If only people in the shithole where i live could be a little bit more understanding and empathetic as much as you are guys...
ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)
421–430 of 453 posts
Re: ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)
#422I am surprised nobody has mentioned Gabor Mate's book Scattered Minds (Scattered in the US) which talks about his theory that AD(H)D is just a cope mechanism derived from childhood attachment issues or trauma with their primary caretakers. After being diagnosed with ADD, and having rejected drugs, this is the first text that has allowed me to first get all the puzzle pieces in front of me and then let me build a prop…
Thank you for this recommendation. Just bought the book. Would love to hear Mate do a talk with Russell Barkley.
Re: ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)
#423I prefer diet and exercise over stimulants, but it's HARD to maintain.
There is science behind the former though:
+ Hunter, fighter, wader theory; having ADHD got us out of our caves and increased random or policy driven exploration [1]
+ ADHD has benefits to society through neurodiversity [2]
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8955426 [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1578754/
Re: ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a useful truth, at least not in the way you've characterized it. It think it is much more useful to think of things as they are rather than as what they are not. In this example: I think it is more useful to think "what is causing my ADHD behaviour?" Rather than using the explanatory model "I am behaving like this because of ADHD." The former can lead to finding models that allows one to mitigate ADHD behavi…
> I think it is more useful to think "what is causing my ADHD behaviour?" Rather than using the explanatory model "I am behaving like this because of ADHD." > The former can lead to finding models that allows one to mitigate ADHD behaviour. The later leads to the same thing over and over. If you don't have ADHD or a similar disability, then in the best possible way, what you think is useful doesn't really matter. Wha…
You are 100% wrong. And deadly wrong.
My son was diagnosed with severe ADHD by one neuropsychologist. Medication was strongly recommended. He was then brought to a psychiatrist, the best in my area to the point where he is well-known, and he said that my son actually has General Anxiety Disorder. His ADHD-like behavior is caused because of severe anxiety.
If we had treated him as severe ADHD, he would have gone on medication. The medication would have exacerbated his anxiety and caused worse behavior and we would have increased the dose. The entire thing would have ruined his childhood from the misdiagnosis.
So you are very wrong. The cause of the ADHD behavior is required. There are many children who would benefit from medication. But many children would have their lives ruined by the medication as well if misdiagnosed.
That’s why I was saying it’s a collection of symptoms and because it’s up to individual therapists to diagnose, it gets misdiagnosed very very often.
Re: ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's less of an attention deficit and more of an _intention_ deficit.
There's plenty of intent. Just no ability to connect that to outcomes.
Yes, that's what I meant -- sorry if it was unclear. You know what you need to do, but you are unable to use that knowledge to do the thing.
Re: ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)
#426ADHD is not a disease. It’s a collection of symptoms that have been arbitrarily grouped together. My son’s psychiatrist who was diagnosing my son for ADHD said that it’s psychiatry’s dirty little secret. Back in the 60s or 70s ( I can’t remember what he said) people were starting to notice that kids were having behavioral problems, trouble focusing etc. So what they did was collect a group of symptoms, and then arbit…
This is wrong, studies have shown that ADHD brains are fundamentally different from non-ADHD brains in the sense that they have reduced frontal lobe (read: executive functioning, ie. cognitive inhibition, working memory, decision making) matter.
No you are wrong. The fact that ADHD is a mostly subjective collection of behavioral traits, many people get lumped in as ADHD. So many people called ADHD would have normal brains.
There are a core set of people who definitely have brains that are different and need medication etc.But the way it is currently diagnosed lumps too many people and makes it useless to call all people with ADHD the same.
My son with Generalized Anxiety Disorder was diagnosed with severe ADHD. This is the problem because many things can cause the same set of behaviors so a diagnosis of ADHD is not accurate enough.
Re: ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unless it happens to magically coincide with their hyper-focus topic of the moment! It's funny. People with ADHD suffer from attention deficit but at the same time they display hyperattention when they encounter a subject they like. I've experienced it as well: once I start programming I have no problem doing it for 12 hours straight. I've found this trait in many ADHD patients. There's usually something that reall…
I have a pet theory that it's much easier for ADHD people to enter Flow state. But also that Flow state is often a bad way to write code. One, virtually everyone has a tremendous case of Sunk Cost Fallacy around things done in Flow state. If someone spent 10 hours in a week working on code that you say is badly conceived in a code review, you'll get pushback and grumbling. Argue with someone who did the PR in a singl…
A study was done to pay people to build sand castles. In the experimental group, the people were told afterwards to knock down their sand castle (because the researchers said they wanted a different sand castle or something to that effect). In the control group, people were also told to build a new sand castle but in a different spot and so they would leave their other castle there. In the experimental group, people became very very demotivated and felt that their work was pointless and boring. It doesn't matter if you're ADHD or not, if your expectations are greater than reality and you have to kick your sandcastle over after building it, you're not going to do as well at your job.
