#neurotransmitter
One of the… I guess challenges I’ve faced in getting people to take ADHD seriously is that the prevailing idea (in my experience, anyways) about dopamine is that it’s the “drug neurotransmitter”. It’s the fun one, that’s bad for you! Like all drugs! You shouldn’t be looking for more dopamine, that just means you’re looking for a high!
The things is, it’s not like that. It’s really, really not.
Dopamine’s a little bit like glucose (sugar, required for your body to generate energy); a substance that is 100% genuinely essential to having a fully-functioning properly working brain and body, to the point that it feels good when you get more of it because you’re filling a need, to the point that yeah, you can get addicted to it.
But if you’re glucose deficient, that’s hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), where your cells don’t have the energy to keep running because there’s no fuel. AKA a major issue.
If you’re dopamine deficient… well, just go look up the symptoms of ADHD. All of them, not just the inattentiveness ones. ADHD can and does fuck up your life severely, on multiple levels, because ADHD brains are chronically lacking in a compound necessary for basic function.
Yeah, like anything, you can have too much dopamine. But that’s literally the opposite of the problem here.
Dopamine’s not the “evil drug neurotransmitter”, but the number of people I’ve tried to explain ADHD and ADHD medications that think that has really impacted my ability to even be understood, much less given the accommodations I need.
I find myself reminded of that line from a movie about not allowing oneself to become addicted to water… Does it count as an addiction if it’s a substance that your body is supposed to have?
