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Honestly, medication helped with this for me. Seeing how hyper stimulants make other folks while they settle me down. The amount of productivity I experienced in my first few weeks of medication was outstanding. Sadly, those tapered off and while i didn’t return to mean, now I barely functional without them.
Of course autism is not treatable by medication…
I have ADHD. All of my failings in life ARE my fault.
My symptoms may be the reason for a lot of the issues I have, but they aren’t an excuse. I can and have overcome all of them at some time given the right circumstances and/or medication. Sometimes I just don’t want to. Sometimes I chose to hyper focus on a video game for 6 hours instead of doing the chore that would take 10 minutes that I have been dreading for 2 days. Sometimes I like starting a new project instead of finishing an old one.
It’s just part of who I am.
This follows that basic rule of forgiving and accepting yourself. Nice .
I have a subset of this problem where I think I might be faking imposter syndrome so that people will think I actually know what I’m doing.
You managed to get impostor syndrome squared
double secret imposter syndrome.
I will beat your fucking ass if you come at me like this again.
It’s a bit more insidious, it’s like “what if I am just lazy…”
This is one of the reasons I cba to get a diagnosis. It’s probably just a coincidence
I mean…ADHD or not, your life is generally in your own hands, both successes and failures are your “fault”. The ADHD doesn’t take the responsibility, it only adds context.
Yes and no. I knew a guy that was biking and had an accident. He lost his legs. He because an athlete, did sailing and climbed mountain and stuff. He still couldn’t use a normal bike. Do you get what I mean? You can do self-help as much as you want but you can’t ask a blind person to look at the sky.
Or more like you can ask, but you’ll probably get a blank stare.
Sorry for the bad joke
This is only true under the assumption that ADHD is only to the detriment of the person. I don’t believe that to be true at all. Unlike e.g. missing a leg or being blind, which don’t really give any benefits at all, many people with ADHD are also very successful because it to drives them somewhere and makes them act because they simply have to.
ADHD adds obstacles and barriers, where ‘failures’ can be due to simple things like trouble memorizing people’s names instantly when you first meet them because not meeting social expectations counts against you.
Yeh people with ADHD could just educate their parents and teachers about how their brains work differently. And how do they not just diagnose themselves and get the meds to function in a society that is clearly not made for them to succeed. Total failure that’s entirely their fault.
There are still people with (varying degrees of) ADHD that are both normally successful or wildly successful. They did this likely not despite their ADHD but because of it. They probably grew up in an environment that allowed them to find a positive outlet for themselves so they achieved behavioral patterns that utilized it to drive them forward instead of it getting in the way.
If they are wildly successful they were most likely born rich like the vast majority of wildly successful people. That would be the environment where they can succeed despite barriers. ADHD does not promote effort, the inability to stay focused and succeed is one of the criteria.
ADHD does let me think creatively about stuff because my mind races about all the possibilities and make uncommon connections, but that is because of all the coping mechanisms I have had to develop while working in a society that absolutely crushes people with the symptoms of ADHD. If autopay wasn’t a thing I would be missing bills constantly for example, it is a work around for the tediously large number of things that society expects everyone to remember and manage.
Context, which can be translated to useful keywords and traits to use for self discovery. Primarily for learning about the coping mechanisms that others have successfully deployed but also to ease the sort of negative thoughts in the last part of this post.
The worse part is when you get so good at coping that others don’t see the work that goes in just to function in a society built to your disadvantage.
I’ve tried to live a large portion of my life like this.
Don’t.
Well, I have been “tested” by neuropsychologists and they said I have symptoms that looks like ADHD, but it’s probably not that. I never pushed more as it’s difficult to get any diagnosis or help here in Quebec as an adult. In the end they said I may have PDA, and they will not give me a straight answer.
I still consider myself nerodivergent but according to the medical system here, I don’t have ADHD. I just have a lot of symptoms that are common.
I went and got “tested” once and was told it is impossible that I have ADHD because I did not commit crimes as a child.
No, seriously. I didn’t steal things, I didn’t fight people, primarily because I was afraid of my dad and his physical punishment. Apparently this is a key lynchpin criteria of an ADHD diagnosis. Never mind that I constantly got into minor trouble for never shutting up, or that I couldn’t sit still, or that I read literally every single book in the entire fiction section of my middle school library in the 3 years I attended that school. Never mind that ADHD-memes groups read like a structural study of my life.
Guess I’ll just fucking suffer I suppose 🤷
Wow, crime that wasn’t something that came up when I got my diagnosis. Impulsiveness, sure, but not criminal enterprise.
We all know the medical system is flawed and adopts a paternalist / validist approach to neurodiversity (not to mention straight up corruption by big pharma). I don’t want to fetishize self-diagnostic, but if I went to my doctor to say “I’m depressed”, nobody will doubt my experience, so why would it be any difference for neurodivergence.
Put simply, a large cohort of mental health providers will look at anyone asking about ADHD as if they are lying and just fishing for a prescription for stimulants. Especially if you look like you’re college age. So if you get unlucky with who you see when you finally go to get tested they might just take one look at you and decide “This person is looking for drugs” and ignore literally everything you present with because of it.
You very well still could be. Diagnosing conditions like these is very complicated when different things can present similarly, or even mask each other depending on their presentation. Autism and ADHD have a lot of overlap for example where it’s not uncommon for someone to have one and be mistakenly diagnosed with the other because of how their particular combination of strengths and deficits manifested. Then still other conditions can mask symptoms entirely that without them no one would ever guess that someone might have ADHD.
That’s what happened to my wife in fact. She joined a research study that was aiming to improve diagnosis for ADHD looking to be part of the control because she was reasonably certain she didn’t have ADHD.
We come to find out through participating in that study that no, she did in fact have ADHD and her severe OCD had just been masking it all her life. The second she got on a new medication that got her OCD more under control I got a front row seat to literally watch the things I struggle every day with just manifest in her like I’d given her the damn Curse of the Were-Fuckup.
Or maybe it’s time to understand that mental issues aren’t as clearcut as viruses that you can test in a lab. As long as we don’t understand the fine grain of how the whole brain work (and so far we only have ideas about it, not the whole story), the yes/no diagnostic will stay a dead end imo.
Sorry to hear you have trouble though, I hope you still lives ok <3 good luck!
While it’s a lovely notion that maybe one day we might live in a world that doesn’t otherize and pathologize the way the minds of neurodivergent people function. Or that maybe one day the whole of society might not be organized around the convenience and function of neurotypical people and I would love for either of those would either of those to be the case. The fact of the matter is that this is not the world we currently live in. So if someone with ADHD or Autism wanted support from this society in the form of say medication, or therapy, then in most cases they would need to still engage with that system that pathologizes the way their minds work and acquire a diagnosis.
So what good does it do to come into a conversation about the flaws in that diagnostic process and essentially just say “Well, maybe it shouldn’t be like that.” as if anyone here is in any position to just wave a magic wand and change the diagnostic criteria in the next edition of the DSM?
Is there such a thing as an “ADHD egg” 👀
Not really. We have: peer reviewed but undiagnosed, “I should get checked because these memes are too relatable”, good student if they applied themselves more; and a few other categories that I lost the focus to think about.
ND gang feel free to add to the list.
Illogical.
