2277 Don’t Tell Paul Revere.

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I often wonder how anyone gets diagnosed accurately with something Like ADD or ADHD since the line between a disorder & a personality is so vague. For quite some time it certainly seemed like throwing pills at anyone with behavioral problems was the way to go. I don’t know what it’s like now.

I remember in first grade having to do extra work at home because I was bad at spelling & handwriting. It was very annoying. I still spell words how they sound most of the time, which works just fin until my accent begins to come in to play. I always misspell sentance because that’s how I say it. Shane, who checks my dialogue for me, catches the same things over and over. The spelling & handwriting never became an impediment of enough strength to hole me back in any meaningful way. I struggled to memorize the multiplication tables, which was, in retrospect, a waste of time anyway, for the most part. Maths in general were always troublesome since I couldn’t just memorize what I heard. They are also incredibly boring to me, so it was difficult to focus on them. Again, almost all the time I spent on maths was a complete waste, apart from the societal expectations that a foundational maths education alleviates. In any case I understand learning difficulties on some level, although not to the degree someone with a diagnosed condition does.

37 Comments

Loads of tests.

I literally didn’t know what concentration was until I tried adhd medication at 25.

I’ve learned to harness it, kinda, since then.

For some Weaponization of Bipolar and ADHD works amazingly well, But when you go to take a TEST like say the SEC+ test. well they deliberately Screw you over. Cant mumble can’t read out loud, can’t move your lips when you are trying to decipher some 3rd world English speaker’s trick question. Can’t have a fidget in your hands…

The mumbling and reading out loud part I can understand but moving lips and fidgeting seems needlessly stingy. You could advocate that as discrimination to the school board if it shows that you have a condition that makes you perform those actions.

Same here, Klas. I’ve written several books now, and have 2 art contracts. I can’t do it without the adhd medication.

Ha, you got off easy. I was more than twice that old when I got tested and diagnosed.
Man those meds changed my life.

I have been learning about ADHD for the last decade because it (at least the non-hyperactive subtype) would explain so much about the life I have had up to this point. I’m afraid of getting diagnosed, though, because of the stigma. The communities I grew up in were rural and religious, and anything that wasn’t detectable via a blood test or an x-ray was a psychosis or moral failing. ADHD was a label for the bad kids, and depression was a sign of unresolved sin.

I struggled with the idea of taking medication for depression. I think I understand your concerns about community. You don’t have to tell anyone you’re taking medication or have been diagnosed, and it should be illegal for any medical folks to spill.

The stigma is real and there’s no getting around that, but for my ex-wife, she says the difference for her on medication (she is ADD), is night and day. Medicated, she is successfully running her own business.

Screw those communities. They’re not worthy of their religion if all they’re going to do is judge you for natural born conditions.

I was diagnosed with ADD (non-hyperactive) and put on medication for it at a very young age. I assume the ADD was legitimate because I could tell the difference when the medication was off. When I was sixteen I went off the meds and didn’t look back, and then spent the next fifteen years absolutely cratering my life. When I was in my early thirties I started working on getting it back under control. While I wanted to go back on meds, the therapist I was working with didn’t think it was a good idea, and started working with me on coping mechanisms. Her coping mechanisms sucked, so I quit seeing her and worked on figuring out my own coping mechanisms. Since then, I’ve gone back to school, gotten my degree, had two kids and I’m working for a software company. And it’s still hard to focus, but I manage.

ADD is a pretty serious thing to me. Sometimes it’s like working with someone tapping you on the shoulder every three seconds and pointing out interesting things. Sometimes I get so absorbed into a project that I lose all interest in anything else. But it especially annoys me when someone uses the term flippantly. “Sorry, I’m so ADD today!” No, you’re just not interested enough to be paying attention.

That’s a really good example of the problem with applying labels. (I’m so ADD today). Once there’s some kind of a short label on something it enters the zeitegeist and people grossly abuse the term. Sometimes in ignorance and sometimes in bigotry.

OTOH, that does describe my buddy’s experience with ADD. If he forgets his meds in the morning it really is a very stark change for him, and the next day he’ll have rigourously confirmed his medication in the morning. He may not say those exact words, but it’s not far off. He’s quite comfortable sharing about his experience though. Different strokes.

