ADHD Didn't Break Me–My Parents Did

For me, it was a combination of my parents authoritarian parenting, and authoritarian school/environment, where teachers never checked in with me to see how I was doing.

Psychedelics was the only thing that helped me, and I haven’t taken prescribed medications in over 10 years since my powerful experience which physically helped me feel love and safety for the first time; things I never experienced at home.

More experiences with Ayahuasca over the past several years have helped me fully process most, if not all the traumas I remember (also helped me remember the ones I forgot!) and I’m now in a much better place mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

As a result, I think its fully possible to be neurodivergent without having disorders

There has been an interesting result recently, which was discussed here [0]. In an online game where participants had to forage for resources, people with attention deficits scored higher, because they preferred exploration to exploitation.

I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.

Having ADHD is then of course a major disadvantage in environments where there is only one global optimum. Examples include highly regulated and deterministic academic environments (school, undergraduate studies) or corporate environments.

But in human history, environments with a single global optimum have been the exception, not the rule.

People with ADHD - and their parents and teachers - should therefore embrace their individuality as a kind of reservoir talent in the human gene pool. We need these individuals in the future.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39508573

I know of quite few colleagues and friends with ADHD who need stimulants to get anything done at all, even to get out from their bed. Who were treated unsuccessfully for anxiety, depression, when all their symptoms vanished after getting on meds.

ADHD not to everyone is something quirky, to some people it can be utterly debilitating and devastating condition.

> Instead, they relied on discipline as the only solution: withholding rights, denying privileges, banning books outside the curriculum because they "caused inattention," cutting off the internet, locking TV channels with passwords, and limiting socialization during study time.

I'm perfectly inclined here to agree with the author in blaming the parents for putting the child in a borderline abusive environment because they were unable to look outside their own views for the sake of their child.