drug use - Emergent Divergence

Oct 31 2023

Being an Autistic bullying victim led to my schizophrenia

At this time of year I often find myself reflecting on my experience as a Schizophrenic person; October 2023 marks 15 years since it became clear to me that I have a psychotic condition. The world is abjectly cruel to Autistic people. Life as an Autistic adult is incredibly difficult, and my life as an Autistic young person was no different. School was a nightmare for so many reasons, but one of the defining parts of my experience was the incessant bullying I experienced. I recently discussed my experiences with being Autistic and Schizophrenic, but I think it is important to recognise how bullying by both students and teachers contributed to my psychosis.

My experience as an Autistic bullying victim

The bullying started in Junior school. For those outside of the UK, junior school is years 3 to 6, roughly aged 7 to 11 years old. Students had realised I was different. I was far beyond them academically, I wasn’t interested in sports or typical “boy” things. I communicated differently and socialised differently. Teachers at the time would tell my mother that the bullying was my fault for being different. If only I would act more like everyone else, I would be much happier. I was undiagnosed Autistic, and rather than accept my differences, teachers sought to extinguish them.

Secondary school (high school to my American readers) was no different. The main addition was that I was being assaulted physically on a daily basis. Every part of who I was became a target for other young people. Even those who had no record of bullying would treat me badly. I was unable to trust anyone, least of all teachers. My school was known as a good place to send your children, and yet the teachers at that school drove me to the point of wishing I was no longer alive. It was a frightening and lonely experience.

How does this relate to my Autistic and Schizophrenic experience?

I experience a great deal of paranoia. Voices have historically focused on how I am not real, the world is not real, that people are planning to harm me. They have also tried to convince me that I am unsafe with people I love. This in itself is an isolating experience, but I feel it is deeply connected to the trauma of my educational environment. Teachers would lock me in rooms, shout at me, tell me I was lying about the way I was treated in school. I was gaslit and abused by the people who were meant to nurture my learning. The constant fear of bullying and assault by other students left me feeling as though I could be attacked at any moment.

I believe that the hallucinations and delusions I have experienced as a Schizophrenic person are intimately linked to the way I was treated in school. School may not have been the whole story, but it formed a great deal of the trauma that I struggle to reconcile to this day. Even writing this, I feel a sadness for the child I wasn’t able to be. A child that needed support and protection from the school, but instead learned that his reality and the people within it was untrustworthy and volatile. The truth is that since my school day’s I have felt alone, trying to make sense of the cruelty of this world. All because I was different.

What was the fallout of bullying a young person into schizophrenia and psychosis

In October 2008 I began hearing voices. A week later I would smoke cannabis for the first time. Within a month I was drinking and smoking cannabis almost daily. By the end of 2010 I was daily using drugs such as mephedrone (MCAT), ketamine, ecstacy, and speed. By 2013 I was using opioids such as tramadol and dihydrocodeine (DF118) on a daily basis alongside high doses of Diazepam (Valium). Within a year I would be a patient at the local A+E on a weekly basis for morphine and oxycodone overdoses. In 2015 I was faced with a difficult and life changing choice; get sober or die. I did get sober, but it cost me two lengthy stays on a psychiatric inpatient ward.

We have to stop the bullying of Autistic young people

Autistic people report bullying in up to 50% of cases. Remember, that’s the ones who report it, many of our young people deal with this pain in silence and isolation. I highly recommend reading this study by Pearson, Rose & Rees (2023) about the victimisation of Autistic people. Bullying and victimisation is costing our lives every single day. Even those of us who do not die in the literally sense face the loss of our happiness and connection to the world. This kind of bullying tears apart the mind and leaves us to try and reassemble ourselves in a world that keeps undoing our healing. We deserve better, our children deserve better.

It’s time the world did better.

