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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Some accessibility/disability advocates are big on touting "the hidden benefits of x condition". I've seen a lot of this in the dyslexia community (see The Dyslexic Advantage [1] for a full-throated example), and I understand why books/articles like this are popular. They especially appeal to parents, even if the underlying logic isn't the most sound—and often it isn't.

This is the first time I've seen the "hidden benefits" notion asserted in the ADHD context. Based on my conversations with people with ADHD (I work for an assistive tech startup [2], so run into lots of them), there is not much of a perception that ADHD provides them a net benefit.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Dyslexic-Advantage-Unlocking-Hidden-P...

2: http://www.beelinereader.com

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Sure, because they can't really compare; they've never been anybody else. ADHD is mainly talked about as the set of negatively-experienced differences. It's easy to see the good parts as just their personality.

But the notion that it has benefits is hardly new. In the classic book "Driven to Distraction," the author a psychiatrist who also has ADHD, wrote about discovering ADHD: "I knew I was a slow reader [...] but I never had understood why I came up with different ways of solving problems, why I had an intuitive approach to so much, why I tended to think outside the box, why I could be so impatient so often, why I was so quick to draw conclusions, why I had an oddball sense of humor, and so on."

He writes a longer article on the benefits of ADHD here, and makes clear that the negative traits are also often the positive traits: http://www.hallowellnyc.com/HallowellNYC/LivingwithADD/Benef...

So, being incapable of working in a modern corporation is a... good thing? I would have to disagree. Remember, we're not a hunter-gatherer society anymore; anyone optimized for that kind of society (not that I believe ADHD would have offered any real benefits in such a society either) would not work well in our current society.

I'm sure many with split personality disorder are capable of deluding themselves into thinking its a good thing too.

We are capable of succeeding in modern corporations. I have met plenty of other people with ADHD at Netflix, Google and now Apple.

Edit: I was diagnosed with ADHD by neurologist and psychiatrist.

Me too (diagnosed ADHD, work in tech)! Prior to being medicated, however, I was frequently on the verge of being being disciplined or fired for being incapable of completing some projects.

Medication made it possible to turn it into a reliable career with promotion paths.

That said, "incapable" was a poor word choice. Not entirely inaccurate, however. I know of many people who end up shifting jobs a lot - smart but lazy is how the upper management sees them.

My managers might want to fire me at times (and some have tried and failed) but ultimately I think I have enough value that it is worth keeping me around.

I am glad to see medication is helpful for you! I have tried it, but I didn't feel like the benefits outweighed the risks (the irony).

>So, being incapable of working in a modern corporation is a... good thing?

I'm not on the "ADHD is a good thing" side of this, but the argument you're implying has some serious problems. First of all, who says that people with ADHD are incapable of working in a modern corporation? Secondly, you're examining only one side of what is asserted to be a tradeoff. There are certainly other ways to be successful in life than working at a corporation, and if ADHD provides an advantage on those other paths, then it could clearly be considered a good thing.

> who says that people with ADHD are incapable of working in a modern corporation

ADHD is a disorder whose primary feature is the inability to control concentration. It's a disorder because the feature is strong enough that a person has trouble interacting with society without help. So, someone who is diagnosed with ADHD has trouble interacting with society without help.

There is no modern institution which supports an inability to control concentration as a money provider. Paintings need to be completed. Novels need to be completed. Abstract thoughts need to be written down.

Any advantage experienced by those with ADHD is also experienced by those who have trouble directing their concentration, but not to a severe enough degree to require assistance interacting with society. I can bet a lot of folks with ADHD would rather live at that point on the spectrum.

There is nothing in the definition of a mental disorder that implies that a person requires assistance to interact with society. You can certainly have ADHD while being capable of coping on your own.

The DSM-IV definition for ADHD requires "clinically significant impairment in social, academic or occupational environments".

This was (somewhat controversially) softened to "clear evidence that the symptoms interfere with, or reduce the quality of, social, academic, or occupational functioning" in DSM-V (2013).

Right: impairment, interference, and reduced quality. Not inability to function.

For sure. And I think it's important to note that in a disorder characterized by a mismatch between a person and their environment, changing the environment can apparently make the disorder disappear.

For example, imagine a musician with ADHD. They might struggle a good deal in school, which requires doing a lot of to-them-boring stuff. But once they're out of school, they might be perfectly good at earning a living, because the environment they create is suited to their approach to the world.

I was talking just recently with a software developer with ADHD. They preferred a pair programming environment because that was much more engaging to them than solo coding.

'Inability to function' is a straw man, 'requires assistance' was what you claimed was nowhere implied by the definition of a mental disorder.

