I actually went into some (definitely not all) of my gripes with the education and workforce systems in a post on [url=http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/88700-b-tchfest-a-healthy-release-for-our-non-roleplay-annoyances/ooc?page=85]this[/url] page of the 'bitchfest' thread.

[@shylarah]
Given that I'm thirty-three in literally five days from now, the age gap between us is actually identical to the age gap between me and [@Ailyn Evensen] (my fiancé, since [@Doc Doctor] might not know that even if you do). That said, I would imagine that the mental health field actually had plenty of room to develop between us -- you must also never forget that I'm from Australia and we're noticeably behind America in a lot of ways. With this in mind, it's entirely possible that you simply got lucky; however, Ritalin might very well have been more suitable for you since you've mentioned having attention problems (not to mention the hyper and wild tendencies) -- I didn't have attention 'problems' (apart from the whole 'being flooded by so many thoughts that my body can't keep up with my mind' thing)... I was legitimately able to tell - as a youth (I've always been wise beyond my years -- when I was a kid people thought my mother was a teacher because I was like a philosopher even as a child) - that everything they were teaching me in school would never actually be helpful for me, especially since I had a lot of other difficulties in my life even as a child that were more important than focusing on education, so I didn't focus in my classes due to that.

[i]Apparently[/i] that meant I was behind the other kids mentally, not in front of them. They even put me on glasses (read: I didn't need glasses, and very quickly stopped using them, but they started causing severe headaches in the brief time I was wearing them) before they started drugging me up. I despise the mental health industry for the same reason I despise a lot of science -- too many superficial assholes and morons like to take [i]subjective[/i] fields and consider them [i]objective[/i].

My schools made no efforts to help me outside of sending me to counsellors and doctors who legitimately ruined any chance of me having a normal life. In some ways, I was a [i]test subject[/i] -- a lot of people have insulted me for playing the occasional character who was the guinea pig of some cruel experiment, claiming I'm just trying to be 'edgy', but what those fools don't realize is I actually [i]completely relate to those characters[/i]. People in this era have better treatment for mental health issues, and also for physical ailments, but in order for those things to reach that level... sacrifices were needed in order to experiment -- I am an example of that trial and error. My entire life was ruined so these fields could move forward. My conditions - both physical and mental (I'm not going into them in detail for now) - were not understood at all in my days nor were they even believed to exist, so I just got tossed onto the ADD bandwagon like every poor sap in my era.

Not only did Ritalin - just one of the medications I was on - completely mess up my mind and legitimately rob me of the ability to think freely for over twenty years, but a lot of people don't actually know that Ritalin [i]screws with people's hormones[/i] -- take one guess why my adolescence was destroyed when I hit puberty. Even before then I had basically no capacity to think freely whenever the drugs were affecting me, and the social stigma I experienced from being 'one of those crazy kids' made it even worse. I've been traumatized in a lot of ways I don't even plan to go into to avoid making this post excessively long, and I've pretty much had to just overcome it all on sheer force of willpower and with my understanding of psychology.

I've always been smart enough to handle myself, but my ability to thrive at a field is almost entirely dependant on whether or not it interests me -- when I'm passionate about something I'll master it very quickly and have a level of understanding and insight into it that far surpasses people with more 'experience' than me, but I'm pretty much hopeless with fields that don't interest me because I won't take the time to think about them at all. As for being socially adept -- I'm not the type who's socially awkward, but I really don't care what other people think at all and I'm incredibly forthright (a bad thing in an era where almost everyone is a coward hiding behind a mask), though since Ritalin robbed me of my ability to express myself this detail only became a problem for me when the drugs weren't working (or when I tossed them in the toilet). You mentioned that you weren't challenged at school -- I was [i]supressed[/i] my entire life; in fact, if you were to think of me as the exact polar opposite extreme of the genius who was 'nurtured and groomed for success their entire life' you wouldn't actually be all that far off.

[@BrokenPromise]
Yeah, unfortunately the whole 'fix it with medication' mentality bleeds over into every field -- people use drugs as a crutch for [i]so[/i] many things in this era when nine out of ten times there's a far healthier solution that just takes a bit of effort. This statement about drugs isn't even limited to medications either.