Hacker News Reader

Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting hypothesis but they lost me at the part about ADHD. I abused substances when I was younger until eventually I learned healthy, constructive coping mechanisms and now I've been happily sober for years. That's an example of maturity helping someone out of addiction.

Contrast that will ADD/ADHD. I'm not convinced it has anything to do with maturity or a lack thereof. Sure, mindfulness meditation helps quite a bit. But I think you can be mature, self sufficient, polite, etc, and yet still have ADHD, or immature, etc. and have ADHD. Not to say I'm a shining beacon of perfection with no room for self improvement, but the point is there's little to no correlation there.

View on HN

Children born at the end of the year are more likely to receive ADHD medication or an ADHD diagnosis than children born early in the year. This is according to a new study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. The researchers have examined ADHD diagnoses and ADHD medication use among 510,000 Norwegian children aged 6-14 years (born in the period 1998-2006).

https://chadd.org/adhd-in-the-news/most-adhd-medicine-used-b...

So many of the ADHD children are basically immature compared to the rest of the class, no wonder since the difference between the oldest and youngest are almost a year.

> Contrast that will ADD/ADHD. I'm not convinced it has anything to do with maturity or a lack thereof. Sure, mindfulness meditation helps quite a bit. But I think you can be mature, self sufficient, polite, etc, and yet still have ADHD, or immature, etc. and have ADHD.

There is a very good video about 30 essential things parents should know about ADHD

https://youtu.be/YSfCdBBqNXY

One of them is that when unmedicated on average a person with ADHD has the maturity of someone 2/3 of its age.

Its is just an average, but is relevant to think how different a 14 years old and a 21 years old are (or 20 and 30).

Everything I've ever learned about biology suggests the 2/3 rule is nonsense. Neither biological age nor maturity are linear, and they vary wildly from person to person.

Oh wow i am 2/3s of a person now... sounds familiar.

I think the correlation they were getting at is - both are mental health conditions and both have a high rate of recovery during patients' early 20s.

While I agree with you that the correlation here doesn't have any direct relation to addiction based on the evidence provided (a study connecting ADD/ADHD to addiction would be VERY interesting), I think that the author included it to show that not all mental health conditions have a low recovery rate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com