David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments

Aug 27 2023

AuDHD addicts don’t respond to shame the way you want them to: Here is why

I have written before about how How the shame cycle barricades us from recovery in terms of addiction. In particular, here, I think about people who are AuDHD. If you exist at that particular intersection of experience, there is an increased likelihood that you use substances to improve your own wellbeing. Where there is self-medication, there is an increased risk of addiction. Where their is addiction, there are people trying to shame them into quitting.

Autism, ADHD, and shame

Being neurodivergent usually comes with a level of shame. This is due to the fact that society uses neuronormativity to police how we think, feel, act, and emote. It is estimated that ADHD children receive around 20,000 negative or corrective comments by age 10. Let us not forget that if a child is AuDHD, then there is a risk that they have been exposed to harmful interventions such as ABA or perhaps even MMS to try and make them “indistinguishable from their peers”.

When we consider this with respect to AuDHD adults, we are literally creating a factory line that takes children and turns them into adults who believe that who they are is wrong, invalid, a failure, or subhuman. To be AuDHD is to be constantly told why you are not enough. I believe from this you can already see why we may turn to drugs and alcohol to feel better.

Why does shame not stop addiction?

Clockwise arrows move between the words “shamed by people” and “use to cope” around the word “addiction”.

Addiction is insidious. It creeps into your life and slowly dismantles it. Stripping away your sense of identity, your relationships, your economic stability. It slowly takes everything from you until it is ready to take you away from the world. Addiction is not a moral failing, and it certainly is not a choice. No one wakes up one morning and decides to give away their liberty in the pursuit of oblivion.

One of the reasons we seek that oblivion is because the pain we experience is so intense that we would rather feel nothing at all. Shame adds to this pain. It eats away at us, tells us we should hide and obfuscate those parts of us that need to be in the light. If open communication is the key to recovery, then shame is the barricade keeping us from it. For this reason, shame will only ever keep us heading back towards oblivion.

What helps AuDHD people recover from addiction?

As we have discussed. AuDHD people are already driven to conceal themselves from childhood. Driving that further by shaming their drug use only serves to entrench that more deeply. In order to recover, we need to be able to communicate our inner experience openly and honestly. We have to create environments where a more natural embodiment of our internal experience is not something that will be penalised. To consider it another way; we have to let people be themselves.

Before we can be ourselves, we have to know ourselves. This is why community connectedness is so very important. Aside from an overall reduction in minority stress, it allows us to learn about ourselves through shared experience with others. By engaging in natural communication and AuSociality, we learn what it is to be us, and how to improve our wellbeing. When we begin to feel good about ourselves, it becomes easier to tackle addiction.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to addiction recovery, but I am certain that shaming AuDHD addicts will never achieve what you hope it will. If we want to save lives, we have to begin creating safe and nurturing spaces, not driving people back to the oblivion they already feel they deserve.

David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments

Jun 28 2023

Autism and alexithymia: The fallout for our mental health

Autism and alexithymia are two things you might see discussed in tandem quite regularly. In fact, Vaiouli and Panayiotou (2021) found a strong postive correlation beween Autistic experience and alexithymia with Kinnaird et al (2019) finding a prevalence rate of nearly 50% among Autistic people. Considering the very high rates of alexithymia among Autistic people, it is necessary to think about how this might contribute to issues in healthcare settings where professionals are largely trained in non-autistic expressions of emotion.

Alexithymia (according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary) is the inability to identify and express or describe one’s emotions. In other words, an alexithymic person experiences emotions in a way that means they struggle to attribute the internal sensations to descriptive language. It is subset of interoceptive differences which is discussed by Adkin (2023) in relation to their concept of “Meerkat Mode”.

This obviously presents issues with accessing support for our mental health. How can we explain our struggle if we can’t put it into words? Professionals often take us less seriously because if it was “that bad” we would be able to voice our suffering. Unfortunately it is not as simple as this. Even in my own experience, I often struggle to feel the difference between emotions like anxiety and excitement. Happiness and sadness also feel similar to me, and exhaustion is something I often can’t recognise until I am at the point of crisis.

