Re: If ADHD describes the symptoms, are we all suffering from the same thing?

[Anonymous]

I was mostly an A student too. I found school incredibly easy and I liked the work in general. I handed in papers late, I daydreamed in class, I lost my homework, but I breezed through my class work and pulled off amazing results in written tests because they were the style of assessment I cope well with (short answer and multi choice). I also picked up concepts quickly, so could afford the daydream time. To top it all off, my motivating factor was that my mother taught at my school, so there was always the threat of her hanging over me (not that the teachers said it, but I knew she would find out if I had failed to complete an assignment and I would wear it in the car on the ride home!). It wasn’t until the later years in high school that the wheels started falling off, because suddenly I found the work hard and required effort on my part. Then I hit uni and started failing classes – though I still passed a subject without handing in a major assignement because I enjoyed the subject and did well in the exam.

That said, I also remember my mum helping me with my projects in primary school, because the volume of written stuff required just overwhelmed me….but I was in an advanced student program too. I sucked at times tables and mental maths, but I was brilliant at maths overall. The ADHD traits were all there (even my mum, who taught me once or twice, put on my report that I could do better if I stopped daydreaming and applied myself!!), but were well hidden due to my love of learning and high intelligence. I couldn’t keep friends, I had sleep disturbances, I daydreamed my life away, I had incomplete hobby projects everywhere, my room was a tip, I was never happy on weekends unless I could get out of the house and DO something. I think that I could say that while I was an A student, I could have done so much better – I was more than capable of being accelerated, of being dux of class, of getting honours at uni, but I just fluffed along doing what I could do with ease and not trying hard.

Okay, I will admit that I have also not been officially diagnosed with ADHD, though it is in the works (slowly!), but all the online tests I have done say conclusively that I show signs of ADHD and should be seeking medical assistance, and I got my hubby to fill an extensive test in, just in case I was biased in some way, and his report of me also showed I had an overwhelming likelihood of ADHD (he highlighted even more things than I did!) and that was without answering all the questions about the way I think, because he could only guess at that. And the signs have been there since I was young, on my reports and in my social history.

LC, when I compared ADHD to dementia, I didn’t intend that ADHD and dementia were similar disorders in terms of symptoms. I was more looking at the way they were classified, and the way they could both potentially be disorders of different parts of the brain with similar symptoms (ie. one form of dementia has overlapping symptoms to another form of demetia, NOT to ADHD, and that ADHD could be the same in that there could be different forms of ADHD with overlapping symptoms). I used dementia as an example because I am familiar with it, not because I thought it could be classified as a disorder in the same category as ADHD.

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