It's long, but I listened to this podcast a while back with Peter Attia and Trenna Sutcliffe discussing Autism, ADHD, and Anxiety, and found that it really reduced the stigma I associated with medication for treatment of ADHD. In particular, understanding the risks of not effectively treating ADHD, in comparison with with the potential risks/benefits of the medication. That's not to say that we should only rely on medication - behavioral therapy (with parents involved too) should also play a part.

https://peterattiamd.com/trennasutcliffe/

You could draw a parallel with GLP-1 agonists: people like to grandstand about how you shouldn't need it and how it's somehow cheating. As if it's not addressing a condition that people are suffering from right now, today.

The stigma also seems to accidentally admit that things like executive function and food noise aren't equally distributed, thus some people could benefit from intervention.

For example, if you've never been fat or you never binge eat or you've never procrastinated 15min of homework until 2am despite, then you're missing the irony when your solution for people who deal with these things is to try harder and to jump through hoops that you don't need to.

Behavioral therapy is only needed to make people feel better about taking amphetamines. It takes only a very cursory review of published reputable papers to realize there's nothing behavioral therapy can do to improve ADHD because as Russell Barkley says ADHD is a disability of doing, not knowing what to do.

Therapy, and most of all, understanding how our brains work make all the difference in the world.

It's like realizing that the reason you've been getting stuck in the mud is not that you're a bad driver.

It's just that people who don't are driving 4x4 trucks, and you've had a Nissan Z series sports car.

Turns out, farms and off-road are simply not the right environment for your vehicle, and when that environment has some accomodations, like the paved surface of a highway or a race track, you're literally running circles around people in the most common vehicles.

One profound effect of taking Adderall was feeling the clarity to understand that difference, and seeing the road instead of the endless mud fields in front of me.

It does help to get things done, but around 30% of ADHD'ers aren't responsive to it.

Understanding that you're getting stuck because your brain wasn't meant for that kind of driving, however, is universally useful.

That's why I made that ADHD wiki [1], and keep posting links to it.

It's an compilation of information that has helped me tremendously to understand the above; and I know this resource was helpful to others too in their journeys.

My perspective is that of a late-diagnosed adult who's been completely unaware of what ADHD is, and thought that they can't possibly have an attention deficit because to get anything done, they have to hyperfocus on it.

Again, learning that hyperfocus is a symptom of ADHD and understanding how it works)l had a profound impact. And medication helped with that too: it's easier to not get stuck hyperfocused on the wrong thing with Adderall.

Getting Adderall was like spraying WD-40 into rusty steering components. The immediate effect is that I can go where I want to go to, not the random direction my vehicle happens to face.

The long-term effect though was understanding what makes it difficult to steer, and how to maintain it better.

And even if I don't have power steering all the time like everyone else, I'm still better off with that experience.

My point here that it's never about medication VERSUS therapy and knowledge.

Medication is not an alternative, it's a BOOSTER.

When it works, it's just dropping the difficulty from Nightmare to Medium/Hard. It doesn't play the game for you.

The said, I'm very much happy the Nightmare mode days are behind me, and I'm very sad that the only reason I've been living my life that way is stigma and lack of information.

When I took Adderall, I unexpectedly had to grieve the future I'll never get to have after being held back by all the pain I've been needlessly subjected to over the preceding three decades.

That grief, too, is a common experience in ADHD late-diagnosed adults.

Thank you for sharing that link, and contributing to the discussion and awareness <3

[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd