ADHD, a symptom of modern society?

[SomaSpice]

Coming from someone formally diagnosed, I'm curious about my fellow travelers' opinions, experiences, and sure, conspiracy theories.

I got diagnosed and assigned medication halfway through college because I'm an incompetent buffoon in an academic setting. However, that didn't help my case because methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta, etc) makes me sleepy, severely depressed (Im talking suicidal ideation), and unmotivated, which is quite the opposite of my usual self.

So I was put on atomoxetine (Strattera), which made me sleep all day and tire easily, with little benefit to attention.

In regards to adderall, where I live there is currently no way to get prescription amphetamines of any kind, so I have no experience with the third reich gamer fuel. I was put back on Ritalin but I refuse to take it.

In any case, I'm not about to throw a pity party about my experiences, but having lived through how strong the effects of these medications are, I can't help but raise an eyebrow at how this "disorder" is generally handled.

This shit got me tweaking, and they're drugs generally prescribed to children who don't get much of a say in the matter because of their age.

Not to say that the drugs are evil, because I know for a fact that they help a lot of people. What I am saying is that they're quite strong and appear to me as over-prescribed, especially as when you put ADHD people in an environment suited to them, they tend to excel.

Sometimes I think that ADHD is less of a disorder on how a person operates, but more like people are being labeled as deficient because of the ever increasing rigidity on which industrial society evaluates what is productive or non-productive.

 

[HellManMayo]

I'm fucking retarded and 100% uneducated on the topic, but my opinion is that ADHD was probably not a big deal pre-agricultural revolution. You can read up on the theory of "farmer vs hunter", with people diagnosed as having ADHD also having more enhanced skills necessary for hunting. This idea of "settling down" became exponentially worse when society shifted from farms into today's gig/information economy. The earliest known records for ADHD seem to be the 18th century (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4694551/). Maybe it became more prevalent when people had to sit still and flick switches in factories or were forced to get at least a basic education.

ADHD was likely "discovered" as a deficiency when those traits didn't benefit modern society. Maybe focusing on jobs or environments where you don't need the pills could help?

 

[Sulfate]

In my experiences with my autism, I've come to realise that mental disorders always have these shining benefits just out of reach, but have these downsides that only really mean anything because they go against the grain of neurotypicality.

I agree with you on ADHD, but when I use autism as an example, I preface it with the fact that it is by no means a product of modern society; many figureheads in history are speculated to have been autistic. What I've seen with typicals trying to understand or support autism is "awareness" and "cures", the latter which offends autists, and rightfully so. Though, I see it curious that fellow autists aren't also offended by the former. What is there to spread "awareness" of? I don't likke that language use. It's coddling, patronising and infantilising. All facets of how autism is understood by typicals is some age-regressive image of bright-coloured puzzle pieces, as if we're all children.

Now that you have a formal diagnosis of ADHD, make yourself aware of how typicals talk about ADHD, and how that conversely reflects on someone's inherent assumption of you. You can't stop them from labelling you, so the least you can do is know what your labels are, and shred them to pieces on an individual basis. An international revolution across all education would be needed to overturn any rock larger than yourself in this battle.

Do tell us of any observations you have on your condition's effects and perception, now and in future.

 

[deepfreeze]

I'm fucking retarded and 100% uneducated on the topic, but my opinion is that ADHD was probably not a big deal pre-agricultural revolution. You can read up on the theory of "farmer vs hunter", with people diagnosed as having ADHD also having more enhanced skills necessary for hunting. This idea of "settling down" became exponentially worse when society shifted from farms into today's gig/information economy. The earliest known records for ADHD seem to be the 18th century (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4694551/). Maybe it became more prevalent when people had to sit still and flick switches in factories or were forced to get at least a basic education.

ADHD was likely "discovered" as a deficiency when those traits didn't benefit modern society. Maybe focusing on jobs or environments where you don't need the pills could help?

