ADHD Accommodations Guide
adhdatwork.add.org
adhdatwork.add.org
That said, there’s plenty of good advice even if it’s a little inconsistent. It’s also fascinating how much the social part overlaps with challenges faced by Autistic people[1].
For ADHD folks who find some of the advice on multitasking/focus in meetings wanting: it’s absolutely okay to stim (perform some stimulating, often repetitive action) when you find your ability to stay focused isn’t what you need or what’s expected. I have a reputation for spending most of my time in meetings playing minesweeper. It’s not because I’m not engaged, it’s because it helps me stay engaged. I happily stop or mute my mic if the clicking sound is disruptive, but otherwise I’ve continually established with teammates and even clients that having that part of my focus on something mostly mechanical helps me stay in the conversation and productive.
1: Which I increasingly feel confident in the idea that there’s no meaningful distinction and ADHD should/likely eventually will be considered part of the spectrum, but that’s not why I’m commenting.
Besides that, if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism
I have hyperfocus for my "special interests" (spectrum) and very little focus for anything that does not intrigue me (adhd) but to my eyes these are the same thing: I just don't have much deliberate control of my focus.
There's some other areas where it doesn't map so cleanly to thinks I am interested or disinterested in. Jigsaw puzzles don't interest me, it's incredibly mentally painful for me to focus on one, but I also can't walk away from one. I have the hyperfocus that I get with my special interest combined with the pain of ADHD where you wish you could control your focus (in this case, focus on literally anything else.)
Another area of overlap: I associate my extreme social anxiety with autism, but if I take ADHD meds it goes away almost entirely, and my social skills also improve. I think this is again a matter of focus: I stop focusing on social hypotheticals which reduces anxiety, and I also go with the flow rather than work consciously on social interactions, which makes them smoother and less awkward for the counterparty.
I know what I'm doing this weekend.
Autistic people are bad at reading people, ADHD are bad at focusing on people so don't read them in most cases but have no problems at all in social situations when they are focused on them. They are different things. Though I am sure many bad psychologists diagnose inattentive people with autism even though they really have ADHD.
Similarly, it used to be "ADD" and then now is more generally known as ADHD, and even more recently than that, specifically is now considered something with three major "presentations", ADHD-I (inattentive), ADHD-HI (hyperactive-impulsive), and ADHD-C (combined).
We're still learning about the brain, and what these sorts of things are, and how they interact. My understanding is that many folks feel there's some sort of relationship here, but the exact details are murky and unknown. It may just be a comorbidity.
So if you have an autistic person that's inattentive, I believe the chances are they'll get both diagnosis.
I fall into this category. Building and maintaining friendships is hard, because you need to be able to give time to your friends on a reliable basis -- which is very hard. If I'm having a day where I'm sucked into something, I wont want to stop doing whatever that is. Another big contributing reason is that with being very unreliable with communication because it's trivial to forget to respond, and the NT folk tend take that personally. It's also hard to maintain focus when being involved in a conversation that isn't that engaging...And having poor impulse control and emotional regulation means that it's easy to go from perfectly calm to overwhelming frustration and back in a blink of an eye...which tends to freak people out quite a bit.
There's a lot of ways that the disorders impact personal relationships between people.
Another problem is the energy I have and reflect upon others. They just think I am agitated or nervous. But inside i am super cool….thats just me ….. btw adderal helps a lot but still ….do i want to be someone who is only workable with medicine?
I have needed glasses to see since I was a young child. While I could get Lasik or whatever and not need them anymore, I would never think to myself, “do I want to be someone who is only workable with glasses?” There are multiple options and all of them are okay.
I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was a junior in college. I kinda knew I had it for some time before that (my ACT score vs my GPA was a good starting point...), but managed to survive without feeling the need to get treatment. Interestingly, I do have a sister and two nephews on the autism spectrum, so perhaps there are common genetics at play.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research/research-funded-by-nimh/rd...
Imagine if you went to hospital with chest pains. They ask some questions then say "yeah, sounds like you have chest pains. Try this medicine it sometimes helps people with chest pains"
But was it a broken rib or heart attack? Who knows.
Hopefully this will change in future.
I'm saying they're as real as an apple is really an apple as in would it be an apple if somebody didn't label it as one?
diseases of the body have very specific symptoms but also an underlying cause injury, cell damage, virus, bacteria...
mental health isn't just the brain...
we can't tie consciousness just to the brain...I mean it could be something in our entire central nervous system...
all these things are... are buckets...
imagine you're fishing and you throw in a bunch of similar fish into a bucket and separate them into two big buckets as similar as possible... you might still have 4 different species of fish per bucket...
that's all mental health diagnoses feel like ..a big bucket because everyone behaves differently in different circumstances under different stimulus...
were you exposed to lead recently and are more aggressive? are your hormones elevated or lowered than norms?
all these little chemical signals going through the brain shape the consciousness to a star or a square but it's not really a star or square... it just closer to a star and square and it's soft around the edges so you can push it into the star shape diagnoses hole even though it's different ...
my point is it's all a spectrum and you can't be on the spectrum with aids, cancer, COVID. you have it or you don't... you can have more serious cases or not but there's a definite... solidity to what is infecting you...
so personally I think it'd be better if we made smaller buckets that were more about labeling what our symptoms are... then treat those specifically better and maybe have a few broader treatments that treat maybe a trifecta of symptoms...
I'm not sure if my point is coming across... basically mental disorders are real but at the same time they're not... because it's an illness if the consciousness.. of thought... and emotions... and the smallest imbalance in even our gut which has brain cells can cause certain reactions...
ADHD is an executive function disorder and you could usefully label it as being deficits in these skills:
* Delay your responses to situations long enough to come up with a good and controlled long-term plan * Pattern-match past situations onto the present situation to guide your current response * Mentally tell yourself what to do and have it stick * Manage your emotions towards your long-term interests * Imagine and evaluate multiple possible future outcomes
There are other ways to describe it - e.g. I didn't mention short-term memory - but this is the flavor.
ASD is completely different. ASD is (I believe) a predictive processing disorder. Normal brain processing involves each layer of the brain predicting what the lower layers will report, and "blending in" all of the minor mistakes in the predictions. Large mistakes are literally surprising and uncomfortable, and push the brain to learn (i.e. change its predictions). Normal brains are constantly ignoring small prediction errors and are very tolerant of ambiguous, uncertain, or new situations. An ASD brain cannot blend in the minor mistakes as well, so it spends a lifetime perpetually surprised and overstimulated by every event that is even slightly unpredictable, and is fairly intolerant of ambiguous, uncertain, or new situations.
Wow, it's like you know me. It also makes sense that I found many of the structure oriented things in the accommodations useful/necessary (templates, checklists, email folders,, etc).
(EDIT) This fragment reminds me of the "get over yourself" advice given to depressed people. Something sounding easy but being absolutely out of your control.
There are different types of ADHD. If you have a constant compulsive need for being elsewhere and doing something else, there is no mental exercise that would make you stick to things and stop finding yourself doing something else than supposed.
When required to do activity A, you'll find yourself exercising activity B or activity C only a short time, and every time, after forcing yourself back to A. When you decide to do B, since you can't focus on A, you'll quickly find yourself back at A because you're supposed to be doing B. Oh, and now it's C. And back to A. What fun. ABCAABCCABCCAABC. Forced, barely controlled multi-tasking.
Forgive me if I misread, but I believe you and the parent comment are in agreement here. “Mentally tell yourself what to do and have it stick” is not given as a point of advice, but as an example of something people with ADHD struggle with.
God fucking damn, every time I think about it I want to die. In fact, I want to die any time.
You know how much this shit ruined my life? No, you don't.
And no one will help. "Doctors". Useless garbage.
Your comment makes me scared I'm gonna be told I'm just fucking lazy instead, but don't give up brother. To an ADHD brain, death sounds fucking boring.
basically if I've planned my next 5 actions if something interrupts the plan I get to feeling like my entire world is set on fire or crashing down...
I also have entire conversations in my head and I talk way too long on subjects that really interest me.... to the point of boring other participants in the conversation...
but damn if I find someone as interested as me... we're besties and can discuss the thing for 6 hours or longer lol.
I'm 42 now, I think I just learned to cope in society because I'm usually more prone to outbursts when my guard is down... like I'm expecting a relaxing dinner at a holiday and the in-laws say something to trigger me.... I'm really good at chewing on things... everyone here is republican and love country music...
I can't send ether but I bite my tongue because I know I'll trigger them then one of us is gonna have a meltdown, usually me... and I lose favorability points...I guess in a way my silence is my preplanning to avoid a bad outcome... plus my precog conversation I have before opening my mouth usually helps me predict if it's worth it or not..... sometimes my mental conversation is pleasing enough or if it's like asking my wife something I'll assume we've already had the conversation because the mental model version went really well so I can skip the real version right?
I'm aware of my ADHD for some time now and I'm trying to get myself to have a proper diagnosis done. I thought I was pretty well aware of how it influences my life by now, but I would have never thought that remembering such things from before going to bed is actually possible at all!
I don't know why you put "doctors" in quotes, but I feel the need to correct you here: medications is generally speaking very effective for people with ADHD, and psychiatrists are becoming more and more aware of treatments.
Once you get an official diagnostic you can generally get access to treatments based on stimulants (very effective to be able to behave more-or-less normally, but takes quite some time to find correct medication + dosage, has side-effects, and can be difficult to legally obtain depending on your country law due to their Schedule II status), antidepressants (can help with both ADHD symptoms and comorbidities such as anxiety disorder and depressive personality disorders, also often easier to get access to), or therapy (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for example).
The understanding of adult ADHD is still very recent, quite limited, and not well spread out. But you do have solutions. I would recommend checking out "Taking charge of adult ADHD" by Russell Barkley, the book is written in a way that can be parsed relatively quickly and gives a good overview of the diagnostic process, treatments, coping mechanisms, etc.
It sometimes helps with some symptoms, and not permanently. Mainly, the stimulants increase your activation energy and 'concentration'.
> But you do have solutions
No, there isn't a "solution". ADHD is adaptive and wide-ranging. With ADHD, you will always needs to be aware of your deficits and how to work around them. However, therapy can indeed help with that and reducing some of them.
