No s**t, Sherlock!

[ipsofacto]

ADHDwife, I think for a lot us older/late diagnosis people, the impulsiveness is not a blatant. It’s effects can be quite subtle, but still have a negative impact. Finances are a big problem simply because it’s the little things that add up.

As for thinking differently, it wasn’t until I got involved in instruction and teaching that I began to notice that difference. Modern instruction theory is based more on a whole brain experiential process. It made more sense to me than it seemed to for others. It wasn’t until my diagnosis, and then researching ADHD, that I understood why.

REPORT ABUSE

[Carry]

@ADHDWife Thanks so much for that article!

Love to get educated!!

Cheers!

REPORT ABUSE

[Anonymous]

What was the question again? Oh, yeah; I can see how somone lost in this world could turn to others of bad influence and/or drugs if lacking the proper instruction. My family has a generational culture of intellectualism and self-sufficiency; “the answer to any question can be found in a book”. After decades of my own research I now realize how tenaciously I adhere to “guidelines”. The Serenity Guideline, the Buddha Guideline, the Ferengi Rules of Aquisition (wha? there’s wisdom there). Like a life raft these help to guide my choices and “conform” so I can pass for normal.

I have had the same job at the same place for almost 12 years and with many of the same people I started with blessed by their acceptance and recognition of my abilities. Through that enviroment I have been able to find stability and raise my family, the next generation of ADDers.

REPORT ABUSE

[Carry]

That’s an awesome story, ksbarne!

It’s not all doom and gloom!

I like the thought of helping our ADD offspring have a good start, as if we’re a separate species..

REPORT ABUSE

[Anonymous]

Carry I just posted about raising my children now 28 & 31 in a positive ADD house in the thread titled……What if it’s how other people treat us that’s the biggest problem?

I speak to just that…..my experience anyway.

Toofat

REPORT ABUSE

[Anonymous]

I have mixed emotions about studies. Part of me is inclined to consider that a study of prison inmates may produce skewed results. It could also be considered a sample that has “self selected” by virtue of the fact it is made up only of people who chose to commit crimes.

Another part of me is brutally aware that a disproportionately high percentage of people in prison are:

people of color, or

grew up in poverty, or

had one or more absent parents, or

had negative experiences in public school (including poor academic performance) or

meet the diagnostic criteria for ADD or ADHD.

The bottom line with studies is that people are going to ignore what they want to ignore, and they’re going to promote what they want to promote.

I don’t have ADD or ADHD; I just live with someone whom I strongly suspect has ADD. After I saw the show on PBS last spring, I asked if he had ever thought he might have ADD. He wouldn’t talk about it and almost acted like I’d insulted him. Problems in our relationship recently brought up the topic again. This time, when I told him some of the things about him that cause me to think he probably has ADD, focusing mostly on the strengths, he said “why are those things bad?” I was really shocked, because he knows those things are part of why I’m attracted to him and I had never used the word “bad” in the discussion. I had, however, used the expression “ADD.”

That made me think about how one of the things going against ADD/ADHD might be nomenclature. That last “D” stands for “disorder” rather than “difference.” Sometimes those differences are intrusive and put one at a disadvantage, and that’s the part of ADD/ADHD that gets a lot of attention because it’s the part that causes people problems. Other times, those differences are a tremendous asset, and that’s the part of ADD/ADHD which is rarely acknowledged.

Another thing has to do with society’s need to label a small subset of people as “normal” and pigeonhole everyone else as “disordered.” In many ways, the “problem” isn’t the ADD or the ADHD. The problem is society’s need to pretend like people with ADD or ADHD aren’t “normal.”

I also think that once people hear a labeling term, such as a diagnosis or classification, they think (and therefore act as if) they know everything there is to know about any person who meets those parameters. For example, if you wear contact lenses and they know someone who wears contacts because he or she has astigmatism, then they’re certain you wear contact lenses because you have astigmatism. Just because some people who have ADD are impulsive or have short attention spans about some things doesn’t mean that all people who have ADD are impulsive and have short attention spans about everything.

My SO can be focused to the point of obsession on something, so much that I pray for a “squirrel” or “shiny thing” to come along and get him off of whatever he’s on about. Other times, he’ll say something so seemingly unrelated to anything else, I don’t know which left field that comment came from.

And, as my ADD coworker would tell me, “your two minutes are up.”

MissMuffins

REPORT ABUSE

[Carry]

You do describe a lot of symptoms that match the ones for AD(H)D. As far as the word ‘disorder’ is concerned. It is a disorder. You’re right to say that it’s a difference, but it’s when the difference starts interfering with a proper way of functioning when it’s becoming a disorderly. And when a specialist confirms the diagnose, then it’s AD(H)D.

