12 Dexies a Day - less fun than it might sound!

What you’re looking at in this photo is one of three bottles of dexamphetamine, prescribed to me on my first visit to a Perth psychiatrist for ADHD.

I’ve never been treated by a psychiatrist for anything else before or since. But I was struggling to study, and all the signs indicated I met the criteria for ADHD. So I sought a professional diagnosis.

And I got it.

Confirmation of what I already felt to be true, along with 300 tablets, instructions to take 12 per day, and 6 additional repeats. A script for 2100 tablets.

One day I was on no psychoactive meds...

The next, I was swallowing *twelve* amphetamines a day, as directed.

You’ve got to understand, I didn’t want to get high. I just wanted to study.

I just wanted to be me, but with better focus.

Within days, I was starting to feel psychotic from the lack of sleep and the high dose of dexies. I asked for urgent advice from the psychiatrist’s office.

And the advice was: keep going. And take something else to sleep.

That part of the story is, of course, about negligent overprescribing.

And a few more years of doctor-led pharmaceutical adventures followed.

But I want to cut a long story short here, because that’s not the part that stuck with me.

The deeper story isn’t about:

Whether I “have ADHD” (I easily meet the criteria)

Whether ADHD is “real” (listen: psych diagnoses are just constructs; labels for symptom clusters. I’m not enamoured with the paradigm, but if you accept the paradigm, you accept the diagnosis.)

Whether stimulants “work” (They do, depending on what you mean by “work.” I saw a mix of benefits and side effects over three years)

Or whether biomedical psychiatry is good or bad (It’s complex. I lean toward flawed, especially in its reductionism)

All worthy, (and possibly incendiary!) discussions in their own right.

But the real issue for me is how easy it was to embrace the story:

“You’re not enough as you are. Let’s fix that.”

The real issue is the paradigms:

That our minds are broken machines to be optimised. 

That inconvenient parts of ourselves are symptoms to be subdued. 

That health means functioning, not flourishing. 

That being more productive is somehow more real than being more you. 

No question, the meds helped me get things done. But I always felt like an altered version of myself.

(Side note: learning to delegate to naturally organised employees also helped me get more done without effecting my personality.)

We don’t talk enough about what people lose in pursuit of becoming more functional.

And we rarely question the systems that say:

The problem lies within you. You are a problem to be fixed. Your value lies in how well you comply, produce, perform and conform.

If that’s healing, I want no part of it.

Btw I’ve known people who have found both diagnosis and medication to be liberating and life-changing.

For myself the liberation came in rejecting both and finding environments that were a better fit for who I actually am along with authentic adaptations to those environments. 

There’s more to healing than fixing what’s been pathologized. And I can’t help thinking that we vastly understate how much of the disorder lies not within ourselves but within the systems we inhabit.