This is a significant enough issue to face as an Autistic adult, but it happens to Autistic children as well. We regularly see Autistic people turned away from services such as CAMHS because they are in no way equipped to help us. Children are naturally less adept at describing emotions, especially the big emotions, and when you throw alexithymia in on top of that it leads to a breakdown in communication that can have life threatening consequences.

I have found myself at multiple points in my life being administered medication that I did not need because the ways I have learned to articulate my very abstract feeling emotions have been misunderstood (accidentally and willfully) by psychiatrists. We live in a world that pathologises our suffering, meaning that we can face horrific side effects to treatments that we might not have needed had professionals been culturally competent with regards to mental health in Autistic people. Tanya Adkin and I have written about the importance of competence previously (Gray-Hammond & Adkin, 2023).

I often ponder on the relationship between my early experiences of not being able to communicate my emotions effectively to professionals and my subsequent years of a drug and alcohol addiction. Honkalampi et al (2022) found a positive correlation between alexithymia and substance use, which in my opinion may indicate a mechanism behind the findings of Weir et al (2021) showing significantly higher rates of self-medicating with recreational drugs among Autistic adolescents and adults. In fact, one of the primary drivers behind my drug use was having control over my emotional experience. I would hazard a guess that drug use is so common in the Autistic community because it allows us to feel a familiar and more easily described feeling.

It is clear that alexithymia is a significant issue for not just Autistic people, but also for professionals working in healthcare and wellbeing practices. The links between alexithymia, poor access to mental health support, and risk taking behaviour are clear. It’s necessary for professionals working with Autistic people to find ways to help Autistic people articulate their emotions rather than to just ignore us or belittle our struggles.

Our lives depend on it.

References

Adkin, T. (2023). What is meerkat mode and how does it relate to AuDHD? https://emergentdivergence.com/2023/06/06/what-is-meerkat-mode-and-how-does-it-relate-to-audhd/

Gray-Hammond, D., & Adkin, T. (2023). Creating Autistic Suffering: Autistic safety and neurodivergence competency. https://emergentdivergence.com/2023/04/11/creating-autistic-suffering-autistic-safety-and-neurodivergence-competency/

Honkalampi, K., Jokela, M., Lehto, S. M., Kivimäki, M., & Virtanen, M. (2022). Association between alexithymia and substance use: A systematic review and meta‐analysis. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 63(5), 427-438.

Kinnaird, E., Stewart, C., & Tchanturia, K. (2019). Investigating alexithymia in autism: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Psychiatry, 55, 80-89.

Vaiouli, P., & Panayiotou, G. (2021). Alexithymia and autistic traits: associations with social and emotional challenges among college students. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 15, 733775.

Weir, E., Allison, C., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2021). Understanding the substance use of autistic adolescents and adults: a mixed-methods approach. The Lancet Psychiatry, 8(8), 673-685.

David Gray-Hammond 6 Comments

Jun 10 2023

Autism and drug-use: drowning in the void

It’s no secret that I’m a recovering drug addict. It’s certainly even less of a secret that I am also Autistic/multiply neurodivergent. When one considers the reality of meeting diagnostic criteria for autism, ADHD, and schizophrenia; It’s easy to see how drug use was an inevitability. I often joke that AuDHD isn’t descriptive enough for me, and that I should describe myself as AuDphrenic.

It’s important to note that I don’t like to differentiate between “drugs” and “alcohol” given that alcohol itself is a drug. The separation of the two has been instrumental in the dehumanisation of those struggling with their use of things outside of the world of alcohol.

Autistic people can and do use drugs. Many professionals believe that we don’t, but we do. We often have access, means, and reason to use drugs. Allow me to present some statistics on drug use, found in this study:

Despite over all being less likely to report recreational drug use, there were some significant findings:
- We are nine times more likely to report using recreational drugs to manage our behaviour.
- We are more likely to report using recreational drugs to manage our mental health.
- We are more likely to report vulnerabilities associated with drug use such as;
  - Childhood drug-use
  - Being tricked or forced into drug-use

This highlights some significant points of consideration for Autistic people. Those of us on the AuDHD intersection may be experiencing atypical burnout. This presents a high likelihood of Tanya Adkin’s concept of meerkatting coming into play. For an Autistic person in meerkat mode, drug use may offer a great deal of reprieve and give the feeling of an extended number of spoons/cognitive resources (see spoon theory).

