Stimulant medications can actually help
Having ADHD doubles one’s likelihood of developing a substance abuse problem. Stimulants themselves are potentially abusive substances. But numerous studies demonstrate that children and adults with ADHD who are treated with stimulants reduce their overall rates of substance abuse to resemble that of the general population. We must not submerge these facts in the sea of emotion and controversy swept in by the opioid epidemic.
The Opioid and Stimulant Medication Crises
Public health officials have appropriately drawn attention to the vast numbers of Americans dying from opioid overdoses over the last decade. But deaths from stimulant medications have risen at a significantly higher rate over this…
Bigly, Big Lie, and the Bigger Lie
Who among us was surprised at the recent revelation that Trump and his minions knew they were lying at the post-election “news” conference when they made outrageous claims about Venezuela controlling Dominion voting machines? A majority of Republican voters still cling to the delusional Big Lie that Biden is not the legitimate president, despite months of ballot counting, recounting, and auditing, as well as the dismissal of numerous legal challenges to Biden’s election. But the Big Lie is just one manifestation of a larger, more destructive untruth. The Bigger Lie is that everyone who opposes you is a liar.
The…
Some of the problems
Some of the Problems
ADHD increases the likelihood that a teenager or young adult engages in risky sexual behavior: they become sexually active at younger ages, have a larger number of partners, are more likely to have unprotected sex, and contract more sexually transmitted diseases than their peers without ADHD.
Both males and females with ADHD are more likely to follow these patterns; data on non-binary individuals remains too scanty to draw conclusions. These patterns prevail across cultures and continents. …
Nature Selects for (F)risky Sexual Behavior
ADHD impairment of school and work performance draws much attention, but we have also known for decades that ADHD also affects social life, including sexual behavior.
Many researchers have examined the impact of ADHD on sexual functioning because both teen pregnancy and the chance of acquiring a potentially fatal HIV infection represent serious personal and societal dilemmas arising from sexual behavior among the young.
In general, studies indicate that ADHD predisposes individuals to more risky sexual behavior. But evolutionarily, risky sexual behavior might actually account for the presence of ADHD in human society.
Sex and ADHD
My child faces a world more welcoming than my own
I was headed back to college. Not with plans to stay for eleven years and three degrees, like the first time around. Nor to make lifelong friends and gain knowledge of myself and the world. I was returning to my alma mater to take one of my children to school. As they began their journey towards independent living, I wanted to step back and revisit how college life for queer youth had changed over the last three plus decades.
I had spent far too many college years as a confused and closeted gay youth. In contrast, my child seemed comfortably…
Nine months post-election, the ex-president has his first foreign policy success
I don’t want to downplay the horrible scenes of chaos, abandonment and terror inflicted by the Taliban on Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan over the last few weeks. I won’t minimize how a return to power by the Taliban threatens women, minorities, education, democracy, and even music in Afghanistan. But I believe in giving credit where credit is due, and the current situation in Afghanistan is probably the one situation, foreign or domestic, that Trump actually executed successfully.
Defenders of Trump will point to his other successes. Like how his peace plan for Israel ended wars in the Middle…
Why Republican leaders care now, and why non-voters matter
As discussed in part 1, the epidemiology and statistics show that deaths during the first eighteen months of the COVID-19 pandemic skew Democratic. But if you distrust the numbers, then maybe the behavior of the Republican leadership will convince you of the early trend, and that only in the last month might this picture be changing.
Who has the numbers on who has really died?
So who might have have more precise data on the relative death rates according to political party? Who meticulously tracks where Democrats and Republicans live, in order to create discriminatory voting rules, and limit the…
ADHD increases the risk for both Parkinsonism and Tardive Dyskinesia
We tend to consider ADHD a psychiatric condition affecting attention and impulsivity, and Parkinsonism and tardive dyskinesia (TD) as neurologic diseases affecting movement, but having ADHD increases the likelihood of developing either of these movement disorders.
Disturbances of the brain’s dopamine systems underpin all of these conditions. While most people with ADHD will not develop movement disorders, and the vast majority of those with Parkinsonism or tardive dyskinesia did not start out by having ADHD, the association warrants further exploration, particularly for what it might tell us about long term risks to the brain from ADHD and stimulant medications.
Dopamine Systems
People…
So far, we have more dead Democrats than Republicans
I’ve heard the comments all over San Francisco. Some mutter them in somber but disapproving they-deserve-it tones. Others spit them out with righteous indignation. Still others proclaim them with gleeful schadenfreude. The libs say that because Republicans shun masks and avoid vaccination, they are dying disproportionately from COVID, which will give Democrats an advantage in the 2022 and 2024 elections. But there is little evidence, so far, that the pandemic had decimated the ranks of Republicans.
A few pundits are pushing the idea that the pandemic might kill enough Republicans to skew the next election. They argue that Republicans have…
Even if Newsom loses the recall, we can keep him in office with write-in votes.
Last month I encouraged people to write in Gavin Newsom for the California gubernatorial recall election. While Newsom can’t be an official replacement for his own recall, the rules did not seem to rule out his being a write-in candidate. Since then, two developments have made a write-in candidacy by Newsom much more viable. A Superior Court Judge reaffirmed that recall elections operate by their own rules, and do not follow the rules for regular primary and general elections. And actions by California Secretary of State Dr. Shirley Weber actively solicit write-ins for the recall election.
I’m not a lawyer…
