[fragmede]

Incarceration over cannabis is already seen as embarrassing. Mental health care overall, but especially drug addiction will be looked at as positively medieval. The barriers to treatment for ADHD. The disastrous state of treatment for people, but especially women with autism. Hell, the way women are treated by some mental health professionals, it might as well still be the dark ages where hysteria was considered a valid diagnosis.

[chrisseaton]

> The barriers to treatment for ADHD. The disastrous state of treatment for people, but especially women with autism.

I'm going to put "treatment" in huge quotes. Do these people need treatment or do they need society to stop bothering them and accept them the way they are?

[norvvryo]

I've walked away from tasks for a second and completely forgotten about them. I don't absorb training and can't hold a job. I've made it through about two books in my adult life. All of my programming projects end somewhere between the initial idea and the first problem I have real trouble with.

What does any of that have to do with society bothering or accepting me?

[drdeca]

I have ADHD. I can achieve more of what I want to achieve when I am on my medication. I prefer not to take it on Saturdays, as a day of rest kind of thing, but otherwise I think the treatment is quite beneficial, and think "treatment" is entirely the correct word.

The idea that there isn't such a thing as a condition causing malfunctions in mental processes, and that all such things are just differences in preferences and such that merely need to be "accepted", doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If someone gets brain damage which damages say Wernicke's area, and causing Wernicke's aphasia. It would be quite silly to say that this isn't a problem or damage which could make sense to treat.

I see no reason that this should change when the differences are more subtle and such.

Now, that being said, I do think it makes sense to basically always defer to the person's own evaluation of whether they need treatment. If someone claims they don't need or want treatment, forcing them to receive "treatment" is, uh, in almost all possible situations, very bad? (note : this doesn't mean "in almost all situations in which this actually ends up happening.". I don't know about those cases. But the danger of like, classifying political opponents as being mentally ill and as needing treatment, is such a terrible danger, that norms should forbid anything within a very large conceptual distance from it.)