ADHD Didn't Break Me–My Parents Did
claimingattention.substack.com
claimingattention.substack.com
There has been an interesting result recently, which was discussed here [0]. In an online game where participants had to forage for resources, people with attention deficits scored higher, because they preferred exploration to exploitation.
I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.
Having ADHD is then of course a major disadvantage in environments where there is only one global optimum. Examples include highly regulated and deterministic academic environments (school, undergraduate studies) or corporate environments.
But in human history, environments with a single global optimum have been the exception, not the rule.
People with ADHD - and their parents and teachers - should therefore embrace their individuality as a kind of reservoir talent in the human gene pool. We need these individuals in the future.
[0]: https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/evolution
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/21/adhd-may-hav...
In ancient times the Raja Yogis (basically wizards) preferred to recruit from those with ADHD. They called them "habitually one-pointed".
Or is the idea that a very distracted person being honed into a focussed and aware person is a duality that's valued -- able to live in both worlds? (Rather than a very focussed person being taught to be distracted and highly integrative?)
And we're borrowing somebody else's terminology anyway. So don't expect precision.
> In ancient times the Raja Yogis (basically wizards) preferred to recruit from those with ADHD. They called them "habitually one-pointed".
I never knew this. Can you please site some sources/supporting literature? I would like to read much more about this.
Another thing I thought- to be an Advaita Vedantin, to see God in everything (both 'data' and 'code' of everything), one benefits from ADHD, as such person will have expertise or knowledge in many areas. This is helpful, if not required to see an emerging "grand pattern" in things.
Also, if you have somewhat deep knowledge of each school of thoughts of Indian Philosophy, you also begin to see patterns, and get all these divisions are illusory and limited. And hence Bhagavad Gita 4.11.
I think I read it in Swami Vivekananda's "Raja Yoga".
I'm more of a Zennist. Thought and knowledge are overrated. Study and cultivation of awareness is where it's at.
This comment really hit me.
Like most here, I live in a culture centered around thought and knowledge. I think I've always kind of known awareness was important, but never tried to compare its importance vs thought and knowledge so directly.
I think I also got the same impression from ZMM.
I submitted your [1] here back then, conversation:
> People with ADHD - and their parents and teachers - should therefore embrace their individuality as a kind of reservoir talent in the human gene pool.
But actually academia is incredibly stressful and feels hostile. There's the publish or perish, so you can't go down the rabbit holes and deep dive. You don't have time to dig deep. Dealing with review is crazy as you have to argue to people who don't care that your stuff matters even though no one can tell if it does or not and you should just pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake. (We used to not review this way. We used to check for errors and plagiarism and if not, publish). Everything is just hyper metric focused even though everyone knows the metrics mean so little to the actual end goal they are everything to your survival goals. The goals are at odds and I don't think anyone wants to do anything about it even though many will admit it.
I know some people will say I'm naive to think academia should work that way but I think that's naive, so we'll have to agree to disagree. I think academia should be about pursuing knowledge and giving people the environment they need to do that, with the trade being teaching the future generations.
To be honest it feels the world is becoming more hostile to me. There is becoming less flexibility. Fewer opportunities to explore and hire punishments for doing so. Its harder to take things apart (physical or code) as the gardens close more and more. Harder to fix things, harder to make things to things I want (for utility and for fun). It literally feels like the walls are closing in and there's not enough adderal that can fix that.
I think you are right that the chaos helps escape local minima. If I've learned anything in my studies it's that noise is essential in optimization theory. It is also a measurement of error or uncertainty. So unless you can measure something to infinite precision then you should be incorporating noise into your models
Puja Ohlhaver has some great ideas and interventions in this space <3
I think with funding, the thing is you need to embrace the noise. I don't want to dissuade people from trying to optimize this process. But I think if we don't recognize there is a high amount of noise, that it is doomed to fail. There's things you know you know, there's things you know you don't know, there are things you don't know that you don't know, and there are things you think you know and don't know. Due to the latter two, you have to embrace noise into the system or else you will be limited to the first two. You have to embrace the outside, wild, and crazy. It can be extremely difficult to differentiate genius from craziness, and often there is none. There's always a price, so the question is which is more costly. She picks universities as the great breakthrough place, and to be fair, I mostly agree, but I think there's a lot of metric hacking that she isn't thinking about. That this has been baked in for years. The people that are successful in the system breed that system. Nor does it account for the dark horses, the noise. It reinforces fast timelines, as we're rewarding predictability in domains where it may take several decades for those predictions to be proven accurate or not. There's a certain irony in her mentioning Higgs, as his original paper was in 1964 but we didn't discover the particle until 2012.
Part of the issue she is talking about is solved more easily. Lots of research is rejected for lack of novelty. Why this is even a metric to judge a paper's worth is beyond me, as the foundation of science is about reproducibility. It also encourages obscurification as so much is obvious once you've been told, but not prior. If we go back to the form of publishing where we publish works void of major errors and plagiarism, I bet we would see an increase in innovation again. Another part of the issue is in evaluation itself (similarly solved). We're all under lots of time pressure and so few spend time reviewing carefully (you'd be shocked at some reviews I've gotten and similarly how generic they are: "paper is well written and easy to understand. Not enough experiments, not novel. There are too many writing errors" (points out easily solvable thing like a broken cross reference or an incorrect issue like saying 'these data')). You can see part of this in HN comments too btw. Where people look at benchmarks and read them as answers instead of hints. Which there is an extra problem in that anything sufficiently novel will be unlikely to be state of the art on all things in the initial go. So it is easy to reject. Then the research is not pursued. But this is ludicrous when we're talking about research, which is at a much lower level. The problem is people read research papers as if they are reviewing products. This can only stifle innovation. In machine learning there is the "gpu rich" and the "gpu poor." I can with high confidence say that the "gpu poor" aren't any worse at innovating, but rather that their works are just more likely to be rejected. How can you compete when others can spend 2-5x the money to tune parameters when what the paper is about is an architectural change or a change to optimization methods. We aren't holding variables equal here and very few want to admit it.
> I tend to be really good at cutting off things early that won't work.
Fwiw, very rarely does that not lead to value. Its just that the value add can be later down the line or in a different project. But so often there's that "Ahha!" or "oh it's just like that" moments. But I think a lot of people have difficulties with long term rewards. I think it's good to have both though but I'm not sure any single person is good at both so you need both types of people. Different optimizers for different goals
A common experience we have is that we'll be trying to figure something out then go talk to a larger group or find someone who should understand the thing (e.g. highly relevant publications) and then either "huh, I never thought about that" or they try to answer a different question (I understand they are trying to be helpful but I'd rather "I don't know". It's academia, the whole point is we don't know lol).
