Disclaimer: I’m referring the the US medical system, but I imagine people in other countries may encounter similar things.
I cannot be the only one who has had this experience, but all my dealings with the medical industry feel like they were refined by a group of psychologists to exploit the weaknesses of those with ADHD.
The volume of calls, appointments, and paperwork I had to full out to get a diagnosis and prescription for treatment is completely unreasonable to expect someone with poor working memory and attention issues to navigate.
Then, to stay on medication, you need to schedule and make appointments with a psychiatrist every month, for the rest of your life, and if you miss a single one, you will run out of meds (and likely charged a fine), which will make it even harder to remember to make the next one. If you miss too many, that psychiatrist will refuse to see you again and you have to go back to your PCP to get a new referral.
Look, I understand that their time is valuable, but this system couldn’t be designed any other way to be more accommodating to people who clinically forget things?!
It’s like designing a wheelchair ramp that’s actually just stairs that are 3x as steep as the regular stairs. Also, if you fall to the bottom, someone takes your wheelchair until you can climb back up.
Germany here. It’s kind of similar here. The system is rigged against us.
My strategy is to use medication to enable me to build a support structure and learn techniques that help with dealing with symptoms. E. g. meditation, physical exercises that help mind-body connection, CBT, routines, etc. So that when I’m without meds, I can fall back on skills I acquired and trained.
What I also do is hoard medication. Ask for a higher dose or more pills, than I actually need. That way I can miss an appointment and still have enough for the next month or so. I even hide pills in different places around my apartment.
Also in Germany, undiagnosed.
There is an ADHD clinic close to me - They sent me a bunch of forms to fill out. Not form-fillable PDFs. They expected me to go to a print shop, print it, fill it out, scan it, and email it back. About 8 months later I ended up just learning how to write texts into PDFs because I kept forgetting and postponing. Now to wait “up to 24 months” for the first appointment, what a joke.
Do it like I did: fail so hard at life that lose your job, lose Bürgergeld welfare, and are in danger of losing your apartment. Have a mental breakdown and go to a psychiatric hospital crisis center.
Do yourself a favor and buy a used brother laser printer. The toner lasts ages and they support universal PCL printer drivers. I bought one new 16 years ago and never bought new toner for it, only paper. It cost less than 100 € back then. Still prints.
Older Brother printers are amazing. I’ve had mine since 2007.
I’ve been self medicating for decades with nicotine and THC. It works well for me. I guess I’m lucky.
THC helps a lot in very low doses (20mg or so) but I build a tolerance to it after 2-3 weeks, and also it makes me completely stupid. Its great for getting chores and shit done but terrible for my job. It also makes me really really wordy, which is kind of annoying for everyone involved.
Treatment for ADHD is meditation.
Sorry you got downvoted so much, because you’re not 100% wrong. Meditation can actually help with some ADHD symptoms, however
- Meditation can be especially difficult for those with ADHD, because it requires doing the exact thing their brain has trouble doing. If you are able to overcome that hurdle, it can be very helpful—exercising a part of your brain that is underdeveloped. But “just meditate” is useless advice for many people.
- This comes across as dismissive to the original post, which is about healthcare systems not just lacking accommodation, but full of extra challenges for the most vulnerable. There is much more to ADHD treatment than medication. For example, many people, especially those who went undiagnosed, have years of trauma to unravel, and therapy comes with all these same challenges.
I have ADHD. I was diagnosed 32 years ago. In all that time, nothing has helped me but meditation. Of course it’s difficult. That’s not an excuse to not help yourself and treat the symptoms instead of the disease. People are so quick to accept a diagnosis and believe there is something wrong with them that can’t be fixed and use that perspective as a basis to over medicate themselves. It’s completely unnecessary. Regular meditation physically restructures the brain and can repair the abnormalities that cause ADHD. I know this for a fact. I guarantee not a single person downvoting me has tried meditation in any serious capacity, or done any research on its effectiveness. Imagine if people actually put effort into helping themselves instead of doping themselves with amphetamines!
So you’re partially right, what you say about meditation helping and restructuring the brain is true and it can help. However, it isn’t an end all be all cure for everyone.
When talking about ADHD, I usually make sure we agree on the definition. Here when I reference ADHD I’m not just talking about the symptoms (inattentiveness, hyperactivity, executive functioning, impuls control, etc), I also mean that these symptoms exist in a person in such a way that it makes their life significantly harder. So, things like struggling or being unable to hold down a job, maintain friendships, and/or live independently.
ADHD does present differently in different people (often broadly categorized into Predominantly Inattentive Type, Predominantly Hyperactive-Impulsive Type, and Combined Type) as well as affecting people with different intensities. This, to the best of my understanding, also means that different strategies for coping with ADHD have differing levels of effectiveness. While some may benefit immensely from meditation, others will need to make other lifestyle changes or will absolutely need medication to handle their symptoms. Usually a combination of different techniques are required to be able to effectively function with ADHD. What techniques work may change over time as well, as our bodies change.
The reason why stimulants or other medications prescribed so often is that they are consistently and broadly effective with helping people manage their ADHD symptoms. It’s best to treat meds as a starting point, something that can keep you going while you determine if non-medication base solutions work for you and start to implement them in your life (if they exist, for some they don’t). Unfortunately, many people don’t have access to proper therapy to get that far. They might be able to get a diagnosis and prescription, but don’t have the ability to continue to get the help they need in further exploring solutions.
While I’m glad meditation works for you, it is a wonderful tool, ADHD (and mental health in general) is complex and cannot be ‘fixed’ for everyone in a reliable, repeatable way.
Sorry, this is just scientifically untrue. Meditation can help improve symptoms by strengthening skills that are typically atrophied in ADHD brains, it doesn’t “physically restructure” your brain any more than learning does.
I’m glad it has worked for you, and meditation is certainly a safe and often valuable method for improving many aspects of mental health. However, framing it as some miracle cure is disingenuous.
Meditation has been shown time and again to increase grey matter in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, thicken cortical areas, enhance neuroplasticity and reduce the size of the amygdala. The major physical markers of ADHD happen to be reduced grey matter in the prefrontal cortex and low cortical thickness. Functionally it is also an overactive default mode network, which regular meditation has been shown to drastically decrease. This is all very well documented, but thanks for asserting the opposite.
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