A significant subset of people do find their doctors unsympathetic and find it hard, especially given the ADHD, to access potential treatment, so it's understandable that your parent post is venting frustration. Not everyone has the option to change doctor or push against an unsympathetic system.
Has a mechanism for any of this been discovered, or theorized?
I'd disagree with this for one single but very important factor - Symptoms of ADHD can often be totally and completely mitigated with medication.
I've gotten tremendous results from switching to a silent-click mouse.
Can you explain this in a different way because I don't understand your point and want to
I have only recently become aware of what it means to try to work with someone who has ADHD. I’d heard of ADHD but I didn’t know what it was or what the implications were.
Then, a project went terribly terribly wrong. I tried to make sense of it through empathic modelling of my colleagues circumstances, but this only made it worse. I was baffled by that, which is when I realised I needed more information about ADHD, because just placing myself in my colleagues shoes didn’t help when we were using very different thought processes.
Without a model of ADHD thought processes my attempts at empathy were counter-productive.
I’d try to put myself in my colleagues position in order to understand my colleagues feelings but because we have different thought processes this didn’t work at all.
I think I’m seeing the limitations of empathy for the first time. Until I have a better working understanding of ADHD, articles like this with practical tips are my best guide.
Many friends/parents/co-workers in my life have tried empathy alone, and the gap between their empathy and my actions turned into conflict. The most frustrating is well meaning advice like “try using a planner” or “don’t procrastinate” (I’m struggling to come up with good examples here) which to me sounds almost tautological, like someone telling you “just remember not to forget”.
Forgot the list... or where I put the list... or what list I needed...
Yes, scattered around my apartment are many many once-used attempts at organizational systems. The trouble is I start trying to use one to remember things and then forget about it!
If you want to edit the file in multiple places, I think Syncthing is pretty much the best option there is. If you plan to do all edits at the same device but just want to view it elsewhere, something like regularly copying the file to the others with rsync or sftp or whatever your preference is may be enough. I manage some files in syncthing while others are just backed up to a server regularly with rsync. The downside of the one-way copying approach is that you may end up with an old version on some machines at some point, or if you suddenly do want/need to edit on a different device, you then have two versions of the file to deal with. Syncthing is kinda like Dropbox, but it's free software and decentralized. I think it uses bittorrent to copy things between your devices. If you consider yourself forgetful, a more automated/background solution like Syncthing also has benefits over manually copying stuff. You can just read/edit your file as normal and it'll sync so long as the daemon is running.
The one time I’ve had such advice turn out to be useful was when keeping a diary for track forgetfulness. The instructions were that if you forgot to log your memory for a week, then write that in once you remembered to journal again. That being given as an explicit instruction gave a signal that there was thought put behind the advice rather than spreading generic self-help advice.
I have ADHD, and I've worked with people with ADHD. Having emotional empathy for their situations and what they're going through just led me to burnout. Having logical empathy spared me from myself, and cut through most of the bullshit (e.g. drawing the line between what is caused by the illness vs. what is just personality/personal choices).
I think the two most effective lines of thought in this area have been:
1). Are they genuinely interested and motivated (ha! More accurately: "open to") succeeding?
Many times, when you have an illness you can get into self-defeating and self-sabotaging mindsets and habits. There's nothing you can do in this area if they're not "open to" success. If they're not, then that's something they'll have to figure out on their own (and perhaps with a psychologist).
2). If they are genuinely "open to" succeeding: what do they need to succeed?
The major facet of my ADHD is very dogshit executive function. I cannot make complex and linear plans in my head. I cannot hold a rough "map" of what I need to do, order it in importance and what logical steps I need to take, and execute on it. I cannot mentally "keep it together." It's just impossible. I don't have the mental facility -- the same way blind people can't see.
But, that means I've had to figure out how to get around it. Primarily, I've had to structure my environment so that I'm always "on rails." I have everything jotted down, and within my eyesight (if it's in a digital planner/calendar, in some file or app I have to open, I will never open it). I have a routine that lets me do everything I need to do, without ever having to think about it. I have a job that doesn't force me into a "one size fits all" structure. I have flexibility and autonomy on how I approach a task. As long as I get the work done that's needed to be done, I'm allowed to do it however I want.
I think that's a massive hurdle in "accommodating" ADHD: everyone's ADHD manifests differently, and there's no "guide book" on how to accommodate ADHD. The only thing there is is people with ADHD figuring out what they need in order to be successful, communicating that to the people they work with, and then those people listening, and making a good faith effort in doing what's needed.
Otherwise, there's really nothing to be done. It's up to each individual with ADHD to figure out what environment works best for them (as daunting and improbable a task it may seem) -- and getting the people they interact with to, reasonably, not impede on that environment.
> Finding a job where most of your work is stimulating to you.
In my experience this is 95% of the “accommodation”. I suspect many adults with ADHD are misdiagnosed with depression precisely because working a job that is insufficiently interesting will cause so many constant performance issues that anyone would assume they are doomed to failure in life.
This is the part of adhd I never understand. Being bored of a boring job isn’t a pathology or a disorder, it’s normal. Why do we expect everyone to always be excited by and super into every little part of their job? And if they’re not, they must have adhd? Seems weird
The difference is, it may be tough for someone without it to focus on boring things. But they still can. But for folks with ADHD, it works a bit differently: first of all, sometimes your brain just kinda decides something isn't interesting, even if you consciously feel interested in it. And so you feel this paralysis, where you both really want to do something, and also just can't do something. Neurotypical adults can go "this sucks but I am gonna do it even if it's uncomfortable" and still get it done, but ADHD folks can be absolutely debilitated by being unable to accomplish tasks, even if they're important.
In all of these cases, the key practical difference is in the extent and impact of the issue. Is the trouble focusing on boring tasks something that's annoying but manageable, or does it get in the way of finishing school or holding down a job?
Physical issues often have a known mechanism that exacerbates the problem. We don't have a great understanding of mechanisms behind most mental health issues at the moment, so both diagnosis and treatment are based on symptoms. I understand there's research showing that ADHD is highly heritable and related to specific structural differences in the brain; I'm not sure how strong the evidence is, but it definitely points to some mechanism behind the condition.
For example, in work situations, I'll do things like take a programming job writing C++ code and then slack off all the time to study Python. It gets particularly bad if I'm distracted. Open office environments are the worst for me. I'm absolutely crippled by them.
Outside of work, if I go on a dinner date, I'll not talk to the woman and rush through the meal because I feel compelled to leave. I hate sitting through movies because I feel trapped, so I'll watch movies on streaming services instead and watch them in 10 to 20 minute increments.
The compulsion to be elsewhere has gotten a lot worse as I've gotten older. The only three things I've found that kind of help are Adderall, Cannabis, and listening to Isochronic Tones while I'm working. None of them work all the time though.
I've found I can temporarily hard-reset my "go go go" inclinations, by starving my behavior-reward system of hyper-stimulus (i.e. anything modern; e.g. internet at all, media/music/video, books, rich food, comfortable things, things that I'm "moved" to do). It's basically a "monk" mode where you only surround yourself with relatively low-stimulus stimulus (for example, rich, complex, and tasteful meals would be replaced with bland, tasteless, only-whats-necessary-for-nutrition meals). And this would extend to every single thing in your life (by force), until your reward pathways have downregulated back to a more productive state.
I've found it helpful to do on days without medication (weekends), so at the very least I don't become a soulless robot over the years, and still retain some semblance of a personality (and individual choice).
> Isochronic Tones
I've been inadvertently doing this with Voicemeeter. You can activate "cross channel," and mess with the equalizer, so any sort of music you listen to has that same stimulating "wave" that keeps you in the loop.
On medication, it definitely stops me from hopping around, and going down dead-end alleyways.
For an ADHD person, focussing on a boring task is like holding your hand on a hot stove - your brain won’t even allow you to _attempt_ it because it’s so obviously a bad idea.
What's being called "logical empathy" here is the perception/understanding that you're calling empathy.
This is why I often wonder it empathy isn't overemphasized as a tool in our collective toolbox. When teaching it, we often fail to highlight how essential a coherent model the subject's inner world is to the empath's success. Otherwise, the empath is merely fantasizing about their reactions to similar circumstances - a recipe that can lead to festering resentment.
My professional experience has taught me that proactive empathy can be more harmful to a work environment than a simple combination of humility and compassion.
A piece of that can mean realizing that a team member isn't fit for purpose and either removing or working around them.
It can also mean taking the arduous path of developing an understanding of your coworker's inner-world, as you ended up doing. Even then, I recommend modelling around capacities and thought patterns rather than emotional responses.
There's nothing more obnoxious than a coworker without a clue, or to-which you're indifferent trying to 'understand you'. Especially if they're tremendously off-base.
This is beautifully put.
> There's nothing more obnoxious than a coworker without a clue, or to-which you're indifferent trying to 'understand you'. Especially if they're tremendously off-base.
I had a colleague try to do this with me, and it led to a couple of the shittiest weeks ever of my career (so far). My self esteem and perception of my own morals were absolutely shattered until I got a better handle on what was really going on.
Thanks, good question.
Yes it was a totally new circumstance with a friend I'd known for a year who has been minding my dog.
To thank her, I invited her to spend a week at my beach house. The electricians couldn't schedule an appointment for 10 days, so I told her it would be vacant until then, and invited her to go relax with her dog.
She's a fashion designer with a great visual aesthetic.
Immediately upon arrival she was full of ideas to improve the place. Those vertical blinds are lame - you need new curtains in the lounge. The bedroom curtains are tired - replace them. That carpet in the stairs is so old - rip it up and just have bare concrete.
But I only had 10 days before peak season. I told her I liked her ideas, but I'd like to keep the scope small so I can rent the place out after the electricians finish in 10 days. We can revisit the other ideas in March or April, I suggested.
3 weeks later, she'd taken over the place, which was unrentable. She'd ripped up the carpet without my permission, and left hundreds of nails sticking out of the concrete. When I told her how surprised I was, she said we'd talked about that, get over it.
The new Italian leather lounge was thus stuck in the downstairs garage, because it wasn't safe to move it up the stairs. That wasn't a problem for her.
She ripped out the vertical blinds in the living room and dining room, but only half completed the curtains, then stopped and started a dozen other tasks e.g. fairy lights for the deck.
