Mental illness, attention deficit disorder, and suffering

I have it, have had it since I was a kid, and it's moderately treatment resistant to boot, so I'm acutely aware of how much it sucks, and I wear it with pride. I don't take pride in my depression and mood disorders.

I think the big distinction, and what TFA is getting at, is ADHD actually is more like a true neurodiverty than a disorder. The dysfunction largely manifests due to the constraints in the modern world. I love making things but I hate "adulting" - bills, paperwork, keeping 9 million small things in order. Were I living in a hunter-gatherer or early agrarian society, things would be different.

I'm able to offset bad prioritization skills by being really good at breadth-first search and having a huge knowledge base from curiosity driven rabbit holes when I should be doing my "real" work. It feels much more balanced than depression, which just sucks the life out of me and reduces all aspects of quality of life across the board.

Do you ever feel like they are just weird manifestations of the accumulations of various stressors in life? Perhaps, there is nothing /neurologically/ different -- at least not to a significant enough degree? What then?

I am not trying to be all woo-woo about this, but we live in a time where technology, and not just recent technology, has propelled us far further than we ready for?

I had trouble sitting still and learning in school, but I was able to fake it enough to learn quickly enough to make it through undiagnosed. However, I still caused various other problems i.e. class clown with good enough grades to not get in trouble. Still, I always found school to be tortuous and stressful (I still would if I had to go back).

However, I like to take a step back when things that bothered me like what I mentioned above start to creep back into my mind -- If I were born 100, 200, ... , 9900, 10000 years ago, how much disorder would I have likely faced? I wouldn't have had trouble focusing in classrooms when there were no classrooms for the below average to average person like myself. How would my life have been? Would I have been 'normal?' If so, then maybe... I'm 'normal,' now?

I cannot speak for mental disorders, but I hope my fellows can find peace. We didn't choose this system, and this system doesn't care about us, but when the sun goes down, the moon comes out. I feel like I have a duty to myself to enjoy life, normal or not, because really... It's not like anything life matters anyway.

Thanks for sharing! This is incredibly relatable. One of my hallmarks has always been intensity. I rarely half-ass anything, and when I do, it's almost astonishingly mediocre. But normally it rockets between obsession and extreme apathy. Emotional reactions to anything are always 200%.

Thanks for sharing, I really appreciated the last half. Good thoughts generally One downside I think after reading here is that there is some wacko in the first half of the post that I feel compelled to comment on a few things.

Hyperfocus is a symptom of ADHD proper. Stimulants can also make you feel hyperfocused. However, the general reported effects of stimulants are a feeling of "normalcy", not hyperfocus as a result of stimulants. Many people taking stimulants are still symptomatic, albeit managed, meditation long term is generally an excruciatingly (if excruciating) adjunct to stimulants.

Second, Adderall often gives the feeling of superfocus and speed to neurotypical individuals but has been statistically shown to give little gain in practice in terms of certain raw metrics. A very strong dopaminergic placebo, as it were. I'd suspect the reason for it being considered effective is that it keeps you glued on tasks for significantly longer than otherwise . It's not propaganda, it's science, you can look at the studies yourself, it's pretty drastic. However there may be another layer on top of that that that could be propagandizing what is otherwise a valid scientific distinction.

Much agreed in the last half, I've seen a lot of subclinical dissociative like disorders fall into ADHD, or DPDR, when really there is probably a core condition and several other families lumped in. Such is always the curse of dimensionality reduction. A more root-cause preserving descriptive language set that doesn't rely on the anchor of billing codes would open up the scientific fields a lot. Language determines nomenclature, which determines assumed avenues of exploration. A dimension reduced model of mental health along symptomatic axes will almost always destroy symptom and condition "root cause" linkage. Additionally like you noted anxiety and depression are more symptoms of traumatic disorders and less actual disorders in and of themselves. My pet theory is that's one reason why "depression" is so hard to cure, imagine trying to generically cure "fever" instead of making vaccines, etc.

Ramble over! I think (especially later on) we think pretty similarly!

> High five, fellow PhD dropout. :(

High five back to you. No shame in that game. I’m mostly just glad to have learned that my issues weren’t just because I was “lazy” but because my brain just doesn’t work that way. I learned something about myself, even if it cost me a few years to learn it!

And I wish you all the best. When those coping mechanisms run out, they run out hard. My wife is an attorney, and one of her best friends at work clearly has undiagnosed ADHD. We both keep pushing her to talk to someone about it because I know the day is coming when she’s going to hit that wall, and I seriously don’t wish it on anyone. It’s bad. When it happened to me, I had no idea what was going on. I’d always been able to just get things done (albeit in absolute panic mode), and then suddenly I just wasn’t able to. Keep fighting, my friend.