Johann Hari

Well. It was interesting and engaging. How "true" or factual it is? who knows?
... sure, the author investigates real life case studies, but... that's the nature of case studies, if you were to pick five "life stories" out of the about 350 million adult persons living in North America, you could, literally, "prove" anything you wanted.

Does everyone who shoots heroin become addicted? Maybe, maybe not, maybe the chemical hooks are only 17% of the problem, but I somehow doubt it.

Would the cartels go "bankrupt" if drugs were legalized? Maybe, maybe not, but is it realistic to think a society can make hard drugs accessible and not have youths become addicted? I doubt it. Youths do all sorts of stupid things, and if heroin were to be "normalized", more people would do it. And more people would be hooked, and more lives would be ruined.

Is locking addicts up the solution? Probably not.

What is the answer? There are no solutions offered here, just some things for us to think about.… (més)

I loved most of the book, there's been quite some good advice I've been able to use to start healing my focus and I found the sections on how these sites are intentionally made to worsen our attention problems very enlightening. There is however a caveat - the chapter (or was it 2 chapters) on ADHD. Now, I'm not completely against touching on this as the problems with attention and how the environment is made to make it very hard certainly doesn't help people with ADHD, but he comitts all of the cardinal sins; 1) Not neurodivergent, 2) Talks with scientists about ADHD, 3) The scientists are not psychologists, 4) Narrows down ADHD to only being about paying attention, 5) Does not talk to anyone with ADHD or ND organization, 6) Only focuses on children, 7) Talks about cases of children mistakenly getting ADHD diagnosis but all of them are basically cases of gross misconduct by those who did it like a child who got a diagnosis of ADHD because he couldn't pay attention and had been sexually abused. A lot of concern against ADHD medication but really any solution other then that you can improve your attention in other ways, but again attention problems is only one (and maybe not even the biggest) issue people with ADHD have.

So by and large the book was very good, but I did want to write this out. And just as an aside I am SO tired of NTs writing/talking ABOUT US instead of TO US or WITH US. Sigh.… (més)