Ofcourse it’s less strict in day to day conversation, but being afraid of words is only going to obscure the path to a better understanding of what it is you’re dealing with. And that goes for AD(H)D as wel as for an allergy to washing powder.

On a lot of fora we tend to discuss what’s bothering us, but there’s a lot of cheerfulness and good news here too.

So first thing’s first! Find out what it is, if it is what it is and then what it’s like! Even if you have it, you won’t know what it is until you get educated. And it it’s not ADD? That’s also good to know!

Good luck with that!

(p.s. a proper study will only draw conclusions from what they set out to investigate, and so should the people who read of them. usually they’re taking very small steps. the bigger picture will not come from a single study!)

REPORT ABUSE

[Anonymous]

One reason I shy away from words like “disorder” is that experts aren’t infallible. We have a lot of intelligent, talented, highly capable people who have a tremendous amount to offer the world who, rather than being cherished and set up to succeed, have been made instead to feel like failures because their brains didn’t work like someone else’s.

When terms such as Asperger’s, autism and ADD are seen as a means for better understanding one another and used to change systems rather than people, I’ll be less hesitant about using the word disorder. Right now, there are still too many people who are stuck on seeing diagnoses as excuses, cop-outs and total BS for me to be completely comfortable using “disorder” rather than “difference” in open society.

The arrival of my ADD books–“Driven to Distraction,” “Delivered from Distraction,” and “You Mean I’m not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!”–from Amazon prompted a good discussion with my significant other about ADD in general and specific manifestations of it within our relationship.

I realized after giving the two Hallowell/Ratey books the once-over, I probably have ADD, too. (Reading and comprehension aren’t issues for me. I learned to read easily, I read very quickly, and I have very good comprehension and retention.) I don’t know if his is worse than mine, or mine just shows up in different ways than his, but we’ve each been affected by it for as long as either of us can remember. We’ve both been described as distant, different, and daydreamers. We’re both creative, him more than me. He did not do well academically and hated school with a bloody passion. I loved school and maintained honor roll grades with little effort through high school graduation, but was always told I wasn’t performing up to my potential. Neither of us are hyperactive in the stereotypical sense, but we both do show signs of that as well. Me through excessive talking, him through excessive busywork.

We each developed different sets of coping skills and use them in different areas of our lives. He did best at jobs that required him to juggle several things at once, be physically active and set his own hours within reason. I also do best when I have several irons in the fire and rely heavily on organization, schedule and structure. The disastrous effects were, well, disasters.

We aren’t in a situation where one person sees it as a problem and the other doesn’t. We both want to do something about the clutter and the paperwork problem that has had such a longstanding negative effect on our respective financial situations. We both want a relationship that better reflects the feelings we have for each other, and we both want to put his online crap behind us.

We are scheduled to meet with a professional to begin work on this. I think we will get the most benefit by working with the same person in a coaching format, rather than working independently with different practitioners.

The books allowed us to actually talk about his 20-year string of failed relationships and one night stands, why he came to have 4 children with 3 different women, why he continued to engage in behavior he knew was risky, and why, before he got married, he’d never had a girlfriend or fiancee he’d never cheated on. He finally understood that I wasn’t asking about what he calls “his other life” to beat him up about it, but because it sheds light on why he was joining “cheating wife” dating sites now even though he knows it hurts our relationship and he doesn’t want to do that.

I don’t know if either of us is going to move forward with obtaining a professional diagnosis. Aside from the fact that we both have other medical conditions and need to be aware of it if those medications might make these symptoms worse, I don’t know what difference a professional confirmation of what we both already accept would make in our day-to-day lives. It’s not going to generate more income, it may very well generate more expense in the form of increased insurance premiums, and it’s not going to make other people stop being who they are.

We’ve each spent years taking antidepressants that didn’t work, or didn’t work as well as we’d hoped, or whose side effects we couldn’t tolerate. We are each now comfortable with how our individual depressive symptoms are being managed. We also know that lifestyle changes are as important, if not more important, than the meds. Neither of us feels that the other’s symptoms require more or different medication right now, and the history of our relationship is such that either of us would definitely lovingly tell the other if he or she needed to take or change their meds.

One of the things we want is to be better at taking care of each other. He and I each lack the ability to tell our bosses and coworkers no. As our relationship has developed, we’ve each become less hesitant to tell the other that no, we shouldn’t cover someone else’s shift or help them on that project. There have also been times when we each told the other that yes, we did need to report a coworker’s inappropriate behavior to human resources.

If I had it to do again, I would get either “Driven to Distraction” or “Delivered from Distraction” but not both. I’d get either “Married to Distraction” or “The ADHD Effect on Marriage” by Orlov instead.

MissMuffins

REPORT ABUSE

[Author]

Posts