Though in other things I fully agree. I'm always slower in "speed to first result" but often that's because I'll write code from scratch, make sure I really understand, and make sure its flexible because I know I'm going to be hacking on it a lot. Others are often forking repos doing a lot of gluing and all that. (When I do that I feel very lost and like I understand nothing). But my experiments end up being more complete and I'm able to answer more questions where someone else would say that's too much work.
I think academia needs both types of people btw. I'm not trying to say I'm better it's just different. There's different advantages. My issue is that the system strongly optimizes for one and not the other. I think the biggest flaw in academia is thinking we know what's a successful line of research and what isn't (along with what's novel, especially post hoc lol). All the evidence seems against this and the high frequency of dark horses suggests it'd be idiotic to rely on predictions to be highly accurate.
I had this experience several times at work - I had to deal with some obscure legacy tech (think industrial protocols from the 90s), I enthusiastically figured I can learn this quickly, sat down to reference material, and... my eyes stopped being able to process text. And yet, over the following weeks or months, I'd have moments trying to work with that old thing, where I'd suddenly find a rabbit hole I had to chase, and through that chase I'd get rapidly up to speed with the spec that was impossible to even look at earlier.
Long term, this added to a much deeper understanding than people around me had, for fraction of the effort - so this was a win. Unfortunately, this also isn't compatible with how everyone works, as I can't plan or give other people promises or estimates around this. "I'll get there when I get there" doesn't fly in the modern workplace.
Like a few other related aspects of ADHD, it really is a superpower - just very hard to activate, and trying to activate it on demand actually makes it impossible.
What makes me sad though is that it seems this is not how it used to be. In fact from what I can tell it was more common in high innovation labs to select these types of people and kinda let them loose. The job wasn't so much to tell them what to work on so much as make sure there aren't things blocking them and to make sure they don't get stuck in the rabbit holes. Of course it was never all sunshine and roses, but it did seem that the environments were a lot more flexible. Even several recent Veritasium videos have talked about people who just essentially didn't do their actual job for like a year, "slacking off", and how this gave them the opportunities to explore certain ideas.
I really think we have to admit how many dark horses there are when it comes to innovation. If we don't provide space for them, then we slow progress down. If we don't create an environment, then it slows. Do we really want to go back to the time where most science was performed by the wealthy? Because only they were the ones who had the luxury of being able to explore?
I often think back to Asimov's "Profession"[0]. I can't help but think this in part was a critique on academia and the relationship to this issue.
My psychiatrist told me that when using any amphetamine-based medication for ADHD, it's important to see it as a way to reinforce routines and habits, whatever they may be, and not necessarily a fix to ADHD itself but rather as a tool to help my brain.
With that in mind, I was advised to take my medication and immediately start doing the things I usually struggle with. For me, that just meant getting to work on specific tasks or studying specific things. Sticking to this approach made a huge difference in how well the medication worked for me.
Over time, I was able to lower my dose, and now I find it much easier to settle into a routine. While the medication can dull my creativity, I've learned to work around that by adjusting when I take it and planning out my work accordingly.
In the case my workload or life changes I tend to get back to my old dosage for a short period until new routines settle, I'm very fortunate to have a family doctor that understands this and is willing to change dosages when needed.
I'm not sure how this would play out with extended-release versions or if this applies to your situation, but I figured it was worth sharing.
Also curious to know if this approach has worked particularly well for me but not for others, or if you take the same approach already.
I find my creativity is still pretty much 100% on a very low (basically small child level) dose of ritalin. I won't even touch adderall- it completely killed my creativity and ability to sleep soundly.
One thing I found helps is I put desiccant in my bottles and it helps maintain the quality. I do some 3d printing and so store any excess medicine with filament.
Anyways, you are not alone, there are others like you also going through this. I am thinking about how nice it would be to have a community for ADHD academics to share advice and strategies.
> I'm putting much more energy into trying to hide/mask ADHD than actually doing my job.
> Anyways, you are not alone
[0] funny story. My advisor is kinda lazy so pushed it off to me. But he didn't always show up. But he would teach sometimes because the department would get mad if he didn't (politics). But when it'd be just me the student in the front would nervously ask "is it just you?" And when I'd say yes they all relax and get excited lol
I have had life-long crippling ADHD that I am only now, in my 30s, starting to learn to cope with. My biggest thing was educating myself on what ADHD actually was so that I was better able to spot it in my own life, and then apply strategies to address it.
I'm not sure the above is relevant, but what I wanted to say is in response to this:
> I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.
My life has been really difficult because I simply cannot, ever, force myself to do something I don't want to do. I think there are cool goals in life I'd really appreciate - playing an instrument, learning a language, gettign a PhD, etc. But each of these goals involves an activity that I inherently don't want to do and therefore cannot make myself do them. Studying for exams to get into a grad program, practicing consistently for an instrument, studying a language that has no real applicable use in my life. I simply cannot do these things.
On one hand, that sucks. I wish my brain needed less short-term reward. I wish I was able to hold long term goals in my head as a motivation to get stuff done. But ADHD brains are famously very bad at this, mine included.
On the other hand, ADHD, to your point, has forced a LOT of growth and movement in my life. I cannot sit in one job, town, relationship, friendship, forever. I get antsy. I have to try new things. I crave novelty, and I seek it out in every aspect of my life. I do weird, crazy things, and I meet people who also do those things, and we get along just great. I live a very nontraditional lifestyle. And I've tried a million different things, hobbies, people, cities. I know a little bit about absolutely everything and can talk to almost anyone about something they're interested in because I know just enough to ask interesting questions that they enjoy answering.
It's a shame that my ADHD is pretty incompatible with capitalism. I work for a couple years then take a year or more off work, rinse and repeat. I've done this my entire life. Thankfully I work in software that pays well enough, and I'm frugal enough, to make this work. But job hopping plus not caring that much about my work means I don't get FAANG bucks or anything, in fact my salary has always been pretty below average for the work I do. But I make it work.
This is 100% accurate description of me, too. Except, I somehow managed to finish my masters' studies, start a career in software and eventually get a decent job, then get married and had a kid before I got diagnosed and realized where all my anguish comes from, why I barely hold on.
On the one hand, that sucks. On the other hand, this still sucks. I really wish I'd been diagnosed a bit earlier, because even if the kind of lifestyle and perspective you described would've worked for me too, it's too late for me now. I can't afford to try any nontrivial novelty, try different hobbies, or do anything else I've been denying myself, with the intensity I actually need.
No, an hour a week of a new hobby will not do; nothing short of frequent binges lasting uninterrupted for days would do. It's how I learned everything, including the knowledge and experience to give me a solid start in software. I thought I don't need it, I denied myself it to fit better with normal society and regular people, and now it's too late - too many loved ones depend on me not just bailing out and reinventing myself in another industry.