You know what they say about medical practice? It’s doubly true for psychiatry/psychology. Basically, a personality quirk is only a disorder if it interferes with functioning in society. ADHD and ADD are also diagnosable if you have the behavior markers and the medication for those disorders actually works for you! For me, I was never formally diagnosed, but I check all of the boxes for the AD portion and one box for the HD portion. What’s really frustrating is that I have slow writing skills and typing is even worse! On the physical working side of life, I find that ear buds playing music really helps. It’s like taking a little bit of the attention off which allows me to focus on the task in front of me.

My brother (one year older) was on Ritalin at a very young age.

I’m going thru testing to find out if I’m on the spectrum because of my habits, which I don’t if I’m ready to share to strangers (even only by my nym). Let’s just say my issues (if any) align well with IT, touch-typing, and pattern recognition.

Sometimes the therapy for processing disorders is more learning, but in different ways. The therapies these days are better than theyve been, but still not 100% there yet. Now, there are apps for that.

Medications can genuinely help some people, and I see no problem with taking meds that help you live a happier, healthier life. But, I strongly suspect ADHD meds are somewhat over-prescribed. One bit of evidence: one factor that strongly predicts which kids are most likely to get diagnosed and prescribed is their birth date. Kids born just before their school’s enrollment cut-off are most likely, while those born just after are least likely. When some of the kids in a class are nearly a year older than others, it shouldn’t be surprising that the younger kids have more trouble with concentration and impulse control, especially considering how much difference a year can make for kids who ages are still in single digits. I’m not sure what the solution for this would be, but I think it’s a genuine issue.

Very good point. I was always the youngest or next-to-youngest kid in the class. I was a difficult little kid,and my parents thought school would help my socialization.

Grade school was rough. High school wasn’t so bad. It was a small rural district, and it wasn’t that demanding academically. But I was not ready to deal with college. Held it together for two semesters, then crashed and burned.

I’ve seen enough PragerU videos to know that “personality” is pretty much classified as “personality disorder” any more, especially when it’s little boys involved. Then they throw medication at whatever’s still standing and call it an education system. I figure it’s only a matter of time until little boys start palming their medications and stage an uprising a la “Lord of the Flies.”

Oh, my current favorite topic. I got diagnosed with ADHD at 38, about 6 months ago. Right up until about a week before my diagnosis I just always figured I was lazy and kind of an asshole that didn’t pay attention to people when they talked, and who lost my phone a lot. I sort of considered ADHD as a possibility over the years, but I’m not chronically late so I figured that wasn’t it. But then I saw people talking about ADHD on Twitter, and someone said ADHD can be boiled down to “can’t do things you’re not interested in, can’t STOP doing things you are interested in, and have a poor working memory”. I don’t know how scientific that explanation is but I was like hang on…that’s my entire deal. And while I did spend a while after my diagnosis thinking I must have tricked the system somehow, there is no denying the huge improvement in my life since I started taking medication. I don’t spend my weekends in a haze on the couch scrolling through my phone – I make to do lists and remember they exist and do things on them. I don’t forget to shower. I can do work that doesn’t come with a strict deadline, I could never do that before. It’s night and day.

Part of my issue was thinking everyone struggled in the same ways as me. Turns out I have a lot of ADHD friends. We tend to like each other and find each other interesting. So my sample size was very biased!

The difference between a disorder and a personality is whether or not it has a significant negative impact on your quality of life. Like, if getting distracted easily only leads to minor annoyance and only slightly lower performance of important activities, it probably shouldn’t qualify as AD(H)D, but if it’s turning a kid smart enough to get straight A’s into a D average student, then medication is probably the way to go.

