Medication

Tuesday

John Hasson

We shouldn’t downplay the risks of ADHD medication

I was diagnosed with ADHD in my freshman year of college. I’d suspected as much in high school, but I disliked the idea of taking medication. College was different. No matter what I tried, I kept finding gaps in my notes – and therefore gaps in my knowledge on test day. While I was prescribed so-called “smart drugs,” I didn’t delude myself into thinking they would magically make me more intelligent – which is why I laughed when I saw the ADHD research industry perform a volte-face in the pages of the New York Times, in a piece headlined: “Have we been thinking about ADHD all wrong?” The obvious answer is yes.

ADHD

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

The adult ADHD trap

From our UK edition

I was on the bus recently and bored when I decided not to ignore but to answer one of those online questionnaires about adult ADHD. It was on Facebook, I think. Question 1) Am I easily distracted? Well, yes. 2) Am I often late? 3) Do I regularly forget appointments? Yes and yes. By the time I had arrived at work I had signed up to something called Impulse brain training. And in a few days I was quite sure that I’d been bravely suffering with undiagnosed ADHD for decades. I was half-caught in the adult ADHD trap, though I didn’t know it yet. Are you always late? Do you let people down? Don’t worry! Don’t sweat it! That’s just your ADHD I asked my brother and my friends what they thought and instead of laughing, they nodded sadly. Yes, yes.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Even psychiatrists don’t know how the drugs they prescribe work

From our UK edition

What is it like to go mad? Not so much developing depression or having a panic attack — which is wearyingly familiar to many of us — but to go properly mad, the sort of madness that involves delusions and police officers and locked psychiatric wards? Horatio Clare didn’t have to imagine what that was like for his book Heavy Light. It’s a memoir, subtitled ‘A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing’, and is an unsparing tale not just of what it was like for him to succumb to a psychotic episode but also of what it did to his family. The book starts with a skiing holiday in Italy with his partner Rebecca and the children.

Thursday

Horatio Clare

The problem with pills: The Octopus Man, by Jasper Gibson, reviewed

From our UK edition

Having a breakdown? Try this pill, or that — or these? Built on the 1950s myth of a chemical imbalance in the brain, long since debunked, modern psychiatry still pours pills on trauma. While their general mechanisms are hypothesised, the specific consequences of different psychotropic drugs for individual brains remain haphazard. ‘We prescribe by side-effect, by trial and error,’ one consultant psychiatrist told me. ‘But I’ve seen all these drugs working,’.The problem is that pills alleviate symptoms of mental illness while doing nothing for causes. Psychiatry’s dilemma mirrors that of Tom Tuplow, the hero of Jasper Gibson’s magnificent novel, a delightfully intelligent man from a broken home who took too much acid etc.