How I got to 200 productive hours a month

>This is like telling depressed people to be happy or victims of violence with PTSD to 'grow a pair' and 'snap out of it'.

It might go against the "just feed them drugs" mentality, but lots of times it totally works.

They had plenty of "traumatic stress" before the 21st century, in all parts of the world -- huge wars, conflicts, disasters, even genocide. But those involved (like older friends and relatives that have survived bombings and wars and dictatorship) also could grow a pair and snap out of it, and even thrive afterwards. I don't believe they had a different DNA or mental wiring back then.

  At an FDA hearing on March 23, 2006, I testified: “Saying any 
  psychiatric diagnosis ‘is a brain-based problem and that the medications 
  are normalizing function’ is an anti-scientific, pro-drug lie” [ 14]. 
  Yet this has become standard practice throughout medicine, for example,   at the American Psychiatric Association [ 15], American Medical 
  Association [ 16], American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 
  American Academy of Pediatrics, Child Neurology Society, American 
  Academy of Family Physicians [ 17], FDA [ 13], and virtually all US 
  government health-care agencies.

  Journal articles [ 6], press releases, ads [ 18], drug inserts, and 
  research informed consent documents say, or infer, that psychological 
  diagnoses are abnormalities/diseases. All patients and research 
  participants with psychological problems are led to believe they have an 
  abnormality/disease, biasing them in favor of medical interventions, and 
  against nonmedical interventions (e.g., love, will power, or talk 
  therapy), which presume, as is the case, that the individual is 
  physically and medically normal and without need of a 
  medical/pharmaceutical intervention.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1518691/

  Currently, depression is not diagnosed via objective chemical
  tests, nor is treatment guided by any such tests. If depression did
  result primarily from a known chemical imbalance, such tests
  would likely be available and in widespread use, and depression
  would be easily and quickly resolved for most patients.

  Luckily, a number of effective interventions are available for
  treating depression. Such interventions include a variety of 
  pharmacological as well as nonpharmacological approaches, sometimes
  used alone and sometimes in combination with one another

http://www.brown.uk.com/brownlibrary/france.pdf

Thank you. I was suspecting that I might have ADHD for a while now but never got to actually test it. The country I'm living in is still very backwards when it comes to ADHD treatment and until recently only children could get diagnosed. For adult immigrants it was almost impossible.

Your comment was a good reminder though. I right away googled for a mental clinic, picked up my phone and asked if they are able to diagnose adults. Now I have an appointment for next week.

I hope of course that I don't have it, but if I do, and if I actually can get medicine for it, and if it would actually change my life, a big thank you!

> Wrong food, bad sleeping habits, wrong teaching methods all influence the way we get stimulated. Studies agree with this.

This part is severely misunderstood. If I don't sleep, eat, and exercise reasonably I completely lose focus. Taking adderall will help, but it treating the symptom rather than the cause. This looks like ADHD, but isn't.

If my children lack sleep and are overburden (thanks modern school system), it looks like ADHD, but it isn't.

Now, some people, children and adults, do have ADHD no matter how well they sleep, meditate, eat, and exercise. With our current understanding, their best bet is medication. But for the vast majority, they simply need to slow down.

> The next step is taming your pocket monster.

This really meant something quite different to me. I think sex (in whatever form) is an issue that needs to be taken semi-seriously within this context.

Professors Mitchell and Webb have good advice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk

It is very likely to be a combination of innate predisposition and behavioral effects. Like almost all diseases that are not caused by external bodies, or extremely hereditary. So ADHD is not really a condition, rather, it is an axis on which you can fit somewhere. In extreme cases, I can imagine it's very hard to manage without pills. In most cases, one can probably work through it without pills.