[mattstir]

I'm quite curious about this sentiment because I've seen it more than a few times here on Hackernews.

I have ADHD and have been very successful in my work life so far. I'm on a prescription medication for when my focus is necessary but that seems to be either dismissed or heavily frowned upon here.

Is there a reason why the answer to ADHD seems to be "use AI to do your work" rather than "use the proven medications to allow you to focus"? It just seems strange to me.

[overnight5349]

A lot of people online have some really weird puritanical notions about medication that affects the brain. Basically all of them should be dismissed out of hand.

Medication is fine, it helps a lot of people, even if it doesn't work for everyone. For some, the effect is quite profound, even life changing. It's up to you, and anyone telling you it's somehow wrong isn't worth listening to.

As to AI, what I want is a LLM acting as a personal assistant fed from a database of all of my daily experiences. My brain isn't that great at organizing and recalling data, so I want to take all of the data I receive and feed it into a machine that can organize and recall it for me. I want a digital copy of my brain that I can search through.

The AI can pick up from my conversations that I promised Bill the TPS reports at 4. Because I'm bad at remembering and actioning on things, it can pop an event into my schedule. Or it can pick up that I said I'd work on encabulator designs in six standups but there's no reference in my commit history and nag me.

I could ask "what do I know about encabulation" and get every article I personally have read relating to mazelvanes and perfabulated amylite. Or "what was that book I read one time about time traveling dogs", or "what's my sister in law's favorite color?", or "what did Kathy say last week about her kid's audition?"

Better yet, it could scan through conversations and guess that Alice wants fancy German chocolates for her birthday because she mentioned it 18 times.

There's just some things my brain does badly at. Just part of the neurological lottery I guess. I want to make up for that by offloading cognitive effort onto a machine. That will massively improve my quality of life, which has the side effect of making me much, much more productive.

I feel like this is a more positive way to help ADHD people. It works with you to make up for the things you're deficient at, rather than making you work harder to compensate. It's actual helping and not "you can do better"

I think everyone could benefit from this type of thing, but right now I see enormous potential for actually helping ADHD and autistic people.

[vineyardmike]

> Is there a reason why the answer to ADHD seems to be "use AI to do your work" rather than "use the proven medications to allow you to focus"?

The same people who are anti-medication are most likely anti-AI.

I have ADHD and I’ve studied it a bit, and have followed a lot of developments and changes in perceptions around it. I also don’t use meditation.

Generally, I’ve noticed a lot of society has a vague anti-daily-medication-for-mental-health view. If you need it every day people tend to be against it. Part of it is that people seem to think you should learn how to cope (you should), which some people think as minimizing the disorder (which is bad). I’ve seen people mention that they don’t like how medication changes your personality (which can be very strong) or generally just don’t like the feeling of being on it.

I’m not a doctor, but ADHD medication can increase your risk of suicide and other severe mental health issues, so there is good health reasons not to take it unless you “need” to. Everyone just seems to have a different definition of “need”.

Personally, for me and my decision not to take it, I felt it was important to learn to live how my body wanted me to. I never liked how i felt on the medication, and i wanted to be myself. Society is very focused on productivity, which can be hard for someone with ADHD to fit into. I wanted to learn how to fit myself into the world, so I could “succeed” and live a happy life (whatever that meant) without having any dependencies. I didn’t want a missed pill one morning or a drug shortage to impart my ability to live my life. That might mean that I don’t have the career I wish I could have, and I won’t live by others’ definition of success, and maybe I have to make conscious changes to my routine.

[callalex]

Based on my experiences on this forum and how my vote counts seem to go, it seems the majority of readers are not anti-medication, but the people who ARE tend to be highly vocal and combatative about it. There’s also the whole vocal contingent on here of people that insist that our disease isn’t real and that we should just try harder and have some discipline.

For me personally, I am interested in exploring every avenue available to me to help me get away from medication, because I kinda hate it. The results I get make it worth it, but every medication I try makes me feel bad physically, and I hate the extreme ups and downs throughout the day that stimulants can cause.