Evidence-based conclusions about ADHD

I'm getting adhd-as-a-lifestyle vibes off of this, and as someone who has ADHD I stay away from that mentality with every ounce of effort I can muster.

ADHD is a thing I have, not who I am.

Edit: The actual "statement" is a much better representation of what this site (and its organizers) are about:

https://www.adhdevidence.org/ics

Seriously, I'm stunned by how terrible the landing page is. If the person who built this is here, you've really got to quiet that landing page down, there's way too much going on. In particular, the AMA accordion component should be removed entirely.

> racing thought and elevated heart rate

This sounds an awful lot like either your dosage was too high or you’re one of the people with ADHD who doesn’t actually respond well to stimulants. Elevated heart rate/blood pressure is common and responsible doctors prescribing these drugs check it routinely, but racing thoughts is not a typical reaction at an appropriate dose.

Regarding other methods, one common but less formal thing that has helped me, and which I’ve seen benefit a lot of friends and others diagnosed later in life: developing and nurturing an awareness of the kinds of coping mechanisms that are already present, with close attention to which are helpful but could be developed further and to which are counterproductive or just neutral so they might be put aside.

For myself, I’ve realized that there’s a couple common threads through most of my helpful coping mechanisms. Foremost among them: keeping consistent routines is kind of a house of cards, but one which is much more resilient for me if I allow myself to be fairly rigid about them. Another: having a high degree of control over the sensory stimulation I’m exposed to, especially but not only sound, is one of my best defenses against cognitive overload.

These coping mechanisms vary by person but they often cluster around the kinds of problem areas that ADHD patients notice rather than the external problem areas that tend to lead to childhood diagnosis (or internalized self judgment reflecting real or perceived external judgment regardless of diagnosis age). As in, “why does ____ cause me to struggle and what’s been most effective when I do struggle?” tends to be a better starting point than “why can’t I just do ____ like normal people seem to do?” If nothing else, it gives you a chance to have self empathy and recognize that there are reasons and that you may already have a framework for those reasons, even if you haven’t noticed it yet.

It depends on what the thoughts are as to what will work best, if they are beliefs or schemas about yourself, random ideas or memories. What they are could mean they have a different purpose.

I have them regardless of treatment, mostly ideas for things to research, or questions to answer or creative things, sometimes I just need to record them and know they are captured somewhere. Like a voice recorder. Because years of trying to remember things means when I have an idea, sometimes, I'll run it over and over and over again to make sure it doesn't get lost. Capturing it and putting it somewhere safe means I can let myself move on more easily.

I do have elevated blood pressure that is now slightly on the "hmmmm lets watch that" side, but I had very healthy blood pressure to begin with and can thankfully adequately manage it with some medication.

Sorry to say, that is absolute bollocks. Sugar is ADHD in powdered form, and both in personal experience and the professional advice from my psychiatrist is to stay as far away from sugar as possible.

Also, symptoms of ADHD != ADHD. Many things cause lower baseline levels of dopamine in the brain, but not all of them are ADHD, the disorder itself.

Personally, as a diagnosed ADHD sufferer, the lower the amount of carbs I ingest, the better my executive centre functions. In fact, yesterday I have had a little more sugar than my regular strict diet and my motivation today has tanked to absolute zero. It's a feeling I have known all my life.

Please provide some sources because your comment goes against all professional and scientific advice.

I thought I was just depressed for 20 years and had a hard enough time trying to cover that up. I work in an industry that is built on trust through repeated execution and excellence - Management Consulting

It's thinking work. Any mental "impairment" could reasonably be classified as effecting that consistent repeatability with certainty.

Dysregulation of attention and emotion means your ability to execute is not always in your control, and sometimes you will take longer, or make mistakes, or sometimes you hit it right out of the park... but too far - you are seen as being inconsistent. Your ups and downs are much more frequent and often in severity than the general population (that's what makes it a disorder)

A lot of people partition you in the "too-hard" to deal with pile. They don't know what to do with you, how to use you effectively.

Covering up for this, masking, takes a huge amount of additional effort and drains you physically and mentally.

Yes my organization champions the importance of diversity, even neurodiversity because diverse teams work better and deliver better results. Yes I have access to some accommodations, but my work is project based, I get pulled onto things by others. If they subconsciously have a bias towards putting me on something because they are afraid of that inconsistency when the stakes are already high, then I'll likely be looked over. Not everyone, but many. You're a risk. A liability.

I have a friend. An incredible lawyer. Here undiagnosed ADHD and diagnosed depression meant she had to take some time off due to being completely burnt out. She disclosed it to her employer. She was pressured into signing an NDA before later being fired because the partner couldn't "trust" or "deal with" her not always being available. The NDA meant that she couldn't speak publicly about it or sue her former employer for wrongful dismissal. It ruined her career.

Yeah, the site hurts my ADHD brain to read too:

- The font is simultaneously too big and too small, inconsistent in sizes and styles between headers and sections. The handwritten font used in a few places is basically illegible to me.

- The margins/padding are too small - the text comes riiight up to the edge of my screen! Argh

- The carousel sections could just be..... all shown as regular paragraphs, one under each other... without the distracting animation... Not great for working memory, having things you want to read going in and out of your visual field! Let me scan the whole document!

- The page is full-width, all sections get as wide as possible - meaning you can have lines of text which are like 40 words long! (Longest I counted was one of the reddit AMA questions - 41 words). The line length should be limited to like 75 characters maximum. [1]

- Lots of stuff is too close together (not enough vertical padding) - like the reddit AMA questions. Why are those in an accordion and collapsed by default? What are the borders between them for - do they show the top of one or the bottom of another?

