What's the Truth About Brain-Problems?
These are the questions that I'm trying to get answers to.
It’s important never to assume that a given person is responsible for their actions.
I overstated this idea in a previous piece. I failed to point out there are in fact ways to distinguish whether X is a responsible agent and Y isn’t a responsible agent.
But the more conservative point—that we should never assume that someone is responsible for their actions—is both true (as far as I can tell) and also psychologically healthy (since you won’t direct unproductive anger at people as much once you drop this assumption).
I would interpret Russell Barkley’s profound ideas about self-regulation to push against the standard assumption of responsibility. People should of course challenge everything that Barkley says, and I myself have various criticisms of Barkley.
I can relate to Barkley’s emphasis on how impairing self-regulation problems really are. I have a few mental-health diagnoses, and I would say that my self-regulation problems are the biggest burden (unless I’m in the middle of a bipolar depression).
I’m currently on a quest to answer the below questions. For each question, I hope that Barkley and other experts will be able to cite for me some helpful literature.
1: What’s the conceptual distinction/demarcation/line between ADHD and autism in terms of self-regulation?
2: What’s the conceptual distinction/demarcation/line between ADHD and autism in terms of social problems?
3: How strong is the movement to rename ADHD to SRDD (Self-Regulation Deficit Disorder) and to rename autism to RISD (Repetitive Interests and Social Difficulties)? I would’ve been considered a candidate for both these disorders had they been called SRDD and RISD. The inaccurate/misleading names caused me to get diagnosed many, many years later than I otherwise would have, and that did major harm to me.
4: What percentage of the people who try ADHD-medications have what you might call a “profound” response, where are their stories (you might think that their stories would be like the famous “Stereo Sue” story), shouldn’t there be 1000s of these stories in the public domain, and how many of these people have complex emotions where they look back on their life perhaps with some anger about not having been treated decades earlier than when they were actually treated?
5: What happens to people with profound self-regulation problems when all of the ADHD-medications fail?
6: For each type of “stimulant”/“non-stimulant” ADHD-medication, what does research show on what the mania-risk is?
7: For each type of “stimulant”/“non-stimulant” ADHD-medication, what does research show on the extent to which bipolar-sufferers on lithium can try that ADHD-medication and quit that medication (if they start to feel elevated) before anything dangerous happens?
8: Could this new medication help those who have struck out with all of the other ADHD-medications?
9: What research is Barkley referring to here regarding the “very, very narrow slice” of ADHD-sufferers who have increased creativity, and does this push against Barkley’s emphatic commentary that ADHD confers zero benefits?
10: What research is Barkley referring to here regarding people waiting to have children?
11: What research is Barkley referring to here regarding the genes for ADHD and autism being “not very stable”?
12: What research is Barkley referring to here regarding “chicken” and “eggs”—don’t various disorders correlate for genetic reasons, so that it’s not that ADHD caused depression/anxiety, but rather that an individual’s genetics gave rise to ADHD/depression/anxiety?
13: What research is Barkley referring to here regarding the idea that the environment captures the ADHD-sufferer’s behavior—aren’t ADHD-sufferers often lost in thought in a way that’s decoupled from the environment?
14: Are psychiatric medications causing an uptick in rates of bipolar disorder? Or are psychiatric medications just causing people’s bipolar to manifest earlier than it otherwise would have?