> It's a shame that my ADHD is pretty incompatible with capitalism. I work for a couple years then take a year or more off work, rinse and repeat. I've done this my entire life. Thankfully I work in software that pays well enough, and I'm frugal enough, to make this work. But job hopping plus not caring that much about my work means I don't get FAANG bucks or anything, in fact my salary has always been pretty below average for the work I do. But I make it work.
Yes, like this, and I wish I could do it like you. Wonder if there is another way.
I had a vasectomy around age 30 knowing kids would make my life really difficult, I think for the same reasons you're seeing right now. It's a lot of responsibility and I frankly struggle to take care of myself as it is. I'd be a really good parent and I take phenomenal care of my partners, but my financial variability would cause me too much stress if I had a kid.
The “scored higher” part of this study is editorialization. The game was developed in a way that exploration produced a higher numeric result so they could measure something as part of the test. The game was an artificial experiment environment and it was designed to “reward” behavior associated with ADHD, so it would have been more surprising if the game did not result in higher scores for people with ADHD.
The layers of editorialization and hypothesizing built on studies like this remind me of the debate over “depressive realism”. Some researchers put out a study showing that people with depression more accurately interpreted something in some specific scenarios which were designed for the study. It was widely misinterpreted by the public and pop culture science writers as showing that depressed people see the world more accurately, and therefore they are an untapped reservoir for seeing the world as it really is. There’s a huge problem with this interpretation because depression produces a lot of cognitive distortions that make people think things are much worse than they really are, so they’re really only more “accurate” when you have them evaluate situations that are worse than they appear. Yet this nuance is lost in the pop culture debate and many people think “depressive realism” means depressed people have a secret advantage.
I think these ideas have become popular as the diagnostic criteria for ADHD and other conditions have widened to include large percentages of the population. In the past the diagnostic criteria for ADHD was such that it was estimated to have low single digit percentage prevalence in the population. Now we’re at a point where Adderall is the 14th most prescribed drug in America ( https://clincalc.com/DrugStats/Top300Drugs.aspx ).
A similar thing has happened with Autism Spectrum diagnoses, where the criteria were once so strict that it was very rare for someone to get a diagnosis. Now I’m hearing fellow parents casually mention that their young children got an Autism Spectrum diagnosis after simply visiting a medical professional (found on internet listings) and suggesting it. Meanwhile my family friends with a severe autistic child are increasingly frustrated that pop culture idea of autism has shifted so far into the population that people are seemingly forgetting that severe autism is actually very debilitating, much like severe ADHD.
This theory proposes that many of the difficulties autistic individuals face
when socializing with non-autistic individuals are due, in part, to a lack
of mutual understanding between the two groups, meaning that most autistic
people struggle to understand and empathize with non-autistic people,
whereas most non-autistic people also struggle to understand and empathize
with autistic people. This lack of mutual understanding may stem from
bidirectional differences in dispositions (e.g., communication style,
social-cognitive characteristics), and experiences between autistic and non-
autistic individuals, as opposed to always being an inherent deficit.
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-p...
I totally sympathize with the author as someone who is (probably) neurodivergent but had accommodating parents. Being given space to better understand myself and my value was integral to my success and in being ok being different.
But as a dad to a neurodivergent kid, I impose structure - sometimes to discomfort, never intentionally to pain - because structure is imposed upon us all. I mean, if I could stop time, that would fix most of the issues with my kid’s ADHD. Same if I could make less the impositions of having to do chores, or to eat, sleep, bathe. But there is no easy escape from those things. So, I impose, despite not wanting to, because the imposition is coming anyway.
"It shouldn't be this way!"
But it is. As others have said in comments, ADHD actually may be an optimization in certain environments, but do those environments actually exist in 2024? Even if they exist Are they preferable, overall, to the typical alternative?
There may be jobs that are better suited to someone with ADHD, but do they pay a living wage? Are they precarious? Are they dangerous?
Maybe those jobs "should" pay more. But, as a parent, your job is to prepare your kids for reality, not sell them a fantasy.
Anything creative or artistic, healthcare, tech, sales, skilled trades, restaurants, etc.
If the "reality" you are trying to prepare your child for is becoming an accountant/banker/lawyer/bureaucrat, then you will probably all be disappointed.
> Instead of feeling bad, examine the gap between your current life and the one you yearn for.
Say, for example, my definition of fulfillment is having a large array of close friends. If I find myself distracted from or am unwilling to shower, that will drive many people off. If I miss social cues and communicate “in a different language,” so to speak, that will make it difficult to relate to people and become close with them. If I don’t let myself sleep, I’ll be robbed of the motivation and energy I need to pursue this goal or any other.
That’s just an example. But the vast majority of people, regardless of how they define fulfillment, will have to “play society’s game” to some extent.
To be clear, I don't mean just telling a child they can blame ADHD for their difficulties. Rather, helping them recognize that ADHD is often the reason behind their struggles with certain things and encouraging them to ask people around them for reminders, support, or ways in general to create accountability.
For example, my first job, a paper route when I was ~14, was a nightmare until I asked a friend to do his at the same time as mine and pick me up. Even though we had separate routes, just knowing I had to be ready when he arrived created enough accountability that I didn’t struggle with it as much, and it didn't require me to rely on my parents to impose that structure on me.
Imposing structure is helpful, but it only lasts as long as they have someone imposing it. Ideally, they learn how to build that structure for themselves before they have to navigate everything on their own.
Often emotional aid is simply a compassionate and present person who sometimes helps a bit. maybe doing their own thing at the same time you're doing your thing, and they know what you're doing or trying to do, and they are not evaluating you for failure but being peaceful within themselves. it's sometimes a really nice thing.
We all deserve to at least sometimes have time with people like this!
Let a kid go a few days without a bath. Don't shame them if/when odors eventually emerge. At least be willing to. But I've never had issues. Same with sleeping. And the only real reason sleep is urgent is because waking up at a certain time might be urgent, but if one gets to the evening time tired, they'll take themselves to bed early.
So, I donno.
I basically think you're defending something that's not true. You _are_ imposing all of those things. There would be an easy escape from all of it, for your kid, but for you. Could you see you and the kid as working together to avoid the pressure _from the world_?
"OK, no bathing, no problem. When I don't bath I make sure to put on fresh clothes before going out the next time... usually, but absolutely not always..."
I think you are over-relying on the concept of 'authority'. "I, adult, do this to you, child, because some external authority is making me."
I don't buy it. could you get more creative? or ask them for ideas?
"sometimes I don't wanna shower either. So I don't. because I usually have the power within me to do things that I want to do only when I want to do them."
