Is ADHD a real disorder?

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.

great! i have a follow-up on thursday to talk about how i am doing on adderall. it's been an improvement but it's hard to tell because i had a particularly stressful week at work last week, which always means i have better focus and get a lot more done. on the negative side i have been too awake at inappropriate times and i'm normally a good sleeper. i think i need to switch to the non-extended release version because it seems to last 18 hours in me, not 12, but might just need more time to get used to it.

Analyzing myself, I wanted to mention how multitasking for me is like my brain is running errands and driving directly to do something, but realizes it's passing right by something else in this part of town it's been needing to do, then in the same strip mall as that other thing there a place next door that has something, and while in there has a new idea about something else, and heads back home without having completed any of the other things, then on the way home it sees... on and on etc. It's a miracle if I complete everything. Keeping a list helps though I've forgotten to list things and then realize later they were never done cause they weren't on the list. Whoops. It's like juggling without visibility beyond just above my hands, so the balls going up in the air leave my mind until they come back around again, and I'm reminded of each ball that comes back into view and stressed about what to do with it usually before I'm finished dealing with the last ball. ANALOGIES

My wife commented on my audible ADD when I was for some reason narrating my discogs rabbit hole dive I was on while she was in the room. So it sort of affirmed that this way of letting constant distractions detour me over and over is not necessarily normal for everyone.

yeah it's as if everything is equally interesting sometimes so you run out of space because you can't discard the less important stuff. most times i can get really into boring and unimportant things but if a small easy task comes along i tell myself ugh so boringgggg you'll never do this don't even tryyyyyyy. the drugs seem to be helpful at rebalancing that, though i'm still far from perfect. i was able to do ministerial work tasks that i normally put off forever, and distracting things were adjusted down to a less exciting level on my brain's mixing board. to the point that i even forgot to do duolingo one day.

So it sort of affirmed that this way of letting constant distractions detour me over and over is not necessarily normal for everyone.

― Evan, Monday, October 25, 2021 9:14 AM (one hour ago)

yeah, I'm someone who doesn't have ADHD, and you are correct. This thread is interesting to me, because I feel like I have some of these issues (the mental juggling, though maybe some of that is just the types of work and projects I'm drawn to, because I get easily bored), but it's like I have some cognitive sorting tool that lets me do the most important errands, allows me to do a few of the adjacent errands that would actually be productive, and determines that the other errands are worth keeping in mind, but that I am not going to deal with right now.

Most "normal" people I know, will give me confused looks when I bring up the adjacent errands though. It's like they have an even greater rigidity in thinking and planning.

The phrase “keeping in mind” is something that’s disappeared from my vocabulary. Because there is no keeping anything in mind. It all has to be logged externally (apps, reminders, lists) or it’s GONE.

The most succinct way I've ever been able to frame it is to say that, before being diagnosed and medicated, the basic concept of strategy was nothing but an abstract, academic notion to me. Like just that general ability to think and plan several steps ahead in pursuit of a larger goal down the road. I understood it, I saw other people do it, but I couldn't really keep my eye on multiple balls long enough to keep them in the air. I'm probably only at like a solid D+ in strategic thinking at this point but, shit, it's better than a perpetual F-.

oh yeah, strategy! totally a mystery to me. there's no point in my playing any strategy-related game; I just circle and circle and do things at random and then suddenly somebody wins and the game ends, and I'm like "?????"

I'm 42 years old and I feel like I only recently gained the full ability to think "I have to do x, y, and z, x will take 30 minutes, y will take 45 minutes, and z will take 30 minutes, and I only have two hours to get them all done, so if I futz for more than fifteen minutes I won't get them done." And I think what flipped the switch for me is that I became the one responsible for getting my kids to the bus every morning, and there are so many steps involved in terms of making sure they are awake, taking both breakfast and lunch requests, making sure they dress and brush teeth, filling each compartment of their two little bentgo boxes with various things, packing snacks, packing water bottles, making their breakfast, getting them out the door, and I feel such a strong sense of urgency about not letting them be late, because once I drive them I know I'll have to drive them all the time and it will interfere with work. And once I started doing that, forcing myself to think really really hard about each task and micro-task and how long it takes, and all the ways I could save time (e.g. laying out the empty lunch box and water bottle the night before), and it's started to trickle into other areas of my life. But only started to. I still find this really hard to do with work, because I am used to kind of winging it and either (a) focusing really hard on a project for unlimited hours when I am into it, (b) getting shit done really fast because of the urgency of a deadline, or (c) frittering away time.

Like it was such a revelation to me to start to see time in this different way, and it hit me that there are plenty of people who, even when they are productive, aren't just like "head down, focus focus focus, this is awesome, holy shit look at the time I need to go home now." And I still struggle to follow it.

The phrase “keeping in mind” is something that’s disappeared from my vocabulary. Because there is no keeping anything in mind. It all has to be logged externally (apps, reminders, lists) or it’s GONE.

― war mice (hardcore dilettante), Monday, October 25, 2021 1:20 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I have both calendar reminders AND set alarms for all of my phone meetings. Because I can literally get reminded 10 minutes before a meeting and forget two minutes before.

made an appointment to consult with an adhd coach this week. (which I think will be genuinely useful but my GOD I hate that term). we moved recently for my gf’s job, and the experience I picked up in my last position was very specific to that employer; being kind of back at square one with my career has really kicked a lot of my symptoms/anxieties about my symptoms into high gear. really hope we talk mostly about practical strategies and she does as little “you can do it, champ!” as possible

lol I keep forgetting that my distain for receiving praise for what I feel should be easy tasks is itself an indicator of a blunted dopamine response that seems to be adhd-related

oh yeah i've had that my whole life

Xxp Coaching has very little “you can do it, champ!” component. Rocky movies have really distorted our idea of what a good coach does.

“Yes! I made breakfast today! Good job, me!” Yeah, whoopdee shit. I feel you xp

every time i tell my son i love him or that he did a good job he rolls his eyes and goes yeah yeah that’s what every dad says

thats when u reply with "ok fuck u then"

you don't know what you got till it's gone

"You ain't shit, you ain't never been shit" is such a thing I'd never thought I'd say as a parent lol amirite heehee

made an appointment to consult with an adhd coach this week. (which I think will be genuinely useful but my GOD I hate that term). we moved recently for my gf’s job, and the experience I picked up in my last position was very specific to that employer; being kind of back at square one with my career has really kicked a lot of my symptoms/anxieties about my symptoms into high gear. really hope we talk mostly about practical strategies and she does as little “you can do it, champ!” as possible

― nicole, Tuesday, October 26, 2021 12:47 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I'd like to hear how this coaching goes if you don't mind updating us, as I've always wondered about something like this. I see a therapist who does take a bit more of a practical, what can we do right now kind of approach. There's a lot of reinforcement of habits that help me manage my ADHD, like exercise and sleep. We might talk about my childhood but only in a way that is very present-oriented, i.e. be aware of how that's impacting the way you respond to things right now rather than trying to excavate. I find it very helpful at this stage in my life and I don't think deep psychotherapy would be as much so, feel like I did enough of that.

adhd sux!