The lighter side of ADHD
Yeah. I feel like it never bothered me when younger (he's "gifted and mature") but you get screwed later on when you have a 8-5 office job where you sit and stare for 9 hours. I can't focus on boring useless stuff like that. Unfortunately, the alternative is destroy your body doing manual labor to keep moving around. Plus. You make a lot more money sitting and staring at a screen. So just keep it bottled up and pretend you know what you're doing and don't feel like going nuts!
You want me to pay bills? On time? Best I can do is rack up late fees.
Set auto payments for all the things!
Oh, my workaround for that is easy, just develop lifelong crippling anxiety and still forget about 10% of them anyways!
Anxiety is a heaven sent for the Bill Paying Problem.
Well, there is partial truth to this. Diagnosing especially preteens with mental health conditions almost always needs an asterisk, their brains are still heavily developing.
Remember that we know of no reliable genetic / physiological markers for ADHD, so when doctors diagnose it, they're really just saying that the amount of symptoms seems to be severe enough. Some kids are just naturally more energetic, intelligent, etc. and may appear like they have ADHD, but when they develop into adults that might not actually be the case.
If anything, it's more like 1/3 of kids were misdiagnosed as having ADHD, so they "grew" out of it because they didn't really have it. It's a lot less likely for an adult to be misdiagnosed because their brains aren't changing.
Great reminders about the lack of physiological markers. The (or one?) elephant in the room, to me - I'd phrase it as - to what degree a kid's just naturally well- or poorly-suited to the public school environment itself.
A child that finds it difficult to sit in one place and listen to words about abstract material for hours every day...I mean does that sound divergent in any way?
One of the fundamental markers of childhood in my experience is a certain...animation, just this almost irresistible urge to move around, negotiate whatever activity is occurring and in what way, with whoever is nearby...switching activities and modes of play fluidly. Seems like the most normal shit ever to me lol.
I do recognize we need a standardized way to educate our kids in a modern society, but as we learn more about young brains, we gotta start developing a more diverse way to accomplish the learning and development of self-discipline. The one-size-fits-all approach just obviously leaves many underserved, and worse, leaves them internalizing a lot of frustration with self, not to mention taking all kinds of drugs to "treat those symptoms".
Man it got worse in ways i didn't think possible.
So convinced i understood myself and i actually masterminded my soul into stagnation...
..but a hand come out of the mud
Hmm I'm sure it's personal for each but me I feel like I didn't outgrow it. More like I overcame it.
Well yeah, if they got better, they wouldn't be someone you know with ADHD. Obviously
…because if it got better, you don’t know about it?
Does learning how to deal with it, but still struggling more than an average person count as getting better?
I've set up workarounds in my own life. Elsewhere in this thread there's people talking about forgetting to pay bills, versus bill pay. That's what I've done (and in some instances, have reminders on my phone set up to periodically remind me to do the things that can't be automated).
I've also steered my social relationships and my career to be more accommodating of my brain. I'm with a wife who doesn't mind (and in some ways finds it endearing), and can help me fill in some gaps. I have a career where jumping around from topic to topic helps me seem well rounded, and where occasionally showing how I've done a deep dive into something persuades my colleagues that I've got great attention to detail (I do, but only on some things).
My ADHD might be the same as it's always been, but my life has been set up so that it's all low consequences. The guardrails and safety nets are in place, and I can just be.
Getting better doesn't mean it's fixed. It's just less bad.
Masking may come easier to someone who is fully an adult and had to adapt to be able to survive. One doesn't keep a customer service job by being unmasked. So perhaps that is "better"?
But on the flip side, growing up means more responsibility. Failing a final in high school says I get a C- for the year, big whoop. Failing a final in college means I get a C-, means the class doesn't count as a prerequisite, means I have to spend more money to retake the class.
Forgetting to hand in an assignment doesn't mean much in school. But forgetting to pay a bill has much bigger consequences (especially if you do that ADHD thing of stressing about it every night and day but being unable to actually do the damn thing that would fix it :) )
Exactly. This sounds like selection bias in action. If you're sampling adults who have ADHD and asking if it's better from when they were kids, you've already skewed the results beyond repair. You need to follow kids with ADHD into adulthood and see if it gets better.