The bedroom curtains didn't work. They hadn't been gathered correctly, and were tied off too short so they didn't close the gap.
She threw out the kitchen curtains, but the blind she replaced them with didn't fit the space, so she cut the ends off. Or, one of the ends. The other one she left sticking out. The hanging hooks weren't in the right place for the three chord pulleys, so she cut one pulley off and now the blind bends in the middle.
For every one of these issues, my friend's response was to start a new initiative!
It took me 2 weeks non-stop to remake the curtains after she left. This is a task I know she could have completed in a day, because I've seen her with a sewing machine and she is brilliant. But she didn't get to this in the context of the renovation in the 3 weeks she was there.
When she left she blamed me for everything and said our relationship was now irreversibly damaged.
I commend you on acknowledging this. Neurodivergence changes how one experiences situations, skills, and motivations, and many well-meaning people tell neurodivergent folks that they'll magically experience things the way they're "supposed to" if they just build enough character (try harder, see things differently, adjust their attitude, etc.).
You're helping your colleague simply by reacting to them with curiosity, rather than just getting frustrated that they don't fit into the incomplete worldview you had going into the situation.
Your initial attempts were to "put yourself in their shoes" which is a bit impossible if you don't know about what ADHD is like.
The disconnect you experienced was an artifact of the "false consensus effect." You imagined how you would feel in their shoes, and what you would find helpful.
So it wasn't the limits of empathy, but rather the limits of your own understanding and awareness.
Once you learn about their experiences, then you can use empathy to learn from them and reason about them.
While it's cool that workplaces can make such accomodations if requested, it would just be better for fucking everyone if these were available to everyone. That's the real problem with being disabled: you're treated abnormally.
Sure, there will always be exceptions, but just recognize humans are not fungible, and be kind. Don't make folks lives harder than they already are.
More often than not, people have to accept the realities of their disabilities and not being treated normal is absolutely necessary for them to succeed. As for how to go about it, your last words are right on the mark.
> … be kind. Don’t make folks lives harder than they already are.
I’d add that if they don’t approach their manager/employer about accommodations, their superior should be very careful about how they offer assistance. It really shouldn’t be more than “Hey are you comfortable with your work environment? Is there anything I can do to help you be efficient?” And if they say no, that’s it. Say they can reach out anytime and you’re done.
I have people who depend on me. I am responsible for their livelihoods. I have to get rest, wake in the morning, do chores, shower and groom myself -- you get the idea. What's the alternative? That's not a world I want to live in.
A thought experiment I use often is: imagine I hired a personal assistant to help me with mundane tasks I struggle with. They start and take that burden off of me.
Is this a good thing? Am I going to be able to improve or overcome my disability now that someone is doing that for me?
Imagine that the personal assistant is a volume knob. Why would I never have that knob turned all the way up? Could I even bring myself to do it? If I could, where would I set it? Other than the extremes, what is the healthiest volume?
I know what would help, and I know what I need to improve, but finding a balance is next to impossible.
Then again it can be said for many things.
That is different from a neurotypical person who feels gift giving is difficult. Happy christmas.
Thanks for the kind words.
Which mode is an "ability" and which is a "disability"? The question is ill conceived.
A friend noted that ADHD is probably over-represented in the arts. That's because in the arts (but not exclusively), you need different modes of thought and action to get things done. A classic example is the arts festival, which is a collection of artistic performances over a period of time, organised around a theme, embracing different modalities of production such as dance, theatre, music, visual arts, poetry and more.
Arts festivals typically have two executives in charge -
Artistic Director - Responsible for finding the creative acts for the festival that will convey the theme.
e.g. Burning Man has confirmed the theme for its 2022 edition, Waking Dreams. Organisers have said the theme will "explore the transformative power of dreams, both literal and figurative, and celebrate the dreamers who channel this potent energy in eye-opening, often surrealistic, sometimes life-changing ways".
That's not something you can get a tech CEO or accountant or board of directors to pull off. You need some crazy, connected creative genius to frequent 1,000 bars, alleys, galleries and theatres over 12 months to find the talent and curate it into a festival.
The other executive who makes the arts festival work is a completely different hat - the Program Director. This is the adult in the room; the super clerk, the master accountant, the disciplined project manager who works the spreadsheet and the gantt chart to make sure what the Artistic Director has chosen can be paid for with the budget and delivered on time.
You need both executives to produce an effective arts festival. But the Artistic Director position is less of a discipline that can be described algorithmically and more of an art form itself. To really pull off a great arts festival, you need a hurricane supernova of an Artistic Director who will be impossible to control, will drive his colleagues a little crazy, especially the Program Director, but who will find the most unexpected genius in the most obscure artists who together will combine to deliver an experience that moves the audience and uncovers thoughts and feelings that nobody knew were there to be had.
And of course, without the Program Director, there's no way all those artists will be paid because the budget will be exceeded by a factor of 10, and the gantt chart will be spaghetti mashed pototoes Jackson Pollock disaster.
But the two of them together, and an army of clerks, interns, admins, techs, and junior ADHD creatives might just pull off the festival of a lifetime.
I mean, if ADHD is just about being very open minded and dedicated to non-mathematical subjects, that would be fine, but I think people would still struggle with ADHD in the context you describe if they can't focus, can't resist distraction and can't listen well to what people express for instance in a theatre piece.
I think you have such an inability to understand art that you think it's just fuzzy magic, but in fact there are still people, plans, budgets, timetable to respect, notes to take even when scouting.
It's a great theory but I consider it a disability that I have to wrestle with myself _every single night_ to force myself to start doing the dishes, which I want to do but my ADHD brain doesn't find interesting enough to start doing. I can spend several minutes just physically pacing and trying to hype myself up to start on something that I _want_ to do, and it is every day, for basically every task that my brain doesn't find interesting, and it doesn't get easier.
Also, brainscans of ADHD-diagnosed individuals clearly show certain parts of the brain are under-developed compared to normal.
My SO laughs as i literally put on a podcast to take the garbage out, but it does help my ADHD for tasks such as that
you know what i do when i put music on? i'll go on my computer and distract myself with "remastering" the album because i'll end up hyperfocusing on something that sounds "off" about the music while i'm trying to do my chore that is clearly not enjoyable.
I talked briefly with a psychiatrist about this - to be clinically diagnosed with ADHD (in his clinic anyhow...) it has to be severe enough to be a major detriment to your life, basically. To quote DSM-5
> There is clear evidence that the symptoms interfere with or reduce the quality of social, academic, or occupational functioning.
How would you define a disability? What criteria must be met?
That's not been my experience: I've been treated normally.
I have not one but two disabilities: I'm an alcoholic/drug addict, and I'm a diabetic. I'm upfront about them, and people don't seem to care--they treat me the same as everyone else.
My take is that most people are so self-absorbed that they don't spend many cycles worrying about everyone else.
For the alcoholic, drug addiction, I suppose you're recovering and not currently injecting heroin at work, so I suppose it's the same: as long as you just say it and show no particular behavioral impact, what do you expect people to do ? It's not like they'll spit at you for having paid drug cartels or overly help you and bring you coffee more often as a sign of pity.
Again, bring a needle at work and start injecting and see how they are so self-absorbed they don't care :)
Yes it's hard for me and I often struggle, but I still feel great for bettering myself and powering through. Medicine is helping a lot for leveling the field, and ADHD hyperfocus can be surprisingly powerful for coding-related tasks.
Very honestly, I've always believed ADHD was something they told little kids they had so their parents wouldn't constantly scold them for being distracted by normal things and that would then scar them for life with a sickness... everybody has. The only thing that makes me believe it exists is I know I can focus monstruously for something very important, and I feel ADHD would prevent someone to even focus on something important ... but this article seems to say it's also possible, so...
Certain abilities that normal people mature in are stuck at the level of a fifteen-year-old for me and will be perpetually. Some of them are:
Ability to "feel" the nearness of the future, and plan and act accordingly
Ability to choose to do one task over another, and particularly an uninteresting task over an interesting one
Ability to stop an interesting task to change to another important task
Ability to stay on a single topic in thoughts and conversations
Many people with ADHD also have the emotional regulation of a ~15 year old, perpetually.
Most people can approximately remember how difficult those different abilities were when they were fifteen so there can be some level of empathy. When you were fifteen, university most likely "felt" very far away, and preparing for it "felt" not very important compared to your day-to-day. In hindsight, 15 is not far away from 18 and starting university, and there are many things you can do at 15 to make entering a good university easier.
> Ability to "feel" the nearness of the future, and plan and act accordingly
I'm almost incapable of preparing and perceiving the nearness of future events until the panic settles in that I'm late, behind, etc. It is especially exacerbated for things that I'm not good at or have anxiety around, like giving a presentation, working on a large refactor/feature, buying gifts for an occasion, preparing for a trip that involves multiple transitions/transportation, interviews, etc etc.
I'm getting evaluated for ADHD as I've recently been reading the literature and realizing that almost all the things I've been complaining about and trying to fix in myself for the last 10+ years, fall in the description and the features of ADHD.
>> Ability to "feel" the nearness of the future, and plan and act accordingly
One way of putting it that I have found useful is that while other people have
- now
- in a minute
- in five minutes
- in an hour
- tomorrow
- next week
for most ADHD people there only exist:
- now
- not now
if it doesn't get done right now there is a fair chance it won't get done at all.
This can explain jumping from task to task: the fear of not remembering it later.
Also explains hyperfocus to aome degree: it is a learned trait to protect what little focus exist.
You're spot on. There's this neuropsychiatrist (I forget the name, he's pretty famous) that says that one major characteristic of ADHD is time blindness. Until a deadline stares at you in the face, you can't see it. Medication is like putting the glasses on.
He then went on saying that normal people plan their life 2 or 3 months in advance, and that's such a mind blowing, alien concept to me. I barely have an idea what I'm going to do tomorrow. The farther I think, the foggier it is.
Also, I've noticed over the years I've developed an effective and unhealthy coping mechanism: anxiety is how I am always on time. The major the event, the earlier my anxiety surges, I can't even sleep the night before, and it dissipates as soon as the time has come.
(Getting evaluated in 2 weeks)
So true. But do you notice emotional blindness as well? My emotions seem to only attract my attention when they reach a certain threshold, which leaves me missing a huge amount of information about how I am, while occasionally being blind-sided by intense feelings seemingly out of the blue.
