an open letter to those critical of ADHD prescription medication
I don’t need my glasses.
I can make out your face just fine once you come within 30 feet or so, and if I squint I can stretch that range to 40 or so. When I was in school I needed them to see the whiteboard, but I’m graduated and done. Now I only have to read from books, my phone, and my computer, and those are all within arms reach. I don’t need to see the burger joint menu, I can figure out what I want ahead of time.
Without my glasses I can’t see road signs, but so long as I don’t go anywhere new I know my way around. My driver’s license says I shouldn’t drive without them, but I don’t have a car anyway.
Luckily I do have my glasses, so the effort required for all those things is cut down to nothing. What I’m missing is my ADHD medication.
When talking to people about starting an ADHD prescription one of the recurring questions is “You don’t want to rely on a drug for the rest of your life, do you?” From the outside, it’s an excellent question. The idea of popping a pill every time you want to write an email sounds limiting at best, and that’s not even touching the weird USAmerican moral hangups on work ethic. And it’s not like I need it to function, right?
You’re right, I don’t need it in order to send an email. I need it in order to send an email without having to devote the effort of an entire day to answering email. My ADHD doesn’t make necessary daily tasks impossible, it makes them incredibly costly in terms of effort. I could give any one of a hundred metaphorical devices I’ve concocted to explain what the holdup is, where the problem lies, why “just focus” is so incredibly unhelpful to me, but I won’t. My goal here isn’t to make you understand exactly what I’m dealing with, it’s to make you understand that it shouldn’t matter.
You wouldn’t deny me glasses and tell me to just “look harder” because you don’t know what nearsightedness is like. Invisible disabilities like ADHD add a constant energy drain to everyday things that most folks don’t even realize they do. We’re playing the same game as you on hard mode. We’re not trying to cheat, we’re just trying to keep up.