Objectivity
People are really bad at subjectively evaluating the effects of medication for psychological problems. Part of the problem is that evaluating whether a given medication is having a certain effect involves accurately remembering what your moods and subjective experiences were in the recent and distant past. Both of those tasks are things humans are very poor at. In particular, recalling moods and attitudes from weeks ago is particularly difficult, unless those moods were exceptional and remarkable, which is only the case, for these medications, when the problem is quite severe and responds well to the treatment. Even then, it’s not always easy to tell. For instance, when I’m on my ADHD medication, I don’t feel more healthy or able to focus. Instead, things just seem more interesting to me. I wonder: “Why is it that I felt less motivated the other day?” So, it’s a bit better once you know what you need to look for.
But you still have the problem of being able to see the improvement. What do you need to do? Measure it objectively. Chart the effects. This is the essence of self-experimentation, and, I think, the only good way to undergo treatment for depression or ADHD (among other things).
I’ve been measuring my performance at work this way, in the hopes of finding out what works and what doesn’t for treating my ADHD. (Thanks to some help from Seth Roberts.) What I do is record every time I start or stop doing some task at work, sorting tasks into “focusing” and “non-focusing” (i.e. goofing off) tasks. This way I can keep track of how much time I actually spend doing tasks that require focus, and this should give me a pretty good indication of how well my treatments are working. I’ll post about my results one way or another.
I think it’s appalling that the standard way of evaluating medications’ effects (clinical trials) don’t include this kind of objective measurement as a much larger part of the study. And I think that if everyone did this sort of thing when they started treatments for problems, they could get a lot more mileage out of their doctor visits.