For me it's more emotional restless-ness, overthinking (esp. what people think about me and self-criticism), oversharing of whatever I am currently focused on (like writing this comment), being late because I constantly forget to account for something obvious like walking time, and a strong "mental barrier" of doing things that I don't want to do, or don't have consequences for not doing. Kind of like a self-drive that only exists when
a) I really really want to do it, but then I have to do it right now because I can't focus on anything else. I want to drop everything I'm doing and only do that instead.
b) there is some external consequence like a deadline driving me to do it.
For example: My apartment has a stack of unopened amazon boxes that I only open when I need the item inside (no consequence of not doing it). But when a task has a deadline, or when I feel that my not-doing something would start to get people angry at me, I'll hyperfocus and rush it out in no time. Or dishes starting to get smelly (consequence), but a pile of washed clothes stays untouched (no consequence) until I need a shirt from that pile.
When I was a child (untreated) I barely ever did my homework or studied, copied all the time from classmates, "daydreamed" and was in my head most of the time instead of listening to the teacher, or talking to my classmates.
ADHD people (from my experience) are also very chatty, jump seemingly random from topic to topic and have a high energy way of writing text messages back and forth, like chopping a longer topic up into many small messages instead of writing longer sentences. We just want to share what we have in our head with someone right now
I'd recommend watching this playlist by Dr. Berkley, even if just the first 1-2 videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg6cfsnmqyg&list=PLzBixSjmbc...
Apologies in advance if I’m off beam. I’m really struggling to navigate this.
When my ADHD colleague’s tasks were overdue and dragging the critical path, her response was not what I expected, which would have been to slash the scope just to get completion of core functions in the deliverable. Instead, she’d start new extraneous tasks, and insist on getting my feedback, which I think required praise.
I declined to comment, fearing making things worse by unveiling criticism instead of the desired praise. I just said sorry, I can’t put my attention to that at this point; I must focus on the one thing I’m doing myself now so I can make my own deadline.
She was furious, and withdrew, then abandoned the project.
Another friend who has an ADHD diagnosis and an education about useful clinical responses, told me that what I saw was common. She said it’s “the cycle of shame”, which she herself had repeated in the past ad nauseum before she’d obtained assistance from new clinical approaches.
What is the cycle of shame? I took it to mean that the ADHD colleague knew the task overrun was deliterious to the project, but was powerless to respond other than to start a fresh (extraneous) task, which only made matters worse for the team, but apparently more tolerable for herself in the short term, but ultimately she had to live with the shame?
???
The ADHD brain can't break down tasks into bite sized chunks in some situations. You should have given the praise. Possibly also of taken over and assisted in, one-on-one, breaking those tasks down. my reasoning for this is that the ADHD brain needs reassurance and dopamine hits. She wasn't getting ANY from herself and the only way she saw to get something, even if it was negative, was to make the scope larger and make it more novel or interesting. dont even ask if she wants help in breaking down a project. just do it. do it before hand. if you're all on a team at work or whatever then help eachother out actively.
EDIT: do you know what is the most fun for people on the ADHD spectrum (and i think just engineers in general but there is a critical difference)? planning out a thing. making that list. coming up with ideas. sketching it out. everything up until DOING THE ACTUAL THING. there is no reward in that. nothing. no one is going to see us struggling and working and doing the repetitive task or coding or whatever the thing is. but hell, our brain lit up like a christmas tree when we were together with everyone talking about ideas for the thing. that was awesome!
> I declined to comment, fearing making things worse by unveiling criticism instead of the desired praise. I just said sorry, I can’t put my attention to that at this point; I must focus on the one thing I’m doing myself now so I can make my own deadline. > She was furious, and withdrew, then abandoned the project.
i would have been PISSED off if you did that to me. oh, so you're so fucking good at things that you just DECIDED that you can't pay attention to the thing i'm struggling with. mister/miss no struggles? oh you gotta fuckin' focus? great cool, guess you only care about yourself and your deadline even though we're fucking collegues and not rivals! I QUIT!
that's... what i'd say...
> Another friend who has an ADHD diagnosis and an education about useful clinical responses, told me that what I saw was common. She said it’s “the cycle of shame”, which she herself had repeated in the past ad nauseum before she’d obtained assistance from new clinical approaches. > What is the cycle of shame? I took it to mean that the ADHD colleague knew the task overrun was deliterious to the project, but was powerless to respond other than to start a fresh (extraneous) task, which only made matters worse for the team, but apparently more tolerable for herself in the short term, but ultimately she had to live with the shame?
cycle of shame is REALLY hard to describe because its per individual. but everyone pretty much with ADHD is a failure in their head. no matter how successful we are. no matter how many little wins we structure for ourselves. at the end of the day we are broken, physiologically, our brains aren't giving us what we need from the tasks we do. even in a perfect situation where we dont need to work and only find our own joy in life there just is a general "ugh i know i have all these fun hobbies and projects that i myself have set up for myself to do but i cant do anything. no i'm not depressed. i have absolutely zero in the tank for even enjoyable things. i have no volition left." every hit of dopamine that matters is exogenous or from extremes but not from the everyday monotony.
> the ADHD brain needs reassurance and dopamine hits. She wasn't getting ANY from herself
That sounds like the core deficit.
> but everyone pretty much with ADHD is a failure in their head. no matter how successful we are. no matter how many little wins we structure for ourselves. at the end of the day we are broken, physiologically, our brains aren't giving us what we need from the tasks we do.
I see. OK. I would not have dared assume that. At last I have a model to work with, of the voice in my colleague's head.
> "ugh i know i have all these fun hobbies and projects that i myself have set up for myself to do but i cant do anything. no i'm not depressed. i have absolutely zero in the tank for even enjoyable things. i have no volition left."
Zero in the tank, OK. So, if that's the case, I can't expect her to bootstrap or therapy herself. I need something else. At the time, I couldn't do as much for her as you suggest - giving her praise, stepping in to organise and structure her tasks. I wasn't available for that. But what you're saying, is that without the external assistance, the result will be failure.
> do you know what is the most fun for people on the ADHD spectrum (and i think just engineers in general but there is a critical difference)? planning out a thing. making that list. coming up with ideas. sketching it out.
Yeah, she loves that. So do a lot of people.
> everything up until DOING THE ACTUAL THING.
This seems to be where we fork. Other people learn how to get rewards from the doing and the completion of tasks. The rewards take time to manifest, so nobody learns straight away. It takes time and repetition and faith. Before we can learn, we have to learn how to learn. But most people learn eventually, because the rewards for KPI manifestation are the biggest of all. But it sounds like you are saying ADHD people can't go through this process.
I don’t feel that way at all.
My greatest reward, by far, is the moment when the all the pieces “click into place” - the moment of understanding a process or system. I feel absolutely no positive reward at all for getting things done. At best, I feel a bit of relief from the rapidly increasing pressure of a looming deadline.
Have you ever had a job that works like that?
A design or engineering job doesn't have such an immediate connection with the completion/reward nexus. I wonder if experience with the earlier mentioned type of work could help to build an expectation circuit that reinforces completion.
Without the exogenous dopamine source, the dopamine synapses in the brain do not fire. Without those synapses firing, the causal emotional chain is broken. The feeling is absent. The very same feeling that would be there in other people JUST IS NOT THERE.
Nobody "learns" how to fire their dopamine synapses. They either fire or do not fire. You either have a feeling or not.
My friend gets excited about conceiving projects and beginning tasks. She has problems with completing them.
My friend is perfectly able to learn new procedures, including complex procedures. On occasion, she performs them with hurricane enthusiasm, such as the time she whipped up a dog carrier backpack for my small dog with her sewing machine in 15 minutes flat. She was amazing on that occasion. And then, for 3 weeks, she couldn't bring herself to hem a curtain - the simplest and most mundane application of a sewing machine. From what other people are saying in this discussion, those are the clues: too simple, too mundane, and the problem is the lack of drive in particular circumstances, not learning the task.
I'm just wondering what the limits are to learning and then what those limits might tell us about the disease mechanism. Since ADHD people are capable of learning, might there be processes they could learn which could alter the application of their disregulated reward system so as to facilitate self-drive in more circumstances?
If not, why not? Or how not? What is the dysfunctional component of neuroanatomy responsible for the condition?
It's functioning differently, regardless of circumstances. It's not "In some circumstances."
> If that were not the case, ADHD subjects could never learn anything, and that clearly isn't the case.
Your reasoning is bad here.
> I'm just wondering what the limits are to learning
You keep using phrases like "limits to learning" that are question-begging and wrong.
> might there be processes they could learn which could alter the application of their disregulated reward system so as to facilitate self-drive in more circumstances?
I don't know what you're talking about.
What you suggested earlier is that ordinary people "learn" to have the emotional reactions to task accomplishments while ADD people do not "learn" to have these same emotional reactions.
That is incorrect: you did not learn to have any such emotional reactions. You are falsely attributing agency to yourself. This is something called Fundamental Attribution Error.
Yes, for many years. I do drone work on the side even today.
> help to build an expectation circuit that reinforces completion
It’s not a function of what I “expect” of myself - if anything, if I expect to complete something and fail to do so, I could enter a rapid self-reinforcing failure cycle that is extremely emotionally taxing and difficult to break out of.
No, they absolutely don't LEARN HOW.
> planning out a thing. making that list. coming up with ideas. sketching it out. everything up until DOING THE ACTUAL THING.
This post hit me right on the head. I have infuriated colleagues with this type of behaviour. At an old job I got bored with a mildly interesting task that I just could not focus on and the progress fell behind. My boss moved me on to the most boring job on the project thinking I could better handle it and boy did I pull out a 6 hour focused task into 6 weeks of depression and anxiety. I would stare at the same 2 windows for an entire day sinking deeper into unproductive spirals.
Ironically HNews might have kept me sane in providing interesting things to read. It’s probably why there are so many ADHD types here.
I have discovered now that a “normal” job just doesn’t work for me. I’m going to get weird with it.
Fast forward 15 years, and I learn that the inability to sit down and complete a task or having to force myself to do pretty much anything isn't normal, and I've been living my life in hard more all this years, berating myself for my laziness when I know I can be pretty fucking smart sometimes.
