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?
I was following along with some of your other comments and whatnot, but this diatribe tells me a lot about your intentions behind this post.
I have ADHD, and I’m a medical student. I suppose in your mind that makes me one of the “dumbest motherfuckers” in training, but I will speak from the education and authority that I do have. There are many health conditions and comorbidities that can make stimulants a bigger risk than they’re worth. Personally, I have idiopathic sinus tachycardia, so my psychiatrist had me get a consultation with Cardiology before she would prescribe a stimulant because one of the major risks of stimulant medications is Sudden Cardiac Death Syndrome (which is exactly what it sounds like) and if you have a high heart rate or other cardiac or electrophysiological abnormalities, it drastically increases your risk.
I get that getting by without medication is extremely difficult for some people. I had to do my first semester of medical school on hard mode while I got my official diagnosis and medical clearance for treatment sorted out. Healthcare access, particularly mental healthcare access in America (and pretty much everywhere else for mental health) is criminally abysmal, but that is not an excuse to encourage people to ignore medical advice and consensus regarding medication safety.
(And as a side note: Surgeons are really good…at anatomy. Most of the surgeons I have worked with would really prefer it if the primary care/family med/internal med/literally-anyone-else doctors did the pre- and post-op medication management. Anesthesiologists are the ones that are intimately acquainted with pharmacology when considering physicians in the OR)