According to the CDC, roughly 9.5% of children in the USA have been diagnosed with ADHD, whereas research based in Europe shows that between 3.5% and 5.6% of children in France have been diagnosed with ADHD. Why do you think that is? There has to be a non-medical explanation, don’t you think?
Same goes with the massive rise in diabetes and obesity in the USA, they engineer high fructose corn syrup into many things, people eat lots of things that turn into sugars, insulin resistance is high, but funny that so little of the industry discusses prevention of diabetes and obesity, they simply treat it as a fait accompli — including in kids, once again a new phenomenon. (In fact it has been shown to have a lot of comorbidities with coronavirus complications — but one is a national emergency, the other is not).
I have seen the same kind of reponses on HN when it came to depression and skepticism that SSRIs are the solution. Until all the studies came out last year, any skepticism was met with “you have no idea what real clinical depression is like. It is primarily caused by a chemical imbalance, needs medical intervention and you know nothing! So please don’t participate in the conversation, let the dominant ideology be the only acceptable one.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2022...
Don’t get me wrong — there are real medical cases in kids of ADHD, gender dysphoria, etc. Or depression in adults, or genetically based insultin resistance. But the fact that it is diagnosed now way more than before means that maybe - just maybe - societal and dietary factors play a huge role. This has to deal with human happiness after all. And that includes people on HN.
Whether self-pleasuring with a hand, or with a vibrating device, the societal factors (of hookup culture, or of cost of rent in cities to own your own place and delay marriage, or everyone getting married later because women now want to focus on their career, while gender age gaps remain similar) matter and should be systematically explored. This article or the nofap movement or women's tacit use of vibrating devices, are all quiet ways to cope with many societal structural changes.
The fact that you think it is off-topic to discuss major societal issues upstream of a phenomenon just goes to show how myopic our culture's approach is to these issues.
I am who I am and have strengths and weaknesses. I genuinely believe my 'adhd' is a blessing because there are certain things I am exceptional at that other people are not yet things that many people can do well and easily I struggle a lot with. Every day is painful, it has been a hard journey but I can see the brightness at the end of the tunnel getting brighter and brighter as I mature and learn to use my strengths more effectively. :)
Most stimulant medication is something you can try for a day, see immediately if it's effective or not, then never take again in your life if it isn't for you. Don't suffer needlessly because of misguided bigots like the one above.
Under capitalism, the social networks compete for your attention, by sending you notifications. It's a "tragedy of the commons" where the commons is human attention: if Facebook doesn't get you to click during dinner, then Twitter will, and then it'll grow through those tactics. Thus the market forces these corporations to give you addictive newsfeeds, tell you when someone replied to your comment, etc. There are analyses comparing the brain to pavlov's dogs and the addiction to a slot machine.
In China, internet addiction is classed as a disease but it's also studied from a social point of view, not just prescribing mediation right away. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/18681026219931...
Here is what I would recommend:
1) Realize you are NOT alone or atypical. The human attention span has declined because of the system we live in. We now have shorter attention spans than goldfish. https://www.wyzowl.com/human-attention-span/
2) Notice how much of your ADHD is connected to anxiety and investigate the causes of that anxiety, maybe with a psychotherapist or other counsellor. Map out what kind of things you are afraid could happen if you don't react to them quickly. See if you can rearrange your life to diminish the need for quick responses (such as Slack or real-time chats). Consider worst-case scenarios and if you also have OCD, consider ERP therapy.
3) Learn to use "Focus" on your phone, to turn off distractions for long periods of "Flow". Set expectations with people (this may be hard if you work in capitalism for an employer) to schedule times to talk to you, and only allow calls for emergencies from friends and family. It will take you AT LEAST A WEEK after you remove your anxiety of missing something important, to start fully relaxing and not expecting a notification to jump out at you.
4) Watch the movie "the social dilemma" and try out its recommendations (taking 1 day a week off from all electronics completely -- live how people have lived throughout history) and spend it socializing with people, eating dinner, reading a book, etc.
5) Look at your sleep, diet, are you taking walks or exercising? What is your job? Anyway, there is so much you can investigate holistically and take control in your life, before you ever have to consider that ritalin is your only hope. (And if you do want to try a nootropic, you can try modafinil perhaps... it's not an amphetamine... but again, I think medications take away our agency and should be tried only if all else fails)
None of that requires medication, so try that first.
