Dude, so fucking real. I just got denied meds because “If you can learn a big part in a play, then you must have very mild adhd.”
I’m convinced that most psychiatrists and psychologists have control issues that they satisfy through their practice. It makes them feel powerful to be able to gatekeep, judge and implicitly control their patient’s life and get paid for it.
Same with autism. It wasn’t until I had my master’s degree in math and teaching high school at age 39 that it ever occurred to me that I was autistic. A colleague and I had a mutual student, and he told me that he thought she might be autistic and that he was going to refer her to the school’s diagnostician for testing.
So I found myself curious about the symptoms of autism, because Rain Man was my frame of reference. I researched the symptoms in the middle of a Geometry team meeting, and everything I read had my sitting up further and further in my seat, until I just blurted out “Oh my GAWD…?!” My colleagues asked what, and I said “Y’all…I think I might be autistic?” They looked at one another quizzically, like they were shocked at my personal revelation. One of them replied, “Wait…you didn’t know?!” I said, “…what, you DID know?!?” She was like “Yes! We all know that about you! You seriously didn’t know? 😂” HELL NO I DIDN’T KNOW!
I immediately called my mom on the phone to tell her that I thought I might be autistic. “Yyyyyeah…your dad and I always thought you might be.” HOLY FUCKING SHIT MOM WTF??? 😲😲😲WHY DIDN’T YOU EVER GET ME TESTED?!? "Well, you always made such good grades that we just didn’t think it mattered that much.
I have since been diagnosed with ASD Level 1, and I think back a lot on my life lived. I marvel at how much easier my life would have been if I hadn’t had to develop all of these coping mechanisms myself. I did well in school despite my autism. I earned two degrees despite my autism. I hold down teaching jobs despite my autism. The biggest problems I’ve had in my life, though, have been personal relationships. I can’t imagine how much richer my life might be right now had I known all along how to exist as a self-aware autist in a neurotypical world.
I don’t know the popular opinion on this, but I personally think you did a great job learning how to be your best self without having a label. Everyone is unique and everyone will have to learn how to do things their way, having children labeled as something when they already do well might just make them feel more alienated, or be like “I’m X that’s why I’m like this” instead of finding their way to be productive/have fun.
Of course it’ll help people struggling but not knowing what’s wrong. But if you’re a type of person who can feel/see what works for you and what doesn’t and find solutions for yourself, you might even make your quirks your strength. One frequent thought I have is, how many of the scientists or philosophers in the past were actually autistic? Or had quirks that made them who they are, but would definitely be “problematic” when they were young by today’s standards.
TLDR: My opinion is everyone is unique, using your quirks to do things others can’t is what makes some people great. Making everyone fit a “normal”, and medicating/… everyone else doesn’t seem like a good idea.
It’s weird how many people on here attribute good grades to being good at everything else in life. Or minimizing the probable and unnecessary struggle some individuals go through to get those good grades because of the system they were put in. I got good grades because i worked many times harder than my peers. I shouldn’t have to. No one does. I was privileged enough to have enough resources to do as well as i did. Most people with my condition don’t. I’ve also struggled a lot more at other tasks, and in the work place. But i got good grades, so fuck me right?
Back in school I literally helped other students cram 30 minutes before a test, using flash cards I made and used all week, only to have them breeze in and get a higher score than me.
Do you know how great it would be to only barely try, and succeed anyway? I can’t even imagine.
Yeah. It’s so fucking shortsighted to be like, “Eh, you did fine, look at your grades. You can’t be that disabled.” Like, you putzes, are you kidding me? If I hadn’t been spending all my mental energy clearing all these pointless obstacles, I might have cured fucking pancreatic cancer by now. It’s not just about what’s convenient for caretakers, teachers, and a health team, it’s about being denied the opportunity that most other people are handed without asking to achieve everything they’re capable of doing.
being good at shit doesn’t mean I can have good grades either
My autism allows me to do it work, create servers, host websites and make my own Foss projects
This won’t however mean I’ll be getting 100 from my chemistry exam just because I can loop hello world a hundred times
Does anyone else have the incling ADHD and PTSD are the same thing? Human brain thinks it’s in danger and kicks into survival mode
Adhd kids get told negative things way more often that other kids, and that is traumatic. Undiagnosed Adhd leads to anxiety and depression because of it, which makes it very similar to ptsd. But since it’s chronic and over a long time period, it is separate from ptsd, as the cause is Adhd, and not the trauma itself.
