Effects of Anxiety,ADD(notdone),ODD(notdone), and parenting on drug use.

[Ranke]

That was quite a rant. Really no reason to go over well verified charactoristics of those with ADD, Anxiety, or as comorbid "disorders". Didn't see how to delete so I guess it will just sit here doing nothing.

SWIM found that social situations cause SWIM to use because SWIM does not enjoy them.

This along with other material relating to this was first posted by snapper in reply to an unclear post of mine. When reading this swim found himself quite familiar with what snapper was describing and since swim was so eager to post his views on anxiety as well as other common "disorders" and their affect on drug use. I have agreed to transcribe his lengthy views.
Swim has always been a very shy and as he got older he became very introverted. At times swim finds it possible to be at ease with peers but they are few and far between. In order to feel comfortable in social situations swim must have something to ground him. Swims ground usually manifests as one or more of the following. Familiarity, drugs, or intelligent discussion. Intelligent discussion can focus on any scientific field. Psychology, religion, electronics, chemistry, etc. Even with this ground swim still experiances physical symptoms of anxiety such as sweating, chewing fingernails, and unconscious often repeatative movements. The only situations totally void of any anxiety are those involving nearly lifelong friends/acquaintances.
Fortunatly without a ground swim does completely unravel. Swims state becomes worse psychologicaly but is fortunate to have never gone so far as to have a panic attack. This degree of unease usually results from unexpected interactions with groups of peers that have little to do with the sciences. I.E. they're not geeks/nerds. The situation becomes worse by orders of magnitude when females are present. At times swim makes feeble attemps to assimilate into coversation with the result being polite chuckles / comments at the best and at the worst uncomfortable silences during which swim can't but feel extremely self conscious.

My apologies for the length of swims personal experiance of social anxiety. My apologies also for the tone in which it is written. Swims writing style tends to become quite winey when the topic relates to his issues with social anxiety.

My hypothesis
(from the greek hypo meaning below/low and thesis
meaning proposition. Aint linguistics great?)

My hypothesis is that frequent and or long term drug use is far more common in geeks. By geek I mean anyone places great importance on knowlage. Obviously this targets a very large group of people in a wide variety of environments and would be very difficult to gather accurate data for. Fortunatly for swim and I this is just idle speculation and doesn't require any real research. In order to narrow this range a bit. I will define frequent and long term. Frequent in the context of this post refers to drug use that occures at a minimum of once a week and long term as drug use that extends beyond the teenage years, where use may be experimental and cease at a young age.
My reasoning is based on both enviromental and biological differences between geeks and the general population.

Enviromental
My enviromental bases is fairly simple. In my experiance the geek personality begins to develope in the later years of elementery school and becomes well defined by mid to late middleschool or at roughly 12-13 years old. Due to the design of public school those with the geek personality typically go down either one of two paths, "delinquency" due to boredom or geekdom. It is my belief that the attitudes of parents, siblings, and culture towards education and intelligence affect greatly whether or not a child developes a geekish personality. For example; my parents raised me with very little regard for knowlage and consiquently I simply transcribe for swim in return for modest 10$/h. However swims parents placed great stake in knowlage and encouraged their children pursue any topic that caught their interest. Because of this him and his brother grew up with a great respect for the value and importance of knowlage and the importance of thinking criticly. Swim is of the opinion that the love of knowlage instilled by his parents is what prevented him from joining his peers in the pit of willful ignorance that is the public highschools and often public middle schools of this country. To quote Paul Graham from his article "why are nerds unpopular?"

"The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties."

"Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable."

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Or much more simply; Being popular requires a considerable commitment of time and energy. Those raised with geek or in this case nerd ideals. Are unwilling to sacrafice their intelligence for popularity. As a result geeks become somewhat isolated. In swims case his isolation eventually led to drug use. He remembers the day he first became aquainted with drugs more clearly than any other memory. It was a tuesday or thursday morning. Because swim was taking classes at the local community college he did not have school. After a week of research swim had decided that previous night to buy robitussin for the first time. Interestingly enough his research had began not from the suggestion of a friend. Rather, from a piece on the local news. That morning at 9:45am swim took 180mg of dxm in in gel cap form. It was his first drug and one of the best experiances he has ever had.

Biological
Swim has recently consumed his last recreational dose of amphetamines from his adderall prescription and wishs to spend his time playing counterstrike and reading as this will be his last recreational dose for 8-10 days. Luckily he planned well and 5 roughly 15mg xr doses remain for the 5 days of school before his new prescription. He will finish transcribing this to me tomorrow if possible.


Writers note:
I am aware that everything written sounds a bit grandiose due to the format in which it is written, the flamboyant wording, the focus on the author (author being swim, I simply transcribe), and the substances imbued by the individual dictating this to me. Obviously neither swim nor I have even a bachelors degree (although swim is currently progressing towards a BS in chemistry), and no real research was done. To make matters worse both swim and I are extremely biased and swim is under the influance of amphetamines. Which clearly make him think quite a bit of himself. If anyone has any personal experiance either supporting or opposing swims views please post them.

Lastly,
Complaints are great, but you really don't need to mention that this is self serving and really just a very long mental masterbation session. I know that. So my only response to such talk is eat my ass.