> In an observational, case-control study, researchers assessed loneliness in children with the question “Have you ever felt lonely for more than 6 months before the age of 12”
Doesn't sound like they "assessed loneliness in children". I thought this would be one of those longitudinal studies where subjects are given a survey while young and then the researchers come back to check on them later in life.
Also, no links to any version of the paper. What a pain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy is the dark matter of mental health. Unfortunately it has been crowded out by absolutely every other possible explanation of why some people don't fit in.
TFA does seem to draw an arrow loneliness->psychosis, but as the headline only stated 'linked' I had initially thought of the obvious connection in the other direction: "being the weird kid"->loneliness.
(Donald Knuth, a man known for deep —and sometimes obscure— interests, spoke of "finding his tribe" upon encountering CS in the 1960s. Did God create the discipline for Don?)
I see the connection of (1) 5-10% of people are born with the genetic predisposition of schizotaxia, (2) most of those people are going to experience negative social learning that leads to the schizotypal personality organization, (3) 100% percent of people who develop schizophrenia spectrum disorders were born with schizotaxia, perhaps 10% of them will go on to develop serious psychosis. I think what they are observing is the co-occurrence of (2) and (3)
The latter book is a bit controversial because it sees schizotypy as "you have it or you don't have it" and there are many reasons to believe it is dimensional as pushed here
but the dimensional team can't tell compelling stories around the practical psychopathology the way Lenzenweger does. Notably Bleuler, who named schizophrenia, found that the parents and family of schizophrenics were a bit "odd" and socially withdrawn more than 100 years ago.
It irks me that you can find just a handful of conference proceedings on a condition which affects tens of millions of people in the U.S and that both ADHD and Autism have boomed in popularity because they both are associated with expensive or addictive treatments. Since nobody has a way to monetize schizotypy (if anything antipsychotic drugs could make you more unhinged) there is no budget to popularize it.
The newer ADHD meds are not stimulants and are not addictive.
Maybe ADHD has "boomed" in """popularity""" because a disorder that used to be diagnosed as hyperactivity and a deficit of attention actually turned out to be a quantifiable problem with executive function which exists in a known part of the brain, can be quantifiably treated with medication and therapy, and if untreated results in very confusing problems with emotions and motivation for as long as you live.
I'm hoping today, in a matter of hours, to get prescribed one of these new non-stim drugs, because the stuff described in that video very much matches my experience.
Maybe thinking that ADHD is made up has boomed in popularity because of the South Park and King of the Hill episodes that downplay it. Imagine learning medicine from cartoons.
A big thing with ADHD is as society optimizes, there's less "unproductive" spaces for people to exist in.
I think of my own experience. I can focus long periods of time on something interesting that solves a problem, but when most work is simply business logic and reinventing the same uninteresting wheel at a desk for 40hrs a week, I feel like a caged animal and cannot focus whatsoever.
The behaviors associated with ADHD are quite literally anachronistic. The ability to take in a lot of stimuli and react on it would have been extremely useful during say, a hunter-gatherer time. Someone to try to figure out what those weird berries are useful for, fiddling with some sticks and ending up with a tool, etc.
We're really not meant to sit around all day being "productive".
> most work is simply business logic and reinventing the same uninteresting wheel at a desk for 40hrs a week, I feel like a caged animal and cannot focus whatsoever.
This is how I feel learning this week's popular JavaScript UI framework just to make a button appear on a webpage and handle a click, or here's another generic CRUD operation with a PUT on the controller, how enthralling! And my brain retreats from reality. Like it would rather off itself than take another step.
And I'm not going to medicate that, I don't think it is "wrong" or anything to do with health. It just feels like part of me is speaking. Like my unconscious, or gut, or a combination thereof is signalling that this isn't the place for me. I need to move and spend my energy. Maybe I will quit the industry, or at least move away from webdev.
Could probably extrapolate this experience to school - some kids aren't cut out for sitting still and learning how to factorise quadratics for the 4th time this week. (Speaking for myself again, but I got that the first time, why over and over again?). Thankfully I wasn't in school when medication was fashionable. I pity this generation.
I've only recently had to touch any kind of JS framework in my almost 6 years working. I'm trained far closer to hardware and I love hacking on embedded devices.
I only got medicated as an adult because I'm just not designed to do the same thing day after day. I had a break at work where I was able to design basically a toy for some recruiting. Did the PCB design, firmware, handled manufacturing, designed 3d printed programming jigs, wrote the flashing scripts, etc. All in a span of about 3 months. I was born to prototype widgets and gadgets but society doesn't have a lot of use for that kind of interdisciplinary skillset.
Folks will say "join a startup" but I needed a month to recover from the burnout of that push, so I don't think it'd be healthy for me to go somewhere that expects that LOE year round.
The idea that you will be steadily productive 9-5, 5 days a week, for most months of the year, is a post-Industrial expectation. Our ancestors knew mostly "long" days that ended at 5, followed by "slow" days that ended at 12. And the workdays shrunk in later months because there was less daylight.