ADHD can lead to C-PTSD if untreated
Goddamn, this innocuous post brought me to tears. Been having a rough time, I guess
Hugs.
You can’t change the past but you can change the future.
Can you though? At least in most of the US if you aren’t already getting psychological help, you have to pay for it yourself, and will just have to figure out a self medication schedule that works for you.
I pay for both a psychiatrist and a psychologist and while my psychologist knows for sure I have ADHD neither of then can prescribe me stimulants so instead I’m on Lexapro so at least I don’t have to care.
Same with autism.
If you get low grades, off to special ed with you.
High grades? Oh you’re just a socially awkward dork or quirky nerd or something.
It’s like the Halo effect, but with grades.
TBF if any condition isn’t causing problems then it doesn’t need treatment. Don’t get me wrong, ADHD can cause problems beyond just school/work, but often that’s one of the most common primary problems it causes
Absolutely, and inner conflict, constant struggle and unhappiness counts as a huge problem, even when external appearances are kept and things run relatively smoothly. Internal peace should always be the primary goal, and not just fitting into the gears of routine life.
Who says it isn’t causing problems? We had a similar issue with my oldest. He is a brilliant kid who can’t get his shit together because of his disability. However he can skate through school.
It was a constant battle to get him services and accommodations, because he “is not failing”. The school system thinks he doesn’t need treatment because he’s not failing. We think he deserves treatment because he isn’t living up to his abilities and struggles to do basic stuff
Thank you for fighting for your son.
I never really had issues in school, I was doing fine. But teachers kept telling me I wasn’t living up to my potential. I was chaotic. Forgetful. Years later, I developed an anxiety disorder I didn’t understand so I went to therapy. Turns out I also have chronic depression (oh, life is not so bleak for everyone??) and it’s all because of severe ADHD and the attached problems. I’m almost 30 now. And while my therapist did a lot of structured tests, she is not qualified to actually diagnose ADHD. It’s gonna be another year until I can get my formal diagnosis and medication.
I often wonder what could have been had the adults in my childhood been more attentive to my -in hindsight- obvious and severe problems.
This was me. Had some good, caring teachers, and some bad, but I was really struggling. Ended up going to a private school on student aid because the public schools didn’t care to help. Started caring a lot more about school. Things also got a lot easier when I moved out of the house and had more space to collect my thoughts and goals.
I mean this is technically right (so the best kind of right) but as someone that got okay grades in school and only passed because I could ace a test on pretty much anything, knowing I had ADHD before I was in my mid 30s, stressing over why work was getting harder and harder and trying to explain to my wife that i genuinely just forget to clean up after a project is done would have been hugely helpful. So diagnosing ADHD in kids and teens getting good grades may end with just therapy as treatment if they are otherwise doing well, knowing that other treatments (like medication) are options if after school they start struggling more. Keep in mind it’s much more difficult to get an ADHD diagnosis as an adult than as a kid.
I got diagnosed and medicated at 39. A couple of years go by and I’ve improved my shit enough that I get offered a promotion from tools to office.
“Great”, I think, because I’m finally getting my shit together.
Couple more years have passed, and it turns out that even with medication it’s real fucking hard to be self-led management when you’ve got a brane that is not at all interested in working with you.
Unmedicated me got reasonable grades at school, then managed a respectable 2:1 degree. That would have been a first class degree if I’d been medicated. But all of that shit is basically on rails, people guiding you in the right direction. I don’t have those rails anymore.
