Distracted By The Dopamine Slot Machine

Could the theory of monotropism help explain ADHD? What about executive dysfunction, or my Bipolar 2 misdiagnosis, or OCD? Can you trick yourself into a flow state? Is rumination just flow, but evil?? All this and more in conversation with writer, science educator, and chair of the Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh, Fergus Murray!📝📝TranscriptLinks:* Monotropism.org * Fergus’ website* Weird Pride Day* Attention, Monotropism, and the Diagnostic Criteria for Autism, Murray et al 2005* Monotropism Questionnaire pre-print* you can also take the Monotropism Questionnaire for funsies here* Monotropism and Well-being, Fergus’ 2023 talk at the Scottish Autism Research Group Conference* Me complaining about the capitalist propaganda in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience* Towards autistic flow theory: A non-pathologising conceptual approach, 2024* Loops of Concern by Sonny Hallett* ‘Autism is the Arena and OCD is the Lion’: Autistic adults’ experiences of co-occurring obsessive-compulsive disorder and repetitive restricted behaviours and interests00:00 Intro / Monotropism vs Polytropism03:26 The Monotropism Questionnaire 05:43 On Being a ‘Serial Monotropist’ 10:48 ADHD and Monotropism 15:00 Monotropism vs Executive Dysfunction 18:11 On Autistic Flow Theory 24:51 ‘Tunnels not Tasks’27:36 Intersubjective Flow (Flowing Together)28:56 The Light and Dark Side of Flow32:46 Autism and Chronic Illness35:23 Monotropism and OCD39:12 Weird Pride This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sluggish.xyz/subscribe

In this episode, I chat with UX designer, leftist technologist, and creator of Irrational Technology, Lou Millar-McHugh, about the sort of questions we really need to be asking about our relationship to social media.We also talk about: why understanding is more important than control, how social media literacy could improve leftist comms strategies, the problem with screen time apps and gamification, ADHD tech beyond productivity, and why Jonathan Haidt sucks so much!!LINKS: * Irrational Technology: Substack, TikTok, Youtube* A Leftist Guide To Staying Off Your Phone (Notion)* Social Media Strategy Template for Social Change Orgs (Notion)* Pre-print showing screen time apps don’t work: Skeggs and Orben, Social Media Interventions to Improve Wellbeing * Beyond the Essay: New Ways of Critical Reflection, a project exploring how to create digital spaces that lead readers toward critical reflection * my discussion thread on ADHD technology (add your 2 cents!)* the video essay I made on Digital Madness* some of Lou’s excellent book recommendations for further reading!!!!* transcript00:00 Intro01:22 Lou's Background and Educational Project02:25 The Concept of Irrational Technology04:14 Persuasive Design06:03 Critique of Addiction Metaphors and The Anxious Generation10:48 A Leftist Critique of Technology12:54 User Autonomy and Social Media15:11 How to Develop Effective Leftist Media Strategies22:33 A Leftist Guide to Staying Off Your Phone27:19 How Personalization in UX Design Creates an Illusion of Control28:34 Why Screen Time Apps Don’t Work29:44 The Problem with Gamification32:37 ADHD Technology and the Benefits of Simplicity37:22 Lou’s Content Creation Process40:59 The Platforms Lou Will Be Using in 202547:37 Where to Find Lou’s Work This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sluggish.xyz/subscribe

What does neuroqueering look like? What shape is time? How is executive functioning like compulsory heterosexuality?? All this and more in today’s episode featuring my dear friend Marta Rose, a queer AuDHD writer and artist who founded Divergent Design Studios, an online peer support space for neurodivergent creatives, and KR Moorhead, an AuDHD, gender non-compliant educator, author, and creative writing mentor. This fall, they’re running a 12-week course with Meg Max of Writers in Bloom called Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice, and I was curious to hear more about what neuroqueering means in their own lives. Find KR at krmoorhead.com and Marta at The Spiral Lab!NOTES: * Episode transcript* Sign up for Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice* Join Divergent Design Studios* Read Neuroqueer: An Introduction, Neuroqueer Heresies, and Authoring Autism* Download Marta’s Spiral Time ebook* Marta and I mention the concept of “curatorial journalism” in discussing how she sees herself as a connection-maker — we got this from the writer Seth Abramson. See: his writing on metamodernism and metajournalism* Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence* The book I bring up at the end about neurodivergent writing styles is Autistic Disturbances by Julia Miele Rodas* KR’s best radical memoir rec is Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sluggish.xyz/subscribe

I recently discovered two papers by a group of researchers who are working on establishing a field of Critical ADHD Studies, and a couple of them were down to chat with me about it!Hanna Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist is a sociologist and a professor in Social Work at Södertörn University and co-editor of the book Neurodiversity Studies, and Lill Hultman is a postdoctoral researcher at Marie Cederschiöld University and senior lecturer in social work at Södertörn University.We discuss their experiences practicing ADHD collective storytelling, the challenges of being ADHD in academia, what intensity means in their lives, and what they’re most excited to explore in ADHD research by and for ADHDers.Episode transcriptNaming Ourselves, Becoming Neurodivergent ScholarsIntensity and Variable Attention: Counter-Narrating ADHDMy sassy little Medium essayMore on the double empathy problem, plus the study I mention about it This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sluggish.xyz/subscribe

I had always assumed flow and hyperfocus were just different names for the same thing, but flow was framed as a superpower (Harness your flow state to achieve optimal performance!), and hyperfocus was framed as a deficit (Why can’t these autistic people stop talking about dinosaurs and get jobs??). But in the last five years, studies have begun trying to pull these concepts apart...This is an essay voice-over - you can read it @ sluggish.xyz This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sluggish.xyz/subscribe