When I was using drugs, I treated myself as a science experiment. For an AuDHD Schizophrenic, drugs allowed me to find a flow-state. They made the management of my Self and identity more manageable. I would keep journals of my drug use in order to see how far I could push it. Just how high could I get?

Some Autistic people use drugs safely. Cannabis and psychedelics are very popular options for self-medication, and I know of many who use them as such. It’s important that we recognise the risks without invalidating those who use them safely as medicine. In a world where a trip to the doctors can bankrupt you, we should not judge those who self-medicate. We should create a space where it is okay to explore all the pros and cons.

It’s also important to note the aforementioned risk of forced drug use. Many of us wish desperately to be part of friendship groups, which places us in a vulnerable position. Mate crime and criminal exploitation can often start with forced drug use. We need to protect Autistic people against the inevitable black market that has arisen from prohibition.

Addiction is a real risk, I know because I am an addict. For many of us, things can spiral out of control. Societies framing of addicts as something inhuman has created a world where it is unsafe to discuss this fact of life. We need to build communities where people can access meaningful peer-based support and advice for drug-use that has spiralled out of control.

In a world where up to 66% of Autistic people have considered suicide, and 35% have attempted suicide (see this study), we need to take a really good look at how we support Autistic people with things such as drug-use.

David Gray-Hammond 3 Comments

Feb 10 2023

Drug use, addiction, and neuroqueering

I have extensively explored my Autistic relationship with addiction thus far. I have considered and lamented the inappropriate treatment services, the suffering, and rejoiced in the moment that I came out the other side. I have listed numerous reasons that contributed to my active addiction, but what I have not done is really drive home the core point of why I kept coming back to drugs. I need you to know what gave me that drive to persevere with something that could have very well cost me my life.

I was undiagnosed Autistic for the first 26 years and 7 months of my life. I know that many, if not most of you, will understand the isolation and alienation that comes with such an existence. It seemed as though everywhere I turned, I was met with condemnation and assertions of my inadequacy. It extended far beyond bullying. It was more than abuse. The world taught me that who I was, the very essence of me, was only as valuable as my ability to assimilate into the culture of my local environments.

I had never wished to enter into the culture of normality. I felt that my lack of desire to fit in reduced me to a non-person. In a world where I could be anything, I would give anything to not be me. My fluid identity was more akin to vapour at this point than it was to any tangible form. Society constructs our sense of Self through our interactions with the environment. My environment rejected me like a gangrenous limb.

Perhaps then you can start to see where the twisted beauty of drugs seeped into my life. Not only could I alter my perception of the environment, but I could also alter the way those in my environment perceived me. Different drugs allowed me to put on and take off identities like clothes. They allowed me to explore the inner workings of my mind. I could manifest the Self in whatever way I saw fit.

Much like the sculptor trying to free the art from its marble prison, I was able to shed the constraints of human thought. Drugs allowed me to rewire my bodymind. I was no longer the necrotic manifestation of the universe, but instead the explorer. I was attempting to neuroqueer without even knowing it.

Sadly, this lifestyle was not sustainable. In order to explore the fluidity of one’s identity, it is necessary to be at some level of peace with your Self. At least in my experience. My attempt to neuroqueer my way to peace was fundamentally flawed. I wanted to subvert myself, not normative attitudes. I was trying to diverge into neurotypical performance.

Perhaps that is why I kept returning despite the dangers. Neurotypicality was a performance that I could never manage. What is it they say about try8ng the same thing over and over and the definition of insanity?

