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ActualTomboyMarch 2, 2023(Edited March 2, 2023)

I can’t upvote this enough.

The things that help the most are physical and creative outlets and one on one attention and tutoring. Drugs produce a superficial boost to academic performance, and appear to “regulate behavior”, but don’t actually help anyone grow and develop past their difficulties. Drugs also cause and come with a lot of problems and negative effects, both with immediate negative effects and with long term development and dependency.

I strongly feel that children (both boys and girls) are hugely over diagnosed and over prescribed with powerful stimulant medication pushed by a large, powerful, influential, greedy industry. I don’t trust any sources claiming that any group is under diagnosed. They are simply trying to expand their market. They love to target their “quick behavioral fix” and “performance boosting drugs” to parents who push their ambitions onto their kids as well, yet lack the time to properly parent them.

I was a victim to this trend of drugging up difficult, restless, and rowdy kids near its original peak in the early 90s. I was in first grade when they signed me up for these mind changing pills. I didn’t know who I was. I was only six when they took over and altered me. High on pills, on prescription dose, I became socially dissociated at school. Emotionally numbed. Robotic.

After school it wears off and I’m worse than ever. Totally volatile. Mental and emotional withdrawals. I didn’t understand why I was like this. I had no idea how to self manage or regulate. The pills did it for me most of the time, until it wore off in the evening when it left me haywire. I lived like this for over a decade before I became wise to it and quit. For a long time I didn’t know any different.

It was hell.

In addition to holding back my social and emotional development, it also managed to stunt my physical development and delay my puberty. It wasn’t until senior year of high school when I secretly stopped taking the pills that I suddenly developed and stopped looking like I was 12. I’m tall now, but still the most chronically thin and small boned of all my sisters. Despite my height, I still feel like an underdeveloped runt.

My grades suffered a bit, and the anxiety was horrible for weeks after, but I was much happier, and I was finally myself. Once I was off the pills for a while, the anxiety subsided. My struggles with self motivation and depression lasted longer. The pills had damaged my dopamine system. I worked hard to improve myself and grow naturally. It was extremely difficult, but my grades did eventually bounce back.

I never needed the pills. I needed to live, learn, and grow. I needed to harness my natural energy and utilize it. I needed to make friends and be social. I needed love and attention. Not pills. Not drugs. Not dependency, dissociation, and problems. Just time, effort, and goals. I needed hope in the future, and belief in my ability to overcome. I needed acceptance of my differences, my limitations, my weaknesses, and of where I am now, and to be acknowledged of my strengths and where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to grow.

Adults should be more than welcome to boost their own performance with any safe stimulant of their choice at important intervals, but targeting kids with this shit is just rooted in an industry trying to set people up with an insurmountable dependency. I cannot see it any other way.