One could certainly exhibit ADHD-like _symptoms_ while still being capable of coping on their own (= low 'impairment'), but an ADHD diagnosis would be incorrect in this case [1]. By definition (DSM-IV Criterion D 'clinically significant impairment'), an ADHD diagnosis is appropriate only when the symptoms cause severe enough impairment that require assistance (e.g., 'clinical intervention') to function.

[1] See e.g., "Symptoms Versus Impairment: The Case for Respecting DSM-IV’s Criterion D", http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.893...

Well, "incapable of working in a modern corporation" was the original claim.

> One could certainly exhibit ADHD-like _symptoms_ while still being capable of coping on their own (= low 'impairment'), but an ADHD diagnosis would be incorrect in this case [1].

I don't see how your source backs this statement up. Yes, it's possible to have many symptoms but low impairment, but your premise that "capable of coping on one's own" is the same as "low impairment" is simply false.

“There is no modern institution which supports an inability to control concentration as a money provider.”

Are you sure about that?

idk re: corporation, but look at the studies assessing unemployment rate of ADHD+ people. it's something ridiculously higher than the normal population.

Sure, and that's a good argument that the tradeoff isn't worth it in modern society. But what the previous commenter said was not.

Is it ADHD, or something else, that results in the widespread inability nowadays to keep two mutually-contradictory-yet-both-true viewpoints in your head at the same time? Or a set of pros and a set of cons? Almost everything in reality is of a mixed nature, so what makes people want to believe a false model of reality where everything is either good or bad, and must be sorted neatly into one or the other category immediately? Is it a need for certainty? For being right? You will find a shortage of both in life.

Who says they're incapable? I know plenty of people who do it. I have done it.

Further, as I mention elsewhere, it's true that we're not a hunter-gatherer society anymore. But neither are we a farming society. As we automate more and more of the boring stuff, I think we are, cognitively, moving in a direction where hunter-gather cognition fits in much better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16607911

"Incapable of working in a modern corporation." Holy hell man, this is some 1950s era able-ist nonsense. "Oh no, they have 'something wrong with them', it's sad that they'll spend the rest of their lives in a living hell they can't escape, unable to contribute or function in society."

I can point you to a zillion people with ADHD who hold high positions in modern corporations, and a zillion more who do excellent work. ADHD is just a different way the brain works, there are many highly effective coping mechanisms to deal with it. And ADHD does have some real benefits as well, such as hyperfocus and creativity.

Also, I should note that there are a ton of people who don't even know they have ADHD simply because they don't understand what it looks like, and they naturally developed coping mechanisms that allowed them to be highly productive. ADHD doesn't look like the cartoon pop-culture version its portrayed as. It's not like some uncontrollable child bouncing off the walls and unable to concentrate on anything.

For myself, I didn't realize I had ADHD until I was 40. Why would I suspect? I graduated college at 20 (with a degree in Mathematics), I learned about turing machines in high school on my own time, I read textbooks for fun, I love science and math, I can get lost in good books or studying quite easily. But those are, actually, signs of ADHD, which is a horribly mis-named condition, it's not about a deficit of attention it's about interest-based attention. If I'm interested in something then I can immerse myself in it quite easily, dedicate hours to study, churn through dense written material, iterate through "boring" repetitive tasks, etc. But if I'm not interested in something then forcing myself to do it can be like pulling teeth.

This made me think about a verse from Auden's poem "Under Which Lyre--A Reactionary Tract for the Times":

  The sons of Hermes love to play
  And only do their best when they
     Are told they oughtn't;

  Apollo's children never shrink
  From boring jobs but have to think
     Their work important.

http://members.wizzards.net/~mlworden/atyp/auden.htm

i don't buy this argument by hallowell for a second, and here's why:

jobs don't need creativity in the quantities that adhd people muster by default. they need, let's say, 5 units of creativity, not 50000 -- that many leads to being outside of the room when the job only requires you to be near the edge of a box in the room.

thinking "outside the box" is a hindrance. most people can't get on your level, and you can't bring yourself to where your thoughts really make sense to them. the point is that with adhd, it isn't a choice to make. they can't control whether to be inside the box, outside the box, or even in the same building as the (conceptual) box.

if it were a choice to make, it'd just be an advantage.

This strikes me as an over-broad picture of both jobs and ADHD. In practice there's great variation in both the amount of creativity that jobs need and in the ability of people with ADHD to present as normal when needed.

I'd be especially curious as to the data behind your sweeping statement that "they can't control whether to be inside the box, outside the box, or even in the same building as the (conceptual) box". That's not my experience, now how the people with ADHD I know behave, and it's not what the ADHD literature I'm familiar with says. I'm sure it's true about somebody, but I strongly doubt it's close to everybody.

easy: attentional control and mindset control are executive functions.