The irony in this story is that at almost seven years of tee total sobriety, I can now see that my journey through that time has actually made assimilation not just less possible; The thought is abhorrent to me. For my safety now, I steer clear of “recreational drug use”. My days as a self-confessed psychonaut are over, and quite honestly? I’m okay with that.

Some people falsely believe that addiction is an illness. Personally, I believe that given the right environmental ingredients, it becomes an inevitability. For me, addiction has been a necessary evil. It was necessary for me to deconstruct the Self that had been built on the rotten foundation of subjugation and childhood trauma. That deconstruction allowed me to make space for the infinite possibilities that lay within my neurology.

The world needs us to regularly deconstruct that which society has built. It’s often a violent and painful process, but necessary as we explore what it means to be neurodivergent. Perhaps more so, what it means to be human.

If I could ask one thing of you, dear reader, it is this; when you see a person suffering, do not offer them vague pity and generic platitudes. Offer them your hand to place a new foundation, upon which all can stand to explore the fluid nature of human identity.

David Gray-Hammond 1 Comments

Jan 15 2023

Drug-use and harm reduction: what does it look like?

When we consider harm reduction strategies for drug-users, we often think about education on the safer use of drugs. Things such as safer injection practices and “tasting the hit” to reduce accidental overdoses. While things such as safe consumption rooms and needle exchanges can reduce a lot of the surface level harms, there is a wider conversation about the factors leading to drug-use and the fall out from drug-use once it has initiated.

Here are some of the things that, in my opinion, are important factors to consider when trying to reduce the harms from drug-use.

1. Trauma-informed practice

First, we need to stop viewing trauma through a normative lens and realise that trauma can be experienced from just about any source. As I discussed with Tanya Adkin in the Creating Autistic Suffering Series, trauma is a subjective experience.

Once we have shed our misconceptions of what constitutes trauma, we need to recognise the role that traumatic experiences play in the harms associated with drug-use. Anyone supporting people around harm reduction needs to remember that they are more than likely working with traumatised people.

2. Responsible prescribing practices

The pathologisation and subsequent medicalisation of distress has done many people a great deal of harm. For many people, myself included, it has meant trading addiction to illicit drugs for addiction to prescription drugs. In my case, prescription drugs were more dangerous than the illicit ones due to ease of access.

People don’t like to admit it, but doctors often end up being a person’s main supplier of drugs.

3. Move away from current diagnostic models in psychiatry

Distress doesn’t have to be centred as a problem in the person. In fact, I would argue that it’s necessary to externalise it by looking to the environment, and subsequent experiences of people in distress. We need to consider that if we want people to be safer in the use of drugs, we need to think about what in their life has brought them to using them.

For a good example of this, check out the power threat meaning framework.

It is also important to embrace neurodiversity models. It’s not just Autistic people that are Neurodivergent. Neurodivergence can be acquired in a number of ways, or you van be born with it. It is important, though, to recognise that “mental illness” as a concept has not improved outcomes in psychiatry in over 50 years. Recognising Neurodivergent people in distress will take you much further.

4. End prohibition

The war on drugs is a lie. It has not stopped drug use, and neither has abstinence-based education. Making drugs illegal does not stop their use, it empowers clandestine markets to exploit the distress of vulnerable people, for profit, and increases harms through the lack of regulations around purity and age restriction.

This is a non-exhaustive list. We need to have a wider conversation about racism and other bigotry, socioeconomic status, housing, access to healthcare, and myriad other factors. I do not believe I could do this justice in a short blog.

I hope that we can move into a world where we support people rather than criminalise and institutionalise them. I hope that medical professionals can take a moment to acknowledge the harm their profession has done. I hope that we can all assess our own internalised ableism towards drug-use and addiction.

We may not be able to solve this issue over night, but little by little, we can make the waves that will sweep away the old models and make space to replace them with something that works better for every one. The greatest thing we can do is have a little compassion for others who are suffering.

