The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Are you sure skepticism of stimulants to treat ADHD is completely unwarranted? Sure, the ranks of skeptics include Scientology and RFK, but even The New York Times has published such opinions relatively recently [1] [2]. I'm not going to call myself a complete skeptic here --- I know people for whom the medications seem to work well --- but the diagnosis criteria are really a spectrum, and the rates at which we're prescribing these drugs (23 percent of 17-year-old American boys!) is concerning with respect to how we've pathologized cases that really can't be that far from the median, and the drugs have very real side effects. To the extent that they're performance-enhancing for most people, there is a real question of fairness and applicability, but I won't claim to know enough to have a strong opinion about that here. See also the fraction of high-achieving "mentally disabled" students at top-tier universities demanding special accommodations.
Medication might well work for you. I'm not a doctor, and I'm definitely not your doctor, but I would recommend a little sympathy for differing views here. There might well be other reasons to cut off contact, but IMO "ADHD skepticism" seems, alone, well below that bar.
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