ADHD healthcare in the UK is very hard to come by. You can only get It on govt insurance (NHS) basically via something akin to a loophole (Right to Choose), and the prices of private relative to median wage and disposable income render It inaccessible for most.
To put this into context for non-brits I was diagnosed in January after around a 10 month wait after my GP referred me, and still waiting on titration, I was quoted a waiting time of 6 months, and I’ve been following up every month since through every contact form available and still no sign of when this will be okay. I work in the tech sector (software development company) as a mid-level cybersecurity engineer. My salary is in the 70th or so percentile for the UK, and paying private would easily take a quarter of my disposable income after rent and bills.
It sucks to see how people just suffer endlessly waiting. But there is a way to have your cake and eat it too and its called self-medicating. It’s not a perfect solution but we don’t live in a perfect world/system, and for me the benefits to life quality make the hassle well-worth it.
However I was banned by /r/ADHDUK when someone asked whether self-medicating was a good idea and I responded with a list of pros and cons in what at least I thought was an extremely sensitive, dispassionate and balanced manner, and the thread was locked shortly after, with the mods lock comment putting in a final word that self-medicating is “always a bad idea” - a narrative that seems not at all accurate in my view.
To my shock though this didn’t seem to be just a case of power tripping mods, but an overwhelming community consensus as well.
Coming from the trans community where self-medicating to transition is arguably almost more common than receiving genuine medical care due to various failures and malice on behalf of the government and the healthcare system in the UK, I am somewhat shocked people had such a negative view of even the idea, and that it seemed fairly common even across the ADHD space as a whole. Honestly I started self-medicating about as soon as I put the referral in, I knew I had ADHD, the diagnosis etc. is just hoops for me to jump through.
So I’m curious what is the outlook in this community? Positive? Negative? Neither? What do you think of self-medicating and why?
Well I did self-medicate a bit while waiting for the actual diagnosis and I think that would be valuable information for the doctor as well, only if I could tell about it honestly. The meds can be used to validate the diagnosis after all. But it also gave me insight on what works and what doesn’t and how. Where I live one has to try 2 different meds (usually both are methylphenidate) before lisdexamphetamine and for me at least the mf’s cause quite awful side-effects (like dissociation) which elvanse doesn’t so at least now I know not to force myself to the bad ones and go through the process to get to the ones that actually do the trick.
Substance abuse is pretty common among ADHD people but you can’t get the diagnosis if you admit that or get caught in the screening (drug tests are also required here for the meds). Probably many drug users too have ADHD but they never got proper diagnosis and treatment and never will.