And now you might be talking (openly, without pushy energy) why you _want_ to shower. Ever. Do you always do it out of obligation exclusively? Is it sometimes relaxing or could be made more relaxing? Turning the light off and lighting a candle can make it super peaceful, and everyone deserves a few minutes of peace.
Also, sometimes we do shower out of obligation, bc we're stinky, but it's totally fine to push the distance between those showers. I've done some long times without bathing, and would feel it important to point out that it's often FINE to not bath for a day or even two, especially if fresh/clean clothing is being worn.
I could prob think of books for creative problem solving. I, personally, would start with "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" by David Friedman. It's available for free on his website, or amazon/library/whatever. Tons of ideas of collaborative problem solving, if you go through it with the lense of sifting for ideas you might be able to implement around you, to reduce conflict/coercive energy.
good luck to us all.
I’ve read that psychotherapy is much more difficult when there is no-one to blame. So it might help for him, until he will have his own kids with ADHD and fail in a completely opposite way.
I would not recommend anyone to blame parents of neurodivergent kids, as it is a very difficult job to do right.
Sure, parenting kids with ADHD or Autism or whatever else is hard, but that doesn't make one a Saint and therefore unassailable. If comeuppance is due, it's due.
I blame the structure of society for this. When kid wants to spend time with animals, friends and just be in nature - we can only offer more classes and screens.
Your nearest friend is two-three miles away. Not walkable at your age for sure. Maybe bikeable, but your parents watch Fox News and know that sex slavers from the city are on constant patrol for juicy morsels like you, so you stay in the house. (Even if your parents have a basic grasp of statistics, your neighbors don't and will call CPS before you make it a block from your door, if a "block" even existed for you.)
Genuinely, what would you do in this situation? This is _normal_ for a depressingly huge number of children in the US. There's school and there's the video games in the basement.
Adults can drive. There are no other options for kids.
the parents have a choice, but they choose not to take it (or pretend not to see it).
I know of quite few colleagues and friends with ADHD who need stimulants to get anything done at all, even to get out from their bed. Who were treated unsuccessfully for anxiety, depression, when all their symptoms vanished after getting on meds.
ADHD not to everyone is something quirky, to some people it can be utterly debilitating and devastating condition.
I get what you’re saying, but parents of ADHD children are looking to help them become adults that can function in society and be independent without the struggles that are often accompanied with ADHD: addiction and self-destructive choices.
A lot of the types of people that you mention — rebels, seekers, misfits — I feel are generally less happy individuals, and might chose a different path for themselves if they had the right opportunities and tools.
Sure they might make life interesting for others, and maybe “interesting” is a word they might describe for their own life. And what often makes them “interesting”, looking from the outside, is that they are addicted and/or self-destructive.
But are they ultimately happy, and is it the life they really wanted for themselves?
That’s what parents struggle with. If they know their child will be happy with addiction, self-destruction, and being “interesting”, maybe it would be easier to not worry about or try to help them with their struggles with ADHD.
But most parents think their children will want a different life, and so they also want that for them.
I think in the past we missed a language to label the "weird" and unproductive people. But I know of communities were it was common for an employer to "hire" such people for a period, then pass the buck to another employer. Now the thing is, in the past, it was for the public normal to see a commercial enterprise as a social enterprise too.
Nothing of that is left anymore in today's Management Schools. In the technocratic thought of Nazism it started by just killing "unsocial elements" (read: people with disabilities).
The Euthanasia Program required the cooperation of many German doctors, who reviewed the medical files of patients in institutions to determine which individuals with disabilities should be killed. The doctors also supervised the actual killings. Doomed patients were transferred to six institutions in Germany and Austria, where they were killed in specially constructed gas chambers. Infants and small children with disabilities were also killed by injection with a deadly dose of drugs or by starvation. The bodies of the victims were burned in large ovens called crematoria.
(https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-murder-of-people-with-disabilities)
Although it is ostensibly not yet approved for mental illness, it appears that the standards in practice are lax, and that some amount of patients that start out seeking treatment for depression are convinced by their doctors to exaggerate other conditions to get approved for MAID.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted...
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/vancouve...
I can tell you at least one “wrong way” though, which is to completely ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist.
That’s what my parents did and it’s extremely frustrating to deal with as an adult. Logically I understand there’s no value in living in the past, but the “what if” thoughts will nag me forever.
What if instead of failing out of high school and getting a GED, I could have been an honor roll student and go to the college of my dreams? Things like that.
The other problem is that I somehow lucked into a great, well-paying career, so now they just say “what’s the problem, everything worked out!”.
Ignoring mental differences is not a solution to the problem. I've met too many parents who are afraid to get a diagnosis because "what if they have it".
There isn't a right way yo parent kids with ADHD. It's going to be something you have to work on together. But pretending it doesn't exist can only bring misery for all involved.
I don’t understand your point about who pays for it, sorry.
Then what exactly are you complaining about? You clearly didn't deserve that college experience.
Or do you not believe ADHD is a real thing?
It's definitely interesting to read stories about such people, especially those that lived long ago or are fictional characters in the first place. The notion of being a misfit is romantic and gratifies our imagination. However, what those "misfits" and "rebels" actually were is people who suffered, or caused everyone around them to suffer, or both. Few of them, or those in their proximity, enjoyed their fate.
Are such people important to society? In some cases, yes. Do I want to be such an important person? No thank you, I'll happily read about them on the news.
> Instead, they relied on discipline as the only solution: withholding rights, denying privileges, banning books outside the curriculum because they "caused inattention," cutting off the internet, locking TV channels with passwords, and limiting socialization during study time.
I'm perfectly inclined here to agree with the author in blaming the parents for putting the child in a borderline abusive environment because they were unable to look outside their own views for the sake of their child.
you'd want to read parents' rebuttal, or at least commentary before judging them based on this post.
> schools will provide evidence based help
In many places you need the former to get the latter.
> Yet I forgave: I have other things to attend to if I truly want to get over what happened.
I'd say his recovery/therapy is going pretty well. His perspective on the situation seems healthier than yours.
They fill you with the faults they had, And add some extra just for you.
But they were f'd up in their turn, By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern, And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
- Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse
My performance is heavily bimodal: my adult ADHD assessment included scores in the 98th percentile and the 8th depending on the task. I also have an extremely wandering mind. Taken together, it seemed to my parents that I was a brilliant child who simply “refused to work hard”. This was not only toxic for my relationship with them, it poisoned my self-image and ability to relate to others for the first two decades of my life.
Any resentment I might have over that is ultimately misplaced. They were loving and caring parents who missed the mark in a way that just so happened to fundamentally shape my childhood experience. ADHD wasn’t even understood the way it is now, so the most I could have hoped for in childhood was a prescription.
