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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

Not surprised. ADHD medications save lives, including the lives of others when it comes to things like preventing car accidents. I could even see it being required for driving the way corrective lenses can be.

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That reminds me of an article I read which claimed that being diagnosed with ADHD will prevent you from being a commercial pilot. Pilots will avoid getting diagnosed and medicated because it will kill their career, even though medication may make them safer.

(I suspect ADHD pilots would handle takeoff and landing very well, as well as emergencies, but oh god the checklists and schedules and that whole middle part of the flight…)

Pilot licences and any mental health issues seem to be a massive pain in general. Lots of people will avoid treatment/diagnosis to not get affected. Xyla has a video on it https://youtu.be/aj0H8oVS7qg + the Pilot Mental Health Campaign.

My meds have me on the ball from about 9am - 5pm. Outside that window I wouldn't trust myself flying a plane unless it was an unusual flight, like flying a new aircraft or flying into a storm, or on a rescue helicopter landing on a highway or mountain. The more routine the more dangerous it gets which is not ideal for your average pilot :-(

What a terrible policy. I sure don't feel any safer knowing that my pilot could have problems going untreated. Just getting licensed seems like it would be difficult without treatment, but it's not like ADHD or other mental conditions are consistent either. You can have good or bad days, or even good/bad months. Those times can be handled with treatment, but I guess we're just supposed to hope our pilot isn't having a bad day when we get on the plane.

> Pilots will avoid getting diagnosed and medicated because it will kill their career, even though medication may make them safer.

Yeah, it's an issue! To the best of my understanding, it's not a mark against you if you have had treatment in the past. You can't have a valid license and be taking active treatment, though.

It's not a mark against you in that you can still get a medical, but it is a HUUUGE pain in the ass, and very, very expensive.

It is definitely a mark against you, in that you must do a huge amount of additional work proving it is no longer a problem.

Before getting onto Vyvanse, I couldn’t drive more than 30 minutes without wanting to stop for a coffee and then needing a red bull to keep going… now I can drive at least a few hours continuous without breaks.

How do you feel after those drives of a few hours?

I have driven up to 6 hours at a time, but I'm in hyper-focus mode the whole time and it takes everything I have to stay locked into that focus so I don't die. I think all the time about moving somewhere where I don't need a car. I hate driving and always have.

I recently found out I have ADHD. I haven't tried meds yet (but am having my first meeting with someone tomorrow to explore it as an option). I'm wondering if this will make driving more tolerable for me. It wasn't even something I thought about before this thread.

Yikes! Yeah no way could I do that without meds. It's amazing hearing of truck drivers driving 13 hours straight... but I guess that's why fighter pilots are on modafinil!

To be honest, now that I'm medicated I think I could at least do 5 hours without stopping. I might need some snacks though - the amount of sugar I've been consuming lately is unnatural

Long drives for me used to be a fucking nightmare, especially long highway drives. Anything over 5 hours was basically an impossibility, now with medication it's really a mild inconvenience. I just moved to a new area, and I have a friend 2 hours away in another town. I don't even think about the drive when making plans, I'll happily drive up, hang out for a few hours, then drive back home. I still have limits on how long I want to drive (did 10-11 hour driving days when I was moving cross country, and that sucked), but they're way higher.

Having a car with lane centering cruise control also helps a ton, at least where I live. Not having to micro-manage a car for several hours when you're on a long drive reduces the cognitive load.

I bought a new-to-me car that supports Comma.ai. It's not full self driving, but it handles the boring parts sitting on the freeway for me. it's the best purchase I've made in recent memory because holy shit sitting there on the freeway forever is the worst.

I tried this, not with comma.ai, but had a VW with lane keeping, adaptive cruise, etc. The first time I did a 6 hour drive with it, it felt like magic. I was essentially on one road the whole time, there was very little traffic, and I didn’t touch the pedals, or really even steer much for 95% of the drive. Just at the start and end when off the expressway.

However, as I made that drive more, it got worse. Traffic was usually heavier, and things didn’t go as well with a lot of traffic. Some of it was how it acted, and some of it were trust issues with it. When traffic picked up or other cars did things around me, I’d switch back to manual control. After a while, I was using manual control the whole time… and then eventually just took the train, because I couldn’t tolerate driving myself anymore.

That seems like a you problem, tbh. If you don't trust it to handle drivers coming into your lane so you couldn't use it and you couldn't rest, neither I, nor the manufacturer can do anything about that. To be fair, given VW's other transgressions, I don't blame you, but I don't have a VW, so I'm don't have to dig into VW's org chart and trust my life in understand how good they [are/aren't] at writing software.

I got a used tesla a few years ago that came with FSD, and I fully agree. I drove to Vegas for DEFCON a few weeks ago and the ~8 hour drive was kind of just a mild inconvenience.

The World Anti-Doping Agency, who defines what a performance enhancing drug is and if it's banned in sports, grants Therapeutic Use Exemptions for methylphenidate and its siblings. This is despite some countries using other medicines as first-line treatment for ADHD that aren't banned by WADA.

The justification is that treatment for people with ADHD markedly reduces accidents and suicidality, and that banning the drug outright would do more harm than would come from liars getting the drug and harming sports.

I've been diagnosed and medicated since elementary school. In the time since, I've been involved in two car accidents. Both times I had forgotten to take my meds, which is a rarity for me.

And yet it was easier for me to get a driving license being unmedicated than it would be medicated. In either case I'd need to pay a bullshit fee for a psychologist to glance at me and rubber stamp a form, and take an extra exam which is completely trivial to pass. In the case of being medicated I'd need to additionally get my GP to sign off on it as ADHD meds have the infamous "yellow sticker" telling you to not operate heavy machinery. If I ever did get in an accident on medication the insurance companies would make a meal out of it anyway, despite it being signed off.

The whole process is a complete and total scam that's not making anything or anyone any safer.

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