My parents just didn’t know what to do and dropped me out of school at 14. I made good grades for the first semester in school every year, then I was moved beside the teacher’s desk and had straight Fs for the rest of the year.
My daughter has developed the same problems as me, mostly after her mom was diagnosed with cancer and then passed away, but I’m trying to get her medicated (if that’s what she needs, and I think it ultimately is). She’s 16 now, on mood stabilizers as of a month ago. The doctor seems to think that will do it.
She ticked every box for adhd which didn’t surprise me at all. I think they’re afraid to give her anything too big because of a history of addiction in the family.
I don’t know. I just hope she ends up doing better than I have since she’s actually being treated.
After I got diagnosed, my kid began the journey towards assessment. Sadly for him his mother didn’t take it too seriously and delayed making a GP appointment for a few months, by which time Covid had happened. The end result is that he got formally diagnosed last February, but because of the waiting lists and a change of our county’s ADHD service provider in April, he’s still not been prescribed any medication.
It’s doubly frustrating because he’s half way through his final year of a law degree. I desperately want him to graduate knowing he did his very best, but without meds I know how impossible that might feel.
Why did you attribute a ratio to your degree? What do you mean first class degree?
In the UK (and maybe other places?) an honours degree can be passed at different levels depending on how well you do.
Top marks is a 1st Class Honours Degree, good marks gets you an Upper Second Class Degree (2:1), okay marks gets you a Lower Second Class Degree (2:2). A 3rd class also degree exists.
Most post-grad courses and some jobs would expect a 2:1 or above to let you apply.
My marks were mere points away from being in First range. It’s frustrating as hell to look back on.
It’s a testament to how hard I worked on the course submissions (in the 12 hours before the handing in deadline) that I did as well as I did. Because honestly, when I think back to that final year of being sat in front of my computer screen, the overwhelming memory is having four different browsers open, logged into four different Facebook accounts that I used to be a dickhead troll in racist groups, winding up the racists.
None of that had anything to do with the radio production degree that I’d paid good money to study towards.
A 2:2 is also known as a Desmond, for fairly obvious reasons.
Take a guess how many doctors and dentists you worked with barely passed medical schools, or politicians you voted for still passed with mediocre subpar scores. Hint: not zero.
You’ll do fine. So stop under selling yourself
Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean. Did this reply go to the wrong person?
What do you call a doctor that graduated last in their class? Doctor
It didn’t get recognized in me until 10th or 11th grade. My grades started to slip fast when the ways I adapted to school stopped helping me keep up.
Arguably, if it’s not causing behavioral concerns, educational concerns, emotional concerns, social concerns, or physical concerns… It’s not really a condition is it?
But even if the results are good, the process can still be very draining on the individual.
For lack of a more relatable analogy, I’ve been using this race based one.
Imagine you’re a black child in America in the 1960s and 1970s, but you somehow managed to remain ignorant of that fact until sometime in your teens or early adulthood. Maybe the area was really progressive, parents wanted to shield you from reality, whatever you need to imagine is fine. You end up not understanding this fact about yourself, and then you end up in the racist public. Now, imagine that the racist public never comes outright and says anything directly racist to you, but all of their other behavior is exactly like what you’d expect from racists in the 1970s. How do you come to terms with this reality? You must be doing something wrong for people to treat you this way.
Obviously not a perfect analogy, and I don’t really like to compare my issues as a ND person with the awful stuff done to black people back then, and that continues to be done today. Anyway, it’s not inaccurate, if anything, the differences between ND people and NT people are greater than any outward racial appearance, and worse, ND people aren’t really aware they are being marginalized, and NT people don’t really understand that they are marginalizing.
I think… you should probably stop using that analogy.