Having said that, if you go to a therapist or a psychiatrist and you expect your insurance to cover even a little bit of the cost, you need to have a diagnosis in your file, so some docs will include a bullshit diagnosis that they can’t possibly have accurately evaluated in the first hour-long session just so your insurance will cover it, they usually try to go for a best fit, but it leads to overdiagnosing of basically everything, especially a lot of people go to talk therapy without actually having a disorder just because it happens to also help with the daily stresses of perfectly neurotypical people, and they usually get labelled with some kind of anxiety disorder or depression so insurance will cover it. The false diagnosing isn’t really a problem, as it’s a result of the docs trying to patch a broken system, but if your doc gave you a BS diagnosis and then decides to treat you like a real case of that instead of finding what the real problem is, it can lead to psychosomatic symptoms, psychiatric hypochondria, and if your doc is an MD even being prescribed pills you don’t actually need, many of which cause the same symptoms in a normal brain that they are supposed to fix in one with a relevant disorder, like anti-psychotics causing hallucinations if you don’t already have them.

I have the same problem with spelling.

And getting accurately diagnosed.

And Sorry there are asses on the internet. It’s why I’m trying to post more again

After two of my children had been dignosed with attention deficit, I decided to get properly tested. I asked our family counsellor for a referral to someone competent. There are a lot of people doing testing who aren’t at all up-to-date on the matter, and I didn’t want to be tpld, you have a PhD. You can’t possibly have attention deficit.
Turned out I had the highest intelligence she had ever measured, and also moderate to severe attention deficit. I had been using one to sort of compensate for the other.
She referred me back to my fsmily doctor for treatment, and I’m now on vyvanse. My wife noticed the difference.
diagnosed at tge age of 70, I can’t help but wonder how my career would have gone if I had been treated starting about five decades earlier.

Dismissing one’s ADD or ADHD on the grounds of possession of college degrees is pure ableism and a frustrating excuse that only reinforces the stigma of the conditions from your elders and peers. I have a degree in Accounting and a Bachelors in Computer Science and yet, I still suffer with ADHD. My dad REFUSES to let me have an official diagnosis based on these factors alone. It’s enough to put you between a rock and a hard place.

They’ve gotten a lot better at figuring out criteria for it. Especially since neuroscience has collected enough data to accurately determine many of the differences in brain activity between ADHD vs non-ADHD brains.

I was diagnosed with ADHD and caffeine actually CALMS my overstimulated brain when I’m having an ‘episode’. That’s a major red flag that you have it, the chemistry of your brain is “Warped” for lack of better terminology, so that the upper becomes a downer, essentially. Makes pain medication a bitch to get to function properly too. I have to be really careful.

It’s the opposite with me as caffeine only serves to drive up my anxiety and ADHD. I find herbal teas work better as it helps calm me and improves my focus.

When I was a kid in Elementary School 55 years or so ago, nobody knew what ADD or ADHD was. They thought I was a little retarded — until they gave me an IQ test. Then the realized I could read at 550 words per minute in 5th grade — with perfect comprehension.

I self-diagnosed myself with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) in college Psychology when it was my major. My professor doubted it but he tested me anyway. I remember he said, “Wow,” and shook his head when we were done. I thought he was going to call the nice young men in their clean white coats then and there.

I gave up the Psychology major and ended up dropping out for ten or twelve years. When I went back, it was for Computer Science. I wound up being inducted into ??? (UPE), the premiere fraternity for ComSci.

Apparently, when ADHD and OCD cooperate, you make a very good programmer.

Haha, hahahahah, but yes, those two form a kind synergy for writing code, especially if you love all the little fiddly bits in the subroutines and the nesting.

ADHD is one of the biggest problems that I have character-wise when going through life. All of that came from my mother’s side of the family.

It made it pretty hard for me to get through school as I found it difficult to memorize material for tests or to even focus on assignments. School wasn’t the worst of it though. I still have nightmares on learning how to tie my laces at a young age due to both my parents screaming at me for not knowing the process even after showing it to me several times. It ultimately involved me having to ask my sister to show me the procedure as I couldn’t follow my parents’ instructions.

The other conditions I have that are joined with me mentally also include anxiety, depression, PTSD, Aspergers, and Bi-Polar. ADHD WITH Aspergers makes for a VERY toxic combo as it could cement your reputation as a retard in the eyes of others.