Instead, I now make a point to be a parent who understands my own ADHD and my kid’s (which thankfully is pretty identical to mine). I help them use alarm clocks and timers like I do. I give them tools to understand and empathize with other people. I don’t treat dragging their feet on a task as disrespect or disinterest. I don’t get hurt when they lash out at me during a hard time. I’m not baffled or disgusted when their words reveal their underdeveloped empathy, and I try to accelerate that development.
I just cannot agree more that it’s a difficult job to get right. All kids need structure and discipline, but the types and amounts can vary widely, even for the same kid across their stages of development. I’m so thankful for the research that has been done and resources that have been created since I was young; without that I would have been a lot more like my parents, and my kid would have barely had a chance. I also appreciate OP for sharing their experience with us. It’s not fun to do but it’s necessary for understanding to grow.
I have been diagnosed both autistic and adhd and I experienced food insecurity despite living in a house with several balconies and a detached garage bigger than my friends' families' houses because my parents thought I would get over it and start going out to eat with them if they didn't bring me any food. I don't think they intended deliberately to harm me - or realize that me not going out to eat with them didn't mean there was enough food - but their authoritarian way of thinking did the harm nonetheless and it's a completely predictable outcome of such a way of thinking; so it's not "I didn't mean it" so much as "I don't want to think differently because I value my attachment to this mode of thinking more than the wellbeing of others; and when I harm them I'll say 'nothing could be done' because changing how I approach the problem isn't on the table".
The healthiest thing most autistic/adhd people ever do is moving from 'I am sick' to 'the society I inhabit has an autoimmune disorder'.
Keyed off by a YouTube video, I thought there is a good chance I have autism and ADHD. I brought this up to the therapist and it was mostly dismissed, while my dad shouldered the blame. I went and got tested anyway, and it turns out I was right, and stopped seeing the therapist.
When I told my dad about my diagnosis he almost instantly started to question if he has the same things, and started opening up about how he feels, that he works hard to hide/mask. The more he’s looked into it, the more he believes this to be true. Looking back at where we had friction when I was a kid, they can pretty much all be explained by his own neurodivergence. Even issues today make significantly more sense.
While it is easy to say the parents should have done this or that and we need to have empathy for these kids with “bad” parents. I think we also need to have empathy for these undiagnosed parents who were doing the best they could without any tools, support, or even knowledge of what was going on… as the diagnosis criteria was either non-existent or only recognized extreme cases.
Of course there will be gaps where they failed you, they're human, expecting YOUR parents to be perfect is just unrealistic expectations. Seeing that failure as something more than just a part of life though is unrealistic.
Yes, your parents failed you, in many ways, because they're human, and it would be impossible to not screw something up unless they're omniscient.
The focus of my attention does indeed change at a rate which is faster than average. If something can distract me from a task, then it usually does, at least for a few moments. But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?
To me, it seems obvious. My attention is considered deficient because we have constructed a society in which we expect children as young as 8 (that was the age I was diagnosed) to focus in a classroom on highly abstract topics (history, language, math, etc.) for hours at a time without issue. If a child can’t meet that expectation, then they will be medicated until they do.
But if we lived in a different society, especially one set in pre-modern times, then my kind of attention might not be considered a disorder. It could even be advantageous. How many early humans suffered a premature death because their hyper-focus on gathering berries left them oblivious to the rustling of leaves?
> How many early humans ...
That's a highly speculative argument for returning to the stone age?
I think it’s because it’s outside of your control. Ideally you would be able to choose which impulses you want to respond to, and with ADHD that’s extremely hard.
I’d value anecdata to know more and decide whether to push back if school starts pressuring for an adhd evaluation which is usually for an ulterior goal of medicating the kid.
ADHD can have material impact on other aspects of your life though not just stuff related to studies or cognitive jobs.
A recent bit of research linked ADHD to shorter life expectancy (7-9 years). Reasons probably vary but I'd wager a big part of it is that those with ADHD can have a much harder time keeping up with regular life maintenance, including matters of personal health.
Making that doctor's appointment for a checkup or cancer screening is always 5 minutes away. Encountering even the least bit of unexpected friction can derail you even when you manage to get moving. Next thing you know, 6 months have gone by.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/23/adults-diagn...
"In other words"... no, those are separate things.
"Normal" means being like most of the rest of the group. My being 6'3" isn't normal here, but iirc would be normal in parts of the Netherlands.
A deficiency or disorder is something that causes problems. And getting people to just declare that something isn't a disorder won't actually change anything, because the language is downstream of the reality of what skills or abilities are needed for what roles in society.
There are many traits that are advantageous in one environment and not in another: for example, sickle-cell phenotype became prevalent in regions where malaria was common, because you are likely to survive the infection. But otherwise the individual is likely to suffer from sickle cell anemia. People who have low calorie requirement may survive a famine, but may suffer from obesity in calorie-rich environment.
Many things are hard enough for “normal” person who would not be perceived as having ADHD, but it’s more so for people with it. The expectations are set by the modern society, but the actual challenges for ADHD are naturally present - thus they are classified as disorder. It’s commonly debilitating enough to be recognized as one.
Parents do their best within the knowledge they have. Blaming your parents for the outcomes of society is childish.
Fortunately the author is maturing out of childhood - and discovering as we all do that they are the only person that has the motivation and ability to find their own solutions to their own problems.
Society definitely fucks us up, and most people are trying hard to help improve their little corners, but it's a devil's problem.
Education systems do unfortunately feel so retardedly broken from the inside as users.
Pragmatically speaking: I offer that society isn't going to read the article but some parents will.
And parents won't change the direction of society but they can parent differently.
That's where I see potential value in the article.
The whole experience was abusive.
[my parents] relied on discipline as the only solution: withholding rights, denying privileges, banning books outside the curriculum because they "caused inattention," cutting off the internet, locking TV channels with passwords, and limiting socialization during study time.
but strict ("authoritarian") parents do not change their habits easily. In my experience parents don't know how to teach independence (the key to adulthood).
My smartest friends left home at 15, to avoid their loving but overbearing/overcontrolling parents.
But that is minor compared to how badly some classes are taught. Every time I've helped one of my children with a class in which they were genuinely struggling I realized that the instructor was not capable of teaching the material (usually because they assumed the students already knew what they were talking about).
Society just don't care, and blaming parent for trying to impart that lesson is harsh, and while I don't know and I cannot judge author own experiences, I can see the one sidedness narrative that's at play, and wonder how much of this is the narrator own issues in processing a faceted issue, writing for himself a easy way out, and I wonder what parents would write about their experiences.