Yeah this was pretty much my opinion. What we now call "ADHD" was probably extremely useful in a hunter-gatherer era. Constantly scanning for stimuli is probably extremely beneficial for survival when a fucking murder monster could jump out of a bush at you at any moment. But modern society is a place where the inability to force yourself to focus on boring shit you don't care about it is, dare I say, maladaptive.

 

[ignika98]

I'm someone who's been living with ADHD my entire life. I've been on and off meds since I was a child, although I'm not taking any right now.

Obviously it made my school life hell, but that didn't matter much to me because I didn't care about school. For the longest time I thought my ADHD was either really mild, or just a symptom of me not being interested in what I was doing, like many here have suggested.

But all that changed when I started working.

I write for a living. It's absolutely not a job I hate or don't find interesting. In fact, I feel like I'm one of those few lucky people who can honestly say they love their job. But sometimes, I just can't do it. Sometimes I'll have a million ideas in my head for what I want to write, and I'll talk about them to friends or my wife for hours. And yet when it comes time to sit down and write them, I just can't. It's like there's some physical blockage inside my head that prevents me from putting my ideas down on paper without getting distracted. And that's what made me realize that my ADHD was real. There's no "advantage" that could possibly come from an inability to do what you want to do. I want to write my stories, but sometimes I just can't. There's no way around it.

Now that being said, I have been taking steps to try and train myself out of this. I set up an office for myself that's free from all possible distractions. I try to constantly keep myself in check whenever I start browsing Facebook or something instead of working. I put on noise cancelling headphones and really loud music to try and drown out any other sounds. It's been working well so far. And like I said, I'm not on any meds so I wouldn't say it's impossible to treat ADHD without them. But what works will be different for everybody so don't just take what I do as any kind of advice.

But despite the miserable state of mental health diagnosis and treatment these days, ADHD is very real. But I don't believe it's something that can't be overcome. It just requires you to take a different approach than most people.

 

[NoSlacking]

Not nessecarily specifically about ADHD but certainly related, I think the way most people, particularly young people, consume media nowadays is harmful to the long term health of peoples attention span. For example, the most popular forms of social media, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, all encourage short form content thats is consumed one after another. Ive notioced this with myself, especially with TikTok, whoich Ive had to uninstall. I would spend almost hours on it just scrolling these short videos and would come away feeling like iuve just wasted my time. I have heard stories that the youngest people who have been brought up with this sort of thing can no loinger sit down and watch an entire film, because their attention spans have been conditioned for much shorter content. Ive noticed myself strugglign to read full books as well, which is quite frightening.

Im not saying this is a cause of increased ADHD levels or whatever, but it certainly makes it much harder for people to "overcome" it when everything around them is geared towards enabling
it.

 

[SomaSpice]

I think things like social media and tiktok can shorten peoples attention spans but if you took those things away their attention span would gradually return to normal, whereas someone with ADHD would not.

I agree with this, when I was a kid and social media wasn't huuuuuuge I just drew stuff and daydreamed during class. Then social media came along, and I got phone addicted during highschool. I quit that since first year of college, and since then simply returned to maladaptive daydreaming.

There's no "advantage" that could possibly come from an inability to do what you want to do. I want to write my stories, but sometimes I just can't. There's no way around it.

I feel you dude. It seems that for mental work either you achieve flow or get almost nothing done.

ADHD is very real. But I don't believe it's something that can't be overcome. It just requires you to take a different approach than most people.

I'm gonna be rooting for you. I'm sure there's a way to make things work.

 

[SomaSpice]

An international revolution across all education would be needed to overturn any rock larger than yourself in this battle.

That line hit me like a bag of rocks, god damn. You're absolutely right, the best thing I can do is engineer for myself a way of life that allows me to thrive in my own way. I can't overturn how the world operates, but on an individual basis I can succeed.

Do tell us of any observations you have on your condition's effects and perception, now and in future.

Will do. Thanks a lot man, your writup was all around super enlightening!