I would definitely appreciate it if at some point in the future (a month, 6 months, or whenever) you emailed me and told me whether what I said made any difference -- positive or negative. You can find my contact info in my profile.
Since your username contains "420," I will add that marijuana is a bad idea if you are struggling with ADHD symptoms. It may make you feel more productive, but it will greatly exasperate your ADHD tendencies.
I do not recall being antagonistic towards people with ADHD. On the contrary, the resources I have linked to (such as the book https://www.amazon.es/ADHD-Hunter-Farmers-Thom-Hartmann/dp/1...) are by people whose kids have ADHD and they opted to embrace them and accept them, rather than saying they have effectively a neurological disorder. You can make similar cases for autism spectrum, gender dysphoria and so on being zealously overdiagnosed and medicated (https://www.statnews.com/2022/02/10/theres-no-autism-epidemi...)
Medication is often a band-aid and the default way systems handle a cog in a machine. One in four middle-aged women is on antidepressants. Do you think they are ALL clinically depressed? And the opiates that men started to take have reached epidemic proportions too... surely, you wouldn't call everyone a bigot who wants to address the underlying societal reasons for this? Or you'd be the guy prescribing vodka to every USSR citizen as a way to deal with issues?
You are redefining the word "bigot" to mean its opposite, it seems. A system that systematically ignores meeting the basic needs of humans, and then dismisses their resulting behavior as "irrational" or "needing medication" is far worse than a bigot. It's like systemic racism or sexism, but directed against non-neurotypical kids, or adults or elderly.
Were people bigots who said "women have real needs that need to be addressed, stop delegitimizing their real issues by labeling them all as Hysterical Women (TM) and sending them to the doctor to get tittilated"? Because today, we agree with all those people, but in the past, we didn't. To borrow another politically loaded term, you could be on the "wrong side of history", just like people who defended lobotomies and medicating hysterical women.
Maybe you should look into the profit motive of doctors and pharma who stand to gain from more medications. And the school administrators who need to cover their own ass before actually caring about the kids and speaking to their parents. I happen to know about such school administrators and cases personally. The SYSTEM doesn't care about the parents, nor the kids, nor the grandparents which they also stick into nursing homes and medicate -- because again, they need to work 10 hour days to pay the rent. Just like under socialism, the capitalist system externalizes costs onto individuals, you should open your eyes. Try looking at some links I posted above. What you call bigotry, I call basic concern that society should have for human beings.
You also create a false dichotomy in which either modern society fails in certain ways to meet all of our needs to the detriment of people diagnosed with ADHD, or ADHD is a legitimate mental illness that benefits from pharmaceutical and therapeutic treatments. Both things are true.
I am raising my eyebrow at this. You want to look upstream at hookups, declining marriage, women's financial independence and their use of vibrators? When that conversation turns to "traditional" gender roles in religion, I win a prize for calling it early.
Anyway, even if there is some tractable upstream problem we can eventually solve, we still have to deal with the people who are already downstream. For them, the diagnosis and treatment of diseases is valuable, even if we deal with the root cause so future generations don't suffer.
If you look at the rest of my comments on this branch of the tree, you'll find that I am identifying a pattern... whenever X vs Y start fighting (women vs men, vaxxers vs antivaxxers, vegans vs meat eaters, ) there is a bigger issue that involves government and corporations working together, while individuals are distracted and blaming each other.
(2021) https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 Super-processed Foods and obesity, Factory farms and veganism, Plastic containers and recycling, Fossil fuels and climate change, Vaccines and mask mandates
(2017) https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286 Women in Tech controversy
(2014) https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=194 Net Neutrality controversy
Both Greta Thurnberg and George Carlin are right. The people in charge have not just failed us, but the entire system is pushing the individual around. What you perceive as a medication you have to take is a symptom of an underlying systemic issue.
