Is ADHD a real disorder?

i am doing this tomorrow (not in a procrastinating sense, i really do have an appointment tomorrow)

not really a condition that makes you good at making appointments

No, it really isn't.

To wit: I unintentionally tapered off the last of my medication at the start of the pandemic back when I thought it was just gonna be a brief bump in the road (hahahahaha, were we ever so naive) but, after doing surprisingly well for a while, I had really been struggling lately. Little ability to focus or stay on task, forgetting things I didn't usually forget, lots of little things that used to be NBD increasingly feeling like an uphill slog, complex thought or planning basically an impossibility, etc. So after a year and a half of intending to but always putting it off, I finally booked a phone appointment with my doctor last week. And it was the easiest thing in the world. So but well I started back on my meds this weekend and...it's been a little rough. I've never had any adverse effects from ritalin aside from some dry mouth, and I've gone off for stretches in the past and ramped back without issue, but the last couple of days I felt like I was on cheap trucker speed or something. All jitters and frayed nerves and other sensations that weren't particularly conducive to high focus. It reminded me of an unpleasant experience with taking too much No-Doz back in my college days. Thankfully, today has been a little smoother so far, but I sure would hate to think that these meds might not be a good fit for me anymore, because they have demonstrably and immensely helped me in the past and I haven't really found anything else that did the trick.

one anecdote i’ve picked up on while doing further reading is people trying cocaine and it ‘not doing anything for them’, then they get an adhd diagnosis later in life and go ‘ah,’

While we’re on the subject of recreational drugs and ADHD, does everyone else find that pot does the opposite for you that it does for most people? Everyone’s like “yeah, I smoke a joint and I just m e l l o w o u t” and I’m like “itakeonelittlehitandimwiredforhourswithmymindracingmadlyoffinalldirections”

i haven't done it in a long time but yeah

i love pot but that does indeed happen

does it to me often (I don't think I have adhd? I don't really know)

I have that experience sometimes. It can get bad. The other night I accidentally ate too much and was wired for hours just watching a brain movie of everything that's wrong with my life. I usually try to keep my doses small and avoid combining with caffeine.

"a brain movie of everything that's wrong with my life" is an accurate description of why i stay away from it!

i have that effect sometimes but it's about 50/50. usually a good experience when i keep it to a microdose.

This is interesting anecdata! Because yeah, that's kinda been my experience more often than not. Which is probably why I've never done it much. One time in college it felt like all of my constituent atoms were flying off in different directions and I didn't like it one bit.

yeah I haaate weed, not that I have much experience of it. The one time I actually got high it physically hurt; I think it summoned up a sense memory of having low blood sugar or something and made me live through it again.

I got my diagnosis a few weeks ago but they haven't prescribed anything yet because everything on their list has a side effect of increasing heart rate and mine is too fast as it is. So I have to go off to the cardiologist and get them to clear me for it. (This is good bc it's reminding me to make that appointment.)

Weirdly, antidepressants don't seem to be on their list of drugs at all, though I thought they were one of the possible adhd treatments and I was kind of intrigued bc low doses of antidepressant have helped both my parents with focus issues.

I have that experience sometimes. It can get bad. The other night I accidentally ate too much and was wired for hours just watching a brain movie of everything that's wrong with my life. I usually try to keep my doses small and avoid combining with caffeine.

― peace, man, Tuesday, October 12, 2021 1:23 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

"a brain movie of everything that's wrong with my life" is an accurate description of why i stay away from it!

― certified juice therapist (harbl), Tuesday, October 12, 2021 1:24 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

haha yes, that's brilliant

depends on the kind of high for me, high-dose edibles are def "brain movie" territory. bong smoking too, but i don't do that much anymore. j's are fine, as is vaping.

i def smoke much less than i used to even though i feel like my adhd symptoms have weakened a bit as i've aged.

Do the rest of you have the thing of not ever planning for the future? One of my housemates told me today that she's moving out bc she and her boyfriend (both like a decade younger than me) are buying a house, and though I'm genuinely happy for them, it threw me into a bit of a tailspin of "why do I never seem to set or reach any life milestones?" Like, I know why I can't buy a house; it's because I'm a middle school teacher. But why do I always just float along in the present, never planning for the future or really expecting it to arrive? Is this an ADHD thing or just me?