 

[UCD]

I met a kid once with severe ADHD. and i mean SEVERE. He was around 13 or so, and could not listen to anything or follow any instructions. We were volunteers literally just digging out weeds, for reasons I will not go into, and he was a nice kid, but I dug up all the weeds for 25 minutes, while constantly telling him to do something, and he couldn't do shit. The ground was too hard, the grass was poking him there were birds and bugs flying around, it was hot, whatever, he only responded after you called his name like 5 times, he couldn't keep eye contact and interrupted with a question 3 seconds into talking, that he interrupted to answer, and then started talking about something else. I eventually just gave up. What this guy was struggling with was real, and would be noticeable in any of the societies that humans have lived in. I do not like the way they treat adhd and other disorders in our society right now, but it undeniably exists. I do not agree with the hunter theory either, this guy would be absolutely shit as a hunter, because he cannot sustain attention towards anything, and cannot process information effectively. ADHD makes you notice more things, but you have no control of what you are noticing, or how you react to it. Anyone can train themselves to enhance their senses and awareness, if you read accounts of hunter gatherers, they treat the "Civilized" people like children, because they crash noisily outside and have no idea what is going on. Having adhd cannot help you do this, It is a learned skill that requires deliberate practice and concentration. ADHD is a disability in these areas. If you cannot help but notice what the clouds are like, or you impulsively start shooting arrows at random stuff, you are not helping and you fuck over your tribe.

I have not been diagnosed with adhd, but I have done research on it since I suspect I may have it. I have pretty much every symptom, and act in very steriotypically like someone with adhd in some areas. I believe that my personality has mostly covered for my problems, but idk.

I think that all of the fear about disorders like autism and adhd skyrocketing in modern societies is bullshit, complete bullshit. If you were a farmer alive in 1564, you just fucking took the L and suffered through your disability or you starved, and If you were severely disabled, people thought you were possesed with demons and shit and lynched you. I think people living in globalized welfare states don't understand how much inner strength people can summon to power through their disabilities if they live in a culture of back breaking labour where your options from birth was to work or die. These disorders only become known as societies begin to build acceptance of differences and divergence from cultural norms. I think that the reason why east asians for example have such low rates of autism and adhd is because that everyone that has the capability to mask is doing it, and doing it hard, because if they don't, they get fucked by their obsessively social rule oriented societies. The west is only the hotspot for these disorders because we are equally obsessively idividualistic, and people are encouraged to be themselves and express their concerns about not being normal. (Normies... sound familiar?)

 

[Iommi Fan 420]

100% it does. Most media young folks consume is choka block full of distractions, from infinite scrolling apps to Fortnite (Seriously it is absolutely full of unnecessary audio and visual clutter). I know ragging on tiktok is a cliche by this point but seriously it is basically adhd (amongst other things) in app form.

I was prescribed ADHD meds (vyvanse) for a few years for ADHD, fucked part is I got prescribed them on my way out of rehab. So I spent my late teens abusing the fuck out of this shit and having 12 hour hero dose ping sessions which is literally the exact reason why they shouldn't be prescribed to people with addiction issues. Funny thing is, when I was in there that shit was being prescribed to literaly recovering meth addicts. They're pushing this shit to not just literal children (seriously, who's never met a 7 year old on that shit) but known drug addicts.
Sorry I got a wee bit off topic rambling about the evils of the medication.

 

[LostintheCycle]

I think people living in globalized welfare states don't understand how much inner strength people can summon to power through their disabilities if they live in a culture of back breaking labour where your options from birth was to work or die.

People living in the built-up, overly-cleansed and smoothed-over lands have a complete lack of belief in themselves. In the crappy public high schools I went to they still had teams of mental health professionals, and we are mechanically told that you gotta check in with your friends to see if they're struggling, as if we have to be reminded... and when I go take a piss at work, I see posters everywhere for this mental health app that is "there for you when you need it" for your vague everyday struggles. You still hear people say that all that's been done is not enough.
I have my personal conspiracies but its unfounded basically this is all intentional yadda yadda but either way you are right, first-world people don't even believe that inner strength really exists. It's the magic fluff of stories. We are less capable of overcoming our problems when, compared to our recent ancestors, we go through less. Back to OP... my contention is yes, the modern world ruins the physical health of people, and it ruins their mental health too, as well as brings out many ailments, either creating them or making them worse.