I do wonder if that's part of it - some of us aren't built for conventional work cycles, but most people are and it it is something we can't expect to reshape easily.
I try to tell my wife this all the time. She has ADHD, and possibly only that, but diagnosed with and treated for generalized anxiety and depression at various points. She likes to act like I'm some kind of mentally perfect person and I should breed with someone else because our children shouldn't inherit her traits.
To the contrary, I think those traits need to stay in the human gene pool. I'm extremely well adapted to a predictable, boring, overwhelmingly safe environment, but there is no guarantee the human environment will remain this way. Calling ADHD behaviors anachronistic is probably basically correct, but I think it's important to remember this doesn't mean we'll never again need them. They were adaptive in the past and may again be adaptive in the future. The important thing for humanity overall is to have a wide variety of behavioral traits so we can collectively adapt as needed when circumstances change. We do not want everyone to be perfectly adapted to the exact present moment. That's how extinctions happen.
What are you getting at with your leading questions? It would be clearer if you just came out and said it.
I don't know why you jump to the extreme of "no matter the potential cost", they absolutely did not say that. They are talking about one specific trait, and think it is acceptable, not making some blanket statement.
They aren't claiming trisomy or Huntingtons is acceptable. ADHD isn't a death sentence and some people benefit from it today.
> A big thing with ADHD is as society optimizes, there's less "unproductive" spaces for people to exist in.
I don't think it's that black and white, consider how civilization-changes have made more space for "unproductive" people who would previously have been abandoned for the wolves.
We aren’t meant to sit around all day writing business logic. Luckily I have the ability to do that, because I’d rather not break my back working construction. So I take my meds and do my job.
> It irks me that you can find just a handful of conference proceedings on a condition which affects tens of millions of people in the U.S and that both ADHD and Autism have boomed in popularity because they both are associated with expensive or addictive treatments.
Because they are associated with expensive or addictive treatments? That is quite a claim in its own right; I’d argue that ADHD boomed in the US because we now understand how it affects people throughout their lives and it is no longer a ‘little boy’s’ disease.
One implication of your statement is that many (some significant portion) people diagnosed with ADHD shouldn’t have been, and that the reason for this over-diagnosis is drug seeking or pushing behavior.
Because of this implication, groups like the DEA make the manufacturing and distribution of these medically useful medications difficult and paradoxical to what they intend to treat. In some states, the patient with ADHD has to call monthly to get a refill because their provider isn’t allowed to prescribe more than one fill at a time, nor could the provider automatically send out a refill without contact with a patient. It is quite inconvenient for a patient who suffers from what is effectively time blindness.
This also maintains the narrative that the patients are seeking drugs for some form of abuse or diversion, causing the patients to feel like criminals. This is absurd.
It's false to characterize ADHD medication as "addictive". At prescription-level dosages, this just isn't true, and despite a lot of misinformation from scaremonger writers who illegally tried their roommate's Adderall in college and thought they got high because their heart was racing, the folks that truly benefit from such meds actually experience the effects in quite the opposite way, because it provides a major calming effect on the mind of many people who have ADHD.
ADHD meds, while they did give an amazing ability focus that I have never experienced before I took them or after I stopped, were most definitely euphoria-inducing stimulants, and they can most definitely be addictive.
Individual/personal experience doesn’t generalize to all users.
It’s useful to be aware of the potential for certain effects and addiction, but this is not an inherent property that impacts all users equally.
May be better to frame this as: depending on your physiology, you may be predisposed to certain effects and/or resulting addiction. Similar things can be said about alcohol/cannabis. Physical or psychological addiction happens, but not all users are susceptible in the same ways.
As a person with bad ADHD and years of experience on and off adderall, I have no clue how anyone can claim that the stimulant ADHD meds don’t genuinely get you high. They indeed are not physiologically addictive, but can be easily relied upon mentally because of how good they feel.
I confess I can barely notice when I take my medicine, as far as feelings go. I can barely notice that anything is different, to be honest. I am more patient with people, but if I don't stick to a very regular routine, I will skip them. When I run out, if there is friction to get them refilled, I will go for quite a while without them.
I don't doubt that they impact people in different ways. I also don't doubt that I likely don't notice some of the feelings. Reading things like this post, though, makes me think there is a lot more going on. And I am very hesitant to try and generalize how others react based solely on my reaction.
Caffeine is really something, particularly if you don't use it every day. It's the substance that I've experienced the worst dependence and had the hardest time kicking.
Caffeine can really be something. It can also be... basically nothing for folks. I am very curious to know if there are larger studies that can quantify some of this. And I emphatically do not mean that some people have tolerances to it. Though, I do expect that a large enough dose will impact anyone.
I suspect it is a lot like catnip. I think most people that have had cats have had situations where one of the cats just does not care about the stuff. At all. Versus many cats that get quite an extreme reaction to it.
