Is ADHD associated with heredity? How does one go about getting oneself tested - if I am (and I fit a lot of symptoms) I would want to ensure my kids get the right sort of help early.
ADHD Is Fuel for Adventure
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Re: ADHD Is Fuel for Adventure
#32I think this is an excellent way to help some kids cope with adhd, but I definitely don't think it'd work universally. Reading this made me think back on my own struggle with adhd. A few years ago I was diagnosed with adhd at the age of 23, and god damn do I wish it happened a decade sooner, but my parents were the type that didn't believe in that kind of stuff, so I was just lazy. It's stuck with me to this day even…
What are your coping methods?
Re: ADHD Is Fuel for Adventure
#33I think this is an excellent way to help some kids cope with adhd, but I definitely don't think it'd work universally. Reading this made me think back on my own struggle with adhd. A few years ago I was diagnosed with adhd at the age of 23, and god damn do I wish it happened a decade sooner, but my parents were the type that didn't believe in that kind of stuff, so I was just lazy. It's stuck with me to this day even…
> but my parents were the type that didn't believe in that kind of stuff, so I was just lazy.
You're not the only one: I failed many high school courses because I couldn't focus on getting the homework done. Official Parental diagnosis: Lazy $*#@. And my mother was even trained to identify mental problems like this, but developed a blindness to my symptoms.
Re: ADHD Is Fuel for Adventure
#34Orthogonal. Having ADHD doesn't imply a desire to be outside playing. It's a disorder of motivation, not a disorder of focus—an inability to practice , and sometimes to concentrate ; but not an inability to think, or to enjoy thinking. Personally, in my childhood, I liked math and science. I had (and still have) ADHD, which made that hard, but I struggled through, because that was my passion. Medication (which I didn…
Not to discount your experiences, but that's not at all how I've felt as a sufferer of ADHD (nor my parents or my son). I would describe the feeling of ADHD not as lack of motivation but severe, almost physical, discomfort at attempts to concentrate. If you've ever suffered from nerve pain, you may know what I'm talking about. It's not quite analogous, since the ADHD discomfort is more of a strong, distracting 'itch'…
Your and my descriptions feel so qualitatively different that I've got to wonder if fundamentally different things are going on between the two.
A previous HN thread had a lot of people comparing ADHD to the effect of chronic sleep debt, with the suggestion that ADHD could be an effect of the inability to enter deep sleep. "Like never having slept enough" isn't an analogy I would make for my symptoms, but it would seem to fit yours much more closely.
As a probing guess, are your symptoms helped more by NRI-class drugs? From what I know about norepinephrine, it governs whether moment-to-moment attention will tend to fixate or drift. The symptoms of both that, and the disorder of motivation, seem to get conflated as "ADHD" for some reason.
Re: ADHD Is Fuel for Adventure
#35Slightly off-topic, but I have seem some great responses here I would like to add a somehow controversial comment. I have a 10 year old kid diagnosed with severe ADHD-Inattentive type. He is on meds and behavioral therapy, and I must agree with most of the posts that meds is a must for these kids. My very personal an unscientific explanation is that ADHD is not a disease in the traditional sense; instead, it is just…
I feel like the best tech analogy would be ADHD is like a GPU, great with lots of independent parallel tasks, but not as good as a CPU for tasks that have many interdependent steps.
Re: ADHD Is Fuel for Adventure
#36Is ADHD associated with heredity? How does one go about getting oneself tested - if I am (and I fit a lot of symptoms) I would want to ensure my kids get the right sort of help early.
Yes, it appears to be hereditary, however no single gene has been implicated. There is also no subjective test, but if you see a psychiatrist they can usually diagnose you be asking questions about your symptoms. This can be problematic because some insururers won't pay for amphetamines to treat a condition that can be "faked".
Re: ADHD Is Fuel for Adventure
#37ADHD has severe consequences on children: less happiness, less self control, more aggressiveness, higher risk of substance abuse and in general much lower grades. Unless a new treatment can demonstrate that it can reduce these consequences as well as medication does in the majority of cases, let's stick with the treatment that works, shall we?
In addition, I would like to see more articles about the dangers of misdiagnosis of adhd. There are a lot a conditions that can be mistaken for adhd( sleep disorders to overactive thyroid). The articles that try to glorify it really annoy me, I can't come up with a single benefit of adhd in my life.