Overall the post address nothing about the thing that still needs to happen to function in the society, only a long unjustified self pity trip where each paragraph ends with an "I was right all along" that doesn't actually feel like it due the onesidedness of the narrative.
I think where a lot of parents go wrong is representing things as "because I said so" when in fact, there is a very good reason for what the parent is doing and explaining that reason to the child would both reduce resentment and be more valuable than the discipline being given. And the corollary to that is, if you can't explain to your child why you're doing something they don't like, maybe what you're doing isn't actually good parenting.
"Society expects this, society is probably wrong and it isn't fair, but it's not within our immediate capability to change it so we have to find ways to function around society's expectations at the current time" is a hugely valuable lesson to teach kids.
Without this explanation, your kid just has to come up with their own explanation for why you're doing what you're doing, and a lot of the time they're just going to conclude that you're wrong or you're just being mean, which unfortunately is sometimes true with some parents (I'm not saying it's true of you).
And sometimes, with the explanation, you're still going to be wrong, and you may never figure that out what you did wrong. But at least if you've explained why you did what you did, your child understands that so when they begin the process of realizing their parents aren't perfect they have some reason to empathize for the mistakes you made.
You need extra work to embed the explanation as experiences in the field they currently relate to.
That doesn't always works, or you get caught in situation where there's just no time to go the extra mile: today conflict was because she decided running into pool of a busy parking lot was what she wanted and she would ignore / shut out me, mommy, the cars, everything else was irrelevant at that moment.
I will find out other ways to explain later on, but the fact remain that I had to act to prevent harm, and it generated resentement. We got to puddles later, but things don't cancel out that way.
Given "neuroatypical" encompasses a pretty wide variety of neurologies, it's pretty clear that you're speaking far too broadly here. There's no possible way you could know this. It's just plain not correct.
That might be true for your daughter, but it certainly wasn't true for me as a child.
> That doesn't always works, or you get caught in situation where there's just no time to go the extra mile: today conflict was because she decided running into pool of a busy parking lot was what she wanted and she would ignore / shut out me, mommy, the cars, everything else was irrelevant at that moment.
I'm not sure how you could read my comment and conclude I think you should calmly explain to a child that they are in imminent danger. Obviously you should get her out of danger first, then explain.
A lot of typical and atypical people have fought and died side-by-side to fight tyrannical abuses of power.
Your idea of normies seem to very controlling people.
No one is saying you should calmly explain to your child that they should move because they are about to get hit by a car as a Ford Explorer bears down on them at 40MPH. Get the kid out of imminent danger, and then have the conversation, obviously.
If you usually explain to your kids why you're asking them to do things, then a lot of kids are going to recognize that when you yell at them to get out of the street with no immediate explanation, there's some urgency to the situation, because you've earned the trust that you ask them to do things for a good reason. But if everything you tell them to do has no explanation, then it's just another thing you're asking them to do for no apparent reason, so there's no reason to take the request any more seriously.
"Because I said so" was always used in the rank-pulling, "I don't owe you an explanation due to who I am in relation to you" sense.
And yeah, teaching your children how to interact with authority is obviously important. But notably, having any respect at all for authority isn't a requirement: I can obey an authority figure says even if it's stupid and terrible, if it benefits my goals. There are plenty of times in my career where I've done things I didn't agree with for bosses and clients I didn't respect, because other aspects of the job made it worth it, and they weren't worth risking my job over. Succinctly, "pick your battles".
Sure, as a parent, you need to teach your kids how to interact with authorities they don't respect, but being the authority they don't respect is a pretty terrible way to do that, and is going to have a lot of negative effects on your relationship with your child.
Obviously you need to gauge whether your child is engaged in what you're saying. Maybe you have some experience that leads you to believe this, but I would encourage you to stop speaking for all neuroatypical people. Your experience is limited.
My personal experience with ADHD is that my focus latches on to certain things, which may not be the thing I want them to latch on to, or the thing that is most urgent to focus on. But often a conversation, particularly a conflict, is the thing my focus latches on to most readily.
In general, it needs to be broad since it is difficult to predict if you get enough attention or not.
So starting with a very short explanation helps increasing the odds of that it will be processed.
Is ADHD a debilitating condition that can be consistently and independently diagnosed, with verifiable symptoms and clear criteria as to who _has_ ADHD and, more importantly, who _hasn’t_?
or is it a loosely defined group of behaviours that all people experience at different severities at some point in their lives, which have all been grouped into a nebulous so-called disorder (although many neurodivergent people now don’t like it being called that) so that doctors can quickly and efficiently work through the ever-growing mountain of patients who struggle with concentration in a world that is constantly and systematically trying to distract them?
I don’t want to insult people and I don’t want to be rude. But the more I read about ADHD, the more it feels like a meaningless diagnosis to absolve people of the responsibility to work on their concentration, and absolve them of blame if they can’t.
Adrian Chiles' "inner chimp" and other columns [1] helped me understand it. Also, when I laughed off my psychologists' questions ("oh, everyone would answer these questions the same way, this is silly"). Oh no they don't, she said.
There will be a grey area for sure. But for people who have it, it is real, and it is different to how other people experience the world.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/30/my-treatment...
I think the best analogy is myopia. Until glasses were invented, people with poor eyesight were very limited in what they can do. People with glasses were stigmatized (remember “four-eyes”?). We didn’t know what caused it. Then things became normalized and lens making techniques became so advanced and ubiquitous that it no longer became such a big deal to see people with glasses. Then things like contact lenses and surgical procedures that came along which can correct it, making the person with myopia indistinguishable from one without. We are now starting to reach a stage where people can prevent the condition from developing because we have a better understanding of the disorder (although there are a lot of snake oils out there).
ADHD is like myopia, which limits the range of things that people are capable of. We have imperfect tools like adderall which has a lot of unwanted side effects. My hope is that technologies like AI personal assistants geared toward helping people with ADHD will act as a way to augment these deficiencies, much in the way glasses have. We as a civilization simply did not reach that stage.
I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and after a few years of psychotherapy (and trying medication) it's becoming clear to me that a lot of what people call adhd, people with adhd, ... is an external observation of an internal experience of emotional management issues with regards to anxiety and anger: impulsively responding to these emotions in a way that was learned during an earlier developmental stage, that now no longer leads to desirable outcomes (often hiding, running away, not getting externally angry when it is appropriate or desired). A lot of self-deceit and unworkable mental models seem to be involved. I hope I'm not projecting myself too much :).
It's quite the opposite of "absolve[ing] people of the responsibility to work on their concentration." Instead the diagnosis shows that this is indeed the reason why people with ADHD have been struggling to meet expectation their whole life, and there are specific actionable things they can do to fix it, that aren't the same thing that work for people without ADHD.