I got to talk to neurodivergent philosopher Robert Chapman about their new book Empire of Normality, which explains how norms of brain functioning got baked into our economic system. We talk about how a focus on individual rights and superpowers can only get neurodivergent people so far, why the line between neurodivergent and neurotypical is more squishy than you think, and how anti-psychiatry was actually good for capitalists, pretty bad for disabled people! We also discuss a materialist view of the rising ADHD and autism diagnosis rates everyone seems to be panicking about, how we might view these categories as real without reducing them to brain scans and synapses, and why executive dysfunction might just be the disability of our age. [Episode Transcript]NOTES: * Get Empire of Normality from Pluto Press * Follow Robert on Twitter @DrRJChapman or read their blog CriticalNeurodiversity.com* For an explainer on the pathology paradigm, see Nick Walker’s work* Here’s the blog post on executive function as ideology that I bring up* More stuff I wrote about the ADHD workshop in DC* SPK stands for Socialist Patients’ Collective, they were a radical group of psychiatric patients in 1970’s West Germany who wrote a manifesto called Turn Illness Into a Weapon* The books Robert lists as influences at the end are: The Politics of Disablement, Health Communism, Caliban and the Witch, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, A Very Capitalist ConditionYou can send me an email at [email protected] and/or get my work in your inbox by signing up at sluggish.xyz This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sluggish.xyz/subscribe

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How do neurodivergent creatives function when we can’t executive function? What do we really mean when we say we want to be productive? And what does climate change have to do with our creative process?In this episode I talk to co-founder of Writer’s HQ and award-winning environmental journalist Sarah Lewis about the climate stories we tell and our struggles in telling them. Plus, Sarah explains what she thinks is missing from climate fiction these days, the limited kinds of apocalypse stories we hear, and what kind of stories we might want to try telling instead. At the end she also shares a juicy list of reading recommendations!Subscribe to follow her work at fictionalsarah.substack.com, or find her on basically any platform as fictionalsarah.For a transcript, check the tab on the web version of this post (but pls blame all typos on Substack’s AI, which created it)Links:* The inspo for this chat: Inner Worlds vs. Outer Worlds [Fictional Sarah]* We Need A New Word For Climate Change [Fictional Sarah]* When the Hero is the Problem by Rebecca Solnit* Joseph Campbell and the Myth of the Monomyth video essay by Maggie Mae Fish* Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch* The Gondoliers by Karen Russell (read as a campfire story by The Woburn Public Library!) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sluggish.xyz/subscribe

In this episode, I talk to compost practitioner and writer Cassandra Marketos about how composting can radically transform the way we look at the world. We get into the stigma around waste, why compost seems to scare so many people, the joy of learning from our intuition, the resilience and magic of a well-tended pile, and what it really means when we say that we’ve thrown something “away.”We also talk a bit about my own experiment composting dog poop (it works, I promise!) plus get into lots of practical advice about composting, including how to do it in a small space when you don’t have access to land.Cass has a composting guide coming out soon called Compost This Book, published by Apogee Graphics, but the release date is TBD, so subscribe to her newsletter The Rot for more info! I’ve included a selection of her writing below.Notes and links:* Episode transcript* Compost 101 collection [The Rot]* The bloody, urine-soaked, poop-filled history of compost [The Rot]* A gentle meditation on compost, love, and grief [The Rot]* On fungus and how to compost slowly [The Rot]* My essay on unexpected low-effort compost success* The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins [note: I strongly disagree with Jenkins’ statement about autism in this book, but there is a lot of helpful information otherwise]* USDA pdf on compost methods for working dog kennels* For more on my claim about floods causing sewage pollution, see this story about California and this one about Florida, or this fun fact from the book Disposable City about how often septic tanks fail when there’s even just a high tide in Miami! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sluggish.xyz/subscribe

I’m starting an interview series — there are so many people whose brains I want to pick and a podcast feels like the perfect format for it. To kick off these conversations, I bring you a great chat I had with Micha Frazer-Carroll on her new book, Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health.Micha is a writer and editor based in London whose work focuses on the theme of liberation, and when she sent this book to me, I honestly screamed, because I’ve been waiting for something like this to exist. (Micha also quoted my work in this book which is to me, the highest honor, and I’m so excited to be included in a book that I love so much.)Mad World weaves together disability justice with mad studies and abolition to give us a political view of mental health that prioritizes solidarity, self-advocacy, and autonomy. What I love about it most is just how complicated it is — Micha gives us lots of questions with lots of different answers, and embraces the fact that there is a lot we can’t know, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to make change.This is an expansive conversation full of big ideas about the limits of rationality, the complicated nature of diagnosis, the liberating power of art, and all the big possibilities to be found in embracing disability and refusing to disavow each other in our political movements. I had so much fun chatting with Micha and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did![episode transcript]Order Mad World (Pluto Press): www.bit.ly/madworldbookFollow Micha on Twitter and Instagram, or check out her websiteMentioned in this episode:* Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton & Artie Vierkant* Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk* Crip Theory by Robert McRuer* Lydia X.Z. Brown on disavowal (@ 37:00)* Toward an Informed Consent Model for All Drugs by Devon Price* Recovery In The Bin* The MadZines project* Making Mad History: Mad Pride 2022, by the Campaign for Psychiatric Abolition This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sluggish.xyz/subscribe