ADHD is an extreme deficit of executive functions.

http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-19094-002

I've heard this "ADHD could be an advantage" trope for decades. On net, I don't think it's usually the case for people with diagnosed ADHD, although I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of variance, especially in what I suspect is a pretty large undiagnosed population.

I was on ADHD medication for many years, and on balance, I'd probably still choose to use it if it didn't make my anxiety so unmanageable. These days I manage it with nicotine, which is an imperfect but working solution.

I find that hyperfocus has become predictable enough for me that I can benefit from it while reliably avoiding the behaviors that cause it (edit: confusing phrasing; I mean can avoid it when I don't want it). In that sense, ADHD may be a benefit to me, but I don't know if it's worth the drawbacks. But if I could open up my source code and do some tweaking, I'd fix the anxiety long before I worried about the ADHD.

You should ask your psych to look into something like Intuniv if you haven't already tried it. It seems to be a very promising medication - even if it's off label use for adult adhd - where you can even use it as an adjuvant to a low dose stimulant. I know a fair number of folks that have success tackling adhd and comorbid anxiety with certain nonstimulants.

ADD has certain strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses can be counteracted with a well-titrated dose of CNS stimulants without fully cancelling out the strengths.

The strengths include (paradoxically) the ability to hyperfocus to a greater degree than non-ADDers and the ability to achieve peak performance in short-term crisis situations instead of freaking out.

The article does clarify that this is with regards to moderate ADHD. In my personal opinion, most psychology disorders were named to differentiate from "normal". Who defines normal?

Society, ultimately. Psychologists and psychiatrists just look at the population and identify the cliffs between "able to operate in society" and "not able to operate in society without assistance". Those diagnosed with ADHD are those who are in the "not able to operate without help" category.

I underwent cognitive testing for ADHD,and it was more rigorous a process than I expected.

They administered a battery of tests, among them a few controls to screen for malingerers. Each was narrow enough of a task to believably evaluate a specific aspect of cognitive ability.

The results were evaluated against the broader population of people with similar levels of intelligence

So, for example, in one test, the task is to sum a continuing stream of spoken digits. Apparently, the test includes a distribution of other' performance,and that distribution defines 'normal.' performing worse than the mean (or whatever measure) is therefore abnormal and, potentially, indicative of some disorder or another.

Tl;Dr they use ostensibly reliable statistical methods to define 'normal'

Additionally the difference needs to be a std deviation or two away from the normal population. ADHD in particular has effects on specific sub-tests in IQ exams. It’s quite a clear pattern which emerges as the ares of IQ dealing with multiple conflicting inputs tend to be standard deviation below the rest of the sub-tests norms for a person. Unfortunately I don’t know the appropriate literature to cite. Another test which is used is response times to an onscreen test.

Is there an explanation of what a "beelinereader" is? Their website is heavy on the selling and lacking on the details and I'm not installing something blindly.

It rotates font color among successive sentences.

The website describes it and demonstrates it in the text itself. It is the use of color gradients in text that wrap from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. This technique is popular as a speed reading tool and as an accommodation for people with ADHD and dyslexia.

The website doesn't demonstrate it on the "front" page. But the effect is so subtle I didn't even notice it on the "individual"'s page, probably due to a color display limitation of a laptop screen.

I would have put a "side-by-side" comparison of the same text on pages like this to make it more prominent--one with the beeline effect and one without.

As someone with ADHD, very much what you’re saying. The original name for ADHD was “minimal brain damage” and that’s what it’s always felt like to me. Mathematical concepts are something I manage well, but I’m laughably bad at mental arithmetic. I’ve more or less overcome my struggles with focus and attention, but I simply cannot do paired-word association, or directions. If I want to learn a new language, I need to be immersed in it, which is fun, but expensive and time consuming. Until GPS units, I couldn’t find my way out of a wet paper bag.

These things do not benefit me, or empower me. I feel a part of what I could have been is just out of reach, and that’s ADHD in a nutshell for me. If I’m being perfectly honest only two real positives exist as a result of ADHD for me:

First, I’ve always been able to utterly lose myself in a book, fiction or non-fiction. I’d be lying if I said that was always a good thing, but it can be useful. I tore my way through Gray’ Anatomy in a few days, while people I know took a month to do the same.

Second, I was lucky in having patient, yet firm parents who helped me learn what was socially acceptable at a young age. I don’t compulsively interrupt people, I can sit through a whole opera without blinking, and I have a strong verbal filter. The downside was that all of this was very hard-won, and at times painful for everyone involved.

All in all, I’d drop ADHD in a heartbeat if I could.

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