The Perils of Working with the Garage Door Up

Someone recently expressed their dismay with the title and contents of one of my Inkhaven essays, Aldous Huxley Predicts Adderall and Champions Alternative Therapies, which was shared on HackerNews. Here, I am mostly reflecting on that part of their commentYou can read the user’s comment in full here. and will also leave what are my totally non-expert thoughts on Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Adderall.

The commenter found both the title and the content “harmful”; while I can admit that the title reads a bit like clickbait—unintentionally so—I was surprised at this assessment of its harmfulness. So, I decided to review this essay. Had I judged Adderall? Had I made judgmental comments on ADHD? What might I have said that was possibly “harmful”? There are zero mentions of ADHD in my essay and just the one interpretation of Huxley’s words to a pharmacological substance resembling Adderall—more on this later.

To my memory, the essay was merely reporting as much of Huxley’s lecture as I could grok. My stance remains unchanged upon review; I went with the summary-style blogpost title because the main contents lack any thesis¹. An astute reader, had they read the last sentence of my essay, might have gathered my dismay at this lack of thesis:

Maybe I will have some semblance of a thesis from it as I contemplate his words overnight.

This summarising title, in fact, helped me overnight in developing a thesis for the next essay; my sense was that Huxley was trying to tell us that education is a technology.

Now, I thought that essay was more interesting and personally shared on HackerNews but, sadly, it never got any eyeballs! So, to those who commented that the title of the post with “Adderall” is clickbait, I can only say: you are right! And you have proved your own point! It appears to me that it drew you to this essay because you attributed some judgment to it, whereas the more interesting thesis in the other oneAnd, if you forgot, let me remind you that this is the one that I, personally chose to share! remains ignored². Would you have read an agreeably titled essay, such as, “Huxley said Some Things about Some Stuff”³? I doubt it.

On the matter of Adderall’s use for performance enhancement, the commenter finds this to be a harmful conclusion to reach (in a later comment) because their use of it is in mitigating their own ADHD. I am sympathetic to and heartened that the commenter has found respite from ADHD via pharmacological means. That said, I do not mention ADHD in my essay; the focus of the piece is on Huxley and interpreting his words in a more contemporary light. But it is worth pointing to evidence from another commenter in the thread; they link to a 2014 report on the alarmingly high use of prescription stimulants (Adderall and Ritalin) among Ivy league students to enhance academic performance. In 2024, they are called “study drugs” in news outletsI do not even know where the town of Binghamton is on the map. This is merely the first result from a Google Search of “Adderall students”.. Concerns that Adderall is being used for performance enhancement and not to treat ADHD discredits the commenter’s thinking; determining if a person has ADHD appears to be subjective and, by the looks of it, a prospective patient appears to be more responsible in determining its prescription than a doctor. If this were not the case, then concerns for its abuse would not exist. Thus, Adderall can be used for both actually treating ADHD and feeling some sense of performance enhancement. This is pretty much the mental efficiency gains that Huxley is pointing to, though I suspect he imagined it being used by adults, not students. Other commenters also revisited the well documented use of methamphetamines in the Third Reich. I think one can safely presume that these medications were not being administered to merely treat ADHD.

I’ll close off by addressing the essay title’s final part: “Champions Alternative Therapies”; if, at this point, you can accept there’s no judgment (from Huxley or myself) in any part of the essay with regards to Adderall, then it should also be self-evident that alternative therapies are not being suggested here as alternatives to Adderall. Or, if you read the first paragraph of the essay, then you will see that alternative therapies—which are a specific category of medicine—refer to the techniques of F. M. Alexander or Gestalt therapy per Huxley’s words.