78% of Children with ADD No Longer Have It as Adults
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
Low quality.
I mean naively speaking, we didn't evolve to sit in classrooms and read books, grow up and sit in the offices. So I would expect on spectrum of human temperaments, there must be a significant portion of people who are not cut for concentrating and calm-behavior.
Generally being skeptical about a lot of modern social "sciences" (potentially made for grants or big business, not reproducible, based on correlations), but aware of my ignorance here, I wonder if there is anything that would convince me that medicating my (hypotetical) hyper-active kid is justified, instead of pushing for environment in which the kid can just scream and run more.
In my experience the primary 'problem' is that I cannot direct my attention at will. I may want to read a book, I may be enjoying the book, but when I will myself to concentrate on the book my attention may or may not obey me.
From the outside, this can look like laziness, disinterest, etc, but fundamentally the difference is, what I want to concentrate on, and what I can concentrate on are not always the same thing. This is problematic in a variety of ways, and certainly does feel like a disorder when you experience it. If this mismatch between command and control was between say, my brain and my legs, then no one would ever question if it existed or not.
I've certainly found that my strategies for coping with this, and my ability to direct my attention have gotten better with age. It's unclear to me if this is due to hard work on my part, or a change in brain structure as I age.
Personally, I have found that medication is only a very small portion of my overall strategy, and I do think it is quite likely that sitting in a classroom 8 hours a day is just not something children, or really anyone is particularly well suited for. It's likely, I think, that we are over-prescribing and over-diagnosing things that should be considered 'normal' behavior in children.
Having said that, I am absolutely convinced that for some, medication is an effective and life changing tool as part of a larger strategy to cope with ADD.
I think of mine as requiring an attention threshold to be passed for me to switch tasks; the cost gets higher if what I'm doing is interesting to me (often more interesting than eating, which is a problem).
Stimulants raise my baseline interested score so that I only need something to be say 50 interesting score (+ 50 from stimulants) to switch tasks rather than 100 interesting score.
I have no idea how accurate this model is, but I do know that remembering to do anything administrative is difficult; even with reminders everywhere. Somehow I can always make time to marathon machine learning dev or video games though...
Edit: This study[1] claims in a rather offhand way that up to 65% of ADHD people keep it as adults. It also shows how feedback (making a task interesting IMO) is super important for us. Probably why I'm a good programmer and awful at lots of other things.