I don't mind telling anyone if they're curious or if I do something very ADHD-typical that needs context. But the spin needs to be this makes me a more organized and diligent employee, which is probably true.
I no longer have an interest in advancing toward leadership roles, so I get to be a bit more relaxed about it, but your point is well taken.
> Medicine is helping a lot for leveling the field, and ADHD hyperfocus can be surprisingly powerful for coding-related tasks.
This is true and I do it too. In a lot of ways I think I do a way better job than my co-workers at solving the hard problems. But the whole work dynamic has a very "take your amphetamines and get back to work" vibe which I'm not super happy about.
I feel like I'm clearly abusing myself for money. But I have normie coworkers that seem happy to be doing the exact same job. And a lot of them have kids!
I have no idea how people function.
As far as I can tell, being employed in software is an exhausting and unfulfilling lifestyle (well, besides the money, that's great) and I'm literally counting the days until retirement.
I have distinct challenges that I have to address, every day. Normalizing many of them can create more confusion than understanding.
For example, I’m intensely sensitive to sound. A non-ADHD person sensitive to sound in say a shared office would surely benefit from noise canceling headphones. But I’m also very touch sensitive particularly on and around my ears, and that often gives me headaches. A general accommodation for this not only could but has basically left me unaccommadated.
Be kind and don’t make folks lives harder is a good principle. But sometimes acknowledging people have different needs and experiences is part of that.
This isn’t meant as a rebuttal of anything you’ve said, it’s a “yes and” more than anything. But I want it to be part of this conversation too.
We're in oppressive times folks. Non ADHD people shoudlnt be running everything.
Another viewpoint: ADHD can be as much a blessing as a challenge. Well-handled ADHD seems better to me than being neurotypical.
Just this acceptance to oneself relieves a lot of stress. But it comes with some experience and I guess most ADHD people would just feel inadequate during teenage and in university. Its horrible when you feel there is so much to do and you cannot accomplish most of it. Its only when you find/realize that there are people who would treat over-accomplishment in some aspects as a fair trade to be not able to be good at everything.
Workspaces/Life Partners/Friends -- not everyone will work with ADHD people. They need to understand that they will have to spend parts of their life experimenting and finding a environment where they are valued. I guess that is the cost of being different in anyway.
I too have ADHD and I hate it when I see it being treated as a crippling disability. It's really not. ADHD is much more common than people would think. As for everyone, people with ADHD learn to cope with their weaknesses and play into their strengths. For a person with ADHD it's about finding what works and doesn't work for them, not about shaping the entire world around them to make them fit. It will only make them feel worse.
I learned to do it and I'm seen as a respected member of my team today. I am seen as somewhat of a quirky oddball too though with how I always do things, but nothing that can't be solved by just being positive and laughing with your colleagues. They'll treat you with respect.
Probably the best introduction to ADHD is a 1.5 lecture by Dr. Russell Barkley, a top researcher in this area. It's technical, empowering and fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzhbAK1pdPM&list=PLzBixSjmbc...
Looking back in my life, I've built sophisticated TODO list and second brain systems to help me manage. Now it's obvious that it's because my working memory is poor because of my neurodivergency. Omnifocus (for GTD) and Obsidian (to be an extension of my brain) are my goto for leveraging my ADHD superpower.
If you're looking for a community to learn more for yourself or for someone else: reddit.com/r/adhd is a great place to start.
Magnesium deficiency is also associated with symptoms similar to ADHD. Even for people who really have ADHD, several studies show that magnesium supplementation greatly improves many issues.
It makes sense, as ADHD is mostly a dopamine-system imbalance, and carbs tend to increase the levels of tryptophan (serotonin), while proteins increase tyrosine (dopamine). The higher the levels of one, the lower the levels of the other. I'm a layman, this is my pet theory, but there's definitely not enough focus on the dietary aspect of mental health in my opinion.
I have about equal problems with under focus in areas outside programming like project management compared to problems with hyper focus when programming. I often end up so focused when programming that I won’t notice people talking to me until they wave a hand in front of my face. I really like Tandem (free app) for a single feature: it will auto-join Zoom meetings on your calendar, and it pops up a BIG bar at the top of your screen about 2 minutes before that slowly counts down. It’s about the only thing I’ve found that gets me into a meeting on the dot instead of 1-2 minutes late.
To deal with project management shenanigans like tasking, backlog grooming, prioritization on projects I run, I find it really helpful to “force the issue” by doing a quick 15 minute collaborate re-prioritization session with my project group before any bigger whole team meetings. That’s been a lightweight way to “partner with more organized teammates” without someone turning into my perpetual minder. This is an area where medication helps me too; I really needed medication to get through most of college, but didn’t need it at all to advance from newgrad to senior at Airbnb. As the scope of my work continues to expand and project management becomes a larger part of my role, I’m resuming that part of my treatment.
The other killer tool for me has been Notion (disclaimer: I decided to work at Notion after realizing how much it helped me). I used to “lose” a lot more work items when I needed to track them in JIRA; often I gave up waiting for it to load or struggling with the IT department locking down things like bulk changing issues. Being able to write up issues, brainstorm them, and then make fine grained checklists all in one place works a lot better for me then juggling JIRA and Confluence. The same goes for personal life tasks like tracking a job search, shopping for furniture, or indexing home contractors.
This is something that I've been very frustrated with recently, because it's really spot on. A lot of that is because it's a neurodevelopmental disorder, so most people that identify it are parents/teachers/caretakers doing so in children. And so the material is targeted at them.
I feel like it's only been relatively recently that there's becoming more resources available aimed at the people that have it. The disconnect between the experience of those behaviors and how those behaviors may be perceived is...quite large.
re: attention deficit -- it's a horrible term because as you note, there's not always a deficit. The real issue behind it is that there's an inability to regulate attention...so if the brain wants to engage with something, that's what it's doing. likewise if the brain doesn't see any value in something...it'll go to great lengths to avoid it like the boring plague that it is.
me: I guess technically I have a disability
imaginary boss: oh yeah is it one of <list of job-protected disabilities>
me: no
imaginary boss: well what are the impacts to your job?
me: cant focus or complete tasks as good as my peers who dont have it
imaginary boss: should be no problemo at all. especially when i'm in the big stack-ranking-by-another-name meeting later this year
me: cool that's what i figured
I'm stuck here because what I genuinely want to say is something like "this sounds like a conversation to have with your therapist" which is truly what I believe. But that seems unlikely for obvious reasons, and it's easy to read it as a joke.
Anyway, it's not! This sounds like something you should explore with a focused, knowledgable third party that is invested in taking seriously why you feel so strongly about it. They have paid professionals for that but maybe a friend or a priest or something would work too.
And when they're chronic and severely life impacting, all of those things are disabilities. With medical interventions.
> You'd be wildly abnormal if you didn't have to deal with at least one of these things to get through the day.
You're correct. However the disorders don't describe people that experience them chronically and more severely than the rest of the population.
> I just think the wild over diagnosis and medication of what is essentially a personal struggle that's completely normal
Citation?
>what else can we call something that a third of the population has?
Again, citation? My understanding is that it's much closer to 5%.
> encourages the pathologization of normal human functioning at the same time as it creates victim mentality and removes responsibility and agency from individuals
oh man, I wish it removed any responsibility. Nope. Still gotta make sure my taxes get paid on time or else get thousands of dollars in fees. I know because I've neglected to do so before until the IRS was threatening to garnish my wages. Twice.
> it creates victim mentality
No, it creates an environment that we have a better chance of succeeding in, and helps combat the narrative that we're just failures.
For example, everyone feels anxious at points but not everyone has anxiety. I’ve been very anxious at times in my life, such around major assignments when I was in school. However these struggles were appropriate given my situation and I was able to get back to my normal life pretty quickly. In contrast, my father was absolutely non-functional for most of my childhood. He literally would not make phone calls because he was so anxious to talk to people. He had no friends, the only people he ever talked to outside of minimal interactions at work were myself, my mother, and his own parents. Medication and therapy turned that around real quick. I’m just a year he was totally normal, had started making friends and going outside of the house to run errands.
There are probably people who are getting therapy and accommodations for ADHD when they don’t need them. But is that really so bad? Why shouldn’t people, even if they don’t have a disorder, get therapy and accommodations to help them succeed?
Overmedication is a different issue, and definitely a real one. But that’s on doctors and drug companies - it doesn’t negate the reality that some people have disorders which need medications, therapy, and accommodations.
I think from personal experience I have a high degree of confidence that ADHD is real. I have a couple friends with ADHD and it is obvious their attention works in a different way - they are sometimes totally engrossed in something, so much so that it’s almost impossible to get them to think about anything else, while other times they are easily distracted. I have other friends who seem normal to me but who say they have benefited from therapy for ADHD, and I don’t see any problem with that. I have observed both of these categories of people taking responsibility for their lives and working to improve themselves, often with the help of therapy but not without their own agency.
The syndrome we call ADHD was discussed in medical literature since the 1700s at least.
yes, in some cases : https://chadd.org/adhd-weekly/asking-for-workplace-accommoda...
The ADA includes ADHD as a recognized disability. For an employee who has ADHD, the act can require the employer to provide reasonable accommodations, as long as it doesn’t create undue hardship for the business.
Not everyone who has ADHD is a “qualified individual” according to the ADA, says Nancy O’Mara Ezold, an employment lawyer and partner in the Philadelphia-based Ezold Law Firm.
I think ADHD helped me become a crazy good programmer, but I seem to have a harder time noticing or caring about other peoples feelings.
Not a psychiatrist, just wanted to mention it as something you might consider, that you or other people reading this might not be aware of.
In my case I think the rationalization of emotions and the dismissal of irrational emotions is a coping mechanism that was brought about by hypersensitivity. Later on I had brain inflammation (CFS/ME) which inhibits emotional response as well a a host of other hormones. I now have effective medication, but I’d still rather not deal with other people’s feelings.
In my experience, it's not that you don't understand or can't comprehend how other people are feeling: it's that you just miss it a lot of times, because you're not paying attention.
We can understand how people feel, but it's usually not something that pops into our heads, because we're distracted/occupied with something else.
In cases when we're not (rare, and as assholish as it is), we can care about and work with other people's emotions.
It kind of sucks feeling dependent on them to do uninteresting tasks and make it through the less-interesting workdays, but it sure beats being a 25-year-old NEET.
