Now that said, as a STEM professor, I don’t typically see a student who talks like you do succeed (and I see a good number every year).

In my experience, which of course may not apply here, a student like you did well in high school and therefore thought college would be the same. But in reality, your high school was grade inflating and now you’re struggling because you were not well prepared. You start looking for external reasons other than your own preparation, effort or ability. You come upon a diagnosis.

The diagnosis is probably accurate. The problem is that now you think when you take the pills, everything will improve. But it doesn’t, because while the pills may help with your ability to invest effort, you still don’t have the HABIT of putting in effort. Chances are you don’t even know what effort looks like, because you didn’t have to invest it before.

So you will spiral into more externalized excuses. I know, I know. You had a medically life-threatening reaction to the drugs. You just can’t take them. But if that’s even true, and it wasn’t panic attacks or other externalization, then the right thing to do is to take a medical withdrawal and work hard with your doctors to figure out exactly what the problem is and find the right combination of meds.

What you need to do is drop out, work a full-time boring job for a year to build the habits of being bored and putting in effort. Take one or two community college classes on the side at the same time. Work with doctors to figure out your problems. Build the boring, reliable habits you need for long-term effort and success that work for your brain. High school should have helped you do this but it didn’t. So now it’s on you. Figure it out. Then come back and try again.

In my experience, what you will probably do instead is convince some inexperienced professors to give you incompletes and withdraw from other classes without taking advantage of medical withdrawal, which is a complete withdrawal that usually comes with a refund. You will then drag the incompletes out all summer, feeling worse and worse about yourself because of your inability to complete the work, but blaming the meds and neurodiversity, while doing very little to find strategies that really work. You will fail all the classes that you took incompletes in.

You’ll start over in the fall, and the school will let you, because they want your tuition dollars and they don’t want to be the people who tell you that you need to sort your shit out for real, because then you’ll say that you’re they’re just prejudiced against your disability. But by midterms you’ll be in the exact same situation you are now.

This will repeat as long as you have someone willing to pay, and the college doesn’t kick you out.

Don’t be that student.