Something something ‘big pharma’. Strange ideologies. Unfounded skepticism of mental health problems. Not knowing how biology works (and not wanting to learn).
People are just unwilling to cope with the idea that some people need medication to function.
Let me rant for a moment.
A common refrain in mental health circles is that “you wouldn’t say (insert statement dismissive of one’s need for treatment) to a diabetic person” but people absolutely do. When you go too far down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, you have people claiming that insulin is a government conspiracy to keep you sick, that you can avoid the flu by avoiding sugar, that every illness, from depression to all forms of chronic pain to cancer, is either made up or curable with a common vegetable you can buy at the grocery store.
I had a friend, now diagnosed with ADHD, who was on a diet meant to “cure” her for years.That accomplished nothing but setting her back in school and making her life pointlessly difficult. (IIRC she’s now on meds and is doing quite well.)
(Antivaxxers are just a wing of this thinking and they’ve gone dangerously mainstream lately, and most of them fear (and hate) autism. So you could say that fear of difference is also a part.)
People have a very hard time coping with the idea that illness is natural. I know so many people who will insist that if people ate only “natural” things they would never get cancer or have mental illness. Or if they never drank out of plastic cups or if they ate more dirt or walked barefoot. There are vast communities of people who deny that modern medicine is responsible for the massive boom in population of the last century and create in their minds an idealized past where no one had autism or ADHD or depression or diabetes or the flu or anything because they didn’t eat GMO’s or some shit.
What’s behind this? Fear, I think.
I feel that it’s some sort of protection against the reality that any of us could become disabled at any time, or be diagnosed with cancer, or any sort of illness. That stuff just…happens. Some people just can’t cope with that insecurity. They can’t mentally process the fact that it’s possible for disease or disability to just happen upon them because it would be too stressful. So to protect themselves, they develop a worldview where illness and disability isn’t a randomly striking occurrence but something that happens to people who have done something wrong.
A lot of the people that apply this idea to ADHD are parents, it seems to me, so let’s analyze that. I believe that parents think their child being neurodivergent is a reflection upon them. Another possibility is that they had children in pursuit of some ideal family or child they created to please themselves and they become frustrated when their kid doesn’t fit this fantasy (or would if their child didn’t.)
So, they use this mentality to cast judgment upon parents of neurodivergent kids because they want to believe they are better, would do better, that their ideal kid vision that slides into their vision of an ideal family and house and life is unassailable, that ADHD won’t come and steal their happiness. Or, if they already have an ADHD child, they want to believe their kid can be “cured” without “drugs” or at least that there’s a Reason for their kid being the way that they are other than that they came out of the womb that way (and, by extension, owe their condition to nothing at all except the parents’ own genetics).
There probably is a lot more to the hatred of “drugs” and the “unnatural.” I can’t pinpoint where chemophobia and the fear and hatred of GMO’s or whatever and medicine in general come from. I’ve noticed in my own life that many of the people who turn to these ideas are sick themselves and have just faced inadequacy in the realm of modern medicine. So they think the answer must be elsewhere, and end up falling down a hole of conspiracy theories. I understand that coping with an illness that is ravaging your life is incredibly difficult to deal with, but attacking modern medicine as a whole does a lot of damage.
But my main point is: the existence of people whose lives don’t get better if they “just try harder” or eat the way some internet stranger wants them to assails the idea that people don’t have health problems, mental or otherwise, unless they are at fault. And that in turn ruins the idea that nothing bad will happen to an individual, whether that “bad” thing is a health problem that causes weight gain or a “non-ideal” (shudder) kid, as long as they Do Everything Right.
“if it’s not plot relevant, cut it!!” is such awful writing advice
if JRR Tolkien had cut every bit of Lord of the Rings that wasn’t directly related to the central plot, it would have been just one book long, COLOURLESS and DULL AS DIRT.
all the little worldbuilding/character details are what draw you in and give the central plot weight, FOOL
The plot is not the same thing as the story. The plot is the mechanics of how one thing causes another.
Some classic stories have no plot to speak of – the characters just wander from one situation to the next. Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are examples.
Some stories have partial plots, where some things in the story cause other things, but other things come out of the blue and pass away without consequence. This category includes classics too: Huckleberry Finn, The Wind in the Willows.
Even in stories with a strong plot, sometimes the most iconic moments fall outside that plot. Think of the No-Man’s-Land scene in Wonder Woman or the dying dinosaur in Jurassic World II.
Ah, but those aren’t classics, I hear someone say. Well, I disagree in the case of Wonder Woman (although time will tell), but let’s go right to the top of the English canon, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
What’s the most iconic scene, if you had to pick one to illustrate for the front cover or the playbill poster? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s the Yorick skull scene. What does that have to do with the plot? Precious little. It’s just a way to keep Hamlet busy until Ophelia’s funeral arrives. And even there it’s not very well fit for purpose, because it doesn’t explain why Hamlet is hanging around in a graveyard anyway.
That’s because, tight though the plot of Hamlet is, the story of Hamlet is not reducible to its plot. Hamlet is a three-hour exploration of death and skulls and murder and corpses and funerals and ghosts and “what dreams may come”. The plot is just there to drive you around between the features of that mental landscape.
So the question isn’t “Does this serve the plot?” The question is “Does this help explore the idea that the story is about?”
(Why yes, I have written all this somewhere before.)
my new thing has been just… acting on my ideas. like i thought maybe my desk would look better on a different part of my room so i like. moved it? just like that! i ripped an old anatomy book and stuck the diagrams up on my wall like some kind of old timey victorian doctor. i wanted a starbucks and i walked one and a half miles back and forth in a floridian storm and goddamn it was a good coffee. life is too short babey if you think of something just do it. nike
べんきょうしなければならない 