throwasquirrel

It's right up there with 'I've been clinically diagnosed with ADHD by a qualified psychiatrist and this medication has improved my life tremendously' -- 'There's no such thing, the medication doesn't do anything and you just need to mediate more, have you tried mindfulness?'

How long does someone have to be on stimulant medication before you consider them qualified to comment on its effectiveness?

When you've grown up with executive dysfunction and excessive difficulty regulating emotion, the ability to choose to sit down and do a task that doesn't grab your attention sure FEELS like a superpower, but all it's doing is effectively medicating your condition.

The best parallel I can think of is that getting effective medication for ADHD is like getting glasses. Suddenly a part of your life that doesn't work (and maybe has never worked) is suddenly functional. People tend to be pretty excited about their glasses when they first get them, too.

On the one hand, it doesn't sound like any possible ADHD tendencies you might have are causing you much grief. Also remember that ADHD is hugely situational - I've had a pretty great career and up until a year or two ago I wouldn't have ever suspected I fit the bill. It was only during a perfect storm of overlapping stressors that I really felt like I was struggling.

On the other hand, just because you can survive doesn't mean life has to be this hard. And looking back I now realise that much of my life I was doing just that. I was surviving, when I could have been doing so much better.

> I went through a whole grieving process when I realized how much easier I could've had it all along.

I was diagnosed six months ago and I have absolutely been going through the this same process. At one point I cleaned up a bunch of old boxes (some of which I'd been meaning to unpack for over a decade... yes the meds help!) and came across a folder of my old school reports. Reading through them and seeing the lifelong pattern of struggle with focus and attention that I'd just thought was normal, and that didn't have to have been that hard... I cried, a lot.

> If you believe you have ADHD, and your therapist believes you have ADHD, BUT your life isn't negatively impacted by it, why start treatment now?

If your life isn't negatively impacted by it then you might be hyperactive or have trouble paying attention, but you don't have ADHD, by definition. It only becomes a disorder when it's causing a significant ongoing negative impact on your life.

See a psychiatrist, if it's an option. They'll ask you to do one or more diagnostic questionnaires, I was given the Weiss functional impairment scale and the CADDRA questionnaire to fill out. Your partner or a close acquaintance will also be required to answer some questions to give an outside view. Answer as honestly as possible (there's no effort at blinding so it's embarrassingly easy to guess the 'right' answers... they really need to work on this).

I don't know about other countries but in Australia if you meet the criteria on the above questionnaires and your psychiatrist's assessment agrees with that then you'll likely be prescribed stimulant medication (Ritalin or dexamfetamine, or the long acting variants Concerta or Vyvanse). I started on dexies and while not everyone's so lucky, for me they were life changing. I can sit down and choose to do a thing... and just do the thing! It's the first time in my life I've been able to do that. I was surviving before but... life just doesn't have to be that hard.

Ooh did you know grain bins are super dangerous and there's a startup building a grain-bin-leveling robot so that farmers don't have to risk death in their grain bins?

Yeah that wasn't what I was meant to be doing either.

https://www.agweb.com/news/business/technology/robot-replace...

I have been unfortunate enough to not be diagnosed with ADHD until middle age, and I'm sorry to hear about your apparent misdiagnosis but for people who actually do have the condition, it's very real and it very much sucks. It's not just "someone walked into the room and I lost my train of thought", it's "I have one simple task to do and I know exactly how to do it and it's been hours but I still can't make myself do the thing no matter how much I want to."

It's "I haven't done my taxes for 18 months even though it would only take a day, and I cannot force myself to do it no matter how hard I try."

It's "I've been unable to fold my laundry for six weeks even though I've alphabetized my cutlery drawer, twice."

It's "I have to document this project but no matter how much I want to just do it, I nevertheless continually find myself on imgur or Facebook or Hacker News or some random other website reading up about how switched-reluctance motors or Monte Carlo tree search or whatever works."

It's lack of executive function when you need it and it's the inability to think about anything else when something's grabbed your focus and it's a built-in character flaw that you can't "just choose to not have" and it's growing up thinking you're "just lazy" but "have so much potential" and it just. f*king. sucks.

If all you need in order to focus on the thing you want to focus on is for no-one to interrupt you, you don't have ADHD.

/rant