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

[Anonymous]

@librarian_chef you may be right–I do recall a lot of cramming before exams, but the source of the focus was always getting good grades, proving Mrs. Tanchuck wrong, and making my dad proud. I can’t think of one time when I thought, “you know, if I get an A in this class, I’ll have a better chance of getting this job or that internship.” It wasn’t about planning or executive function.

REPORT ABUSE

[Bill]

Good point, LC! What we choose to remember can have a huge influence on how we feel about our past. I, too, choose not to dwell on the cramming, but on the fact that I got through and got the job I wanted, even if it would later prove to be totally wrong for me.

REPORT ABUSE

[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.

REPORT ABUSE

[billd]

Wow sugargremlin, the next to your last post really sums up a lot of me – driving issues, nodding off after an hour, this, for example, is me in many ways:

>>Some people on here talk about superior ability to multitask and finish work rapidly. or to work in fast-paced adrenaline fueled situations. Not me at all. I am the opposite. I am slow like a slug, I get lost in thought, I linger on tasks, I lose track of time, I have a lot of cognitive noise in which I have trouble making decisions,<<

krazykats’ post on school — I COULD have been a mostly A student. I was in areas I really enjoyed and applied myself. Science – with the right teacher, and I was an A student, almost anything shop-related, I was A student – however, I found the TEACHER had a huge impact on how I applied myself – depending on their personality and how they taught. 8th grade science he got REALLY deep, and did a lot of demonstrations – not lectures. Later on, however, it was a lot of lecture, and less demonstration. I had trouble even though I LOVE science.

Once I got to college – I was almost straight A. Frequent breaks and labs…….

One of the funniest parts comes from high school. I HATED English classes. but I needed another credit so I took of all things “survey of American Literature”. Yeah, it meant reading a lot of books, doing reports, passing tests on the books, questions about the author, etc.

I never read any of the books start to finish – often only skimmed if I read at all……. and I passed that class fairly easily. i was able to grasp what was going on even without reading a lot of them. Wow, was I lucky or what?

But put me into anything with grammar or spelling – I’d fail easily. I hated it – and all the rules with all the exceptions.

I nearly failed chemistry because the instructor forced us to MEMORIZE things – a lot of thing. I had trouble there.

I ran across a scrap book my mother gave me years ago – with report cards dating back into grade school. The comments I read now, wow, so ADHD! Talks out of turn, doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t get homework done on time…. the list goes on. Yet in later years, anytime I applied myself – I was successful. Key words there “apply myself”. If I was totally interested, or had something to prove, or wanted to be really certain it worked or succeeded – I would succeed.

REPORT ABUSE

[Anonymous]

I only have a couple of primary school reports and they are good, but I remember my mum helping me with big written projects. She would write out the info and I would copy it, then she would take over the writing (trying to make it look like mine!) when I gave up. I would then decorate the project, doing borders and sticking in magazine pictures (that my mum had found and cut out for me). I always struggled with written work – one high school teacher wrote that I just needed more confidence in my writing ability! Planning and writing essays was an executive function area that did eventually mature for me, when I was in my twenties, and I “got it” at long last – in time for my second attempt at uni. Grammar and spelling were never an issue for me though. I had a good feel for that side of English, maybe because of my extensive reading (another thing that was rarely an issue for me – reading was my escape, and still is, though I have always had times when I just cannot read due to distraction, or tiredness, or something else on my mind).

I also remember stressing about my times tables – we had a daily test on them in the morning, which is probably the only reason they eventually sank in to some degree (though I still have trouble with them to this day). Memorising has always been hard, though I have been taught some pretty neat tricks that have helped over the years. Mnemonics and stuff were used by many of my teachers, and that helped, as did visual imagery and diagrams (if I could visualise something, then I would remember it better). We were allowed to have formulae on hand for tests, so we didn’t have to memorise them, which saved my butt many times. Our science classes involved lots of hands on stuff, which was great, and so did our geography. We watched lots of movies for history. English was good because my love of reading made up for my poor writing. I just feel I got lucky much of the time, or I would have done much worse than I did. I am like you, billd, in that lab work and frequent breaks worked well for me when I was at uni. If uni had been set out like high school, then I would have failed more subjects than I did. The subjects I failed were the ones without lab work and that involved more memorising, and more assessed written work throughout the year.

REPORT ABUSE

[Author]

Posts