Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

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I've always had a peculiar, extremely elastic relationship with time, which I do perceive, only it's wildly all over the place, day in day out; a "moment" could fold hours into an eyeblink, or it could make split seconds last an eternity and a half. A tidy calendar, reminders for basically everything, and setting up "mental tripwires"† is the only way I found to be any sort of reliable.

Finding balance between the constant dread of missing something I have to do that turns me into a slave to the clock and being able to live a relaxed life is an eternal battle of mine.

† Some kind of autosuggestion trickery, where I lay a callback upon some unrelated physical thing I know will happen in order to trigger another thought. e.g "when I cross the kitchen door I'll think about texting foo about bar"

> Check the time, check the time. To what end? I can’t tell you.

    It was Grandfather’s watch and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
    
    I don’t suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don’t have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.

    It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.

    - William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

> Lunch is at lunchtime.

    “Drink up,” said Ford, “you’ve got three pints to get through.”
    “Three pints?” said Arthur. “At lunchtime?”
    The man next to ford grinned and nodded happily. Ford ignored him. He said, “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

    - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

>I've always had a peculiar, extremely elastic relationship with time, which I do perceive, only it's wildly all over the place, day in day out; a "moment" could fold hours into an eyeblink, or it could make split seconds last an eternity and a half. A tidy calendar, reminders for basically everything, and setting up "mental tripwires"† is the only way I found to be any sort of reliable.

All quite common in ADD/ADHD.

Self diagnoses (and diagnoses over the internet) are pretty harmful in a society where many people think they have every mental/physical disorder just because they have a few (of the many) symptoms associated with one (or many) disorders

One might even argue that the labeling aspect of a certain disorder (particularly a mental one) by a "professional" to not be particularly helpful too in addressing ones problems

>Self diagnoses (and diagnoses over the internet) are pretty harmful

Self-diagnoses can be legitimate or not - depends on the person doing them. They are often a necessity, in an environment where a professional diagnosis takes thousands of dollars or years in waiting (and is often done badly, by ill-informed professionals, like the many-decades prevailing myth that women/girls "can't be autistic", or that "ADD and autism can't coincide").

As (in this case) they are also based not on bloodwork or some physical indicators, but on a subjective assessment of a person's way of thinking, the person having the actual experience is often more qualified than the professional. Same to how you don't really need a doctor to tell you you're gay.

>One might even argue that the labeling aspect of a certain disorder (particularly a mental one) by a "professional" to not be particularly helpful too in addressing ones problems

One might argue that the false dichotomy between professionals and laymen, where the former is supposed to hold all the keys to knowledge and the latter to passively consult and follow the advice of the former, is a problem in itself.

And a little outdated in modern societies where the "laymen" are not some mud dwelling peasants who never went to school and only know farm work, but univercity-educated (even over-educated) in their own right, and libraries are not confined to the rich or the scholars, but every book ever written is a click away.

In any case, a self-diagnosis doesn't give you the required paperwork to get drugs, or to get benefits, or specific accomondations, or anything like that. So it's not like it hurts society by taking resources from "legitimate" diagnoses.

Last, but not least, pointing that X symptoms is "quite common to ADD/ADHD" is not self-diagnosis, it's not even diagnosing. It's a suggestion hinting to a possible condition. It could very well be used for seeking a professional diagnosis.

Or do you think people with ADD/ADHD just go to the doctor to get diagnosed out of the blue, and not because of some similar suspicion, spotting some unexplained symptoms or themselves, or identification with some symptoms they've read about?

If you compare notes and find mitigations/strategies used by people with diagnoses helps, then it hardly matters for all but one practical purpose. If you need a diagnosis for disability support, that's another matter. It's sometimes more trouble than benefit from what I've heard.

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