I'd say hyperthyroidism is difficult to overlook. At least I hope nobody is started on long term stimulant treatment without routinely checking simple blood parameters.
Re: ADHD Is Fuel for Adventure
#38I think this is an excellent way to help some kids cope with adhd, but I definitely don't think it'd work universally. Reading this made me think back on my own struggle with adhd. A few years ago I was diagnosed with adhd at the age of 23, and god damn do I wish it happened a decade sooner, but my parents were the type that didn't believe in that kind of stuff, so I was just lazy. It's stuck with me to this day even…
I'm probably in the same boat. I see myself as a firefighter, things don't get my attention until their burning down, then I perform miracles to save them. Every few months my utility bills don't get paid until they turn it off.
Personal relationships degrade until the point they are about to fall apart, then a blast of attention brings them back to normal. I'm a disorganized mess but when the right moment hits, I can do in a day what would take someone else a month to do.
Unfortunately I have nearly zero trust in the psychiatric community, and little trust in the medical community. There's too much overmedication/overdiagnosis in a attempt to CYA, limit liability, and in some cases, profit. I'm always suspicious of anyone who could be motivated to prescribe medication or treatment by a factor other than solely my well being(I reworded that sentence several times trying to decrease ambiguity...hopefully it makes sense). Full courses of antibiotics are prescribed for a runny nose, hearing tests ordered for mild congestion. I've seen kids diagnosed with ADHD and medicated into submission when all they needed was good parenting and a structured environment. A family member adopted 3 children from 3 different families. Wouldn't you know all 3 of them 'had' ADHD. If they started making noise or acting like kids, she would say 'oh, it must be time for their medication'. I've mentioned this to a couple of MD acquaintances. One of their responses were "She's convinced something is wrong. If I don't prescribe something, she will just go down the list of doctors until she finds one that will. Then I'll be the bad doctor for not doing something. The buck might as well stop here."
In any case of my condition being real, I have a fear of dependency. I'm scared that if I finally do submit and take medication, I will become dependent on it. I know my propensity to addiction and have vigorously avoided all drugs, including alcohol, except OTC painkillers and occasionally some cold symptom medication my entire life. I'm not concerned with becoming addicted to adderall/ritalin/etc... -- I'm concerned that it will eliminate what little control I've managed to exert over the issue and I don't want to take it for the rest of my life.
Your story about being able to wean yourself from it with little negatives while still maintaining the benefits may have given me the confidence to take the next step and try to get help.
Re: ADHD Is Fuel for Adventure
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to discount your experiences, but that's not at all how I've felt as a sufferer of ADHD (nor my parents or my son). I would describe the feeling of ADHD not as lack of motivation but severe, almost physical, discomfort at attempts to concentrate. If you've ever suffered from nerve pain, you may know what I'm talking about. It's not quite analogous, since the ADHD discomfort is more of a strong, distracting 'itch'…
Your and my descriptions feel so qualitatively different that I've got to wonder if fundamentally different things are going on between the two. A previous HN thread had a lot of people comparing ADHD to the effect of chronic sleep debt, with the suggestion that ADHD could be an effect of the inability to enter deep sleep. "Like never having slept enough" isn't an analogy I would make for my symptoms, but it would se…
I have what you have, and not what app22213 has, and I wonder the same.
Re: ADHD Is Fuel for Adventure
#40I think this is an excellent way to help some kids cope with adhd, but I definitely don't think it'd work universally. Reading this made me think back on my own struggle with adhd. A few years ago I was diagnosed with adhd at the age of 23, and god damn do I wish it happened a decade sooner, but my parents were the type that didn't believe in that kind of stuff, so I was just lazy. It's stuck with me to this day even…
> but my parents were the type that didn't believe in that kind of stuff, so I was just lazy. You're not the only one: I failed many high school courses because I couldn't focus on getting the homework done. Official Parental diagnosis: Lazy $*#@. And my mother was even trained to identify mental problems like this, but developed a blindness to my symptoms.
Tests are the only way I passed highschool. If I got a teacher that required homework as a significant portion of the grade, I would fail that class. Leave me alone, let me sleep through class, then give me the test and let me go. Thankfully homework was usually only 20-30% of the grade, so the little I did along with my test scores passed me in most classes with a C. I managed to fail 7 classes in 4 years and still graduated with a 3.08, thanks to summer school and the extra points from honors/AP classes.