Just in the last few decades we have had:
an opioid epidemic for men
one in four middle aged women uses antidepressants
elderly in nursing homes are medicated more than ever
a huge rise in diagnosis of ADHD, autism, gender dysphoria for kids
There are many societal reasons I could get into, but let's look at a few other ones:
attention spans of adults have steadily fallen
(not just ADD for kids) to that of a goldfish
stress levels are higher than they used to be
obesity and diabetes has risen tremendously in USA
(including in children)
Yes in some ways I am a social conservative. But it seems to me, just like "postmodernism", my views are more progressive than "progressives" LOL. I want the government and industry to stop dominating our lives, our time, making us work and telling us that "having no time" is a badge of honor. You're right that I want most women not to "lean in" at work, but I also say that exact thing to the men... if we had a UBI, we could all "lean out", and spend more time with our kids an elderly parents who took care of us, instead of sticking them in nursing homes, that would be a start.
ADHD is also not just the hyperactive type, there is an inattentive type and more. Go actually educate yourself on it.
Stimulants amounts for ADHD are also more subtle than you think, coffee feels stronger for me than ADHD stimulants.
Pure copium. It’s a fake disease designed to put every active child (mostly boys) on amphetamines. I’ve read the nonsensical definitions of this “disorder” and I reject them. I reject the institutions that acknowledge them — they will go down in history with the lobotomists. It is pure nonsense. They tried to diagnose me when I was young. They will try to ensnare any naive parent or young person that will put faith in their absurd white coats.
ADHD = normal (boyhood) rejection of sitting still for 8 hours straight and/or lack of study discipline. Simple as that. To diseasify normal behavior like wanting to play sports over reading Pride and Prejudice, and to prescribe amphetamines to a growing brain as a solution is both absurd and evil. ADHD is bullshit and you were tricked into an amphetamine habit (and the lack of personal accountability that comes with calling your lack of discipline a disease).
I made it to middle age without any ADHD diagnosis or stimulants, including coffee. My symptoms were present from early childhood and remain to this day, I expect I'll carry them to my grave. The entire time it's been an agonizing struggle, in ways I learned over decades were not normal compared to my friends and family.
I avoided diagnosis and medication due in part to stigma perpetuated by attitudes like yours. I suffered in silence for years that could have been avoided if only my condition were better understood and supported.
When I finally got a professional diagnosis, the stimulant didn't make me high the way it would do for you, it just made my brain act more like your brain on a normal day. My stresses and struggles became simply normal challenges, with the smothering layer of ADHD failings on top removed.
So at least in my adult experience, properly dosed stimulant medication given to people who need it can be life-alteringly effective, as close to a cure as a neurodivergent brain thinking today can hope for.
Stop telling me how to speak, you brain dead amphetamine junkie. I will speak as I please and dissuade as many people as possible from taking daily amphetamines with a junk diagnosis for a fake disease.
> When I finally got a professional diagnosis
You got tricked into doing brain-altering drugs by a drug dealer in a white coat. You couldn’t develop study or focus discipline as an adult so you took the nebulous, no-quantitative-measurement diagnosis and ‘script.
You've unfortunately been doing this in other places too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34417737
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34417049
These are unquestionably bannable offenses on HN. I'm not going to ban you because you've also posted good comments and it doesn't look like we've warned you before. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on—that means making your substantive points thoughtfully and respectfully, and using HN for curious conversation, not battle—we'd be grateful.
First of all, I appreciate your sharing of personal anecdotal experience (I mean that sincerely), and I am open to more infomation. But you should be also willing to educate yourself on what your country and system are doing. What I am about to share with you below — if you click the links, will probably shock you and make you question whether the issue is really your personal medical issue. At the very least, you have probably never seen it before.
First of all, no one is saying that it’s “all in your head” or you can snap yourself out of it. Any more than diabetes is in people’s heads. What I’ve been saying is that you are downstream of a fixable problem, that most of society doesn’t realize — or even have the desire to fix - with its current priorities.
I certainly understand how you feel you have a genetic disorder or clinical disease that can only be “managed” by medical intervention.
It’s not your fault. You are an individual who has been told by your country’s system that things are the way they are, because it is always easier to externalize the cost to the individual and make them believe a story than to fix the problems of industry. Here is just a sample list that goes well beyond ADHD or obesity, and into factory farms, plastic pollution, and more… it is always the same pattern:
https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
When there is a huge disparity between the USA and other countries (eg on prevalencd ADHD, or on obesity and diabetes) or USA now and before, it is a sign that the problem is upstream — often having to do with corporations, diet, and societal changes.