I only know what I know from a podcast but I think that has a lot more to do with your liver and its enzyme profile than your brain. I know someone who took 90mg a day (I assume it’s higher now) just as a clinical dose - they’ve probably never experienced a recreational dose because it would probably be an obscene-looking amount. THC is like this, too, when ingested. Some people can eat 100mg and barely get a buzz but that dose would knock most people out. Inhalation is a different story - baseline tolerance from person to person doesn’t vary nearly that much (from what I’ve seen) and as far I know the difference is that the liver doesn’t come into play since cannabinoids cross the blood brain barrier on their own.
I was wrong to bring up the blood brain barrier and the liver. My point is that an individual’s enzyme profile* is more relevant to dosing than whether or not they have ADHD, which seemed to me what you were implying here:
> One friend (into recreation drugs) took 40mg
> Another (prescribed) took 80mg
You can take someone undiagnosed with ADHD, give them 80mg and they could possibly not feel a thing. Likewise there are those who are prescribed low doses like 2.5mg.
It’s a pet peeve of mine the myths I’ve seen shared pervasively on SM:
1) getting high from a stimulant doesn’t preclude you from having ADHD. I know this is not what you said but I’ve read comments that literally state if you experience euphoria or other stimulating effects from Adderall, then you couldn’t have ADHD. That’s clearly not how ADHD is diagnosed. Therapeutic dose is all about minimizing those “side effects”
2) that certain people with ADHD cannot experience a stimulant high. That seems extremely dubious to me. Barring a higher dose of amphetamine or more straightforward meth, I’m sure if they can’t get it there then they could from MDA, MDMA, coke, DMT, mescaline, LSD or plain old THC… yes even from a psychedelic it’s a stimulant effect. It’s not the ADHD it’s the personal chemistry
* said enzymes exist in the brain, too, of course, I didn’t know that till I googled more
Really? First off, are they the stimulant variety? Secondly, was the dosage pretty low? Honestly that is nuts to me; I can’t imagine getting no whiff of a high without taking such a low dose that the meds do nothing.
I can claim it from 16 years on a relatively high dose of Adderall. If you had a different experience, I'm guessing your physiology is different. But a lot of folks with ADHD do not experience a high from stimulants like Adderall.
I've seen promotional material from the stimulant industry that makes it sound that by writing a prescription a doctor is doing some magic transforming a dangerous drug (as it would be to kids who shook you down for your meds) into something health-giving, much like the priest magically transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
Whatever else might be true about those drugs it is true that they are performance enhancing drugs for most people in many respects. There's probably nothing wrong with taking a Dexedrine and taking the day to clean your whole house from top to bottom but taking it for a lifetime is something else.
I have a friend who was one of the earliest adopters of ADHD medication and he gets a bottle of pills each month that looks as much like a small trash can as a large pill bottle and has had his teeth all rot out. He says he can't get anything done without his meds but he can't get anything done with his meds.
I'm certain he has problems of a wider scope than "ADHD" but so long as there is a system to tag kids that don't fit in with a label and that profits from a solution, other diagnoses will be neglected.
_Thought_ they got high? I have ADHD and you still one hundred percent get a high from it. Maybe if you’ve been on it for years it will be hard to notice or you’ll have grown accustomed to it. But c’mon.
In general people with ADHD are dopamine deficient and these drugs actually calm them down... if someone takes more than their effective dose it can.
I was diagnosed by telemedicine with it, tried various doses of bother Adderal and Vyvanse and got fairly upbeat on them even on low doses, so I doubt if I technically have it from a neurochemical standpoint.
"Read The Fucking Manual." It was a common phrase earlier in the tech ecosystem when someone would come in and ask simple questions that could be answered by reading the man pages, although it has fallen out of favor because it's perceived as overly aggressive/mean.
> The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH) is a fictional rogue computer operator created by Simon Travaglia, who takes out his anger on users (who are "lusers" to him) and others who pester him with their computer problems, uses his expertise against his enemies and manipulates his employer.
It is hard to escape the truth that much of your personal development is either helped or hampered by those crucial early years spend with your parents.
It is obvious from probing family histories of self, family and friends - seeing how the dots join between certain experiences then and certain traits now. The same patterns emerge, and you do wonder how many fewer broken people we would have if parents held themselves to a higher standard.
Maybe, but this study doesn't seem to establish that.
They've at best established a correlation, but it could also be explained the other way around: people that struggle making human connections have a tendency to develop mental illnesses. Which should be pretty unsurprising to anyone...
until doctors can treat the brain just like any other organ in the body this is just an educated guess (respectfully I believe in therapy and all that)
The difficulty is in hardware vs. software. You can fix up a failing video card on a computer, but if there is a weird visual glitch that is caused by a deep software bug and you don't have source code or a compiler for it, then you are left with treating symptoms and avoiding conditions that trigger that error.
Doesn't sound like they "assessed loneliness in children". I thought this would be one of those longitudinal studies where subjects are given a survey while young and then the researchers come back to check on them later in life.
Also, no links to any version of the paper. What a pain.