←back to thread

Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies

(angadh.com)
129 points surprisetalk | 3 comments | 17 Nov 25 14:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
alterom ◴[17 Nov 25 21:33 UTC] No.45958585[source]▶
This article (and the title alone) is harmful. Adderall is not about increasing mental efficiency.

What Adderall is about is:

- helping with executive dysfunction for people who suffer from it.

- allowing people with ADHD like me to function. To do the things that everyone else does, things that we want to do and need to do, but can't do because of the way our brains are wired.

- increasing the lifespan of ADHD people who don't get help. Women with ADHD die about 9 years younger than those without ADHD [1].

- making our lives less painful, since every small task incurs pain, resulting in 3x depression rates [2] and alarmingly high suicidal ideation rates (50% of ADHD adults [3]).

Please, please, educate yourself about ADHD and medication for it before writing something like this title.

No, Aldous Huxley didn't. "predict" Adderall.

To understand more, I've put together a resource which, I hope, will be easy enough to digest. Here's my experience of getting prescribed Adderall for my ADHD:

https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Medication

If I have attention deficit and I could write it, I hope you (and the author of the text we're discussing) could spare some attention to it before talking about Adderall, amphetamines, and other stimulants prescribed for ADHD.

Thank you in advance.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/23/nx...

[2] https://add.org/adhd-and-depression/

[3] https://crownviewpsych.com/blog/adhd-increased-risk-suicide-...

replies(12): >>45958847 #>>45959152 #>>45959284 #>>45959603 #>>45959622 #>>45959716 #>>45959738 #>>45960105 #>>45960113 #>>45961075 #>>45962592 #>>45970217 #
1. d4mi3n ◴[17 Nov 25 22:30 UTC] No.45959152[source]▶
Here here. I also have ADHD though I couldn’t use stimulant medications due to bad reactions to it, but I’ve had success with non-stimulant medications (Straterra aka atomoxetine [1]).

A big thing I struggled with prior to medical treatment that I don’t often hear discussed about ADHd was rejection sensitivity.

For those unfamiliar: imagine a time someone said something that hurt your feelings or caused a strong emotional reaction.

Now imagine that as a routine emotional response to day to day interactions. Feeling intensely sad, irritated, insulted, etc. to extents completely o it of proportion to whatever was said or even implied.

It’s brutal. It contributes to a lot of depression and social anxiety for folks with ADHD. It doesn’t matter if you’re aware of the response being disproportionate—you get to go on that emotional roller coaster whenever somebody says they don’t care for your favorite food, accidentally cut you off in a conversation, or the day just turns out differently than you were expecting.

Medical treatment makes a huge difference—in my particular case the difference between feeling like I had the emotional regulation of a toddler and not needing to constantly question every emotion I felt prior to responding to things I was reacting to.

Stimulant medications didn’t work for me, but they do this for most people with ADHD (more effectively, too!) and like alterom it saddens me whenever FUD like this crops up.

replies(2): >>45959989 #>>45964645 #
2. alterom ◴[18 Nov 25 00:17 UTC] No.45959989[source]▶
Thanks for writing this comment and raising awareness!

Rejection sensitivity is neurodivergent trait that's not exclusive to ADHD, but the way it manifests with ADHD can be truly life-derailing.

Learning about it helped me a lot to deal with it (in particular, externalizing that emotion as a trait and not what me is).

I wrote about it too in that wiki. Here's my experience with rejection sensitivity in the ADHD context:

https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Rejection%20Sensitivity

3. machinate ◴[18 Nov 25 12:24 UTC] No.45964645[source]▶
Rejection sensitivity may be the reason I detest to-do lists. The lists inevitably languish and slowly turn into a perpetual reminder of who I haven't become, i.e. a rejection from past-me.