I fucking knew it, I SAID it: they're making ADHD people the next culture war targets. They will 'just ask questions' until we lose every scrap of ground we've gained in the last decade and more. We may not quite inspire the same level of hatred as a sexual minority, but we can very easily be made to inspire disdain and that also works.
They will strip us of our accomodations and our medications and try to stifle any sense of shared identity, and if that kills some of us, oh well. So long as it fuels another outrage cycle, fine.
So many of the tropes they've been using on trans people work extremely well on ADHD people too! "There are too many of these people suddenly! It must be a fad! It spreads through friend groups! And online! People are going private for diagnoses and that's bad! They are using pOwERfUl medical interventions and we think it's freaky!"
I saw the first ripples of this in terf circles about two years ago. And of course it's spread.
6% of British ADHD people lost their jobs in the last year thanks to the meds shortage. SIX PER CENT! And that just made these ghouls go "ooh, tasty, what else can we do?"
Recently an 'expert' was on the BBC saying people see ADHD diagnosis as a "golden ticket." Laurence Fox has been ranting that the condition doesn't exist and threatening "'you won't poison my child's body [with ADHD meds] against my consent"
People need to be aware this is going to get worse. Maybe, if we're lucky, it won't get really bad. But it's going to get worse than it is now.
What's even more of a fucking piss-off are the "leftist" media types who write cop bullshit like the "essays" in this collection.
Dispatches from the Adderall Epidemic.
All your favourite annoying "left" media figures prone to wildly ableist assertions are in here: Amber A'Lee Frost, P.E. Moskowitz, Daniel Kolitz, et. al. It's breathtaking just how fucking unsourced and weak the essays in here are. Let's look at the first essay by Kolitz:
I do not believe ADHD is an inherent thing. Otherwise a large subset of Japan’s population would not be able to function, since all stimulant medication is illegal there. But I do, I realize, believe it is a thing—real in the way most things are real, because we collectively deem it so. Because we have chosen to call a cluster of gas a star and a cluster of symptoms a disorder.
Japan, the country with the famously large subset of adults, the Hikkomori, who are unable to function. Fuck off. Oh and people are diagnosed with ADHD in Japan, they're just prescribed Methylphenidate instead of amphetamine.
It's also incredible how almost none of the authors are actually taking the drug for a prescribed condition, most of them are abusing it recreationally. In Joshua Tempelhof's essay, he wasn't even using Adderall, but methamphetamine that had been bought on the street.
The phrase “gateway drug” has fallen out of favor since the government ludicrously applied it to weed, but it seems a fair description of the Adderall trajectory. In my experience, many of the kids who grew up on Ritalin and graduated to Adderall—a group I affectionately call Generation ADHPV—have come away with a general sense that they like uppers. If you enjoy Adderall, there’s a good chance you may be open to the odd bump of cocaine. And if you’re snorting that slush, you might as well do a bit of gentrified meth.
Oh fuck off. I've been on the same dose for over a decade at this point, I was prescribed Adderall for brainfog and all it does is cut through that fog just enough for me to sit up and write or read a little bit, maybe watch a few episodes of TV. (It actually also helps with my dysautonomic symptoms by raising my blood pressure a tick.) I still manage to sleep around twelve hours every day. I've never once been tempted to try cocaine. I don't even smoke weed. Hell I've had maybe two beers over the last three years. This is cop shit.
The last essay by Kendall Waldman is about coming off of stimulants after years of finding they helped and being worried that he couldn't keep up the pace (he was also on waaay too fucking high of a dose in my opinion 100mg a day is nuts).
I scoured PubMed and Reddit and wellness Pinterest for advice on holistic repair, what we know about how to heal the brain from long-term amphetamine use. I found an integrative nutritionist with amazing hair and tasteful filler, some 60k followers and lots of sponsored posts for matcha and nootropics.
Fuuuuck off.
[inarticulate screams of rage] Oh, "in your experience"? In your, radiant, sanctified, main-character-of-reality experience? In your experience of witnessing recreational drug use by people who don't have ADHD? OH WELL THEN. That's certainly more than good enough. Fuck all of research, and fuck all of us then! I'm not on stimulants any more. The most -- the absolute most -- I ever felt when I was on a remarkably high dose of amphetamine was a vague feeling of ...preparedness for the day ahead. Just a sense of "Huh. I've got this." It was no stronger or more exhilarating than you would expect to get from being fairly well-rested and the sun shining. I did not get that feeling every day. And then I stopped getting it, or any other particular benefits, at all ... so I stopped taking amphetamines, which was very easy to do as at no point had I experienced anything even remotely similar to a "craving" for the medication. Nothing I felt about my meds even came close to the way I felt about my morning cup of tea. I felt exactly the same as you might feel about a vitamin pill. Like all ADHD people with all meds, I routinely forgot whether or not I had taken them. I now do fairly well on non -stimulants, but let me tell you, even if they worked equally well for everyone, force-switching millions of people onto non-stims royally screws over everyone involved, including all of us already on them ASK ME HOW I KNOW. BECAUSE OF THE LAST YEAR OF THE FUCKING MED CRISIS, WHICH APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN AT LEAST PARTLY MANUFACTURED BY THIS BULLSHIT PEARL-CLUTCHING, THAT'S HOW.
You know, my prepared line for when I go ask for stimulants was gonna be “I’ve been prescribed them a couple times before, but because I grew up in the days of scaremongering about teens and college students abusing stimulants I never really gave them a fair shot.” All else aside, I’m very annoyed that I might have to rethink that line because those days are back.
