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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder — just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost a lot of money to investigate.

The flip side is that in some cases, such possibility can be relieving. For me, the idea of having undiagnosed ADHD (which I plan on verifying soon) means there may be a better solution to the problem available than endless talks about pomodoros, bullet journals and getting one's shit together. In general, given symptoms which aren't going to disappear on their own, it's probably universally better if it turns out to be a medically recognized condition, as it gives a way forward.

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ADHD is a label, not a disease.

You can't really be diagnosed with symptom (although of course your money will be cheerfully taken to do just this).

Attention and focus and other related ADHD-type issues are bell curve.

It can feel good, for sure, to externalize our weakness and failings into one of these labels, like ADD. If that is helpful to get over the psychic weight of past failures, then that is helpful and useful.

Taking stimulants definitely helps most people with ability to work and focus, regardless of where they are on the attention-ability curve. There are also drawbacks and side-effects, at least I have observed.

It is pretty well understood that people with true ADD and ADHD have dopamine deficiency and issues with dopamine regulation and re-uptake in the brain. This has been highlighted in many studies. While I understand that there is an epidemic of over-diagnosis of ADHD, it does not make it any less of a legitimate medical condition in which the only treatment for it, is to increase the usable dopamine in the brain. One of the tell tail signs of ADD/HD is that the first time one with dopamine deficiency takes an amphetamine or one of it's derivatives, they realize that they are completely clear and it's like they come out of a fog in their brain, it's more profound than just the feeling of I can get stuff done. Again that alone is not effective as a single point to diagnose attention disorders but it is a strong indicator that there could be a dopamine deficiency.

TLDR it is a true disorder, it is over-diagnosed but that does not make it any less a chemical disorder of the brain.

Pomodoro and journals are part of ADHD treatment and that's OK. (There may be better behavioral therapies, like setting alarms and writing plans). The presence of a drug for a condition is not the same as the existence of a condition, and drugs are not always superior to behavior therapy. If you had low muscle mass, you wouldn't say "thank heavens it's a recognized condition that I can treat with steroid injections, so I can stop messing around with weightlifting!"

Pomodoro actually works quite OK for me. It doesn't solve the problem, but it's one of the more effective strategies to get some work done.

I'm not saying there are magic pills. But most articles about procrastination seem to target regular people, for whom this is not that big of a problem.

If you had low muscle mass, and weightlifting and diet didn't help, you'd sure be grateful if it turned out to be a recognized condition. Even if there was no effective remedy, you could at least tell the people saying "you're doing dieting/sports wrong" to shut up.

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