I’ve been meaning to get an official diagnosis for years but my dad vehemently refused and STILL refuses to let me do it on the grounds that A: I have a degree in Accounting and Bachelor of Science in Computer Technology, and B: Any likelihood of employment in my profession as a result of my conditions would be gone in a heartbeat due to societal stigma. He refuses to listen to any counter claims on the issue.

My mother had it FAR worse as she herself struggled through school and lived in poverty before she married my dad. My parents are Ukrainian and mental illnesses back in those days in their home country was very heavily stigmatized to the point that you could be lynched for being a “DURAK”. My dad went through a lot of abuse himself when he was a young man but he didn’t have the conditions. However, as a result of his abuse that drove him to be a perfectionist, he had zero tolerance for other people’s bullshit and took my mother’s mental health condition as an act of infidelity to her duties as a wife. This led to years of mental, emotional, and physical abuse which led my mother to enlist the help of other Ukrainian acquaintances to try and get a divorce from my dad and help her get back to Ukraine. Unfortunately, the costs for her outweighed the benefits and she had no choice but to stick with my dad’s abuse. The abuse went on for 30 long years before she finally contracted liver cancer and decided to use it as a means to commit suicide by refusing to fight it and denying all medical treatment.

I could go on but I’ll just decide to end it here by saying that mental illness is something that NEEDS to be addressed and understood. People can and DO suffer. Stigmatizing it perpetually is inhumane, period!

I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, I was put on many different types of meds depending on whether or not my system got used to the meds. I remember they costed a lot and if I didn’t take them I was uncontrollable.

I remember the blood tests everytime I needed new meds and being told that along with my ADHD and being left handed I probably won’t be able to fit in with society, this was the late 90’s and I was about 7-8 at the time.

Paul Revere wasn’t ADHD in my judgement, he was one of those people who was involved in absolutely EVERYTHING in his community. You know the type. Not sure if there’s a psych profile that goes along with that.

I’m not certain, but I think it’s ADHD + extrovert. Or if you really do mean absolutely everything, then it’s ADHD + extrovert + hypersexed.

People who don’t have AD would generally have a difficulty performing the frequency of context switches he’d need to have done to pull that off. People who don’t have either HD or mania wouldn’t have the the energy needed to pull that off. If he wasn’t an extrovert, dealing with that many people would’ve had too high of a spoon cost.

not memorizing the multiplication tables is one of the biggest issues with the school system today. someone using a calculator when they buy 4 7.00 items to see if they have enough money still makes me cringe.. even moreso when its a little kid asking their parents in the toy aisle. its as bad as the people who cant give change.. or figure out what a 20% tip is. yes the teachers were wrong when they told us we wouldnt have a calculator with us all the time.. but its no excuse to slow the rest of the world down because someone couldnt learn stuff an 8 year old should know.

I don’t know if this means anything to you or not, but when I was a child, I memorized my multiplication tables in the first grade, memorized the first 20 powers of 2, and the first 10 powers of 3. I took 21 credits of math in college as part of my CS degree, and I’m one of those people who actually has used my advanced math education in my work.

At one point, I had a cyst by my pituitary swell up enough it blocked my pituitary’s function. During the two months I had to wait for surgery for that, my brain function was addled enough there were times I didn’t trust myself with 2 times 2. At least once during this time, I added 2 plus 2 and wound up with 22. I’m not joking.

Since then, I’ve come down with Multiple Sclerosis. With medication, I’m generally fine. When I’m not fine… one time I managed to do something similar to 7 times 2 equals 9. The worst thing about MS is I’m not always aware when I’m having an issue. The thing most impacted is also thing I use to determine how I’m doing, so it doesn’t always work right.

So when I’m in the store? I use a calculator even for things like what’s 7 + 8. It’s not about the education in my case, it’s about disability and what to do about it.

I understand that our education system today is crap. It was crap 50 years ago, too, just not quite the same kind of crap. I spent most of my primary and secondary education trying to figure out which questions to get wrong so that my classmates wouldn’t want to beat me up. Honestly, I’ve heard they’ve dealt with the bullying for the most part, and if that’s true, then I prefer what they’re doing now, even if they’re failing this one thing.

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