When I was growing up, people started getting diagnosed with ADHD.
I was never diagnosed with that, but in grad school, I told the student health organization that I was having trouble concentrating. They sent me to a psychiatrist, and again, I said I had difficulty concentrating, so he gave me a low dose of Adderall twice daily. It worked well to help with concentration for about 2 weeks before I noticed a tolerance build-up in that it wasn’t working as well. I could have asked for a higher dosage, but I just stopped taking it.
Instead, I worked on cognitive techniques to work with my brain to aid in its refocusing. Techniques such as breaking down tasks and doing the same thing at the same time every day create an excitement of progress through ritual in the brain.
There was an article in the Economist recently about how most people with mild to moderate ADHD lose their symptoms when the activity is one they enjoy — suggesting that cognitive training could replace medication.
This is obvious. I knew this as a child. Truly shame on the educational system of America for turning to pharmaceutical companies to change children’s brains, before changing a child’s environment or patterns.
We treat children’s brains as machines to be tuned into place in this country. And it needs to stop as we are most likely losing valuable humans with valuable skills by expecting all children’s/person’s brains to be uniform.
