adam w.k. @sabbatical@qoto.org

@levisan @jeremiah see here my family doctor referred me to a psychiatrist who evaluated me and tried me out with medication. but yeah anything else was up to be to be proactive about looking into (which i didn’t, for about a decade basically until
problems piled up enough)

@JonChevreau hey i think i saw her perform like a decade ago! forgot all about her and didn’t know she was still going. will have to look up her stuff

@levisan @jeremiah five years! wow. i sought out evaluation of whether i might have adhd well before it became “in vogue” to whatever degree it is now, but a friend got diagnosed recently and i don’t think it took nearly that long. (ontario though.) my tinnitus specialist appointment has been booked for a year and a half though, hah.

@levisan @jeremiah think one of your sentences got cut off here. “(notably what…”

@jeremiah @levisan i do think there’s prob a lot of folks experiencing adhd-like symptoms that have something else going on that’s causing some similar symptoms, and that the DSM framework for it needs updating, but how many of those folks are actually being diagnosed and treated w stimulant pharmaceuticals? no idea. but it’s not that easy for adults to get diagnosed in many places, from what i hear

@jeremiah @levisan yeah, could be a vector that pharma is happy about, but i doubt that’s the leading factor, bc 1) most folks leading the charge on normalization of broader autistic and adhd communities are also advocating mainly a non-medical, non-pharma paradigm for how it’s treated, 2) autism in particular isn’t particularly suited for pharmaceutical interventions. adhd fits your bill a bit better.

@jeremiah @levisan is it possible that could eventually happen, or that some doctors overdiagnose? for sure. but overall i think the removal of stigma is helpful, and the direction is towards helping more people live their lives more fully. i was diagnosed with adhd ~15yr ago, and regret not taking it seriously then. around 5yr ago i started learning how adhd works and using targeted strategies to better deal with it, and that has improved my life immensely.

@jeremiah @levisan well it def has changed, in that asperger’s (and now adhd) are increasingly seen as part of the same “spectrum” of neurological conditions. and of course there’s the pop understanding of the conditions too which is often nonsense. but i don’t think it’s a conspiracy to try to medicalize everything. we’ve seen demedicalization of it too — seeing them as neurotypes that can exist without needing treatment rather than as just disorders