This is unironically me. I just went through a lengthy diagnosis process that determined I do not in fact have ADHD, despite ticking an alarming number of boxes. I call myself ADHD-adjacent now.
It felt pretty bad at first. I wanted to be able to help myself somehow, and I thought this was a great place to start. It was like starting back at square one. But practices and therapies that assist with ADHD also tend to help me out, so at least I got something out of it.
I hate explaining ADHD to people because itās a completely unintuitive disorder. Itās like āIām easily distractedā yet at other times Iām completely incapable of tearing my focus away from something. I have continual thoughts of things unrelated to my current focus, and other times I canāt think of anything at all, I just canāt hold on to any thoughts. Iām fidgety, almost all the time, but I can sit still and drive a car on the freeway for several hours with absolutely no issues.
Itās like, for every symptom I have of the disorder thereās always a ābut sometimesā caveat that is present. Itās just a nightmare to try to make someone understand especially when theyāve never struggled with the disorder or anything like it. Itās a complete conundrum.
I figured it out last year, I was 39. Youāre in good company.
I just couldnāt figure it out until I came across information about ADHD and everything clicked. Iād be lying to say that I havenāt had moments of self doubt and imposter syndrome like the op suggests.
To me, at the end of the day, whether Iām actually ADHD or not, I have very similar tenancies and traits and the treatment works for me. Thatās all that really matters.
I am 50. After reading a lot about the subject, I also suspect I am affected - my whole life. Getting an appointment with a psychiatrist to be sure right now. It would explain so muchā¦
Iām more than a little convinced ADHD isnāt really a disorder, society is the issue, and this personality/brain type is actually beneficial in simpler societies.
To an extent, it is also beneficial in todayās society. Hyperfocus and fast context switching can be assets in some jobs, if the downsides are not too great and that can depend on the job and colleagues a lot.
But yea, I can imagine it has been more of an asset in a different time.
I was reading your study, and got to the part where they said it is hard to empirically test this theory because of limited genome whatever, and it crossed my mind Africans donāt carry the neanderthal DNA Europeans do, so i looked up if ADHD was more common in either race and it apparently is much more prevalent in white people. Yeah correlation isnāt causation but it is interesting.
As someone diagnosed with ADHD, I find many of these posts overly dramatic. I understand that dealing with it is challenging, but when I see others discussing it, I sometimes feel that some might not genuinely have ADHD and are merely exaggerating for attention.
pretty much the biggest inconvenience for me was getting people to write stuff down. Like when theyād try talk for five minutes about how they wanted something built, explicit instructions, Iād always have to remind them, write it down or draw it, if you want me to understand, weāve been over this for years now, you know I know how to do the work once the desired result is presented in a way i can understand.
Absolutely, most parts of neurodivergence is evolved to be useful for āwildā humans, hunter-gatherers. Like gee i sure wonder how it might be useful for people living in tents in the wildnerness to have a dude who just cannot go to sleep before 2 in the morningā¦
Apprently court jesters were historically generally autistic people, whom the rulers kept around because they wouldnāt sugarcoat stuff and acted like a bullshit detector. Might be pretty handy for a tribe to have some people whoāll speak up when they think the leader is being dumb.
Thatās not how evolution works. Traits donāt evolve āto be usefulā. Anyone who claims a goal to evolution has failed to grasp evolution.
Evolution converges on local maxima by selecting for traits that are good enough to continuously propagate through the filter of individuals death. For sexual reproduction, if a trait is not bad enough to continuously reduce carriersā presence in a mating pool, it can and will remain.
When it comes to neurodivergences that arenāt strictly universal negatives (for example: anyone would agree that DID is terrible, while modern autism advocacy strongly opposes any sort of ācureā, and even assimilation as opposed to integration), you can easily find the case that they work great as complements within larger groups. Having an autistic dude fascinated by working materials may result in your tribe being the very first one in the area that gets obsidian spears or composite bows, even if he isnāt a very good hunter otherwise.
The problem comes when an industrialized, profit-obsessed society attempts to standarize social customs, goods, living spaces and so on while individualizing responsibility for every aspect of your life despite plenty of its factors being outside any one personās control. Perhaps youād have a lot to contribute to society if you just had certain unusual accommodations, such as a very quiet house or freedom to set your own working hours, but companies in the contemporary market economy hisses at people who donāt fit like cogs in a machine, and having a house with very specific conditions is outside the reach of a lot of people. Perhaps you do even manage to find the means to become a very productive member of society despite the odds being stacked against you, but because the specificity of your situation means you barely have any negotiation power in the labor market, most of what you produce gets appropriated by someone who isnāt very smart, but has some capital and better āpeople skillsā.
I thought this a couple of years ago, even though i was diagnosed at 5 (29 now). Itās funny how i went my whole life thinking it was just the stereotypical adhd is just hyperactivity and laziness because the doctors never really tried to explain how this disorder could affect me. I decided to look it up studf about adhd and am deeply conflicted by how it literally explains my entire life and behaviors even though i thought i had it under control. On one hand im glad there is something that explains a lot of my struggles and medical issues but on the other i feel like my entire personality is just dictated by adhd and that i never really had as much freedom of choice as i thought i did.
I feel like the more you understand how your brain works, the more you learn how to work around it.
Full disclosure: Iām not diagnosed, but on a waitlist for ADD - for over a year now and itās not moving, but I digress. I am diagnosed with autism though.
To me it feels like my brain is a wildwater. You canāt control it, but if you change the environment around it, you can guide it into useful directions. Iām lucky that by now the people around me have accepted it and are able to laugh with me when I fuck up. We have a lot of systems in place to reign in the worst effects, and the more we get used to it the easier it gets not to fall into traps and not to be unreliable.
I guess Iām working on my skills as a mindbender who tricks my brain into being useful while still allowing it to get that dopamine?
i was diagnosed early in childhood. my parents chose to believe it was fake and more than once actually pleaded with me to explain why beating me senseless every other day didnāt make the behavior stop.
Getting diagnosed is a joke. Literally took 10 minutes. They donāt verify or go into depth about anything. At least it was that way for me. They gave me adderall but it made me feel like a crackhead so I only used it for a month. Vynase was better but still didnāt end up liking it too much. These days I let Jesus take the wheel.
āWhat if I donāt actually have ADHD, I simply share some behavioral issues that make it seem like ADHD because I was raised by parents who did have ADHD and I just kind of adopted it from them?ā - Me, like once a week since getting diagnosed.
getting a real diagnose in my country means ill be stuck with a mental disability in an extremely psychophobic society with no way to treat it because all adhd meds are banned here
so my only way to cope is to talk to other people who probably have adhd as well and learn how they manage their lives
All these ADHD memes have several times made me think if thereās a light version?
But from what I understand everyone can experience ADHD āsymptomsā from time to time, but people who are diagnosed with it have symptoms that are several orders of magnitude more intense.
Iām ātwice giftedā, so my intelligence can help me mask my ADHD in some ways. Looking back, allā¦ ALL the signs were there, but no one was looking, or just didnāt understand. Lots of āyou just need to apply yourselfā kind of shit.
Anyway, check out Russell Barkley, if youāve got a thing for educational videos, his are interesting enough, I feel, since heās talking about me.
He made me feel a lot more confident that I have it, despite 3 different psychs already agreeing I doā¦ and made me feel a lot more comfortable with who I am.