 

[handoferis]

I have the ADDs (I personally think ADHD is a generalising misnomer, I'm not hyperactive, I just can't hold the things I need to do in my head long enough).

Unmedicated and undiagnosed for many years, now medicated and diagnosed but I don't take them all the time cause I learned to live with it long ago. I was lucky. School was pretty easy for me so it was quite easy to coast not paying any attention and just smashing stuff out (coursework or exams) right at the last minute, got good grades, then absolutely hit a fucking brick wall when things got even moderately difficult.

Went homeless for a bit, then the real panic set in, and I was able to motivate myself through it all, scramble into getting a career by chance and slowly learning how to just about be productive. I would say this took fully 27 years to get to the point I could sit down and force myself to do some work. Eventually got meds and it was night and day but I only really take them if I'm absolutely shitforbrains now.

With that being said, I reckon what people in this thread have said about it not having been a detriment before industrialisation probably are correct. tbh, if school hadn't been just one big joke to me, it probably would have become a very evident problem much faster. One thing is that, if I am really, truly motivated to do something I can do it no matter what, but if it's something I have to do or am bored of, it's absolutely impossible without meds.

Unfortunately, modern society is cripplingly boring and anything you have to do to get the coins to survive is a real struggle without meds. I have no problem at all sitting down and figuring out how the fuck dynamic wallpapers in macOS work for 3 hours, nor do I have problems voraciously reading anything interesting I can get my hands on - but ask me to write some enterprise software or fill out forms? lol get rekt i'm just gonna go stare at a wall or be exactly as productive as I need to be, but doing something entirely unrelated while forgetting to put my bins out or run the dishwasher

 

[metalainism]

the discussion on the relationship between modern society and ADHD is very interesting, my father has it (i do as well) and i remember a while back having noticed a book, a think it was "A Hunter in a Farmer's World" . it makes sense that it would be denoted more as a condition or 'issue' now than in a pre-modern society where it was more of an advantage in some ways (whereas now it's "bad" mostly because it makes one's exploitation sometimes bear less fruit).

"Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behaviour that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good." - Theodore Kaczynski

 

[Meeko]

Might be, I'm an aspie girl with it and that's rare apparently so I've been hit extra hard by modern society if so.

 

[gwen]

My opinion is ADHD is a name for a normal spectrum of human ability and behavior. It only appears pathological from an expert viewpoint that sees "mental health" as essentially synonymous with "being a good serf".

 

[koteirl]

Oh lord, there are so many points I relate to here that I don't even know where to begin. I'm unsure whether I have ADHD or not, but it's been suggested by friends and I do have other mental disorders so I can sort of relate to some of the diagnostic procedure. I've thought about this topic and the more generalized way society deals with mental illness for a while, and I could write pages on it, but to summarise:

• As psychology and science advances, the understanding of conditions like ADHD increases, so more people will be diagnosed.
• At the same time, widespread use of social media (especially by impressionable young children) encourages talking about mental health conditions/validates self diagnosis, and glamourizes genuinely awful conditions to the point that they become a trend. This artificially inflates the number of people 'suffering' from conditions such as ADHD as more and more people access mainstream media.
• Relating to the use of social media, some people will actually begin to develop problems with their attention, spanning from apps like TikTok and Youtube where they begin to need the quick hits of dopamine and stop spending long periods of time studying any media. Society as a whole promotes this and worsens it; sit in your 1x1 cube office, work quickly, scroll on your breaks, go to bed, scroll before sleep, etc.
• Instead of actually trying to deal with the root of the problem, people are medicated. In some cases this makes the disorder worse or doesn't help at all.