As a code reviewer they should be giving you a compliment sandwich where the criticism or constructive feedback is placed in between two compliments. As a coder, I've found adding async and await to functions does a lot to make your code look sexier to code reviewers even if it doesn't have a perceptible performance impact on non-network calls.
If I were to comment on a new plan for you, I'd say let flow state be your friend and not your enemy. After all, you have a chair you probably have to sit in for ~8 hours a day while you stare at a computer screen full of code and that's hard for anyone to do for that long let alone someone with ADHD. Flow state will give you an advantage over others. Invariably, your flow state will break. Use that time to spend more time talking to the stakeholders in your group because sometimes stakeholders want what they want and nothing else. They'll appreciate the time you took to listen to them, they'll trust and believe in you more (instead of you being an unknown variable), they'll be more confident that they'll get what they want, and you'll benefit from the confirmation bias. If you deliver what they want, it's less likely that their sandcastle will get kicked over -- though still not unlikely.
Re: ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always think that when people start a comment so aggressively it’s not really worth responding. However, that aside: I’m not “fallaciously” anything! I responded to a question that was posed “could you explain away depression with a similar argument” with a relevant piece of information. You seem to think I’m arguing depression doesn’t exist. I am not. Forgive me if that was how it appeared, but please, for everyon…
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be aggressive. As someone with ADHD and a history of depression (misdiagnosed as having bipolar disorder at one point), this is an emotive topic for me.
That's OK - and I very much appreciate the apology. I also have ADHD and one of the most important people in my life suffers from a combination of complex mental health disorders which are sometimes absolutely crippling (and was also misdiagnosed for years), so my intent was absolutely not to say that these things don't exist.
Re: ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's another weird factor. Ritalin is an upper and it's stigmatized to take an upper - either your performance, judged by coworkers, will be equivalent or below theirs and the stimulant is seen as the only thing keeping you in your job (which can get super depressing internally) - or, if you're doing well in your position, it can breed internal and external doubt as to whether your performance would just be normal…
> Ever spent a day off staring at a wall dreading the possibility that you might waste a day until you realize the sun has gone down? Yup, so much fun. This is literally every Saturday for me. I'm thinking about keeping my Ritalin by my bed. I don't understand why it's so difficult and it makes me really frustrated - I just can't get out of bed. I try to wake up and my mind goes "naw". I sit up to get out of bed, sit…
The FDA recently approved a drug for this scenario: https://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/home/topics/adhd/jornay-pm...
It’s an extended release methylphenidate that you take at night time, and 12ish hours later it actually takes effect.
Re: ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a pet theory that it's much easier for ADHD people to enter Flow state. But also that Flow state is often a bad way to write code. One, virtually everyone has a tremendous case of Sunk Cost Fallacy around things done in Flow state. If someone spent 10 hours in a week working on code that you say is badly conceived in a code review, you'll get pushback and grumbling. Argue with someone who did the PR in a singl…
A study was done to pay people to build sand castles. In the experimental group, the people were told afterwards to knock down their sand castle (because the researchers said they wanted a different sand castle or something to that effect). In the control group, people were also told to build a new sand castle but in a different spot and so they would leave their other castle there. In the experimental group, people…
5-10 years ago there was a study that said that contrary to common wisdom, 20 minutes is not the minimum necessary to get cardio benefits from exercise. 3x7 minutes also works. This changed my life. I'd gotten so out of shape that 12 minutes hurt, and also if you disappear at work for 25 minutes at a stretch people will talk. 8 minutes twice a day and once after work is easy.
Getting away from the desk for 5 minutes can give you a lot of perspective, and unstick you from a host of problems. I think if I go back (when I go back?) I'll find a pomodoro app that lets you customize the intervals.
I think I agree with everything except this:
> As a code reviewer they should be giving you a compliment sandwich where the criticism or constructive feedback is placed in between two compliments.
Manageable when the code review is 50 lines. Not so easy to do when it's over 500 lines. Damned awkward when the person outranks you, too. I don't know where the cutoff is, but I feel like there's a point where this advice feels like victim blaming, or at least codependency. Don't put your coworkers in this situation, please.
As for knocking over the sandcastle, I agree this is something all humans wrestle with, maybe developers especially. Almost nobody wants to accept that their code is ephemeral. We always push back. Zen or a little horticulture can give you perspective. Kids might too, but that takes decades to play out. Plants are always changing, and they'll never be exactly the way you picture them in your head for longer than a moment. They're alive, and making them 'do' anything is a negotiation that often goes in directions you didn't anticipate. For good or ill.