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).
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About a month ago, I posted about my realization that my family dynamics are abnormal and not a classic case of a generational/cultural disconnect I suspected them to be, but that my parents are in fact emotionally unstable. At the time I was pissed and believed that my relationship with them has fallen to rock bottom, but little did I know that was not the case quite yet; I still had the residual baseline of respect for my narcissistic father on the basis that he is my biological father who raised me, who when on an emotional high freed of all discomfort in life, can actually behave decently. I clung onto the idea of what could have been if he sought help. I was willing to be polite with him from a distance, if only I could move out and catch my breath. Even that is no longer the case.
I most likely have inattentive ADHD, and on the off-chance that I don't, there certainly is something else on board. The fact that I am not hyperactive, have always performed well on exams until high school, have always been described as an analytical person with a vocabulary above my grade level, and have seldom inflicted any difficulties unto my teachers or peers means that no teacher has entertained the idea that ADHD could be the issue at hand. Some teachers have flagged that I may have Asperger's, though usually the justification for that has always been week (e.g. I knew Africa was a continent and not a country at age 5 when most of my peers didn't, in 9th grade I struggled to make friends when navigating a language barrier in a country notoriously difficult for socialization, etc.). My parents never went ahead and did anything with that information, not because they believed I didn't have Asperger's, but rather because they were too prideful and didn't want some naive pedagogues be the reason I land on a mandatory autism registry that does not exist. They still weaponized the notion that I did have Asperger's against me in arguments, using autism as an insult at times if I said or did something they didn't like. The overlap that I did have with autism was that my coordination was poor, and I was curious about subjects most people my age were not. That said, my niche interests have never been a monomaniacal obsession I needed to force onto others, but rather a tool for synthesizing ideas and finding ways I can apply them. On the contrary, the demonization of autism that I've constantly heard from a young age have led me to be hypervigilant about people not picking up that I know more than what's expected of me in a certain subject, though thankfully my inhibition has now gone down considerably after attending church for the past year and meeting people who I know value me for who I am with no strings attached.
When I recently heard somebody say that when teachers give a student the "you're not realizing your full potential" line, there's often a high probability the student has undiagnosed ADHD, I began to investigate the symptoms further. I've always felt a constitutional incapability of being neat and organized, teachers have often observed a delta between my oral participation and performance on formal examinations vs. my output on a regular assignment/project, I am capable of hyperfocusing in one subject and go down a rabbit hole of Substacks and academic articles, while one I've never been passionate about such as biology may simply not click with me and I will be unable to initiate the process of studying to a point of near-paralysis. The posts I've made about my paranoia when making advances with women, that's likely rejection sensitivity dysphoria. Handing a woman my number over DMs knowing damn well it may get left on delivered is even more draining for me, I did it today so we'll see how it goes. For the same reason, I also get more pissed when I see a misrepresentation of my reasoning or any uncharitable behavior when trying to have a constructive discussion online.
Well, the other day, I mentioned to my father that I am in the process of pursuing a formal diagnosis for inattentive ADHD. He accused me of taking the easy route (I guess brushing off academic performance beyond my caliber, settling for poorer educational institutions and workplaces, and refusing tools that facilitate my success is the difficult route per his contortions). He justified his skepticism towards the medication by mentioning one anecdote of my younger brother taking Concerta with no discernible effects, saying that he'd rather not take any mind-altering chemicals as his output would then not be entirely his own doing. I asked him why he wears glasses, another tool that allows people to maximize their success and eliminate a tractable disadvantage, and he told me it's an apples-to-oranges comparison as glasses are a physical object and not medicine. He told me that there are many things I can do before taking medication, such as improving my sleeping schedule, managing my screen time, eating more, as if it isn't a Catch-22 problem. What I find most disconcerting is the fact that my younger brother who is at an age where he's not quite as analytical and self-aware will have to endure this negligence and disregard for his well-being for another few years. In the end, I got despondent and was visibly agonized, and my father had the audacity to tell me I'm the one gloating over this. He was always capable of treating me in a very undignified manner, but it was typically calculated and subtle. For him to brazenly invalidate my medical needs is a new low.
If all goes according to plan, I'll be out of this house in a couple of weeks, and now that I see him for all that he is, I will unhesitantly be cutting contact with that prick. I remember when I was 13 or so, I watched a video adaptation of several sci-fi novels by Phillip K. Dick on Amazon Prime. One of them was The Father-thing, where an alien eats a child's father and perfectly replicates his external appearance. Relating to its plotline was not on my bingo card, but here we are.
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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