David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments

Jan 13 2023

Autistic drug-users and the lack of solid guidance in support services

In the UK the majority of mental health support and treatment is guided by an organisation called The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). Their guidance sets out how each and every person treated in a clinical setting should be managed, and what treatment modalities are appropriate and inappropriate. Except there is a glaring gap in this guidance, this gap is with regards to the treatment of Neurodivergent drug-users. They have guidance on the dual-diagnosis intersection where drug-use and “severe mental illness” meet, but nothing regarding neurodivergence.

This presents a unique challenge to practitioners working in the field of substance-use; it certainly contributes to the misconception that drug-use is a non-issue for Autistic people. Of course, if it was an issue, why wouldn’t it be in the guidance?

Neurodivergent people exist at multiple intersections of race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, why is it so hard to understand that we often turn to drugs in order to self-medicate the trauma of our improper society? Weir et al (2021) showed definitively that while we are less likely to report using drugs, we are more likely to report self-medicating with what can be considered “recreational substances”. This pulls the plight of Neurodivergent people into the spotlight. Where self-medication exists, the potential for escalation to addiction exists.

Without concrete guidance in place, support for those existing at this intersection of experiences is likely to continue down a path of inadequacy. Some might ask what guidance should look like, while I have some specific ideas, I believe there is a wider need for understanding of Neurodivergent experiences in service providers. Guidance can’t just be drawn up in a “one-size-fits-all” manner, clinical commissioners and others involved in treatment policy need a nuanced understanding of our experiences.

This understanding can only come from co-production of material guidance. Autistic and otherwise Neurodivergent people need to be involved in the generation of guidance and policy. Having worked in service user involvement models, I have seen first hand the vital impact that the voice of those affected has on steering policy.

The truth is that many people writing guidance and policy have little to no experience of the real world effects of drug-use, let alone the real world impacts that drug-use has on Neurodivergent people in particular. Most of them are still rooted deeply in medicalised ideas of neurodivergence. Their are broad issues to consider.

Drug-use is intrinsically linked to socioeconomic status and further marginalisation. When you consider that only 22% of Autistic people are currently in any form of employment in the UK (Office for National statistics, 2020), not to mention the number of us existing in the court and judicial system; Neurodivergent young people represent a particularly large portion of youth offending populations (Day, 2022). We are 7 times more likely to be permanently excluded from mainstream education (Gill et al, 2017), representing 44% of all permanent exclusions (Vibert, 2021).

It seems as though Neurodivergent young people exist on a school to self-medication to prison pipeline, and that is assuming the drugs don’t end their lives before they have begun. The guidance is not only needed, it needs to consider all aspects of life that are contributing to it. We cannot claim that we are engaging in harm reduction while such things are happening. Let us not forget the horrifically traumatic experiences that Autistic people face (Gray-Hammond & Adkin, 2021). It’s a perfect storm for drug-use and addiction. We need guidance from official governing bodies.

It’s vital to mention that neurodivergence doesn’t end at 18. Neurodivergent young people turn into Neurodivergent adults. We need support and guidance across all age groups.

Until NICE and other clinical governing bodies work with Neurodivergent populations to produce guidance that is fit-for-purpose, we will continue to see the premature death and imprisonment of Neurodivergent people who are doing nothing but trying to survive in a system that sets them up to fail. We need guidance across all settings, but especially clinical ones.

Please sign this petition regarding the lack of NICE guidelines

References

Day, A. M. (2022). Disabling and Criminalising systems? Understanding the experiences and challenges facing incarcerated, neurodivergent children in the education and youth justice systems in England. Forensic Science International: Mind and Law, 3, 100102.

Gill, K., Quilter-Pinner, H., & Swift, D. (2017). Making the difference: Breaking the link between school exclusion and social exclusion. Institute for Public Policy Research.

Gray-Hammond, D & Adkin T (2021) Creating Autistic Suffering: In the Beginning there was trauma. Emergent Divergence

Office for National Statistics (2020) Outcomes for disabled people in the UK: 2020

Vibert, S. (2021). Briefing: Five things you need to know about SEN in schools: February 2021.

