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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

I think the best description of ADHD I heard was that it has more to do with an "attention-switching" deficit. People with ADHD are capable of intense focus on highly stimulating things like a good book. The intensity of focus drowns out everything else, making it hard to deal with other important tasks until the book is finished.

It's also much more difficult to maintain their attention on things that are no longer stimulating.

So ADHD folks are great at starting interesting projects, but once the space of possibilities has been narrowed down and all that's left is hammering it out, it becomes intensely difficult to maintain attention on that due to lack of stimulation.

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I also like the idea that it would be better labeled, “intention deficit disorder”.

Dr. Barkley’s talk completely altered my understanding of the disorder. I always knew I had it. My life roughly paralleled the author’s. After failing out of school, I found workarounds that got me through the second time (thanks to extremely supportive parents).

This video, combined with my wife’s urging, caused me to find a legitimate doctor who specialized in it (he’s ADHD too), and get treatment. I was already doing well with my coping mechanisms, but my life took off like a rocket with treatment.

If anything in the article or the comments resonates, I would watch this ASAP: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc-rkIfo

Any insight on how you went about finding a competent doctor for this?

After watching this video, and almost being moved to tears with how accurately everything in it described my life, and seeing your comment about being better off with treatment, I am convinced I should finally try something.

I too have been able to cope, but I would love to live beyond just coping and I am realizing it is only shame and pride stopping me from getting help, and fear that meds could make me worse or I couldn't find a good doctor.

I literally just googled ADHD doctor, tried to find reviewed, and then scheduled some appointments. You can tell a lot from how they handle the appointment and evaluate you.

If they’re cavalier about just throwing meds at you, I’d probably keep looking. My doctor always counsels that the ideal is to work myself into a position in life where I no longer need to take medication. He encouraged me to bail on it during vacations, if that’s my preference. He interviews and is constantly looking for signs that I should adjust my dosage. If you’re in SF, shoot me another reply and I’ll send you his info.

Thanks for the input. I'm on a different coast, but I appreciate it!

I'm in SF and interested in who you used - would you mind posting your doctor's name, or else posting a way to DM you (maybe twitter handle?). Thanks!

This sounds familiar to me. I've been trying to launch a blog for years. It goes in cycles. I start building a site, learning a web framework or static site generator, writing CSS and JavaScript, coming up with topic ideas, etc. Then, when the interesting learning part is over, I get bored and it just sits there for a few months until I start again with a different idea for the design or typography. It's a pattern I observe in several areas of my life.

(It's not that I'm not suited or capable of doing the writing part of blogging; I make a living ghost writing other people's blog articles and ebooks.)

Maybe you’re actually interested in design and typography?

Maybe, but only being able to focus on things that happen to grab your attention/interest is one of the major pain points of having ADHD.

It's not a matter of preferring to work on more interesting things. It's more along the lines of not realizing uninteresting things need to be dealt with (or even exist at all, sometimes) until they bite you in the ass.

Keeping up the theme of starting a blog... you'll have a rational understanding that a blog needs content. But you'll get wrapped up in solving the more interesting design/engineering problems. Once those parts of the project have been sorted out well enough that you are no longer actively solving a problem (note, I didn't say they were completed), something unrelated, but more interesting, will cross your mind and steal your attention away.

The attention switching idea seems consistent with my own experiences. I dated a girl with pretty severe ADHD; whenever she watched Arrested Development (a very fast paced sitcom with a lot happening) she would turn into a zombie and be almost entirely oblivious to any outside stimuli.

I have ADHD and have literally trained myself to use Arrested Development to put myself to sleep. Always the same episode. Even with the most crowded mind, I lay down with one earbud in, and I can’t make it 3 minutes without passing out.

The rapid dialogue means there’s no opportunity for intrusive thoughts to enter, but I know it all by heart, so there’s zero intrigue in any of it.

I have a similar situation, but it's a daydream. If I lie down and think about it and let my mind wander I usually find myself waking up many hours later.

> So ADHD folks are great at starting interesting projects, but once the space of possibilities has been narrowed down and all that's left is hammering it out, it becomes intensely difficult to maintain attention on that due to lack of stimulation.

This is not something that most people have problems with?

Not to the degree people with ADHD seem to have this problem. A recent study looked at whether people with ADHD were more likely to repeat a grade. Here's what they found:

>28% of individuals with ADHD repeated a grade compared with 7% of controls (p< .001).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23382575/

You can find many such studies about ADHD that find that people with ADHD just do worse in situations that require sustained attention and persistence.

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