I had a huge amount of guilt and shame that comes from having tried every productivity, organization, and concentration technique to no avail. I felt like I was pushing against an invisible brick wall that nobody else had. I could deeply care about something, focus all of my energy on it, and yet fail to do it for reasons that remained a mystery to me- when peers with less innate ability and less motivation/drive still did it easily. The diagnosis made sense of this, and pointed me to solutions that actually work.
As a parent of a young child with ADHD that was kicked out of 5 schools before getting a diagnosis that led to him thriving... the idea that it is just an excuse to avoid personal responsibility seems absurd. I could (and have) guilted myself into thinking this way about myself, but can't really apply that to an innocent young kid trying their hardest to fit in, and constantly being rejected and abused by adults and peers due to their brain just working so differently.
These strategies don't "fix" or "cure" ADHD, but allow us to do what we want in our life, and are generally very different from productivity and life strategies that work best for non-ADHD people.
One could imagine a world where ADHD was the norm, and things would work out just fine, with a lot less stress for those with ADHD. However, that simply isn't the case, and the ADHD community is quite realistic about that.
You cannot blame others for their (alleged) inflexibility when you yourself are incapable of flexibility.
Consider: you fly to the UK and try to drive on the right side of the road like you always have. Do you have the right to blame everyone for driving toward you? Or should you adapt and drive on the left side of the road for once? Yes, the rule is arbitrary, but that doesn't make it valueless.
We need to distinguish between the rules that make sense (everyone driving on the same side of the road) and those that don't (everyone writing using the same hand). Often the existence of the former is used as an excuse for the latter.
I can still work with it though. I recognize that I can't fix their flaws and the power I have is to adapt.
Recognizing flaws in others was gateway thinking for me. It lead to me seeking and finding flaw-groups that I'm a member of. That led to me seeking reasonable causes for mass flaws.
And that led me to a small group of causes. They center around individual capacity (everyone is doing ~the best they can) and reactions to feelings of helplessness (the other end of a bad behavior chain).
FF to now. I'm considering a unified flaw that seems to hobble every group eventually.
No one anywhere wants to clean their own house
Going through the treadmill of school followed by a career that all require strict schedules, punctuality, meetings, note-taking, difficult conversations, social norms, and hard focus-heavy work is really difficult for people with untreated ADHD. It's all extremely hard for me, and it's doubly hard because if I don't do this I will literally be homeless and starve and have no healthcare, and there's not a single employer or coworker that has ever given two shits about how hard this may be for me, and in fact some of them have actively punished me for vulnerability around this
I'm not saying society can't or shouldn't adapt to neurodivergent people, but it is absolutely necessary for all such adaptations to be made with the understanding "this is a problem with the individual, but we have the good will to make life easier for them anyway."
if most people couldn't walk, the world could be difficult for people who can. it doesn't make one group "correct", it just means the world is shaped better for them
I see both of these in my kids' experience at school:
The true deficit can be seen in inability to complete schoolwork on time. Sure, homework is artificial, but I have no doubt the same difficulties would apply to - say - planting and harvesting crops on a schedule
The societal incompatibility is seen in relatively benign "behavior issues" like difficulty sitting still. The idea that children should sit at attention for hours seems bizarre unless you accept that school is training an obedient factory/cubical workforce.
Not necessarily. Before the Industrial Revolution artisans were paid by the piece and peasants harvested between the crop being ripe and it being damaged by the weather. <https://dhayton.haverford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Tho...>
Both of those have immediate rather than delayed (artificial?) consequences, which might have been easier to handle.
When factories tried paying peasants by the hour, they would work as much as they felt like (e.g. not showing up at all on "Saint" Monday) until they were taught time-discipline.
Instead, they [parents] relied on discipline as the only solution:
What did I do? Maybe I punished them(singular). Maybe I took them out of school for a day we spent together.
One solution will be a wrong solution most of the time. Kids are continually a new person and continually need new approaches.
Since society has moved from muti-generation families to just ≤2 parents, it falls on those ≤2 parents to perform the roles of many different adults. We can't ever stop rethinking our methods.
I'm less interested in things that can be found in the DSM-V than it seems most of my english-speaking peers are, but things that can be called "adhd" make me always wonder what childhood emotional neglect and emotional abuse that person experienced. for instance, 'spankings', if ever a part of one's experience, is also known as 'adults hitting children' or 'assault of child by adult'. It can extinguish parts of one self that would otherwise be accessible.
A little while ago I read an excellent book about punishment. [0] Might be helpful/instrumental to others in the same way it was interesting to me. (I have more first-hand experience than I wish I'd had with evangelicals of the exact flavor described in the book. Was raised by some of them.)
[0]: [Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1335495)
I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Over the years I've developed a narrative that explains away my utter failure as a student, the huge highs and lows of my professional career, my distrust and lack of respect for authority of any kind, and my pride in my achievements as an autodidact. I am a non-conformist I'd tell myself, a rebel, an independent thinker, yes a frequent fuck-up, but also a drug user, a risk taker, and someone who sees the "small stuff" as beneath them.
Now the narrative is becoming: "I have a neurochemical condition that affects attention, impulse control, and executive function which causes me to seek novelty, and drives a need for stimulation and engagement." Honestly, I like that narrative a lot less.
I suppose it's somewhat of a comfort knowing that there is a fairly common condition that goes a long way towards explaining my life, but it does seem to take the personal choice out of it.
It sounds to me you just have a name for the weight you've been unknowingly fighting your whole life.
I don't think any of that other stuff is true, either. Your life with ADHD gave you a perspective others don't get which likely informed and encouraged those assessments, but that doesn't make them wrong.
Lot's of people live great live swith untreated ADHD. And it looks like you have to, you just didn't know that's what you were doing.
> the therapist said that she had rarely been more certain of a positive ADHD diagnosis
> my utter failure as a student, the huge highs and lows of my professional career, my distrust and lack of respect for authority of any kind, and my pride in my achievements as an autodidact
Oh yeah. I'm with you.
People's experiences inside their head are amazingly different, but society treats them the same. Some have inner monologues, some don't. Some have aphantasia. Some have prosopagnosia. Some are left handed, which was once considered evil ("left" is "sinister" in Latin, from another autodidact).
We used to label people as one of: normal, genius, retarded. We are becoming more nuanced now and exploring "neurodivergence". The label you have been given is ADHD. One day it will be much more nuanced.
Embrace it. It's not negative, it's society recognizing you and me and our type.
I struggled a lot through HS and college, which I mostly attributed to having a sort of shitty childhood and generalized depression. But when I started my career and depression issues naturally went away as a result of independence, my issues of attention and focus actually got worse. A lot worse. I could only function in high stress environments with strict deadlines. Which is great when you're working on live ops issues, but bad when you need to complete a big redesign and you have a few weeks to do so. And the stress was having other negative effects.