Fortunately, as software engineers, we have the privilege of being able to be choosy about our jobs. Which means I can find a new job or team as soon as things stop being fun.
I sometimes wonder if I would be capable of doing anything but programming work without completely hating my life. I'd probably be using my prescription every day at that point, instead of 3-4 times a week.
"Once a ladder, now a crutch"
Medication is the first line of treatment for ADHD. The second is a mix of cognitive behavioral therapy and medication.
When I was in the office I would try to "work hard until lunch", then break, then "work hard until 5", and then go to an after-work class, so I was forced into time boxes. That hasn't worked out so well remotely.
The timeboxes you describe have worked best for me. I put them on my calendar and have the computer go “ping” when it’s time. And there’s always a workout scheduled after work that forces me to stop.
Seems to work well if not better remotely because there’s fewer external distractions to disrupt my timeboxes.
The problem with working late is that it just steals energy from tomorrow. Best to say “Fuck it didn’t get anything done today” and try again.
Learn how rushing and working too long are counterproductive and think about things that are impediments to getting stuff done and try to make them better.
- make a to-do list on paper and keeping it visible - set phone in a different room or have it run out of battery so you won’t be distracted (assuming you don’t need it) - set a timer and try to complete x amount of tasks before it ends
Crossing tasks off on paper is more rewarding than on an app. If you find yourself unable to start a task, restart the timer and pick a different one - It’s better to get something done.
Also, remember that it may be better to get sleep than to stay up all night catching up. No point in doing all of that if you’ll be unable to work effectively the next day.
I would add that pomodoros can be really good for tracking how much you've gotten done, and then being able to walk away after a certain amount of time has been spent being productive.
You may be getting more done than you realize - one of the factors of add is that once a task is complete, it flies the cognitive coop. I have this problem in spades.
Also, it may be helpful to realize that if you're working on code, some of the work is finding the solution. Even if you don't have a scrap of working code to show for it, having done some work to find out what doesn't work or just reading documentation is productive work.
Beware that imposter syndrome, it's a real doozie.
Once I had my initial diagnosis, the ADHD specialist pointed me at a bunch of resources. Learning more about ADHD made a massive difference right away—just reading other people's experiences helped clear some painful guilt and cognitive dissonance. He also referred me to a psychiatrist in case I wanted to try medication; I wasn't sure at first, but after doing a bunch of reading, decided to give it a go. The combination of learning, building new skills/habits and medication ended up making a massive change to my life, a lot more than I expected.
From what I've heard, people have very mixed experiences around ADHD with their primary care doctors or even general mental health specialists; I expect that finding somebody who actively specializes in ADHD can help avoid some of these. Going out-of-network was expensive (maybe $1500 or $2000 for initial consultations + follow-up appointments in the first year), but it made such a change that I'm sure it was a major win even in purely financial terms.
In retrospect, it's obvious I've struggled with it for most of my adult life, but I learned to cope. Usually by self-medicating. Like you, Adderall seems like a winner.
I’m in my thirties now, and was stuck at home during lockdown with my then pregnant wife. I’m a working developer, but I knew my work was inconsistent. I blamed myself, and had mostly forgotten the diagnosis. Living and working in the same house as me had made my wife begin to notice just how much ADHD affected me day to day, and was starting to become frustrated with it.
Immediately after reading the comment on here, I created a doctors appointment. I ended up going back on Adderall, but when discussing dosage I asked for the lowest dose possible. 5mg. My doctor told me it was a child’s dose (not in a mean or demeaning way,) and was happy to start me there.
I’m still at 5mg. It hasn’t made living with me the easiest, for sure. But according to my wife it’s been a huge improvement. I’m so much more focused and capable. I really cannot overstate the improvement at home. My wife is less nervous about distractions and issues related to having a newborn being taken care of by a wife with ADHD.
Of course, it’s helped at work as well. I’ve been more productive than I previously thought possible. I’ve also just learned so much more and read so much more. Earlier this year, I ended up realizing that I’d like to try interviewing for the first time in years. Within a month, I’d doubled my salary. That last part is probably the least reproducible thing. But I do think I was essentially accepting a salary level I could live with because I knew I was an inconsistent employee and my employer was letting it slide.
Obviously, everyone’s body and mind are different. This isn’t meant as an unreserved ad for ADHD medication. Living with someone who could give me her perspective I’m really helped — I probably wouldn’t have stuck with it had she not been able to articulate a marked improvement within a few weeks.
Still, this single recommendation to go to the doctor and talk about ADHD was the single biggest life improvement me or my family could have ever received.
If being on adderall is a little new to you, and you're on such a low dose, might I recommend supplementing with chelated magnesium and agmatine sulfate. These are vitamins that (somehow - I knew for a little while how when I was researching them but tbh that knowledge has flown the coop since) will suppress the development of a tolerance, if taken daily alongside the adderall. One of the pitfalls of being medicated with this stuff is that you're kind of on a steady uphill slope that eventually, if you get to where I am (15mg x 3 / day) means that when you need to take a break, you become more or less an obnoxious vegetable. Don't freak out - it's a looong slope (and probably not as dire an outcome as I may have made it sound), but you can make it longer with these to help mitigate, and you'll be thanking yourself for avoiding hard crashes.
There are probably completely different “problems” in the brain whose results are all classified as ADHD. Some people with are “inattentive” ADD, others are “hyper-attentive” ADHD.
There are also various levels of ADHD. I think everyone has some level of “ADHD”: everyone can understand having trouble starting tasks or forgetting things. These are the symptoms of ADHD. But people diagnosed have them much more severe (sometimes to a flat-out “how?” extent). Some people with ADHD can get by with mental techniques and planners, others really need medication.
e.g. having trouble getting up (normal) vs spending hours in bed not realizing any time passed (ADD). Not being able to focus for long (normal) vs losing focus literally every 5 seconds and getting distracted by anything (ADHD).
Most are great like headphones, writing things down, blocking out distractions, but the long boring task one fascinates me. For me it actually helps to turn on some video series I’m mildly interested in while doing that long boring task. In-office was so much harder because I could never try having Netflix open.
I’m a professor now and allow students particular freedoms along these lines, like wearing headphones or skipping lecture for the recorded one. I recently had a student who was able to participate more and keep up with the lecture much better by looking down and slowly maintaining a game on his phone.
The worst of it was, when I would go to rectify things that got done late or needed extra work, it was all "yeah sure, here's this thing you can do and these deadlines and you'll need to schedule time with me to review during this weird window of time and make sure to fill out these other forms". All of a sudden my late work consists of new scheduling, bureaucracy, and extra deadlines. Throws hands in air
Man, I do the same thing. Zoom meetings have been great for this because I can do that to help me pay attention while still looking like I'm paying attention for the other person on the call. It's funny because it first almost felt like deception, but really it's the opposite: I'm paying more attention than if I weren't doing anything else and worrying about my body language instead...
Also, i didn't know to call my problem ADHD for a long time. So, employees or employers first need to recognize there is a problem with ADHD, then they absolutely need to do what the article says and let someone have a private office if they need to come in or work from home.
I am farther along that spectrum than you, and can't even get myself to get through (or started on) projects that I'm excited about most of the time.
And that's what makes it a disorder. The threshold may be vague, but it's not something we can just rule out as inconvenient but manageable under ideal circumstances.
I don't doubt you when you say you have it worse and that it's a disorder, but I don't think the professionals have their shit together for this either. If I had taken the drugs I'd probably be stuck leading a normal life, addicted to Adderal, or worse not on medication and failing to achieve any goals. In either case for me personally the doctors didn't have the answer.
Taking a prescribed dosage with the intent to improve your life very rarely leads to addiction.
Medication is only one half of the solution. The other half is cognitive behavioral therapy.
Using both together has been shown by peer reviewed studies to be very effective for most patients.
What's called a "disorder" is in the eye of the beholder. Disorders are defined relative to the norm, based on whether they cause difficulties to the person or not. I'm lucky to be interested and skilled in IT where there's a huge over-representation of ADHD and ASD people I can get along with, where my needs are mostly already accommodated for; but I'm well aware that should I choose a different field of work to pursue a career in I'd very likely have a very bad time.
So, imagine a world where the proportions are inverted. There would be majority of people we currently call neurodivergent and some minority of people we currently call neurotypical. In such world, it would be that minority that would struggle with jobs, schools, shopping centers, governmental offices that aren't accommodated to how they process and react to the world around. It would be them who have a "disorder".
In a world that doesn't ask me to do things I have difficulty with, I'd have no "disorder" at all. Some of us are lucky enough to have arranged their lifes in a way that minimizes these situations, but others did not have such luck.
I've been asking for this type of stuff and consistent work (not full stack in multiple stacks/languages for 8+ apps), and it's like the people in power just don't care.
Unrelated, I actually love oncall work. If I get woken for something pointlessly, I fix it immediately. I'm a night person by nature, so staying up until 3am fixing a but and the sleeping during the day feels great. It's a constant stream of shiny things to chase and fix.
I’ve seen more comments on HN recently about the disorder, and people sharing their experiences. I personally believe that it’s more commonplace than seen, and my personal theory is that maybe many people have it on the lower end of the spectrum, and thus are high functioning.
But I’m also wondering that if the characteristic symptoms of ADHD also exist beyond the neurological condition and maybe people who have other disorders might also experience ADHD symptoms and thus self-diagnose it?
In my own limited experience, the common diagnostic process seems awfully lax, while the rigorous version takes hours and costs thousands to undertake. So could there also be a lot of people being misdiagnosed?
I’m also wondering if it’s possible to manifest ADHD symptoms or even start thinking like someone with it, due to the environmental factors of modern life, specifically continuous attention-diverting digital lifestyles.
Finally, for whatever reason ADHD is currently the internet condition en vogue, much like self-diagnosing Asperger’s was in the 2000s and identifying as an introvert was a few years ago, see this recent tweet skewering a fatuous graphic attributing a common non-ADHD related issue to ADHD:
It also requires there be a struggle or problem with the patterns that cause issues with normal living and functioning.
The industry in general (well, the part of it HN folks have tended to be from), is maturing and that can bring folks to have to seriously face these issues. It isn’t as new and shiny as it once was. Also, stress from the pandemic and burnout and very non-ADHD friendly circumstances have been turning the screws and making it significantly more painful - which also highlights it.
