I see the confusion. I did not express myself well. Without medication, our daughter yields to any impulse that occurs to her. If the impulse is to knock her kid brother unconscious, she can think of no reason to stop – even if she has gotten negative feedback from this before. With medication, the impulses are still there (and are normal, natural occurrances), but she is able to stop and think before carrying them out.
With the medication, she has the same personality in that she likes the same things. She still enjoys drawing, reading, writing, watching Mary-Kate and Ashley movies :rolleyes:, and all the other things she enjoys. She also has the same sense of humor. She is simply better able to cope with the random thoughts that occur in all of us. She is able to slow down and THINK. She is also more comfortable with herself and doesn’t worry that the next thing she does will get herself into trouble.
Darwin’s Finch, I am not a doctor, but I am a data point. I’m like you. I have the attention span of a gnat. I have a hard time sitting down and concentrating on any one thing, unless it’s something I’m personally interested in like the SDMB or a good novel. I frequently leave things undone, or come back to realize I’ve left something midstream that shouldn’t have been left. When I got pregnant, it got much worse. I couldn’t even pay attention to a sitcom or listen to a 3-minute song all the way through.
However, I’ve never been diagnosed as having any medical problem and no one has ever suggested I have ADD or ADHD. I’ve always managed to compensate quite well for this problem, and here I am in grad school. I guess whenever I had to flit off to something else, I managed to eventually get back to what had to be done. And all that dilletantism meant I had a knack for incorporating interesting tangents in my arguments and theses. It’s been a challenge, but it’s not been a real problem. Not when it counted. I think I’m just, well, afflicted with a crappy short attention span.
My niece has a genuine ADHD problem. Among her problems is that she can’t associate someone’s anger or disapproval with the action she did to earn it. She just doesn’t grasp it. Medicine helps.
I find that the “short attention span” that I have, while not disabling, is certainly annoying. It is one of the main reasons why I feel so damn ignorant about most things (I am not what one might consider “well-read”, since I can never stay interested long enough to finish a book).
Based on what you say, Cranky, as well as Drum God, it almost sounds like what is termed ADHD is more of a disassociative disorder than “mere” attention deficit or hyperactivity. I’m wondering if perhaps this is a case of poor choice of nomenclature for the illness…?
It carries with it a whole laundry list of “features”, some of them good, some of them just irritateing, and some of them bad(at least the way society is set up now). And not all of the people with the disorder have all the features, but they all have the attention deficiet part. Some of the problems are the result of the disorder, rather than part of it.
For instance: People with ADD often fail to complete boring long drawn out projects and assignments, such as homework. They get used to failing, so they often stop trying, and often get a very low self-esteem from it. Quickly achievable goals bring instant gratification, and a feeling of success, so they become very important. Impulse buying, for example, fills this void.
Unless there has been changes in the terminology since I’ve studied this (which is quite possible since nobody has gotten it correct yet), the REAL difference between ADD and ADHD is the year that you are referring to when talking about it. I am not sure, but I believe before 1993 the disorder was called Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and once that diagnosis was made, it was then determined if you had the added component of hyperactivity (which I was diagnosed with as a child.
In 1993 the disorder changed to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and then it was determined if you fit into one of 3 subcategories:
Predominantly Inattentive
Predominantly Hyperactive
Combined
As to the OP, let me try to give just a little bit of insight into what my ADHD means to me (i.e. when I’m not on Dexedrine, the speed they prescribe me). Imagine being in a conversation with someone, not necessarily a boring conversation, and having your mind wander moment to moment on all different things. The person starts to speak, and you look him/her in the eyes, but instantly your mind jumps elsewhere, and you lose your place, just for a moment. You fight to control your mind so you can do your part to make this conversation work, but you’ve already lost the connection. Your timing is thrown completely off, and it’s very difficult to get back in the groove. The conversation sort of fades away and dies.
As a child with ADHD it is very difficult to have a healthy social life because it is very difficult to connect with other people. This is great for lowering self-esteem and making school much less enjoyable which in turn makes the ADHD child less interested in school, which in turn makes it more difficult to focus because of lack of interest. And thus, a viscious cycle is born.
Also, as a child with ADHD, it is markedly more difficult to control one’s impulses. If there was a button in my presence it was as good as pushed.
The conversation example mentioned above affects me everyday as an adult. It’s often difficult for me to organize simple lists of things in my mind.
Oh crap, I gotta run. More on this later, (if anyone is interested that is)
Well, acording to the plethora of books I have on the subject(which I never seem to finish reading,for some reason), the doctor that diagnosed me, and my father, the shrink/graduate school psych professor(who is semi retired as of this year, and now just writes psych textbooks and teaches a couple of classes at baylor just for kicks), ADD is ADHD without the hyperactive features. The two terms are still both used.
I’m not sure of the books that you have read. The source from which I’m trying to remember is the DSM-IV (1993). I don’t know if there have been new editions since then.
This actually kind of brings us back to my OP (having learned quite a bit in the process): how “predominantly inattentive” does one need to be in order to be given the diagnosis of ADD (or ADHD)? That is, where is the clinical differentiation between “predominantly inattentive” and “short attention span”?
Im pretty sure there is a new version of the diagnostic statistical manual, but it is not really the bible of the psych world in any case. The shrinks I used to work with mainly used it for insurance billing for the most part, not as a guide to whats what in the psych world. It did make for interesting reading late nights on the psych ward after all the patients went to bed.
Using the term ADHD for someone who doesnt have the hyperactive feature is inapropriate.