Weir, E., Allison, C., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2021). Understanding the substance use of autistic adolescents and adults: a mixed-methods approach. The Lancet Psychiatry, 8(8), 673-685.

David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments

Jul 10 2022

Back to the corner: Psychoactive drug use, my Autistic experience

Some 4(ish) years ago, my debut blog post on this website was Standing on the corner: Where autism and addiction meet shortly covered by Recovery services as an Autistic adult. Back then My writing was merely an attempt to scream into the void, offloading my frustrations. Little did i know that in 4 years, my articles would have garnered over 25,000 views, and that people would ask me to go places and do things. I was also pretty surprised to discover that for the most part I don’t mind going places and doing things.

With that in mind, I decided it’s time to take another crack at this one, seeing if 4 years of experience makes for an improved experience for you, my wonderful readers and followers.

So here we are.

I’m David. Born Autistic at the dawn of the 1990’s. My life was pretty standard for what you’d expect of a truamatised, psychotic, recovering addict. So let’s consider where this particular part of my journey started.

October 2008.

My long term relationship came to an end (mutually, but still painful none-the-less). On that very same day, I had a peculiar experience. I heard a number of voices calling my name, but it seemed that it wasn’t the people around me that were doing so. Interestingly, this was the day of my first ever cigarette as well. Hindsight tells me that the fact that my first cigarette led to me smoking an entire pack in a number of hours should have been a huge warning for what was coming. Sadly, hindsight isn’t good for much, and I have a traumatised AuDHD brain that at the time was going through what some might term a “prodromal phase” for the psychotic condition I would later be diagnosed with.

Over the next week I discovered that smoking cannabis really helped my growing paranoia and auditory disturbances chill the f*ck out, and that when drank a litre of vodka, I just didn’t give a sh*t. Just a note here for anyone who can’t see what’s coming; drug-use and trauma is a volatile mix. Some people use psychoactives safely and medicinally their whole lives, with no real negative outcomes. I on the other hand came to resemble one of those warning videos your school would have shown you about the dangers of peer pressure and drug-use.

So, naturally I did what any normal AuDHD’er would do when they discovered something that makes them feel good. I did it again. And again, and again, ad infinitum. Each time I used, my consumption grew. Each new environment I entered I would break down another boundary in my life. First it was cannabis, then alcohol, and I figured that since these two weren’t the dangerous and hellish things my school had made them out to be, perhaps other psychoactives would be okay as well. Side note: this is why using scare tactics and abstinence based approached to stop young people from getting high is f*cking irresponsible, because when they find out they’ve been lied to, they don’t truat you on ANYTHING.

My time at university can be summed up by quoting myself “I don’t think you’ve ever seen me this high, have you?” and the phrase said to me most often “How the f*ck are you still alive?”. You see, I hadn’t noticed it, but I was taking drugs by the shed load. I was out of my mind on pretty much anything I could get. It’s easier to list the drugs I haven’t used than the drugs I have used; To date, I’ve never used “street” heroin, or crack cocaine. More on this in a moment.

What this meant was that when I ran away from my environment, making the 300 mile journey back to my mother’s house, I swore I would never use again. After all, I had nearly died on a couple of occasions, and found myself on the radar of what one might describe as “less than savoury people”.

Spectrum 10k Special- David with Katie Munday and Priscilla Eyles - David's Divergent Discussions

David is joined by Katie Munday (AKA Autistic and Living the Dream) and Priscilla Eyles for a discussion of Spectrum 10k. Whether you've never heard of this project, want to learn more, or have been a regular fighting against it, this episode promises to be really informative and important. David's Books Katie's Facebook Priscilla's Twitter

Tag Archives: drug use

My experience as an Autistic bullying victim

How does this relate to my Autistic and Schizophrenic experience?

What was the fallout of bullying a young person into schizophrenia and psychosis

We have to stop the bullying of Autistic young people

Autism, ADHD, and shame

Why does shame not stop addiction?

What helps AuDHD people recover from addiction?