Going back to the office was a huge boon for me, even before starting medication. I'm currently the only person on my team working 100% from office, and I would walk barefoot over broken glass to my open plan office before I would ever willing return to working from home.
I'm not sure if you've got ADHD; I know there's a lot of variation in personal experience. I've heard similar sentiments from multiple people with ADHD regarding working from home, although I think I'm a bit of a freak for tolerating open plan offices well.
It'll also help build your relationship with that person, and they'll most likely want to repay the favor in the future when you could use a hand.
I strongly believe, that someone I know very well falls into that category. There are a lot of habits which align. like the need for lists, strong moral compass, unability to accept the approach of others, micromanagement. But also disorganisation in some aspects of life.
That person also went to lots of different therapies in life but mainly to treat other aspects, like depression and self-doubt. And nobody ever diagnosed OCPD or ADHD. But the person himself thinks that it could very much be ADHD.
The thing is, how do you correctly diagnose ADHD? How can you be sure? What's the most significant trait? Is it a problem if someone gets treated (and medicated) with diagnosed ADHD without having it?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive%E2%80%93compulsive...
If we were better able to uncover what helps move people toward their preferred homeostatic state, it would reduce a lot of suffering. As it is, we spray and pray, shotgun blasting people's brains with amphetamines, bupropion, methylphenidate...
What I imagine is a spreadsheet with all of the values we uncover that affect an individual's state of mind. I guess that would be a simulation of human physiology and I'm curious if that's being worked on at all...
A close family member exhibit the ADHD behaviour. Growing up, I thought that the normal adults are all restless talk over other people and only think short term. I unconsciously mimic the behaviour. The traits really hurt me during my early career because the traits come across as non-professional and blunt to others. I've since identified those traits and fixed my own behaviour. I've since advanced my career and increased my income quite a bit.
I brought up the topic with the family member and was interrupted.
IMO, working groups should be established to promote this kind of knowledge to benefit this community.
If they don’t really matter and meh, then that’s fine. But if they do matter, and no matter what you can’t do it? That is when it starts to become a problem.
If that sounds familiar, then you might want to get checked.
I am by no means trying to generalize ADHD, just sharing my personal experiences.
I think all of the accommodations listed would benefit a general workforce, and do not consider it a disability accommodations guide, but rather a best practice guide.
Anyway, although I can never predict what I will do or how much I will get done it seems that I am steadily accomplishing more as I learn to relax. Accepting some of my bad habits has made them easier to manage and hopefully let go of eventually and engineering my environment so that I make smaller circles when I'm trying to avoid things has also helped. Most of all though I think what allows me to relax is that I have obtained a sufficient level of skill to survive and I am curious to learn more, even though I am a NDTM I am still converging, all the DTMs are puzzled by my behaviour but I arrive in similar places nevertheless. My credentials / certifications don't necessarily match the things I know, which can be annoying. I wish the evaluation system was decoupled from the education system.
I believe philosophy is the most important tool to better your condition and computer science, scratch that, lisp! is an amazing gateway into philosophy... Evolving to extinction is not intelligence.
Non deterministic Turing machine?
I’m not sure it can be or should be resolved. My friends and I are mega nerds and high functioning ADHD. These are the people who I like to build things with. It seems as if we’ve accidentally set up a separatist enclave and It works for us. I think people should play to their strengths to make the most out of their individual situations.
I have ADHD. I was surprised to see this one. When I stopped typing and (only) recording meetings and started writing notes by hand, it forced me to pay attention and think through what I was writing. Research backs this up as well.
In fact, I rarely look back on my notes. The mental process in the moment of writing it down is far more important in my opinion.
If you struggle to function as a ‘normal’ adult without them? Or spend a truly inordinate amount of time and effort compared to your peers doing them just trying to get to the point you're somewhat ‘normal’? That is more than likely ADHD (or something else, but a problem)
COVID has definitely shaken a lot of that up, and I've known several people who had to really sit down and figure it out recently.
I've known people at 60+ that got finally checked though, and it was immense just figuring out what had been going on. So don't necessarily write it off just because of age.
There's no sense in living halfway when the other 50% is available.
The other issue is that many people with ADHD develop unhealthy coping strategies, which turn into depression and anxiety.
I once had a partner with very, very bad ADHD. So bad it seemed to be causing us huge life issues, due to a recent change in circumstances.
She went in, got tested - sure enough - got medication, and it helped.
It also helped her run both of us ‘off a cliff’ in a really terrible way shortly after due to some deep seated psychological problems she had been hiding the entire time. She previously was never able to follow through with the terrible consequences of it because of ADHD - and that was a rather unpleasant experience.
The medication is great for being able to slow down and focus enough to accomplish what you set your mind to, but if there is another problem going on sometimes that just means you can cause yourself much deeper problems.
People are complex. I’d never urge someone to seek treatment for something that wasn’t causing them distress that outweighed the risks.
Just because helping her with her ADHD didn't just flip a switch and "solve" her mental health doesn't mean it didn't help her.
The threshold for ADHD being a disorder is it causing distress in someone's life. Unfortunately, most of that distress tends to be invisible, so it's not something you can just decide as a third party without a lot of training and empathy.
If you want to reach your end goal of good mental health, you have to work on every problem that exists. Healing one aspect of mental health often has a positive domino effect, but that's not the case every time.
People are complex, and so is treatment. I would never urge someone to avoid treatment for something that is hard to solve, because health is worth the effort.
It’s easy to say it’s all good - and time will tell. But yikes.
I know amphetamines can also nominally 'treat' things like depression and anxiety, by dumping reward chemicals into the brain (but, as it seems happened here, also exacerbate a latent set of bad behaviors). You really don't want to make someone who's afraid of the world / mad at the world / frustrated with the world more motivated, which is the essence of how a lot of ADD meds work.
This was something I had no idea was a symptom of ADHD before I got diagnosed. It was extremely distressing to experience. I'd be sitting next to my partner, no other noises distracting me, no phone dividing my attention, etc, and I'd know they were talking to me and that I wanted to hear what they say and I'd recognize that I was hearing syllables just fine but was entirely unable to process the sounds I was hearing.
I finally got diagnosed and started taking drugs (Vyvanse, which is a slow release drug that's apparently mellower than Adderall). They've been extremely helpful to get me to a baseline where I could actually start work to improve things for myself.
"Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder – published in the U.S. as Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates And What You Can Do About It – is written from the inside by a doctor who himself has Attention Deficit Disorder. It offers a completely new perspective on ADD and a new approach to helping children and adults living with the problems Attention Deficit Disorder presents.
- Demonstrates that ADD is not an inherited illness, but a reversible impairment, a developmental delay Explains that in ADD, circuits in the brain whose job is emotional self-regulation and attention control fail to develop in infancy—and why
- Shows how “tuning out” and distractibility are the psychological products of life experience, from in utero onwards
- Allows parents to understand what makes their ADD children tick, and adults with ADD to gain insights into their emotions and behaviors
- Expresses optimism about neurological development even in adulthood
- Presents a program of how to promote this development in children and adults alike"
source: https://drgabormate.com/book/scattered-minds/
this is an author and expert definitely worth exploring.
Terrible process, not being able to run the gauntlet first try should be one of the tests honestly
While there were small improvements, it never felt like it really fixed the "problem". I think the only solution is to ensure you work with like-minded people.
An environment where colleagues and managers don't make seemingly irrational decisions.
I get things done when I am left to get on with them.
I don't like it when I question tasks I am given, and it is interpreted as me not understanding it. I understand it just fine. I'm baffled by the vague and inaccurate definitions of the tasks. I then question whether it is me missing something obvious, or them missing the essence of it.
It's not me. It's everyone else that has the issues.
It's all relative.
i would love to see some ways a business can adapt to better meet the needs of employees with executive function disorders
Now, why do we think ADHD rates seem to correlate with lifelong access to the internet?
Incorrect. Here are 3 of many studies that show empirical evidence for physical differences in patients diagnosed with ADHD.
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11682-013-9269-5 - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.558... - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5884954/
> Now, why do we think ADHD rates seem to correlate with lifelong access to the internet?
Because we are all connected constantly to a dopamine producing machine that exacerbates ADHD symptoms. You can't see how this correlation could simply be a correlation and not a cause?
It's not even slightly about the time spent paying attention. It's about the object of the attention.
If people leave me alone and give me some wide berth to go complete some massive project I can do that fine. Better than fine. I can do projects that 15 people together can’t do, by myself.
I typically am able to develop an extremely accurate prediction of the future from the base technology up to the market.
However.
At this point in my life, it isn’t a matter of “if” I am going to get into severe interpersonal problems and fights with co-workers it is “when.”
What has helped me is to have a small group of friends who I use to improve my decision making quality. Left to my own devices, I misunderstand and misinterpret people and this leads to war in many cases.
I can’t read peoples intentions, I don’t understand peoples motivations, I can’t understand what “normal and expected behaviors” are.
Once I get pissed off at someone, I stay pissed off permanently. That person is “dead” to me. This is apparently typical of people with Aspergers.
My favorite analogy is this: “normal people have a wide variety of tools ranging from soft to hard in their toolbox. People with Aspergers open their toolbox and all they have is a hammer.”
That is exactly how I feel. Once I lose my composure, I only have a hammer to solve the problem.
This leads me to become highly paranoid. When people start annoying me or infringing on me, interfering with my ability to work on my own terms - I start building resentments.
I get along really well with older people who have calmed down. Mid career managers and I do not have a great track record.
My career has been a nightmare. A lot of great parts. The number one thing that protects me now is having a panel of advisors who have normal brains. Without these advisors, I am literally wandering blind through the land of the humans, unable to understand them.
On the surface I often look and act normal, underneath the hood I am a genius and a mess. Working in the modern workplace has been a nightmare. I have come to realize that people like me don’t get to “win” in corporate. Sooner or later, they figure out what I am (different) and it’s over. Highly discriminatory against people like me.
My idea of heaven now is not to be promoted, but to be left alone to pursue my interests where they align with the corporation.
I tend to have a very massive positive impact at companies where I work. My ideas, creativity, research and insights result in massive wins. But other people always get the credit, never need. I am so misunderstood, it’s my lot in life. I don’t expect to ever have my abilities respected, noticed or rewarded.