But I will go even further. Even effective cures to major diseases that are not approved by the bureaucracy, are shut down by the USA. All the way up to and including cures for diseases that you would think you’d know about. You as an individual probably NEVER heard of this:
This is a video showing actual footage from all the congressional hearings, the actual results of multiple scientific inquiries at the highest level — the text of the actual letters from the CDC, and actual medical journal reportings that you have never heard about.
It is like “progress and poverty” by Henri George, a bestselling economic book totally forgotten today… similarly this kind of stuff has been systematically buried by your government.
I know I got really deep with this comment but who on HN has seen for example the video I linked to above, and how deep the rabbithole goes?
That is only one possible explanation.
For example an underdeveloped country might appear to have lower prevalence of dementia than a more developed country. Perhaps because the former lacks effective nationwide medical diagnostic abilities, or perhaps because fewer in their population make it to old age where the disease shows up, or perhaps because they have a religious belief that conflates it with devilry so it goes unreported. In all of those situations the ground truth prevalence could be exactly the same in both countries, yet the developed country would report higher rates of the disease than the underdeveloped country.
If your society has you working on a small farm as a child instead of going to school and doing knowledge work, of course ADHD will be underreported. That doesn't mean it's not present.
There may be some causation from ADHD to obesity, I can't say, but otherwise they are categorically different issues.
Here are possible reasons why kids have ADHD:
1) The world is far more fast-paced. ADULTS haven't fared much better, and you'd hardly argue that everyone is genetically predisposed to having the attention span of a goldfish... it's clearly a societal thing: https://www.wyzowl.com/human-attention-span
2) Technology affects society. Corporations are incentivized to put ever more ads in front of you, and now we all have cell phones in our pocket, connected to the internet at all times. Being distracted at dinner, notifications you have to check to make sure it's not important, etc.
3) Now that people can be reached anytime by their phone, any SMS or email causes anxiety that maybe it's from your boss, etc.
4) Even the tools that HN loves so much are often detrimental. Real-time is a gimmick, and studies show that Slack, etc. is actually worse for mental well-being and productivity overall. Here is a recent NYTimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/01/23/magazine/cal-...
Again, ALL THESE THINGS are related to how capitalism and technology affects society and all of us. The very things that we are Hacker News are involved in, and we can do something to make a better world. Instead of saying that people deserve to be medicated. 1 in 4 middle aged women is on antidepressants ... what's more compassionate -- finding out the underlying reasons and building a better dating site for instance, or just assuming that's the new norm and selling as many pills as they will buy?
Yes ADHD is a different mind structure, it's also being called neurodiverse. But just watch a kiddo or a completely dysfunctional adult a with severe ADHD / autism and you quickly dissuade yourself that it isn't a problem and isn't a dysfunctional disability, and to expect a society to totally reconfigure itself beyond the equivalent of a few wheelchair ramps to match a forever minority with a lack of various mental abilities is economically naive.
Just like how we don't mandate zero-flicker lightbulbs for autstic people with sensory issues for the entire country because they consume more power with a higher power factor.
But it doesn't matter much either way in the end, and seeing how conspiratorial you are, I don't think I'd get much of anywhere trying to convince you otherwise. Sadly or happily, reality is way more mundane than you think it is.
Also many freak out about stimulants, but they really are not that big of a deal IMO. If ADHD didn't involve stimulants, one of the most effective mental health medications for any mental condition out there BTW, I don't think you'd get this denial of treatment for the condition so much.
This is how ADHD works in reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tpB-B8BXk0
1) He shows how an actual physiological cause of some cases of severe ADHD have persistent behavioral implications, such as a split between the knowledge and executive parts of the brain illustrated (crudely) in his diagram.
2) Around 2:211 "now you might be able to train up some of these executive functions, we don't know that yet." Indeed, even for many actually problematic cases, we don't know yet how far non-medical interventions can go.
