Introduction

I was recently diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1 and ADHD, the inattentive type. I suppose, AuDHD for short. There are many reasons why I now have this official label of AuDHD, not that I was hoping for it, but due to a childhood behavioral disorder diagnosis and a desire to understand myself better, I decided to start considering that something in my childhood issue was misunderstood.

Personal History

A brief history lesson for context is that I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but not specifically type 1 or type 2. This diagnosis came about two times, once in my late childhood and again when I was 19. The diagnosis never made a ton of sense to me, but it seemed to almost match some of the things that my mom specifically was concerned about. There is another point for later on, which is that part of me wanted to be bipolar. I felt like it would be cool, but also it made me special.

Once I started kind of thinking for myself a little bit - the bipolar diagnosis was one of my first spiritual challenges in understanding the brokenness of humanity.

The Challenge

I believe in an orderly God, the creator of all things, who makes things both soundly and reasonable. Mental health is complex because it's not like a broken arm, throw a cast on, and wait... Taking medicine felt almost antithetical to my worldview because I had a deep desire to see something miraculous. So, I backed myself into this odd worldview where I taking medicine must be fighting something that God wants to do in me with this brokenness. I felt like I was trying to do something maybe God didn't want me to do, but was also wrestling with "but if something's really wrong (which is possible because we live in a broken world) God gifts these doctors to come up with this medicine to help heal some of the brokenness."

So I had these two competing ideas that were very loud in my head.

So I've been more at less at peace with the idea that behavior disorders are apart of life for many people - and that medical treatment can be helpful.

Reflection

As I've gotten older and reflected on being bi-polar I couldn't help but notice that hardly any part of the atypical pieces of myself matched up with bi-polar at all... Around the time I started to notice this my wife began wondering if I had something more akin to ADD. We didn't really understand what that meant, or how it has changed over the years, or any of it - but based on some initial stereotypes ADHD began to become a common thing we discussed After some more legitimate research we both became pretty convinced that I was measurably on the Autism Spectrum and that certainly there were ADHD tendencies that negatively affected my life. I talked with my doctor and after several psych evaluations it turns out that my self-diagnosis was consistent with the conclusion of the evaluation. So if this was the end then my thought would've been

However, this wasn't the end for me - getting diagnosed with AuDHD didn't/hasn't changed my life - it's given me a framework by which I can understand myself in the context of our Western world better. But there's a lot more here and as we look ahead, I want to be clear that I take no special pride in the AuDHD label... I'll talk about myself with this label as a way of communicating with people who understand it, but the main point of this post will be in how understanding myself as a human being more holistically led to a different point of view of what the West calls neurodivergencies.

Treatment

I have been taking a light mood stabilizer for a while now per my former bi-polar diagnosis. There's no doubt that it is coincidentally a helpful tool in coping with some debilitating aspects of AuDHD but the more I reflect the more I want to get away from it - personally.

I'm not sure what to think about treatment overall... I recognize that some folks are much more negatively affected by the tendencies we label as neurodivergent and that there are meaningful changes that can come from modern western medicine. However, there's also old/ancient and natural solutions to many problems that I think are often overlooked

Two Systems | East v West

I've become critical of the modern Western perspective on neurodivergence and mental/behavioral health. It's primarily that I'd be much less skeptical if it wasn't for all the money... I notice patterns as well that I don't find comforting - such as the focus on symptoms and isolated treatment of them or groups of symptoms rather than looking at a human-being as an entire organism or system. I know that certain pieces of a system can break, and sometimes treating those isolated breakages is the way to go - but also we (in the West) seem to avoid thinking about ourselves as 1 whole thing... There's language that younger people use about their "whole self" but honestly I only see them talk about sexuality as if that defined everything about a person... that's 100% not what I have in mind here...

Every one of my psychiatric appointments up through the last few years had never sought to get me off my medication... It got me thinking the goal was for me to be a customer for life. I don't like being reliant on anything external and the fact that there was never a goal for me to be self-sufficient in my own health became troubling.

My philosophical issues arising with our modern medical systems have led me to becoming more open to Eastern medicine and as I explore how those systems have historically analyzed patterns and attributed those patterns to different ways of thinking, I think the pattern-analysis and subsequent recommendations can be extremely valuable. This is where adaptogens come in for me.

Lifestyle Changes

I'd heard of Lion's Mane via some Joe Rogan clips (have become a bigger and bigger fan of him over the last few years), and then got a subscription to FourSigmatic which is a coffee company that offers mushroom-replacement and supplements for coffee and tea basically. So I'm drinking coffee with Lion's Mane, and have added a few other mushroom tinctures with Reishi and Chaga specifically, as well as Eleuthero and Turkey Tail as a means of introducing adaptogens into my routine and maybe it's confirmation bias again, but as I've gone on and off the Lion's Mane specifically I notice a significant difference in my cognitive function... When I'm diligent about putting the Lion's Mane tincture into my coffee in the morning it is like unlocking on-demand hyper-focus some mornings...

Wrapping It Up

This post is mostly a stream-of-consciousness as I reflect on the atpypical nature of much of my life, how that fits into the modern Western discourse of mental health, and how the Western perspective might end up not being a helpful lens through which to process these behavioral issues.

With sufficient context, a faithful summary of my journey is that I don't mind being labeled as AuDHD - there's plenty that's helpful with it. However if an Ayuverdic Shaman "diagnosed" me as a person whose elemental make up was primarily earthy and watery with an odd flare of fire, and that elemental make-up is what explains some of my tendencies (needing to know the correct answer, tunnel-vision and hyper-focus, literal understanding of the world, etc.) then I want to understand that with the same amount of "weight" as being AuDHD..