A good analogy would be being forced to use your non-dominant hand to write, maybe to play guitar, paint, use a right-handed mouse with your left, etc…
Over time and practice, you may get pretty good at it. But, you want to ask if you think you’ll ever get the speed with the smoothness and precision you would have gotten if you’ve been using your dominant hand. You’d be doing what a lot of ND people have to do, which is put a lot of valuable concentration and energy into adapting to something that while NT people have no issue, it’s completely foreign to you.
You can also think of getting the proper treatment as, at worst, switching that incorrect 5-button ergonomic mouse for a basic 3-button ambidextrous one, and at best give you the forward/back buttons, but ignoring the ergonomic design. I.E. The treatment should help lessen the disadvantages, but they would still be present.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I think it’s too shallow vs the actual experience. The depth at which ND people are marginalized is so far and away under presented today. Most of the established science is just wrong and resistant to the reality that ND led researchers are presenting. We need to do better at advocating for ourselves as an entire group with shared experiences and unique mental and physical health issues.
The next best analogy I’ve heard so far is NT people are Windows based software running in a Windows based world, ND people are MacOS software being forced to run on Windows (suspend your IT mind about how it wouldn’t work at all, and understand that for a lot of ND folks, it doesn’t). Get on the correct runtime environment and a lot of issues go away. That’s just really hard to do when the world is primarily built for the 85%-95% NT population, and many of the most capable in the ND population are either ignorant or in denial due to lack of acknowledgement, and stigmatization of anything that would be acknowledged.
People can not agree with what I’m saying, I’m sure it sounds absurd especially if you are NT. I doubt I would have agreed with it two years ago, but introspection after my own realizations that I’m autistic, after over 30+ years of living with this brain, I understand things quite differently now.
As long as you’re not disruptive, they don’t give a shit.
And if you are disruptive, they diagnose you with odd and beat you to make you shut up. You can’t win
And if you had ADD, ODD, and breaking the curve grades, they took every opportunity to lock you up in jail that they could.
At least that’s what happened to me.
Truth. I remember being in school in the 90s when they were giving Ritalin to everyone who didn’t want to sit still in class. Shit was wild. And then you have me, with a healthy case of ADD but since I wasn’t a social butterfly, that just meant I wasn’t motivated.
Ritalin made me a zombie. Thankfully Adderall existed. I wish I could get some as an adult. That shit made me superhuman.
They had me and my brother on I think it was Concerta, and yeah there was something not right about that stuff. Adderall was great for getting shit done, but no way I’d want to take it everyday.
T breaks from amphetamines are (hopefully) encouraged.
T break?
Tolerance break. Even a one day weekly washout can be good enough.
Oh man, one of my people! My parents, my school, my teachers just watched me fail with an under 1.0 average, while I scored 95th percentile in every standardized test. I was lazy, undisciplined, and unmotivated, and it made me hate myself.
I feel like this would be a red flag now, but back then, even the school counselors were only worried about my impact on other students. Since it was minimal, they let me just stay there and fail… my best friend, who’s every bit at sharp as me, got Ritalined into fucking oblivion and put in remedial classes. Jokes on me tho, he got a diploma from HS.
GED is just another standardized test. If I knew how easy it was back in my junior year, I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble.
Dude, all the same here. I tested insanely high on that aptitude test in elementary school and was placed in their version of honors. But the teachers would get pissed because I wouldn’t do any homework, yet somehow aced all my tests and scored minimum 90th percentile on all standardized tests. I just paid attention to the lessons but had no interest in the busy work.
I ended up just doing the CA proficiency exam and got out of high school on my 17th birthday, and then got a diploma at 25 to make my mom happy.
If you’re malleable enough, the machine will mash you into place.
Wait till you see what they let you do if you’re good at sports.
Wait till you see what they let you
doraw dog if you’re good at sports.Ftfy
Cheerleaders, teachers, whatever you want. The football players at my high school could do no wrong because they won state once.
Pretty much, my mom didn’t notice that I had adhd. But my little brother was a poor student, and ended up on several different medications for his adhd… meanwhile, my mom made fun of me for having like 5 water glasses scattered throughout the house all the time bcz I forgot I had a water glass, and where it was.