Totally an adhd thing. I found this lecture (helpfully broken up into teeny weeny little chunks) super useful in understanding adhd as an executive functioning disorder with many facets (vs just “not being able to pay attention”) & has allowed me to enact some strategies to mitigate some of the effects.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzBixSjmbc8eFl6UX5_wWGP8i0mAs-cvY

xpost Absolutely. Anytime anyone has ever posed some variation of 'where do you see yourself in five years?' my answer is invariably some variation of 'I don't know where I see myself in five months'.

Ugh, this is depressing. Maybe medication will help with this? I hate even thinking about the future because in my mind it just looks sort of formless and foggy and exactly like the present but worse because I'm older.

future-planning, self-motivation, anything that involves treating myself as a significant figure in my own life rather than a drifter on the sands of time = a problem

Barkley describes ADHD as “time blindness… no, more like nearsightedness to time.” And all these little tumblers fell into place as to why I’m unable to do long-term planning or even delay gratification oftentimes

This all makes so much sense. It's a bummer, but it makes sense.

i don’t have adhd but i also live my life largely that way fwiw. it has its downsides but there are upsides too. there’s a whole industry now of telling people they need to live in the moment. huge swathes of people extremely anxious about something just over the horizon, planning like maniacs. i’m sort of glad i’m not them?

Yeah, I should probably do something about getting a diagnosis for this (if for nothing else, to cross it off the board)

The start of this thread is pretty wild by modern standards, I'm pretty sure that andy was just making a joke?

While we’re on the subject of recreational drugs and ADHD, does everyone else find that pot does the opposite for you that it does for most people? Everyone’s like “yeah, I smoke a joint and I just m e l l o w o u t” and I’m like “itakeonelittlehitandimwiredforhourswithmymindracingmadlyoffinalldirections”

― New Zealand, with that hottie (hardcore dilettante), Tuesday, October 12, 2021 2:11 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yes this is absolutely my experience and I am legit envious of anyone who can do a gummy and just mellow out and enjoy movies or music and not have - as peace, man so perfectly put it - very dark “brain movies.” I always try it again because I’m an idiot and think “this time will be different” but always almost instantly regret it. It also keeps me awake, which also seems like the opposite effect it has on most others. Never correlated this with my adhd but we may be onto something here

I've also been wondering if I should ask a doctor about this. Nobody's ever suggested to me that I might have ADHD, but some of the indicators are awfully familiar, e.g. internet addiction, difficulty organizing, freezing up when I have to think about any kind of long-term planning, needing to exert a lot of willpower (basically pretend to be someone else) to get through the work day and meet deadlines.

I mean, I'm happy with who I am, and I don't exactly want to change, but it would be nice to know if some of the obstacles that make practical life difficult could be lessened.

Speaking only for myself, they absolutely can. Like I've come to accept at this point that certain things are probably always going to be a struggle for me, but the medication (which I've always viewed as training wheels rather than any kind of cure-all) has helped me to get out of my own way enough that I've been able to adapt some rudimentary strategies and coping mechanisms that significantly lessen the struggle. Just something like being able to follow through and finish the majority (even if only a simple majority) of the things that I start is a huge accomplishment.

jmm, the way you phrase that points up an interesting wrinkle in the world of mental health: would seeking diagnosis and treatment for any chronic physical ailment change who you are? “Gee, I’d like to take care of this lower back pain, but the pain is so much a part of me now that if I got rid of it I wouldn’t be the same person.”

FWIW, I have only ever felt _more_ myself after the right meds & therapy, like upgrading a component on your stereo & getting better sound. Nietzsche’s admonishment to beware casting out devils is some bullshit.

yes- i feel far more like myself- i'm now able to recognize so many conditioned habits and responses i've developed to cope with the sense of 'basically pretending to be someone else' that jmm mentioned above. and yeah, meds not a cure-all, they're a tool

Put it this way: the pre-meds version of me would never have been able to successfully WFH for a year and a half, and the fact that I managed to do that without meds (however much of a struggle it's increasingly become) is a testament to the scaffolding I erected when I was regularly medicated.

FWIW, I have only ever felt _more_ myself after the right meds & therapy, like upgrading a component on your stereo & getting better sound.

same here. It doesn't change me, it just makes Paul a better Paul

Yes. It's the difference between knowing what you're capable of in theory and actually being able to put at least some of that into actual practice.

jmm, if you are on the fence about medication: I was too, mostly because I assumed adhd meds would just make me feel like I was on coke all the time. Which, in and of itself, might sound pretty great, until you remember that people on cocaine are the most obnoxious people on Earth. I found that the effects - at least not in the low doses I take - weren't like that at all. In fact, there are many days I barely realize I've taken anything at all until I look back at the first half of the day and marvel at all the stuff I was able to accomplish. Obviously medication is an extremely personal thing and the opinions of random strangers on the internet should not factor into your decision either way, but I thought I'd share my own experience as a former skeptic, because meds have worked wonders for me.

