ADHD

My perspective is only mine, but I've had mixed results on this.

I'm in my mid-thirties and I have not seen a doctor as an adult. I have been to urgent care twice, once in my early twenties for pneumonia and once a couple years ago for a fungal ear infection.

I have a few minor ailments, some curable and some not, which I would love to see a doctor for. But I'm always afraid to open that door. Due to my ADHD, I tend to get in a cycle where I'll find a decent job, burn out due to poor sleep hygiene and the pressure of wanting to do well, and then spend months working on personal projects and getting good sleep until I have to find work again.

I have this fear that I'll find a doctor and get prescribed for something that I'm told I need and then become reliant on that medicine and then leave my job and not have an affordable way to get it. I'm mildly overweight, but at my peak fatness I was worried I was pre-diabetic. And I avoided seeing a doctor still because I figured I'd like to focus on diet and exercise to address it without medicine, because I don't want to get prescribed anything. I get concerned hearing news stories about doctors getting pharmaceutical kickbacks.

I can't stay young forever. My problems will worsen without adequate care. My goal is to make enough money from creating software independently that I don't have to worry about whether I have a job or not when I schedule a doctor's visit. To know I'll be able to afford any medication either way. I feel like I'm getting close to realistically achieving this but it's not necessarily a realistic goal for the average person with ADHD to have.

In the absence of healthcare, I have smoked and consumed a lot of cannabis. This self-medication has been the source of some of my ailments. There is a real possibility that if I continue to smoke this way into old age, I will develop some form of emphysema. I do not want to be dependent on this drug forever.

That said, the effect it has on my ADHD is mostly positive. I've developed a tolerance such that I'm not as affected by most of the usual negative side effects - impaired memory, lowered cognitive function, etc, though there is still some effect. It leads me to disassociate more for sure. But that can also be good practice for maintaining focus when I'm sober. I'm a lot better at that than I used to be. Maybe mainly due to maturity and experience. But if properly channeled, the THC-fueled ADHD tangents can lead to productive results. In my experience.

People forget that cannabis has a narcotic component. When I consume edibles, it makes me sleepy. But something about the metabolic pathway of smoking gives cannabis smoke or vapor a stimulant effect on me. And it motivates me to enjoy the thing I'm doing, whatever that is. It's very easy to get lost in the enjoyment of watching movies or playing video games or making comments on Lemmy (oops). But when I'm doing work while high, I get a certain enjoyment in the minutiae of the task and trying to adequately solve whatever piece of the puzzle is keeping my work from advancing. Where I might not have had the motivation to work at all before, cannabis can make it a fun activity. Again, it's how it works for me.

But it's expensive, even with how cheap it's become. When you look at the long term, who knows if I would have saved money with pharmaceuticals instead? And it hurts my lungs, makes me cough loudly. I'm also dependent on it. I've needed to stop at times for jobs, or because I was trying to quit. And I notice after a week or two, I'm more irritable, more lethargic, with increased depression and suicidal ideation. It is addictive.

But so are the stimulants people with ADHD take. I've dated people on these meds and seen the difference in energy of on versus off. I wonder if in some ways I'm better of from having not used my access to medical care and instead I developed coping mechanisms that allow me to exist in the world. Or just grew out of some of my issues to some degree. But even if THC has helped me with the introspective development I needed to reach this point, I wonder if I would now be better off without it. And maybe give the pharmaceuticals a shot, tentatively. I'm unsure.

I don't think the guy promoting cannabis in this thread is doing so with very much tact, and maybe the downvotes are useful to deliver that point. But given my history I hesitate to entirely dismiss the idea that cannabis can stand in for a stimulant in certain scenarios. We should be realistic about the risks and tradeoffs, but I felt the need to provide my somewhat biased viewpoint. Not trying to persuade anyone, just want my experience to live here as another point of data. In case anyone else has experienced something similar.