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Comment by steeleyespan | Hacker News Reader

What is the medication you're supposed to take? Ritalin or something?

The side-effects are vaguely evocative of antipsychotics or some sort of antidepressant.

There's no specific autism medication that I'm aware of, but psychiatric diseases often have plenty of comorbidity. There's some ADHD popup in the game that distracts you with Wikipedia, there's misophonia, it sounds like the character has a whole mix of different things.

Had I paid more attention to that, I probably would have skipped them instead of saying I’d take the normal dose.

Some questionable doctor prescribed me something like that a couple months ago as a precursor to dealing with ADHD. He said it would take a few weeks to build up in my system with once daily pills. I took a single pill and didn’t sleep for 3 days, and felt “off” for a good week or three. Never again.

My doctor tries to put me on antidepressants but I'm scared of side effects. My main complaint is that my energy levels are virtually zero despite relatively healthy lifestyle.

How old are you? There's like a zillion health factors. I've struggled with this because if IBS and getting older.

Taking Ubiqunol now, red light therapy for mitochondrial health - there's a bunch of other related supplements. Started exercising. Energy is better now.

My doctor was asking me about taking a sleep study to see if I have sleep apnea. Many people in my family had it, but I’ve been told I don’t snore, and while I don’t have energy, I don’t fall asleep at the drop of a hat like they all did before getting a cpap.

I really don’t want to do a sleep study, as it sounds like nightmare fuel, so I got an Apple Watch which is supposed to be able to signal if there is a possible issue over the course of a month. I’ve had a couple days in normal range, but most days show elevated breathing interruptions. If it signals me after the end of the 30 days, I guess I’ll feel forced to get a sleep study. While I hate the idea of needing a cpap, being tired all the time isn’t fun either.

CPAP can change your life. It had a huge impact on my partner.

There's no medication for autism, nor there really is supposed to be any.

A bunch of medications are commonly used to help manage it, though. And it's so often co-morbid with other diagnoses (these are all just classifications we made up anyway, so that they're two "different" things is basically just semantics, it's all happening in one brain, like we could easily and no-less-reasonably halve or double the number of labels we apply to these same situations and the underlying reality would be unaffected) that it's common to be diagnosed autistic but also taking ADHD meds or mood stabilizers or antidepressants or what have you, under other diagnoses.

Ponders

Damn, it's way past the time for me to take my SSRIs, because I forgot to take Adderall earlier in the day and zoned out on HN instead when I should've been finishing that API.

Narrator: the actual task didn't call for an API redesign, but if we're doing things, we're doing them The Right Way™ or we don't do them at all, right?

A lot of times they take an SSRI to be able to manage their emotions better and not be triggered by daily life. That’s what I remember when I was trying to help an autistic friend deal with having autistic children that were having a lot of issues.

Edit: Just asked her and the final cocktail they have settled on is aripriprazole (Abilify, an atypical antipsychotic) and hydroxyzine (first-generation antihistamine with anxiolytic and sedative properties).

I sent her the game and she said it was hard haha. I asked if that was what autism feels like and she said this-

“Not for me but I have ASD. For my son, it would be similar but different since he can't tell me what is going on in his head. I can only guess with him, poor lamb.”

Autism is a super diverse condition so varies pretty wildly person-to-person.

This. I have no medication as I built up immense resiliency and masking mechanisms over the course of my life. Others may take a cocktail of meds just to make it to lunch.

It’s a condition that exists on a spectrum, as does its treatments or coping mechanisms. That said, I’m the “take my assigned medication” type, so I always took the full dose in the game.

Yeah, I wish there was a bit more clarity on the medication prompt.

IE, medication can be hit-or-miss. Did I (as the person in the game) go to a pill pusher and thus the medication causes more problems then it helps? Or, is the medication something where the benefits outweigh the consequences?

As many other people in this thread point out, there is no "medication for autism," so I assumed that it was a case of poorly prescribed medication from a pill pusher and didn't take it the first time I played.

Xanax, Zolpidem, Belsomra, and a fifth of your favorite.

Nitrous oxide, ketamine, buspirone (not buproprion), gapapentin, abilify, lamigtal.

No alcohol.

Also look at your environment and its stressors. Moving out was one of the best things I did for my mental health.

My food can touch without me melting down, so I'd consider it a win. This is not medical advice.

Do you view autism as a pathology or a difference?

I'm pretty strongly in the difference camp. It giveth and taketh away. I can't get through a full meal hearing people chew food without some background noise going but I also completed my PhD before I was 30 so it feels wrong to call it a pathology ya know?

Is it rare to complete a PhD before 30?

I just looked it up - I guess it's not! As I said in another thread, paid the price, didn't receive the intelligence.

Not much rarer than completing it at all, probably. It's still certainly an accomplishment.

What I was getting at in my question is, in response to the question about medication, is the intent to "fix" a perceived "problem", or should any medication taken be tuned to provide support for coping with a world that can be actively hostile to neurodivergent people.

Any psychological disorder is treatment-worthy iff the patient suffers from it. So not just "you were diagnosed", but "you were diagnosed, have problems caused by it, suffer from those problems, and want relief". So yes to both, treatment can be intended to fix a problem that a patient suffers from that is just related to his perception of things. But it can also be intended to support your interactions with a hostile environment that you suffer from.

"disorder" is a loaded term in this context.

It's redundant. "disorder" and "iff the patient suffers from it" are basically the same thing in this context. So you can remove the word disorder and that comment means the same thing.

FWIW (and I do have relevant personal experience) "fixing" is not in the option set. One can only cope. SSRIs, VPA, amphetamines or whatever (including alcohol, THC, DMT and opiates), they just shift the person's perception/consciousness a bit so it might become more copeable in the current society. That is all.

People are touting Leucavorin. (It doesn't work) There are a lot of different things people have tried.

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