Also “the right meds” was a deliberate phrase; the wrong psych meds, or the right ones at the wrong dose, can make you feel distinctly not yourself.

if adhd meds make you feel like you're on coke, you're probably not taking the right meds.

i don't want to discourage anyone who legit feels like they need help with their executive functioning but tbh i think a lot of these "symptoms" can also be convincingly explained by current environmental stressors! also, like tracer hand was saying, living in the moment is a feature, not a bug. n.b. this is coming from someone who has sort of made peace with the fact that things like "financial planning" and "career development" hold absolutely no place in their life and who will probably work until the day they die for that reason. but in the meantime it affords me ... joy on a day-to-day basis?

"living in the moment" isn't exactly what is meant by "no sense of time." it's not a carpe diem situation. for a person with adhd, life is work. people with adhd neglect the past and future because it takes so much mental energy to process life from moment to moment

gotcha

friends, i am getting the addies

to respond to map i know what you mean but i don't think "explained by environmental stressors" and "needs help" are mutually exclusive! i am paralyzed by this and also blame capitalism

i have also taught myself to be obsessed with budgeting so :/

if you have attention deficits i highly recommend the YNAB app it's fun, price has gone up since i got it but i've saved literally orders of magnitude more than the monthly cost by not just spending money because "i got paid" and "i want to" (even when i made a lot less money, so this is not one of those "stop being poor by budgeting" pitches)

yeah i shouldn't have said what i said tbh. justifying not talking to a psych about my possible symptoms by downplaying the disorder is ngl.

not just spending money because "i got paid" and "i want to"

Wait, this is a thing? (sees fifteen dollars in wallet, furiously throws the full amount at the first person displaying a sufficiently shiny bauble)

i know right! i did impulsively buy some brach's halloween pumpkins at walgreens as a reward for my success but i'm a member of mywalgreens so i got a discount you know

Anytime anyone has ever posed some variation of 'where do you see yourself in five years?' my answer is invariably some variation of 'I don't know where I see myself in five months.'

Talked to my dad about it today and he said literally exactly those words. I'm starting to think my whole family has ADHD.

I read Gabor Maté's Scattered over the summer, primarily to get to grips with my son's diagnosis but also to educate myself at school. His central thesis is that it's a product of environment and arrested emotional development from a mix of trauma and/or due to over/hyper-sensitivity. What I also discovered was that I have more than a whiff the traits too, as do both my parents, and the range of co-morbid traits (anxiety, depression, OCD, Tourette's) are present also (hugely so in my son).

Clearly, I am now an expert, so can make daft pronouncements along the lines of: it seems easier to me to think of ADD (closer to our understanding of ASD) as a totalising style or a mode of living, with its own behaviours and tenets and outcomes, that affects way more people than is currently understood. It's probably an availability heuristic thing, but the number of people here having the same eureka moments seems illustrative somehow.

Anyway, I'm in a Covid fug. Apologies if any/all of that is patronising, obvious or downright offensive. I recommend the book, BTW.

I probably didn't explain that very well: Maté is keen to move away from the idea that it's all genetic. He acknowledges a predisposition but thinks environment is the majority of the cause. This forms the basis for his sense that ADD can be understood and accommodated through compassion and acceptance (within families, schools, the self). He's pro-medication where necessary, fwiw.

I think Maté is a useful and compassionate writer, but he seems very prone to generalizing from personal anecdotes, much like Freud. Most of the theoretical side of his thinking appears not to be wel supported by the data.

On the clinical/human side I think he’s very good, but I’m inclined not to put much weight on his theories.

I'm glad it's working for you. I really need to get help sometime soon. I've been procrastinating this for years.

― peace, man, Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:33 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Procrastinating for years is definitely a sign that you might be afflicted, sad + all-too-familiar lol.

― Donald Fhtagen (Old Lunch), Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:34 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

i am doing this tomorrow (not in a procrastinating sense, i really do have an appointment tomorrow)

― certified juice therapist (harbl), Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:34 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

not really a condition that makes you good at making appointments

― certified juice therapist (harbl), Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:35 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

I made an appointment! It is for the end of November. thanking harbl for that post, which rattled around in my head for a week or so before I picked up the phone and called.