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Comment by pcurve | Hacker News Reader

"And nearly half of them mentioned "by the way, I have ADHD"

Statistically that seems rather unlikely, so I wonder if people are being over-diagnosed?

Statistics might ignore the "birds of a feather flock together" tendencies of humans.

Over the years it's turning out my entire since-college friend group have some sort of mental health disorder that's been missed for 30 years.

If I found a team with a couple other ADHD folks that seemed to be thriving that company would be top of my list for sure.

Many people diagnose themselves, and still more are diagnosed by psychiatrists with checklists, as opposed to a neurologist. So there is probably some amount of over diagnosis. Some people may be using it as shorthand for "I'm sometimes disorganized" the way people use OCD as shorthand for "I like things clean".

Some industries and workplaces are better suited for ADHD sufferers as well. My ADHD got in the way in most of my other jobs before I became a developer, where it's actually sort of an asset. Perhaps OPs job attracts a certain type.

Many of my friends have ADHD.

Probably because ADHD people have trouble getting along with neurotypicals

> Probably because ADHD people have trouble getting along with neurotypicals

In our defense, normies suck.

I couldn't even say who's normal and who isn't.

I have a very small circle of friends and they're all kinda... special. So for me such behaviour feels normal.

I think there's a more constructive way to look at this which is neurotypical people have an extremely difficult time empathizing with people who are neurodivergent. This leads to a lot of friction, especially in friend groups and between managers and their subordinates.

NTs have no incentive to understand NDs, yet the lives of NDs hinges on how much effort we put into understanding and being understood.

One side is motivated to be open and communicative and the other is motivated to be insular and closed.

I know the "us vs them" mentality isn't healthy but I've lived an entire lifetime in a societal warzone and I refuse to just roll over and pretend that I'm not part of a socially marginalized group.

NTs are the problem. Society's intolerance is the problem. NDs aren't the problem, NTs are.

Lets rephrase what you just said

> straight people are the problem for not wanting to date gay or trans people

It just is. Everyone has challenges, people with ADHD have challenges that can be particularly difficult for sure, but blaming others for not being like you is and telling them it's their responsibility is the same thing just reversed. It doesn't improve your situation.

Please don't.

Society forces everybody to interact socially. In a society where everybody is expected to date anybody, forcing somebody to date is still abhorrent.

> Society forces everybody to interact socially.

No, the premise you require in order for me to be wrong is that society forces this on everyone, but I live with a woman who has crippling anxiety to the point of being on disability for it and I can tell you that's emphatically untrue. Even SSI related meetings happen over the phone because of her disability.

Those with ADHD have many challenges that other people don't have, but asking the whole of society to suddenly be able to understand them better is like asking all women to be start preferring short men. It just is, and those with these challenges will have to learn how to deal with them (and you see posters on HN all the time talking about how they've done just that). For those for which it's truly debilitating, we need to make sure they don't fall through the cracks (and for the most part we do this).

It's as much a part of reality as the person with 2 missing thumbs having more difficulty grasping things than someone with both thumbs.

The analogy with sexuality and gender bothered me. It is a sore point and fragile. The solution for them is (foremost) equality, the solution for people with disabilities is egality.

Yes, society changed to help people as much as possible. With changes your living-mate can interact with society as well as possible. Sure, the missing thumbs are disabling, but somebody insisting on hand-written instead of typed notes is an asshole. At some point, people who ignore a disability or disorder because of general ignorance or worse are the problem.

reality doesn't give a shit how you feel, that's the point.

I mean, I get it. Every time I point out other groups have challenges too, you're going to attempt to explain why those challenges are not relevant to this conversation.

And when you're done with this conversation, you'll be in the same spot you were before.

I've heard a nice description of ADHD being both the most under and over diagnosed issue at the same time. Since it's mostly based on self-reporting, it's easy to get on the meds if you want to, or easy to pin on an issue someone may be having, as a quick solution. On the other hand, for various reasons high functioning people will keep on going and try to deal with it daily until they run into some roadblocks. It took me over 30 years to get diagnosed, but really I should've done it in primary school already. (There was minimal awareness then)

Possible that the people are misdiagnosed, also possible that there's bias in hiring, or bias in field selection from people with adhd. It could also just be that yes, it is statistically unlikely, and this is just a less likely sample.

On the other hand, the parent's wording kind of made it sound like it was a lot of people. "Nearly half" of "six or seven" could be ... two.

That might be a lot percentage-wise, but it's also a really small number of people to draw conclusions from, isn't it?

The statistics you're not citing are from history. It could be that in the past it has been majorly under-diagnosed.

I still suspect that yes, it was under-diagnosed or overlooked for a long time, but that ultimately it's a disorder that is, for most people who have it, a result of a fairly-large section of the ordinary human brain-development spectrum being badly mis-matched with modern society, in a way that it hadn't been in the (perhaps somewhat distant) past. Since differences in brain development aren't really considered disorders unless they cause a problem in ordinary life, if ordinary life itself changes to put different sorts of demands on people, then it seems plausible that could create disorders where there were none before. I'm pretty sure that's a lot of what's going on with AD(H)D.

I mean, if you look at early 20th century jobs most similar to office jobs today, they look from the outside, and are depicted by contemporary media, as crushingly dull—but, they had the benefit of also being highly repetitive, stack of papers to go through, do the thing you do, put it in the outbox, move to the next stack. Now everything's every bit as dull, but we're also expected to juggle a much broader set of not-terribly-similar tasks, often taking on little bits of what used to be the jobs of entire, dedicated humans before computerization "freed" companies to smear those tasks across their entire workforce. That seems like a recipe for failure for someone with ADHD-brain.

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