There is much talk ‘on the street’ about conditions, Labels and categories. The one in particular I will focus on for this article will be ADHD. I find the subject very interesting, having already speculated slightly of a cross over into hyperphantasia. But within that, I also consider that neither ‘condition’ exists at all. But is perhaps a label and construct as with many other things, to help put ourselves into categories for them, to then be standardised and medicated.

But I can’t help leaning towards there being an issue, and have been trying to put my finger on what the cause was, now we see an effect. Adhd isn’t a new diagnosis of only this generation, it spans back to the 70’s, and I had thought maybe it was a simple case of high spirited children having their spirits dampened, quashed and medicated to make them fit in to society and the mainstream. Strangely though, as many have pointed out over the years, with a highly stimulating drug apparently to counteract a highly stimulated brain. And that may indeed have been the angle or purpose. But today I came up with another thought towards it, which I theorise was to help to bring about an adhd response in people, rather than ‘treat’ it as they say. And as it seems the powers that be often say one thing and do the opposite, so I have no reason to presume this would be any different. A bait and switch type of thing, as we have observed a number of times over the years in various forms.

What if, say, the stimulating medication given to ‘calm’ the overworking brain, is there to speed up the processing centre? To actually allow a hyper state of mind to adapt to the constant stream of information they wanted society to be saturated with and develop a certain threshold for it. There was a quote in Ready Player One that stayed with me on this line of thought that ties in here to me – “We estimate we can sell up to 80% of a user’s vision without inducing seizures.” So, I wondered if the companies and marketing machine who know well in advance of coming technology and trends, would need a way to to be able to make people more accepting of the landscape they wanted to present. Knowing it wouldn’t be normal for people to have the attention span to digest all the information or keep up with their constant conveyor of consumerism. Using a normal thing they get to deem a ‘problem’, then being able to medicate said problem, thereby getting the drugs you want to test, into people on the ground in a real life setting and distributed as a matter of daily life. It’s then encouraged by average people down the chain of society.

And then along the way, if it was realised that the excess demands and speed at which the brain was working started causing all sorts of behavioural issues and what we now call ‘mental health’ issues? Would they pull the plug? Or decide it was an opportunity to test those people even further, apply more drugs and medications and labels to combat anyone noticing and tracing it back to a time before all the interference. Perhaps. There is another option though, and sort of the flipside of it. So, two theories, I guess. One being they created the wave of hyper processing within people’s brains with pharmaceuticals, and try to further it or control it with more of the same. So we will maybe become bound and integrated into their ‘fast moving systems’ online, because life will seem to dull or slow without it. Or the second theory being, maybe people have developed a way to hyper think and process information at a pace they did not foresee, and wish to control and dampen that with drugs and distractions. It’s also possible that theory two occurred as a consequence anyway of theory one, but could have emerged just through environment changes and a requirement for ‘survival’ in this new tech world we are being drawn into. But remember the good old days when you just turned off the TV, or stopped listening to constant noise of the radio, how normal and quiet everything seemed…

(c) K Wicks