- Why do the "Source" buttons pop up a modal dialog with a snippet of reddit thread which is styled entirely different to the rest of the site? Again, why not just show all of that information on the page to begin with?

- A long page which you just have to scroll is _infinitely_ more readable than a user interface where stuff is popping in and out of existence everywhere and depends on user clicks. What if you're dyspraxic / you don't use a screen reader but your carpal tunnel's acting up?

The accessibility options provided by UserWay are a nice touch, but the little human icon at the bottom right isn't immediately obvious what it is (at least give it an "Accessibility" label). Make it _above the fold_ - top of the page. Make it one of the first things someone who would _want_ the accessibility options would spot!

I think that sites like this, where it does look like the _intention_ is to make it accessible and readable by as many people as possible, could take inspiration from the UK Gov Design System [2] and read about the principles underpinning it [3].

I've experimented in the past with making my personal blog more readable for "people with brains like me" [4]. It's certainly personal taste / meeting my own personal needs, but how I lay out information on that blog (very narrow, very linear, minimal interaction needed) is a lot different to how the ADHD Evidence Project site lays stuff out (very wide, multiple columns, stuff inconsistently in and accordions and popups)

[1] https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

[2] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

[3] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles

[4] https://odj.me/blog/2021-10-22-a11y

(This turned into a long comment because I'm going to send the link to u/sfaraone on reddit as my feedback :-))

https://www.adhdevidence.org/ics

> Widespread public belief that artificial food coloring causes ADHD-like hyperactivity in children originated from Benjamin Feingold, a pediatric allergist from California, who proposed in 1973 that salicylates, artificial colors, and artificial flavors cause hyperactivity in children;[35] however, there is no evidence to support broad claims that food coloring causes food intolerance and ADHD-like behavior in children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_coloring#Criticism_and_he...

Even if you somehow don't care what other people think, stigma gets in the way of medication.

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/attention-deficit-hyperactivit... [2] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

(And then, when you look at local authority websites for local councils, or local healthcare trusts, they're an absolute disparate hellscape of information badly put together in powerpoints, word documents, handmade GP websites tacked onto by students on work placements who know a bit about HTML, ...)

Why do you believe so?

I’m in my 40s, and have been taking prescription amphetamines for ~20 years now. To this day, my experience is consistent and predictable. Before I take my first dose (which isn’t always in the morning), I have little ability to control where my attention goes. It’s not that I lack attention, mind you. There’s plenty of water in the tank, I just can’t control the firehose, and the nozzle just sprays water everywhere. My brain is a “noisy” place, different aspects of my cognition demanding to be the one that is heard. It’s a firehouse full of firefighters demanding to direct that wide-stream firehose. Every interruption, every slow driver, every unexpected sound, they’re all adding to the din, each one a firefighter demanding the firehose for their own purposes. If I’m lucky, I can fight them off and direct the hose where I want…until a new firefighter (distraction) walks in.

As a result, I’m anxious, irritable, fidgety, and impatient. You’d think I was on speed, given how quickly my attention jumps from one thing to another, and how quickly I lose the ability to focus on non-novel, boring things. It doesn’t matter if they’re “fires” that require my attention, I’m just ill-equipped to battle for the firehose.

About 20–30 minutes after a dose, the noise abates. The firefighters disperse. The flow to the firehose is narrowed and slowed, and I’m able to consciously hold on to it; I can direct the water (my attention) wherever I need to. Sometimes, I don’t even need to hold on to it, and it just stays where I pointed it (“hyperfocus”).

At the end of the day, when my meds wear off, I’m not exhausted from fighting my own brain all day long. I’m more relaxed. Peaceful. Calm. Patient.

I’ve seen no cognitive or physiological deficits as a result of taking prescription amphetamines for ~20 years. Because my wife and other adult friends/family members knew me before my diagnosis, they have a baseline to compare to when evaluating my behavior. I’ve asked outright, several times: they’ve seen nothing but positive improvements in my attitude, my ability to work, and my relationships with them and others.

I was diagnosed a few years ago, after a fairly severe mental health crisis with crippling anxiety and nearly drinking myself to death. Since diagnosis and beginning treatment with stimulants, I’ve been able to put my life back together. My life is stable, I’m happier than I ever was even before my mental health tanked, and my anxiety is manageable enough I seldom take notice of it.

I don’t like the side effects of stimulants, particularly the toll they've taken on my already poor dental health (for folks who don’t know, “meth mouth” can be a thing even with prescription amphetamines taken as prescribed, not just from smoking). But I have no doubt in my mind that whatever side effects I’ve experienced or may, it’s better by far than what I’d have experienced without meds.

I would argue that even if the effects diminish over time (and it’s true, they do), the benefit of being able to focus in class in those early formative years will pay dividends down the line. Being able to pay attention means you don’t have to play catch-up in math/English/etc later in life. The knowledge you gain in those years doesn’t go away once you stop taking meds.

I’m just speaking as someone who didn’t get diagnosed until I was in my late 20’s. Getting diagnosed and prescribed meds was truly life changing and it’s frustrating thinking back and knowing school didn’t have to be so difficult.

I don't want to inquire into your own experiences as it's personal. But, I used to follow NLP very closely and sort of lost interest over time.

Anyway, I felt it was best suited to 'software' changes in oneself - say at level of beliefs about the world, and how our use of symbols and language can affect our experience and abilities.

ADHD, as condition seems more like a 'hardware' thing. It's intriguing to imagine how conditions like that can be helped with a 'cognitive' approach. Perhaps it's used more to help manage things through techniques and strategies.

This site gains nothing from any Javascript or display: styling. Keep the overall theme but make it just plain content.

That being said, I wonder if it was made by someone who has ADHD?