I don’t know how the fuck I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD (or autism or BPD) until I was in my late 30’s, when my parents had taken me to the same therapist my younger sibling was diagnosed with ADHD by as a child.
Adhd was demonized back then. I was diagnosed and my parents decided to do nothing because the media was telling them that Ritalin was the devil. Hard to blame them given the climate but man I coulda used the help back then.
That and most people’s idea (including some doctors) was that unless the person was hyperactive, they couldn’t have ADHD. Happened to me. And rather than being diagnosed and treated correctly for the problems I did need help with, I got diagnosed with
Asperger’s[ASD] and was put in a curriculum well below my level not because I didn’t understand the subjects, but because they just didn’t interest me.
Probably because you were the easy one? That was what it was for me, didn’t realize until my mid 20s (covid really wrecked havoc with my studying in college because I couldn’t go to a physically separate space that I had designated as a place I couldn’t goof off).
Exactly. My younger brother and I both have pretty bad ADHD. I am Primarily Inattentive but he got the hyperactivity and ODD. Guess who got diagnosed at 9 and who got diagnosed at 32?
Samsies, my sister had other issues and was for sure the one who needed more effort from my parents. Meanwhile, I got A’s without much effort in HS and for the most part in college (until Masters, which of course landed me with a bit of a breakdown and being depressed for a long while). I’m not formally diagnosed, but that’s mostly because I feel it’s largely a waste of money for my case (I checked into it a while back when I had terrible insurance, and it was gonna cost me something like $1200).
Tbf same if you are ‘slower’
Subtle but they said, “get good grades.” Very different than earned.
whole life
Even with ADHD you’re like, an full-ass adult, no? it’s weird how people never actually grow into their independance. I see many people come up in their 30-40s and discover they have ADHD - what were you doing this whole time?
what were you doing this whole time
Assuming it was this hard for everyone else and I was just really, really, inexplicably bad at this…so I’ll work harder to overcome my personal shortcomings!
Undiagnosed thought: “I’m always forgetting my important things, this is really difficult”
Society: “everyone forgets things”Undiagnosed thought: that fluorescent light is so incredibly loud and the way it flickers is creating this strange rainbow effect on my computer and it hurts my eyes and I’m really struggling here.
Society: working in an office sucks, the lights, the distractions, it’s normal to have unfocused moments.You repeat enough of these thoughts - I feel like I’m struggling with my emotional regulation, could it be ADHD? Well as a teen it was hormones, as a uni student it was “freshman anxiety”, then I was getting divorced so my emotional state was blamed on that, then I was always moving house so it made sense that my mood was always a hair trigger.
There were always just enough environmental factors to mask the underlying condition.
And it works! Until you burnout in your 30s because no one else is actually giving 150% all the time.
I did the same with a physical illness! I was born with a hip deformity so my whole life any pain or issues around my hips was just totally brushed off until I got aggressively assertive in my 20s because with the physical symptoms I was able to feel more confident in my perception of my reality and advocate to my doctor (where as with mental health, it’s harder, sure I think I feel this symptom but it’s in my head it’s fleeting what if I’m remembering experiencing my own thoughts wrong? Years of describing how I feel to therapists, being told it’s nothing out of the ordinary, so I’ve convinced myself it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing)
Turns out I had nerve damage in my spine the whole time, but we all just assumed I was being overly dramatic and sensitive about the known hip issue.
Same with my ADHD. We all (myself included) thought it was just really bad anxiety in addition to me being bad at sticking to the homework for therapy so it made sense I wasn’t getting better.
But we know more about how it presents, so if I was a kid going through the process again I’d be less likely to be misdiagnosed in the first place.
It’s a fair question, if you haven’t gone through it. I agree: it seems ridiculous!