I do disagree with some points people are making in that I think a lot of these conditions can be genuinely detrimental, not just in society as-is but to the person themselves. Even if society was a utopia where we weren't forced to work for the system and we could pursue true passions, disorders would still manifest. The way the world works exacerbates it, but clinical depression will not just vanish; money and friendship and true love might help, might alleviate it some of the time, but the imbalance in the brain isn't going to go away.

 

[_TF]

man remind me to go back to this post on the 15th of july pls.
There's a ton of shit i need to say here but not right now.
Very nice thread

 

[RisingThumb]

ADHD diagnoses have been going up. So have a lot of other Mental Illnesses. Society is also generally more accepting and to some degree romanticising of mental illnesses.

My opinion of this all is pretty simple. If the diagnosis and/or medication helps you and you want to take it, take it. The problem with modern medicine, is people take a doctor's prescription way too seriously. The prescription is there to fix the symptoms not the root cause, and the root cause could be all sorts of things. The simplest way to find out in my opinion is just looking at your life and removing things you think could be contributing. It's been quoted something like this by someone I forgot "Medicine industry fixes the health without care for the diet. Food industry fixes the hunger without care for the health".

I'll also add that it's extremely hard to live an optimal(healthy, fit, eating properly, not mentally ill) life in modern society, as those qualities aren't beneficial to people other than you and are so utterly poisoned as topics to research due to the conflicts of interest of driving forces in their respective industries.

As for suicidal ideation. I'd suggest looking into Philosophy, not pills. Philosophy, especially Stoicism and Nihilism(with the ubermensch as its answer, not hedonism) is well worth looking into and has generally lifted me out of most existential funks I've been in. It provides a lot of material for understanding the world, people and your own suffering better and makes you better equipped to handle that suffering. A huge problem in living a good life, is we generally have no values with the loss of Religion and Philosophy provides the tools to steer towards a consistent and useful set of values.

 

[Jordshire]

but either way you are right, first-world people don't even believe that inner strength really exists. It's the magic fluff of stories.

This was a really good way to put into words something I've felt for a long time. Before the days of easy pharmaceutical fixes if you were generally feeling anxious or having problems paying attention to things that were important to you, then you had to either change something about the way you were living your life or really spend a lot of time working on improving yourself. Now you can just bypass it all, talk to a therapist for 2 weeks and get a prescription that fixes the problem!

I firmly believe that there's a lot of people who benefit from these medications and im sure even some who require it to live normal lives. That being said, it's impossible to not at least question how frequently these drugs are prescribed.

I learned awhile back that since drug testing is partially paid for by the company who's drug is being tested in America , then those companies also get to negotiate how the testing itself is being done including the metrics for success. When you start adding these things up you get trillion dollar businesses who are incentivized to create the most addictive, least effective drugs possible and methods we have of ensuring they don't is controlled by them too.

 

[RisingThumb]

Thats exactly what I am trying to do. I have been reading a lot of philosophy lately and I am trying to put it into practice but I find it difficult, like there is something inside me that I can not overpass. I tried mushrooms (4g so I was close to level 4), meditation, reading philosophy and I am trying to life like Stoic but it is so hard for me to live like that day by day. I don't like the environment that I live. It's like nothing working for me. I never have been to therapy because I don't think that will help to become new person. My take is that you have to change by yourself and I am still looking for the answer within myself. You said it is hard to live optimal live and I agree with it. Right now I would like to stay offline from any socials in some forest and learn for example new languages but for how long will I do it, in the end I have to earn some money to extended my existence.

My problem with Stoicism is that it's path that goes into learned helplessness(especially with the way modern stoics preach it) if you go too hard into not bothering about what you can't control. As such, I think it's lessons are better for knowing how to interact with other humans, but not that much for your own circumstances. I forgot this when I wrote my other post, but Jung is also worthwhile reading into. The entire point of his work is on the topic of "self-actualisation" which is a fancy term for basically bringing to the surface all the qualities you unconsciously bury about yourself(the Shadow) and merging them with the ego. As for therapists, I always thought them to be redundant if you can learn how to do therapy on yourself which is what philosophy lets you do. Anyway good luck getting out of your slump, wagmi