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I certainly had ADHD before being exposed to work environments. I've had my entire life. But it wasn't until I got my diagnosis, and started taking medication for it, that my square-peg of an existence began to fit in with the round-hole of reality.
Work environments have nothing to do with it for me. In fact, I love my job. Here, my ADHD is something of a benefit. I've excelled at everything I have found enjoyable, and have no qualms with working insane crunch on the stuff I like.
The key word there being like. If I don't like doing it, it's practically impossible for me to do. Or rather, if it's mundane or otherwise just "not interesting", I struggle. Strangely enough, I have an easier time accomplishing things I actively dislike doing. Not sure why.
It's like my body is controlled by an autopilot gone rogue, and the medication helps me override it.
For example, I have trouble going to the bathroom to take a piss. Not because of any phobia or anything. I just cant. Literally. I'll sit and squirm until I'm about to piss myself, and only then will I go to the bathroom. Been doing that since I was a little kid.
One way around it is to trick myself somehow, like by putting on a podcast, even though I'll only hear like 20 seconds of it. Couldn't do that as a kid, tho. Back then, I would wait until it became physically painful, because only then would my rogue autopilot allow me to go piss.
Doing laundry? Impossible. Vacuuming? No. Washing dishes? Well, now I have a dishwasher, but emptying it? No way.
That is, unless I take my medication (methylphenidate). It doesn't make mundane things any less mundane. It's still boring to brush my teeth and piss. It just makes it possible.
I didn't get my diagnosis until I was 28. My entire life I've been struggling with this. It's a primary factor in my lifelong battle with depression. It's lead me down a path of substance abuse — alcohol and cocaine in particular.
Despite all of this, I still second-guess myself on whether I truly have ADHD. What if I'm just a drug addict, and I just tricked a psychiatrist into giving me those sweet sweet drugs?
If you don't need to spend significant amounts of energy on daily basis to cope with your ADHD (successfully or not), do you have ADHD at all?
Certainly an interesting question. I was told by two people that have it that I do, and by a psychologist that i clearly don't. But I do know that I have symptoms. So the question is rather spot on. Unless you "you don't need to spend significant amounts of energy" do you actually have it? Can it be that the symptoms are caused by something else?
And that brings me back to my initial poorly worded comment. Whereby my worry is that some may be too happy to prescribe medication where its no needed, as opposed to focusing on removing the factors that cause so many people to have symptoms of various traits that they don't actually enjoy. I am just worried that we rely too much on sedating folks just to numb them as a first resort simply because our work patterns and habbits are toxic to varying degrees overall.
Also, it's hard enough to get ADHD meds even if you genuinely need them to function that I'm not worried about people ending up overmedicated at all. I'd rather see meds becoming easier to obtain, since people who actually need them suffer from the obstacles meant to stop people who don't the most.
Hate sitting at a desk, been diagnosed, and not into sales.
Not trying to be combative, would love suggestions. I partly want to go bar-tend or be a plumber, but the wage isn’t there.
I should have gone into medicine, but it’s too late for that at this stage.
Wage is still a step back and I’m nearing the age cut-off, so would have to jump on it pretty soon.
Spent a summer working in a blue collar fashion for a small company. It was fun-ish, but the owner was at a desk all day.
ADHD means "I don't choose what I focus on", which poses some management challenges, but in an environment where there's always a lot of various interesting tasks to choose from and a team of people where others can take care of things you end up neglecting because your focus has changed, one can still thrive sitting behind a desk. In fact, my ADHD barely ever takes me away from my desk (unless making it too cluttered to sit there and moving with a laptop to a couch counts).
Maintaining your health, house and relationships is not as easy though.