There were a couple interesting tid bits in what you wrote, but I will refrain from arm chair diagnosis.
I am glad you have some supportive friends, we all need that. You might also consider seeking out professional support. Finding a good therapist is tough, but when you do, it can be life changing.
I wasn't one of the downvoters, but I think those "couple interesting tidbits" might be the reason for downvotes. People aren't comfortable reading someone's delusions of grandeur, even if they might be true. It is just off-putting to hear someone very confidently proclaim "under the hood I am a genius and a mess" and "my ideas, creativity, research and insights result in massive wins. But other people always get the credit". The post can easily be interpreted as a "oh woe poor me, I am a super productive genius who turns everything he touches into gold, but people like me never win the corporate game because the system is rigged" type of a humblebrag that is not being entirely truthful.
Again, even if it is actually the truth, it just leaves a sour taste. Probably because all of it seems like just shifting the blame onto everyone else and going on a rant that can be boiled down to "I am a misunderstood genius, but everyone else gets the credit every single time for every massive win I get for my company, because great winners like me just never get to win in corporate, the system is rigged".
This is quite out there and is something a lot of people with some heavy overestimation of their abilities say. Because to them it seems like they are "losing the corporate game" due to them somehow being discriminated against for their ingenuity and smarts, and not due to their actual lack of ability coupled with massive overconfidence in their ability. After all, as the famous quote says, if everywhere you go you see assholes, you might be the one who is the asshole.
Last year: My total income was about $2 million.
The numbers say my intelligence is unlike anything normally found, but it comes with some disability. I work 7 days a week. My mind never rests. You wouldn't enjoy being me :)
My dad once told me: His tested IQ was 145+. Everyone in my family has similar stories. Photographic memories, Each of my family members has independently found a way to make millions of dollars. Its atypical intelligence profile.
People generally tend not to like me, and it happens quickly. My facial reactions, emotional game and how I open conversations: People don't like it.
I was talking about the overall manner of how you said it being something that puts people off, not necessarily the content. Like, even if the content is legitimate, the tone just makes it all sour. I am not trying to be mean or attack you, but your last reply was kind of a perfect example of what I am talking about.
If you figure out how to work around the "people don't like me and how i converse with them" issue (which imo is just a lack of social skills, regardless of whether it is due to neurodivergence or not), you are gonna become legitimately unstoppable if you combine it with the rest of your skills/intelligence.
I have some experience with this, picked up on some clues and ran with option B.
It’s kind of odd, but personality and intellect feel a bit like a zero sum equation. The more truly brilliant a person, the more likely they have trouble ‘reading the room’. Obviously there are exceptions and it isn’t so simple, but I have seen it play out more often than not.
(I'm not as talented as 'aspergersadd' but usually came up with good technical solutions for companies I worked for - however my interpersonal relationships and ability to deal with workplace stress and emotions were a disaster)
You do seem to be doing a pretty good job of understanding yourself, keep that up. Try to figure out how you can expand your skills at navigating yourself and the world.
Send me an email if you’d like, not at the moment but I’m occasionally in the position to find and hire great people.
No doubt that we are not all cognitively equal, but I am a personally convinced it is a total scam invented to put people on drugs.
The difference is, in those cultures you just 'try harder' or drink yourself into a stupor/early death if you can't fit in. The US at least gives folks options.
Sure, millions of people, myself included, do have attention deficit issues, but the question is whether it is an actual pathology or something socio-educo-cultural. The very diagnostic seems to be extremely controversial amongst scientists, according to google. My bulshit meter is activated because again, while people with troubles of attention can be found everywhere, the United States is about the only country where ADHD is a thing.
PS: in terms of options, cocaine works as well and for sale everywhere in the world.
Since a pathology is a disease (aka something not working) and all. And it clearly isn’t working in either place.
There is a reason why life expectancy is dramatically shorter for men in Eastern Europe, it isn’t just ADHD that gets this treatment.
And suggested illegal street drugs of unknown potency or other problems is somehow better than regulated and tested stimulants is more than a bit bizarre.
There is no need to make a false dychotomy here: I have nothing about the use of substances if they help people struggling with attention and concentration, and there are probably tons of people on similar drugs in Europe. The only difference is that the United States is the only place where ADHD is a thing, e.g: considered an actual pathology despite the absence of any demonstration of a confirmatory physical (including chemical) abnormality in the brain. And I believe it leads to massive over-prescriptions.
> And suggested illegal street drugs of unknown potency or other problems is somehow better than regulated and tested stimulants is more than a bit bizarre.
I'm not suggesting anything, I used the example of cocaine as a substance that is known to improve concentration too. My point being, Adderal/Ritalin are not the magic drug that treats ADHD, they are just brain enhancing substances as well, sold by pharmacies.
This is just simply untrue. It is true that how seriously it is taken and what is usually prescribed as treatment varies significantly, but it is understood to be a real thing across Europe, at least. I have multiple friends in multiple countries who have received a diagnosis.
And you explicitly referred to cocaine as an equivalent option to prescribed medication. Despite it being highly illegal in nearly every country in the world, of difficult to ascertain quality or purity (and often cut with dangerous or unknown substances), and would be used in this context with no professional oversight - since it’s highly illegal.
Yikes.
No, I tried and failed to make you understand my main point that these drugs which are 'presecribed' for a pathology whose existence has yet to be scientifically demonstrated, are actually no different from cocaine in what they do when you take them. I've seen comments in this thread saying that since Adderal/Ritaline works and has positive effects, therefor the existance of ADHD is demonstrated. After all, that's an opinion as well, so please let me keep mine that Adderal/Ritaline are nothing but legal meth.
20mg of Adderall for someone with ADHD (who benefits from it?) - finally only having one thing at a time they are thinking about instead of 20. And most of the time, they can sleep better that night - maybe even a ‘finally can sleep’ night.
Someone with normal brain chemistry? Obsessive, hyper focus and unable to sleep potentially for days.
Having seen it myself.
Medication (with stimulants) often allows the person to stop or control it when it isn’t helpful or desirable, and actually sleep. Which is quite unintuitive at first.
Inattentive type is also a thing, and often looks like someone who is always daydreaming/off in their own world. That tends to show up more in women, but that’s only a rough categorization. Some folks cycle back and forth.
Overall as pointed out elsewhere, it’s the difficulty in regulating and directing attention that is the problem, and when it causes distress and difficulty living a normal life is when it gets categorized as a disorder.
Whereas you do right?
> These stimulants work markedly different for folks with this different brain chemistry, and pretty clearly so.
They are both brain stimulants, that's why I coined this "Legal meth".
PS: As for the rest of your arguments, not gonna answer because I have no idea what you are talking about, trying to mean, or even if this gibbering makes any sense at all. Please take your Adderall actually.
ADHD people can focus on things they enjoy or are interested in (More precisely, something that stimulates them) for excessive periods of time.
When something doesn't stimulate them, it's extremely difficult or impossible for them to regulate their attention and force themselves to focus on the task.
A lot of the common comorbid issues of anxiety or depression can come from the anxiousness and self abuse that comes from doing the exciting/interesting thing despite their every attempt to do what they know they should be doing.
Add in little external beatings in some environments, and it isn’t a pleasant existence.
Describing ADHD as “just less cognitively capable” is harmful as you could confuse knowing things and doing things. People with ADHD often struggle with doing things (starting, switching or sustaining focus on a task), but do struggle with knowing things. It’s a performance disability not an intellectual one.
Look up how stimulants affect an ADHD brain, it’s different to a brain without the disorder. In an ADHD brain neurotransmitters like dopamine are less available and removed quicker. Stimulants often act in ways to enable more dopamine to be around.
An analogy here is imagine having 70% packet loss on your internet connection. Try doing your job with that. You need to make a number of adjustments and accomodations to succeed. Well, when you add in stimulants that packet loss drops significantly to say >10%. I experienced this happen in real time when I started taking medication, and this is backed up by Dr Russel Barkley one of the leading experts in this area.
In a brain without ADHD (or a neurotypical brain) there’s no missing dopamine. So taking stimulants still increases the amount of available dopamine, but now there’s way to much. Norepinephrine is also increased with most stimulants to.
There’s real pharmacological evidence to back treating ADHD with medication. It’s well known to be one of the most successful medical treatments in psychiatry.
Giving kids with ADHD extra time or unlimited time is a reasonable accomodation if you want to test if that kid _knows_ the material. If you want to test if they can do it in the time frame, that’s a different test.
ADHD is not a uniquely American thing. Though there’s decades of stigma and loads of research to still be done. Right now we have treatments that work, and a decent understanding of ways to accommodate people with ADHD.
Medication is temporary, and helps correct for a lack of naturally occurring neurotransmitters. (Though I believe it’s more because our brains reuptake them too fast?)
It’s a bit of a shame the medication is a party drug for nuerotypical people, because I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if it wasn’t.
I’ll finish by adding that I think ADHD is horrifically named. The name alone contributed to me not looking into it seriously enough which delayed my diagnosis by at least a decade. The disorder really is more a challenge with executive functioning and the ability to deploy attention where needed. Like many other conditions it’s described by how it affects others, not how it affects those with it. It’s like saying someone who just broke their arm has a problem regulating their volume. Technical correct, but so far off base its harmful.
For me medication has had a profound positive impact on my life. Like getting glasses, but orders of magnitude more.
In the meantime, I'll add ADHD to the list of uniquely american things (alongside circumcision and tipping), even tho I am sure that there are at least more than 0 people in every other country in the world who heard about ADHD before (so impressed by your rhetorical skills guys, merry xmas1).
UK, for the record
EDIT: yikes, given the rest of your comments downthread, please do yourself a favour and do some research before repeating your preconceived and incorrect notions of something you don't know much about. It's fine not to know, it's not fine to think you know something you don't.
Do you realize how weak your argument acutally is? You can now be invested in this believe and it's entirely fine with me but the hard reality remains the following:
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/adhd/what-is-ad...
Ergo, there is absolutely no scientific diagnosis for these imaginary pathologies, these patologies are diagnosed entirely via symptoms, which isn't necessarily a deal breaker for me, but when I read the list of symptoms, I just call bulshit sorry.
I have no interest in engaging further with you. Good day.