3) My main question is this: What is the proportion of people diagnosed with ADHD that actually have such a pronounced physiological divergence? My point is that it is small, and the DSM-5 criteria are applied by simply choosing M of N symptoms to be present. The same is true for autism spectrum, and for gender dysphoria, and all have been on a tear in terms of diagnoses, in countries around the world where governments and schools specifically instituted related top-down policies about it:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7011a1.htm to quote the Introduction: ASD prevalence estimates have increased from 6.7 (one in 150) per 1,000 children aged 8 years at ADDM Network sites in surveillance years 2000 and 2002 to 18.5 (one in 54) in surveillance year 2016 (3–10). Over time, the proportion of children with ASD who also have intellectual disability has decreased from approximately one half in 2000 and 2002 to one third in 2016 (3,4,10).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95421-9 (Sweden) to quote the abstract: The incidence of GD, defined as ≥ 4 diagnoses increased significantly during the study period and mostly in the age categories 10–17 and 18–30 years, even after adjusting for register coverage. We concluded that the validity of a single ICD code denoting clinical GD in the Swedish NPR can be questioned.
and so on.
4) Even in cases of e.g. gender dysphoria, we simply don't know enough about how many cases are due to social media and peer groups, and there are many activists who are looking to silence inconvenient studies such as the 2018 study of "Rapid-Onset-Gender-Dysphoria" for teens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_c...
Humans are social animals. If we were as diligent in looking at the social and dietary causes for children, as we are for adults, we would probably find a lot better solutions than just medicating people. For example:
1) Giving up sugar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPyFIvCvh8U
2) Documentaries on how profit-seeking industries create attention disorders an addictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Dilemma
3) Diabetes and coronavirus: https://www.elsevier.es/en-revista-clinica-e-investigacion-a...
4) Loneliness is a significant variable affecting depression https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29792097/
As for conspiracies, look, how crazy do you want to get? What if you knew that the FDA tried for 40 years to bury certain effective treatments that cure cancer. Even though tons of people were getting cured, they tried harder than they ever have to shut it down for years. It sounds like some hyperbolic nonsense, but tell me after you look this video (flip through it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmxUsAI29fw ... it has all the studies, texts results from medical journals, double-blind studies, TV footage of multiple congressional inquiries, repeated admissions from the CDC directors themselves on video, etc.
Once you start looking for this stuff, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that our society isn't exactly set up for anything other than "medication".
> The Burzynski Clinic is a clinic offering an unproven cancer treatment, which has been characterized as harmful quackery. It was founded in 1976 and is located in Houston, Texas, in the United States. It offers a form of chemotherapy called "antineoplaston therapy" devised by the clinic's founder Stanislaw Burzynski in the 1970s. Antineoplaston is Burzynski's term for a group of urine-derived peptides, peptide derivatives, and mixtures. There is no accepted scientific evidence of benefit from antineoplaston combinations for various diseases.
> The clinic has been the focus of criticism primarily due to the way its antineoplaston therapy is promoted, the costs for people with cancer participating in trials of antineoplastons and problems with the way these trials are run. Legal cases have been brought as a result of the sale of the therapy without regulatory approval.
> Burzynski is also the president and founder of a pharmaceutical company, the Burzynski Research Institute, which manufacturers his antineoplaston drugs.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-vibrator/
Let’s not forget the kids before puberty. Today’s “hysteria” is alive and well — it’s called ADHD and it involves overdiagnosing rambunctiousness and prescribing amphetamines like Ritalin or Aderall to medicate the “problem” away instead of making the kind of changes to the school system that Finland made. A lot of societies have often chosen to use medical interventions on the individual instead of fixing the underlying problems. In the case of ADHD:
1) both parents work to afford the rent and “self-actualize” themselves 10 hours a day at corporations https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286
2) they stick their kids in public schools where administrators treat them as a number and they have to sit down and shut up for long periods
3) many kids (especially boys) have too much energy to just sit still for so long but the system needs to teach them how to be good corporate drones (even though by the time they graduate corps won’t need them to wirk that way due to AI)
4) climbing trees and running around creates liabilities in the US, keeping the kids docile keeps them out of trouble https://www.smartparenting.com.ph/parenting/big-kids/the-sim...
ADHD is today’s hysteria.