I grew up surrounded by authority figures who didn’t have a nuanced understanding of mental health. I internalized being called “lazy” and “a procrastinator,” because everyone told me that I was choosing to be bad at managing my time and focus!
I believed this right into the upper management of a tech company in my 30s. And I’d get down on myself constantly for zoning out during meetings and being overwhelmed at long-term complex tasks. “Wow I’m so lazy and unmotivated,” I’d think to myself in between client meetings. For years.
A friend showed me the ADHD symptoms (probably after I zoned out for the thousandth time), and it was a shock and how closely they described my childhood, schooling, and professional and social life.
Some people do just fine with their coping mechanisms - I discovered that I had quite a few! But I made the choice to seek medication. Taking it was like breathing air for the first time.
So that’s what I was doing.
Maybe trying to get out from an overprotective parent or unburying yourself from decades of gaslighting? Are you a psychologist? You seem to hold a very high opinion of your ability to judge people.
yeah but that’s not the context of the post.
Thats not important here.
You can’t just add random context to suit your claim lmao
And I didnt. You nibbled at a detail of the op and I did the same with you. Its always okay as long as nobody does it to oneself.
Trying to fucking survive the last fucking 40 years of this life i didn’t ask for
To have a disorder it has to interfere with your activities of daily living. If it doesn’t you don’t have one.
Yeah, my guess is that this post is implying the typical case - it wasn’t disrupting grades specifically, so it wasn’t diagnosed. You may have gotten those grades by staying up until 3am as a child, lying to get out of forgotten homework, had more injuries, pushed through work by building up a healthy reserve of depression and anxiety, struggled socially because you couldn’t prioritize both school and socials or because you couldn’t connect with most other people because of your way of talking, been horribly forgetful, etc. but because grades number stays high, nothing is wrong. It’s easy for people to see grades as the metric for mental wellness which is wild
You can pretend that clinical significance is the gold standard measure of disability if you like, but you should recognize that you leave a MASSIVE gap in your effectiveness both as a diagnostician and a practitioner if you neglect all the masking your client has been doing to deal with everybody’s demands their whole life. Seeing that bias in someone pretending to treat me would be enough reason for me to walk out of the appointment and schedule with someone more capable and knowledgeable.
I’m neither a diagnostician nor a provider and I don’t pretend to be one. I’m just a nurse. That’s one of many things people seem to ascribe to me. I will say however, something needs to be disabling for it to be a disability.
The equivalence of what you’re saying is that if everything contained lactose and just because Phil, with his lactose-intolerance, is always able to make it to the toilet in time, he shouldn’t need lactase supplements or a special diet.
Lactose intolerance is actually a very good example. The level of lactase production varies significantly among the population. Different people will find different amounts of lactose as interfering with their ADLs. There’s generally a point where too much milk or cheese will cause you to have gas and visit the bathroom within an hour. This is called clinical significance. If they don’t have enough clinical significance, it’s pointless to diagnose them with lactose intolerance.
Although I agree with the facts, binary „diagnosing“ isnt the only way to go about your life. You, your parents and your doctor can make decisions without a piece of paper. The problem here to me seems to be that „you‘re not diagnosed so you dont have it“ has been a valid strategy for too long and needs to go already. Seeing that your child (eg) shows signs of autism doesnt mean you need to put them in special everything but people are rightly pissed that they have suffered irreperable damage to their bodies for self medicating an issue that could have been mitigated if not soved, were our society able to accept imperfection and not reinforce stereotypes at every turn.
That’s literally correct for ADHD, yeah - the diagnostic criteria for it is all stuff like “patient says they have difficulty organizing tasks”, which, naturally, depends a lot on what kind of tasks they’re doing.
That’s why ADHD is very common in concentration-requiring professions like software engineering (naively you’d expect the opposite) - there’s people with “undiagnosed ADHD” (low concentration) everywhere, but if you’re in a profession like that you are much more likely to have it impact your job, and go to a doctor, and get a diagnosis and a prescription of Adderall or some other kind of amphetamine.
