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Comment by demosthanos | Hacker News Reader

There are many volumes on the subject, but I'm honestly tired of debating this with people who doubt ADHD is a thing. If you're legitimately curious, there are myriad sources out there about the differences in ADHD brains.

Suffice it to say that I'm sure. All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.

"Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't. I just know that we don't work in the way that the world expects us to.

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Thank you for answering.

I don't doubt the research, it's more I doubt how many diagnoses were accurate.

I was diagnosed with ADD as well, so I'm not being entrely dismissive. In this age of self ID I think there can be reason to be.

> All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.

If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?

> "Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't.

Not my intention, I should have said unique or significantly different in the contexts you mentioned or something.

> If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?

There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes—there's too much similarity and too many people with both to be a coincidence. But in the case of my family, most of us do just fine in reading social cues... when we're paying attention. Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.

> Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.

Yes, this is something I deal with as well.

It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.

I've wondered if I am on the spectrum also but I don't match a lot of the base/core traits, although I feel ADHD or ADD alone doesn't explain some of my, ahem, quirks either.

I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.

> It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.

These days they don't draw a distinction any more. There are different presentations of ADHD, but it's all the same disorder.

> I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.

No worries, sorry for reacting negatively! I've had a lot of people assume that ADHD is not a thing at all, and it gets exhausting having to explain it. I pattern matched on your comment too aggressively.

Look into AuDHD, PDA, and monotropism. See if any of it resonates. Definitely feels like our current diagnosis paradigm is in dire need of changes.

> There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes

Autism and adhd definitely appear to share traits, and I suspect there's a shared cluster of genes affecting certain aspects of neural linking between regions of the brain. Even without shared genes it makes sense that a "networked system" of core brain functions would share similar behaviors if the parameters were tweaked in similar ways.

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