away for later analyzing. There was no need to repeat your point so insistently. I tried to smile and agree, I tried giving you something to think about, I tried to do other things, but you did not stop to think that you only need to speak once. Whatever. I'm not here to accuse you. Point is, my life, my problems, my reactions: they are mine to live and judge myself, not yours. But because you feel it necessary to vocally judge me based on the forty-five minutes you see me every day, please consider what happens in the other twenty-three hours and fifteen minutes you do not, just to give you some knowledge on what shells exactly you are stomping on.

Let me begin by telling you some of the causes for my current negative attitude, starting with events of today. Getting called out and judged in front of others is somewhat of a big fear of mine, and both you and my english teacher did just that. I had to skip lunch because I'm out of money. I can hardly use my right hand because apparently writing too much on a required assignment causes injuries that take months to heal, which means no drawing or games to let off steam. It won't stop hurting. I can't focus on my grades because I'm stressed and overwhelmed by the enormity of my assigments, and I woke up late to top it off. That was just today. Under normal circumstances, it would be a bad day but nothing to cry over. However, I'm a bit of a raw nerve right now for a variety of reasons. Money is pretty tight for my mom and of course my dad has plenty. My dad is a manipulative control freak who doesn't understand emotional anything. I walked out on him and we are on very awkward if not tense relations. My mom recently got out of the hospital for her own emotional issues. Because of this, I had no one to wake me up in the mornings. Sounds like a petty personal problem, but I've been known to sleep through as many as four alarms, which is all we have in the house. So for a long time I was bouncing around places trying to find somewhere to stay out of fear I would sleep in and miss school. Now that she's back home, both my parents are moving, so it seems that I still don't have a stable home. As my primary parent, my mom's the one who has to pay for a lot of the things I need to live, including the four prescritions I take daily for my "mental illnesses," as you so eloquently put it. But since my dad has money, we do not get financial aid for our issues despite the fact that we don't get any help from him. Also, depression does exist, and I take double the maximum dosage of my anti-depressants in an attempt to counter the feeling that there is nothing good in the world. I'm also on the maximum dosage of my ADHD medicine so that maybe I can think straight enough to finish a few worksheets. It's a problem. I know my problems. I know what I need to improve on. I have been well-informed by the excessive amount of people telling me I need to be better in almost every aspect of my life. That's kind of a downer. How can I do better than my best? With my current wrist injury I can't draw or smash (game) my stress away. Add in femenine hormones to the mix, and you've got one negative teenager.

Now I may be wrong because these next things are based on inferences and guesswork from my observations of you, but you seem like a very good student. It looks like you have good grades, lots of time for extra-curricular activities and a fair amount of recognition for your achievements. Considering your technology, state of dress, and the fact that you go to a school in trophy club I can safely assume that your family has money. I doubt you've ever had to worry about finding a place to stay for the night. You have already told me that you don't deal with any learning disabilities. In conclusion, you are fairly sheltered from the problems I have described. Completely ignoring my frustrations with our teacher because your lecture was far more personal than being about him, I don't think you understand my plight because you have not experienced it yourself. I implore you to give this some thought and imagine how tired you would get after many months of it.

To get to why I am so bothered by your opinions on me, I am somewhat offended that you decided to tell me in front of the entire class, but also at the one time no teacher was present. That comes across as pretty suspicious, possibly indicating that on some level, you knew that there was something wrong with what you were doing. That is not an accusation though. Merely an observation. Had this been an office setting, such an action would have led to an involuntary visit to HR.

You really seemed like you were trying to help. I do appreciate that. But it had the opposite effect than you intended. Another person telling me that I need to do better, that I need to be better, does nothing to actually reach that goal. Instead, I feel attacked, like a disappointment, and even more of an outcast than I do already. I am not useless, lazy, or stupid. I have an IQ of 132-140, depending on the individual traits of the brain. The lowest one was processing speed, and obviously, while not genius level it is still well above average. As someone with this intelligence, it is very frustrating to be met with problems and disapproval at every turn, and it begins to be the only thing there after a while. You are what you eat. If you are surrounded by negativity, you will inevitably exude negativity. So, if you please, a continuous and repetitive discussion about my attitude is unneeded and unwelcome, and perhaps it would be best for you to consider more research on your part as well as a bit more respect for others' feelings, privacy, and freedom of expression. Before you call me a hypocrite and point out how much personal information I have given, I only gave it so you would understand, leave me alone and learn from this experience. Someone as smart as you and I need more detailed answers than, "Because I said so," before being convinced of something. If you wish to challenge my points, perhaps we could try switching places for a short while. Good luck dealing with my father.

Thank you for your efforts and consideration.

#my writing #original works #email of rage #i love this #real life stuff

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