That's great!

ADHD makes me utterly incapable of holding a job down, creating a CV, or even "performing being disabled properly" because to "perform being disabled" you have to do things like regularly travel to the job center, do lots of phone calls and scheduling with medical professionals, actually going through the "disability application" process (which requires going to court when they inevitably refuse you), etc. There's a laundry list of medical issues I've been putting off for- literally years now- and only half of those got solved when one of my friends stepped in and acted as a carer. The rest seem intractable at the moment.

The last psych I saw for ADHD ignored my two prior failures at holding a job down, my inability to properly access healthcare, my inability to sit down and read a god-damned book or study at something for more than an hour, and wanted more salient evidence. Namely, she wanted me to acquire another job (I'm not quite sure how, because despite my skill and very large breadth of knowledge (acquired back when I could focus on things — I suspect stress has had an impact on this), I have two large gaps on my CV and less than 2 years combined in a position) and fail at it before providing treatment. To me, right now, in the current status of the hiring economy, that's basically an insurmountable task where there's no guarantee that if I do those things, that I will actually be prescribed treatment. Which is a hell of a situation to leave someone in, especially when my symptoms match up exactly with people I know who have ADHD (I've literally pointed at people with my symptoms and gone "sounds like ADHD buddy", and they've been prescribed, lmao), and the solution to all of this is a non-stimulant like guanfacine, or literally just "adderall". The doses are small enough that when it's working well it doesn't feel like you're on anything, which is very hardly comparable to me downing so much caffeine at my first job to function that I ended up having panic attacks in meetings.

So like — what, do I pay 3k on a private psych that might say the same damn thing? Do I struggle uphill forever until I can finally "perform adhd" enough for them to see me and believe that I'm not just trying to find a way to sell pills? What are my options here supposed to be that aren't "get ground up by a system that doesn't want me around"? It makes me wonder why I bothered putting my life on pause for (honestly much longer than,) two years for the appointment in the first place.

Articles like this leave me in a position of — ok, but who is this point of view helping. Almost anyone I know with a mental health disorder that has actually managed to create a stable life for themselves has said medication was the key — that yes, over the long term, the solution was to reframe and reorganize their environment, acquire stability, etc. but that they wouldn't have achieved any of that without medication and therapy to provide the tools and stability necessary to do that from. I know people, and I myself personally, have gone to heath services seeking support for mental health issues with, e.g. depression[1], and been presented with — not even social options (group therapy) — but mindfulness therapy[2]. I genuinely wonder how many people are driven to suicide by a system that takes years of work to basically battle them into giving you a solution to something, and that provides approaches that leave people putting in a lot of work and feeling utterly uncared for.

Increasingly, the health systems that people rely on do not want to give those initial tools — and while there are a number of very good reasons for this, it drives people to unsafe alternatives. I very literally know someone in another country who buys black market amphetamines and purifies them into ADHD treatment, simply because the alternative is "no treatment" or shelling out 300 bucks a month. Drugs are a huge risk for people with ADHD, I wonder how many people are out there doing cocaine or street meth to function when they could be taking drugs at low dosages dispensed by a doctor with medical training all with a level of certainty that trace elements present are not going to completely rot your brain.

I'm not quite sure how to finish this, since the graphomania has kind of left me. 50/50 chance on whether i can focus long enough to read the comments! lmao

[1]: Before I discovered that my depression is entirely because of how fucking hopeless my circumstances feel like.

[2]: Mindfulness therapy can be very effective, I've used it on myself. But it requires a better presentation than the website's "wish yourself better with the power of your mind!", it should absolutely not be a first-line approach of therapy, and especially not for depression. If I hadn't had personal experience with it it probably would have taken many months with a therapist for me to be convinced that it's a thing that works, quite frankly. What I'm trying to say is that most people are not as open minded as I am towards mindfulness as a Thing, and it felt like a slap in the face to me. It was almost as bad as me waiting 8 months for speech therapy and getting a letter that boils down to "Sorry! The best we can do is these recorded zoom links, 30 minutes each, one of which is a dead link!"