So I finally got fed up and started talking to people. The more I explained my thought process and how hard it was to hold onto one coherent line of thought and attention, the more I realized this was a problem specific to me. It wasn't something everyone went through, other people could naturally just sit down, work on something and that was it.
In many respects, we have far less control over our brain than we think. So we develop strategies to deal with deficiencies and don't think about why those strategies are necessary in the first place. Recognizing what we don't have control over is a step towards gaining control, and being on ADHD medication made me realize what that actually meant. So you shouldn't think about it as having less personal control, but finally having more.
Planning for the past (what if my parents would do things differently?) is a sign of depression (not clinical advice). Blaming the parents is not productive and doesn't lead to solutions to the problems at hand.
For me, taking responsibility on deciding what needs to be done, how to get better at doing what needs to be done and how to get better at getting better, shifted the focus significantly.
I'm not a therapist, but maybe one can back me up:
The "thing" driving this emotion is essentially hard-coded in the author at this point, from early childhood.
More central than rationally spelunking into the nature of what they currently consider "breakage," the author would be better off acknowledging and accepting (i.e., sitting with) the feeling when it arises as part of their own rich emotional life. This, ironically, will dissipate the negative impact of the feeling over time. (But this doesn't count as "fixing" one's emotional "breakage" any more than accepting that humans have belly buttons makes belly buttons disappear.)
Am I close here?
Edit: get rid of unnecessary and false dichotomy
I'll respond to this indirectly. I eventually learned that healing isn't restoration. We improve our being by layering better thinking over scarred ground.
The bad layers never go away. However, we can draw on better layers to improve our behavior. With enough layers we hope to stop perpetuating our parent's flaws.
it's both, but the incompatibility is worse - if you don't attempt to fit in, the 'normal' (actually, quite literally normal) people, which are the majority (hence why they're 'normal') will make you either conform or suffer. probably both. your parents knew that and that's why they enforced the norms so much.
> This was never a matter of insufficiently-firing neurons: your natural patterns of thinking and being were systematically suppressed.
it's possible your natural patterns of thinking were causing dangerous, potentially life-threatening, situations for you, your classmates or your family, hence why those around you wanted to suppress them.
My parents are awful people but having lived through ADHD and chronic fatigue I no longer blame them for who they are. Knowing that they would have been going through something similar when they were my age I understand how tough it must have been for them. The internet is what saved me from becoming a full time asshole, without the internet my parents just had gaslighting from doctors. The amount of pain and suffering that you don’t know isn’t normal because everyone is telling you it is, is enough to make anyone an asshole no matter how much they fight it, it’s not a choice.
I wonder what this guy’s parents were seeing, what they were going through. From what I’ve seen from parents going through it, it can be really super challenging to handle a hyperactive child while still being, you know, an imperfect person yourself
Now that are kids are older and out of the house, they voluntarily follow pretty close to our teachings, largely because they saw friends do the opposite and experience the bad consequences we foretold. “Huh, Dad was right: staying up too late and sleeping through a work alarm really does make bosses cranky.” They’ve each thanked us for taking the time to teach why things are important instead of just laying down inscrutable laws. I know I hated that as a kid.
As an extreme example just to make the point undeniable, your parents could have poisoned you, ending your life. Or they could have maimed you and left you unable to walk, or to see. And those are just gross examples.
Parents have a huge impact in an unknowable number of ways. Yours did on you, too.
The idea that we can't possibly know what good parenting is until some time in the future, is an absurd abdication of your responsibility as a parent.
Parenting is hard and nobody expects you to do it perfectly, but that doesn't mean you get to throw up your hands and pretend like good parenting can't be done.
> I felt the need to blame my dad, until I had my own kids.
It sounds like your shift in thought process had more to do with a shift in what thoughts made you feel good about yourself, rather than what thoughts are actually true.
There is a confirmation bias especially in tech, since many high-achievers are also taking these drugs. I want to warn people that you are only seeing the winners not the victims.
For every successful Adderall addict you know, there are dozens of lives that have been ruined by parents and quacks.
Counterpoint: Adderall changed my life. It makes the difference between my self-improvement effort anchoring into the ground - or uselessly bouncing away. Over ~20 years Adderall has been key to me becoming a better person.
Different stims similarly improve the lives of two of my sons.
These are two bold claims. What are some independent sources for each of them?
They certainly run counter to decades of my own experience.
Presently: For every person I know on ADHD meds, I know more who are unable to get them. The vast majority of Dr's are too afraid of the DEA to prescribe them.
It's difficult to recognize a health crisis when all exterior signs point to the opposite.
They don't. Pharmacies do and mostly they aren't either. There have been chronic shortages for a few years and an inability to get scripts filled has been the rule.
Well yeah. Every time I followed the thread of a bad behavior, I found feelings of helplessness at the other end.
Following the behavior-threads of the people who hurt me, you know what I found.
Knowing that helped shift the dynamic (between me and abuser) from animosity to shared support. In some cases, anyway.
For me, it was a combination of my parents authoritarian parenting, and authoritarian school/environment, where teachers never checked in with me to see how I was doing.
Psychedelics was the only thing that helped me, and I haven’t taken prescribed medications in over 10 years since my powerful experience which physically helped me feel love and safety for the first time; things I never experienced at home.
More experiences with Ayahuasca over the past several years have helped me fully process most, if not all the traumas I remember (also helped me remember the ones I forgot!) and I’m now in a much better place mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
As a result, I think its fully possible to be neurodivergent without having disorders
I am 24 now and I lucked out far better than my peers. I have a career in software, a loving partner of 6 years (which I definitely traumatized multiple times), and am even in grad school! For me, the biggest issues I face from a societal perspective are not the BPD symptoms, mostly regressed and which usually make me alluring to people, but the ADHD symptoms I developed along with BPD. I’ve read that these are often comorbid and that tracks with what you are saying because a BPD parent and BPD is trauma.
Weed and shrooms also helped me get better. Not with the ADHD which definitely gets much worse on weed, but with the BPD symptoms. It made me slow down and let me get in touch with my empathy long repressed. I believe I was 19 when I first smoked and it’s been a journey but trending upward.
Fun BPD story: by the time I was 18, I had over 60 sexual partners. I was a dorky guy who played video games over 8 hours a day every day.
I’m excited for the psychedelic renaissance that seems to be occurring. So much of this comes back to our internal mechanisms for feeling “safe”. If we weren’t taught that by our parents (which many don’t sadly) then it’s hard to find it later in life without very deliberate work.
Glad you were able to heal yourself mate!