A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Can medication be a massive help when the right dose of the right thing is found for the right situation? Yes! Can it be an enormous detriment when prescribed in a cavalier manner? Yes! Is the average 12-year-old Dream fan going to understand this? Fuck no!

Real talk: When I was first diagnosed as being on the spectrum at age 12, I was prescribed a pair of medications that at the time, yes, did have a profoundly positive impact. One addressed "issues" with depression. The other addressed anger "issues". It wasn't right.

At the time, I had every god-given right to be depressed. My single mother was between jobs. I had few friends. I suffered constant bullying in school, on the part of both classmates and staff. We were fed and our bills were paid by the local church. The family car died.

And similarly, how is anger an unjust reaction to having venom thrown at you by your supposed classmates, having purported authority figures like teachers ignore your plight, for 6+ hours a day, every weekday, for more than half of the year?

I rarely talk about this, because it's an intensely painful subject, but these medications fucked me over in multiple ways: While they were a band-aid for the underlying psychological issues, after 15+ years my neurochemistry *expected* them to be there.

For various reasons, I was on the tail end of a refill of both medications when moving to Sweden in late 2013. When your neurochemistry expects these meds to be in your bloodstream, even a small step-down in dosage causes hellish psychological blow-back.

And so it did in my case. When I chose to step down my dosage in December 2013 because I'd not found a doctor yet, I should've, but didn't, predict the strain it'd put me under. And so when what would be a fairly normal interaction online went sideways, I went positively apeshit.

The events of that evening will - and do - haunt me to this day. Eventually, I *did* get off of that medication about a year back, and I've been all the better for it. I'm no longer in a place where I needed it, if I ever did. I feel the lows, but I now feel the highs, too.

Meanwhile, I have had exactly one experience with ADHD medication, off-label, and it's why I'm certain that it *is* the one medication that I need. It did not affect my creativity, but it helped mute the constant track-jumping of my train of thought for about 12 hours.

So, yes. I 100% sympathize with @Dream. Medication is not always the answer. It needs to be dispensed carefully, and with constant supervision. I know how bad it can be, the long-lasting effects it can have on a person. But my experience is just that: Mine.