[toomanybeersies]

As a counter point, being diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed medication was one of the best things to have ever happened to me. Everybody is different though, medication is beneficial for some and detrimental for others. It's important to be aware of your mental state and how treatment (whether drugs or other) affects it, and to be able to make informed choices regarding treatment. A good doctor/shrink should take into consideration your feedback and act accordingly. Bad doctors will just push pills on to you. This is why I'm deadset against prescribing stimulant medication to children, it's easy (and common) for doctors and parents to basically force feed their kids amphetamines, often causing them great harm (I also believe that it stops children from learning proper ADHD management strategies, leading to them being completely incapable of functioning without medication or illicit drugs)

Meditation and yoga do nothing for me. Seeing a counsellor has been good though, and I think that its something that everybody should do, regardless of neurotype or how well they appear to be functioning in life.

[minerjoe]

> deadset against prescribing stimulant medication to children

I've seen it first hand. Child is beautiful and active and happy and sad and angry and living and the Mother just can't handle it and BAM - drugs.

Child grows up, becomes a teenager. Prescription drugs stop. Teenage moves to Methamphetamine, start cooking. Eventually is busted and jailed.

The connection, for me, is clear.

I feel very very lucky that I grew up before the ADHD diagnosis was a thing as I could have easily been that child.

[toomanybeersies]

> and the Mother just can't handle it

It's unfortunate that it's often the case that psychiatric help is only sought for "problem children", who negatively impact those around them. These are the kids that get "easily distracted and distracts others" on all their report cards.

Well behaved children with ADHD (generally those with inattentive-type) tend to have their poor academic performance written off as laziness or stupidity. Their report cards tend to say "has great potential, if only he would apply himself"

Unfortunately, it's common just to give kids some pills to settle them down, especially when therapy is expensive or resource limited, without helping them learn healthy coping mechanisms and management strategies.

Often as they grow older, they become less hyperactive, which leads to the belief that they've "grown out" of their ADHD. There's a common misconception (even amongst doctors) that ADHD is a children's disease, when in fact up to 2/3 of children with ADHD carry it through to adulthood. I have friends who went to their GP and were straight up told that they couldn't have ADHD as they're adults.

Therapy should be the first-line strategy for treating children with ADHD, with medication being an alternative or supplemental treatment. Otherwise you end up with adults who never learned healthy management strategies as children, as the medication suppressed the need to learn them. Then as they "grow out" of their ADHD, they're taken off medication and are unable to function as effective members of society.

[lwkl]

Medication allows therapy to be effective. And it depends where on the spectrum you are. Just going to therapy and talking won‘t change anything. For me a main symptom is and was the inability to take action on existing knowledge. Therapy can’t fix that.

Treatment of ADHD without medication needs action accommodations from the school, teachers, friends, boy scouts and parents. And it‘s not possible for every parent and every school.

If you feel emotionally numb because of the stimulants your dose is probably too high and it should be adjusted.

But I agree with you. The treatment can‘t be just a pill. It needs at least to be a pill and education for the involved parties. And especially education for the patient. So they can adjust their treatment and lifestyle according to their needs.

[chc]

It seems like you're conflating accurate diagnoses with misdiagnoses here. Nobody thinks being medicated based on a misdiagnosis is a good thing, and especially not as a substitute for parenting.