Fighting depression

Fighting depression as I realize just how impacted my brain/body is by the past and ongoing drug abuse, and increasing doubt that I will ever regain my vitality and peak performance.  I especially suffer with the inability to concentrate which means that I find prayer, reading, writing, and thinking difficult, so much so that I cannot be productive in any significant way while I am abused.  I watched part of a video on the epidemic doping of kids for ADHD and ADD.  What are we doing to our kids?  I read that bipolar diagnosis of children has jumped 4000% in the last decade.  What are we doing to our kids?  Feeding their heads, and destroying their ability for creative individuality by the chemical poison that the pharmaceutical industry is pushing on all of America--for obscene profit to them, and lifetime detriment to hundreds of thousands of individual lives.  As Michael Moore was interviewed for the show, he noted that by the standard determined to diagnose ADD and ADHD, he would have been identified as a "hyperactive" kid in need of medication.  He also realizes that the Ritalin would have crippled his creativity so thoroughly that he he never would have become a controversial and creative filmaker.  I agree with him completely.  By the criteria used to judge ADD children, I was hyperactive myself.  I was so hyperactive that I used to run to school, run home, run on my newspaper route at 6 in the morning, and run and run in the woods.  I will admit that I had a really hard time concentrating in school, but I think my attention disorder was not caused solely by any  "deficit" within me, but by an education system that did not know how to engage a highly intelligent and imaginative child who chafed at the traditional methodology and strictures of  education.  Fortunately for me, I learned how to zone out passively into my imagination, instead of into "acting out" behavior, and most teachers were content to let me sit in the back of class and read book after book, while I disengaged from the mind numbing boredom around me.  But had I been force fed drugs as a child, I never would have developed into the critical, intuitive thinker I am today.  I never would have developed my creative IQ and the unusually powerful degree  of concentration that I used to have (and hope one day to regain, if I ever am free of these damned drugs).  For hyperactive people are very capable of concentration and intellectual achievement--they just have to find and learn what motivates them to discipline and apply themselves.  They are not motivated at all by imposed objectives and goals.  But I don't think our educational system is any longer concerned with allowing each individual to find and claim their unique identity.  Education has become a fact fest designed to turn out drones of a hive "groupthink" mind and attitude.  That is the worst part of the drugs--whether Ritalin, anti-depressants, lithium, or any psychotropic medication.  They are crippling the minds of our most potentially creative and specially gifted  youngsters before they ever find that unique identity and vocation that is to challenge and uplift the social order to a higher, more self-aware level.  The world doesn't need more drones; it needs more individuals, and individuation requires a healthy and strong mind, and having suffered from two years of forced psychotropic medication, I can witness to the reality that drugs cripple the mind, and the spirit.  Hopefully, I can recover, because the damage being done to my brain has happened as an adult, but I weep to think of the damage being done to formative youthful brains that probably never will have the opportunity to reach their full potential.  For I agree with Michael Moore--as trying as my education was, for both me and my teachers, I would never would have become the creative, challenging, indiviual person that I am today, had the pill pushers forced their for-profit poison into my tender brain.  For that matter, I don't know if I would have so successfully overcome my autism had I been diagnosed as an autistic and put in a special ed class (in rural Eastern KY, there were no special ed classes--we were all thrown together and had to make the best of it).  This is not to say that special ed or drugs are not helpful.  They can be--on the rare occasions when a child's behavior is substantive and destructive and cannot be redressed by natural means (I think suburban and urban kids are just not getting enough physical exercise and play, and many children are lacking personal attention from their parents, many of whom  are inattentive to deep reality themselves, often due to drug usage whether legal, including alohol and prescriptions, or illegal.  I also suspect all the artificial everything that our kids ingest through junk and processed food). 

Anyway, kids, I share, and empathize with, your pain.  I find it incredibly difficult to concentrate while I am on this speed.  I cannot read, and I find writing laborious, instead of my previously effortless absorption.  I suffer from the nerve pain in my leg, TMJ, and incessant headaches that it causes.  The drugs separate me from my deep and free self, making prayer and a spiritual life severely limited, and since my spiritual life orders my days, I am seriously handicapped.  There is nothing I can do but endure this, but I am "offering up" this particular suffering for a whole generation of children who have endured irrepable suffering and damage to their brains by dope pushers--whether it be crystal meth from a corner or park, or Ritalin from the school nurse.  Hopefully, someday I can heal from this abuse, and can help others do so as well.