In other news
Feb. 12th, 2016 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
commodorifiedSo this is why at the tender age of 40-odd I started taking amphetamines.
Oddly, I WAS diagnosed as a child. I was also overmedicated, in retrospect—you know what, it was the 70s and from all I can find out everyone on Ritalin was getting too much of the stuff; I don't even know my exact dosage but it was 4-6 Ritalin/day—which led to a 30-year refusal to try again, and also, probably to my benefit, a life-long wariness of recreational drugs, on the grounds that if my experience of speed was so very very different from what other people described, I was not interested in finding out what happened if I took, say, psychedelics.
This is my brain on drugs, probably. If this were a spinning .gif with the saturation hiked up and thegoat sheep invoking ancient gods.
"...[G]irls’ symptoms include:
a tendency toward daydreaming
trouble following instructions
making careless mistakes on homework and tests."
Oh man, so you know how I turned into such a good proofreader? ABJECT TERROR. Which is NOT the way to develop a life skill, really.
Most of the things I'm really good at I acquired through a combination of a) hyperfocus and b) fear of being screamed at.
Oddly, I WAS diagnosed as a child. I was also overmedicated, in retrospect—you know what, it was the 70s and from all I can find out everyone on Ritalin was getting too much of the stuff; I don't even know my exact dosage but it was 4-6 Ritalin/day—which led to a 30-year refusal to try again, and also, probably to my benefit, a life-long wariness of recreational drugs, on the grounds that if my experience of speed was so very very different from what other people described, I was not interested in finding out what happened if I took, say, psychedelics.
This is my brain on drugs, probably. If this were a spinning .gif with the saturation hiked up and the
"...[G]irls’ symptoms include:
a tendency toward daydreaming
trouble following instructions
making careless mistakes on homework and tests."
Oh man, so you know how I turned into such a good proofreader? ABJECT TERROR. Which is NOT the way to develop a life skill, really.
Most of the things I'm really good at I acquired through a combination of a) hyperfocus and b) fear of being screamed at.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-13 04:45 pm (UTC)a tendency toward daydreaming
trouble following instructions
making careless mistakes on homework and tests."
...'Cause that's not every socially isolated teenaged girl I ever knew...
And, no, not a great way to develope life skills. :-(
no subject
Date: 2016-02-14 04:24 pm (UTC)I mean, yes, there are other causes of those things but if you fix the social isolation of someone with adhd they will still have life-damaging concentration issues, just in pleasanter company and circumstances.
ETA I mean, would you describe me in the years you've known me as socially isolated? And yet getting stuff done was an ongoing, grinding issue.
Also, and this is one of the reasons I've always been reasonably pro-meds even when I didn't want to try them again myself, if you give someone a short-acting amphetamine they will either feel calmer and more focussed, or they won't. If they don't, they don't have adhd and you should be able to peel them off the curtain shortly.