Hocus Focus

This is the most current version of Hocus Focus.

Hocus Focus is a common story, rarely told, about a common trial experienced quietly by millions.

It centers on ADHD medications and their long-term effects on an individual outside their intended metrics of productivity, organization, and focus. The author examines the larger phenomenon through his own experience in this one-of-a-kind memoir. At times insightful, scattered, but wholly honest, Hocus Focus offers a critical perspective in a world drowning in its own inattention.

The author grew up in nineties suburban United States and began taking amphetamines at age seven to treat ADD (as it was called at the time). They worked, and he took them for sixteen years-until they started taking him, devolving into dependence, withdrawal, and recovery.

With eager, direct prose, he writes candidly through a personal arc of shame, depression, uncertainty, misplaced identity, and a perpetual search-not for a way out of addiction, but for a way into himself without medications after they had defined him for most of his life.

The book follows his life from diagnosis, including the documents given to his parents, through adolescence, early enjoyment of the medications, academic pressure, societal expectations, other substance use, bike trips across the United States, periods of isolation, and ultimately liberation from a system that sought to define him against his own nature.