I’ve been reading Quasimodem’s Alzheimer blog and wondering if he has very very late onset ADD, or I have very very early onset Alzheimer’s
ADD doesn’t have late onset. It’s a physical difference in how the brain works - usually that the prefrontal cortex is not as active on its own as it is with neuro-typical people - and it’s there from birth. Some lucky people seem to grow out of it (I can’t help but wonder if they just managed to hard wire coping skills until it stuck), but most of us have it our entire lives.
It bugs me that the DSM-IV names it ADHD instead of ADD. Pretty much everyone with this different wiring has problems maintaining focused attention. Fewer than half have difficulties with hyperactivity. In fact, for years and years, the establishment thought girls had a significantly lower rate of ADHD because they rarely had the hyperactivity portion. Turned out, most girls with ADHD are of the “predominantly inattentive” variety. I suspect that if they’d realized this, I’d have been diagnosed in sixth grade, when school swamped my tiny coping skills.
It also bugs me that ADD is referred to as a “disorder”. I don’t believe it is. I think, like being left-handed, gay, or red-headed, it’s just a variation of the human condition. Back in the days of cave people, I probably would have been a lot more useful to society. If I go out with the girls to pick some berries and catch frogs, I may not pick or catch as many, but I’m far more likely to see the leopard watching from a tree than any of them. It’s just that the world we’ve created treats us like interchangeable cogs than unique creatures, and those of us on one or the other end of the bell curve suffer for it.
Wow, I really have nothing to add that hasn’t already been said I think. I’m mainly just posting so I can more easily find this thread in a search in the future for reference.
I’d say when I was younger what I hated most about ADD itself is the way it effects my social skills. It’s very hard to make a connection with someone when you’re struggling to follow and absorb what someone is saying to you. It throws your timing off and it’s often difficult for me to get a good flow going with people. Kinda related are my problems with short-term memory. Often I can’t remember details of a conversation that most normal people would. And so I’m often accused of not listening. But believe me world, I’m struggling like crazy to remember as much as I can.
I’d say my inability to complete, well… anything, has taken over as the bigger concern. I can manage socially with some effort, but the amount of unfinished projects I have, or even just conceptual ideas that might actually be cool should they ever get worked out, is is just staggering. I’m a musician and composer but I’ve hardly ever been able to finish a piece except when there was a clear and important deadline. My solution to this? All of the music I perform these days is 100% improvised. I just use a delay effect to create loops and I improvise freely. Because the moment I start to compose I get overwhelmed with thoughts pulling me an different directions and it’s this battle against my mind that I always lose.
BUT, the thing I really hate the most in general is the skepticism the people have about its very existence (and it’s much worse here in Germany than it was when I was in the US). I think just about every German I’ve told about it has had this exact reaction: “hmmm… well… have you tried yoga?” One of them was a trained psychotherapist (which means I believe she has the equivalent of a masters degree in psychology).
I hate that I can’t get my dexedrine here (since here as well it’s only treated as a childhood disorder and only with ritalin) and that it’s always a lot of stress to get it from my doctor in the states and ration it so that it lasts long enough until my next return visit. My life really does not function without it. And it scares the heck out of me to be without it.
I hate the fact that I have so much trouble describing what it is to other people. I personally am a skeptic in life in general. I love science, I love critical thinking, I love and expect claims to be backed up. But when ever I try to put my finger on my experience of ADD in order to articulate it to someone else I find that I can’t quite get at it. Instead I talk about individual symptoms which invariably leads people to one of 2 reactions: either “oh well everyone does that. Nothing abnormal there” OR “Hey! I do that too! Maybe I have it also!”.
The thing I have to admit is that, were I in other people’s shoes, I’d probably demand a better explanation/description than I could give.
I expect and hope that one day it will be diagnosable via FMRI or something like that.
I may be opening a can of worms, but I’m afraid I might be one of those people. I have trouble sometimes seeing ADD as something other than the pathologizing of traits that a huge percentage of otherwise-normal people (including myself) happen to have. I certainly think it’s something of a self-sought diagnosis for many people, and thus probably considerably overdiagnosed. This thread alone shows a surprisingly large number of people who say they have it, or suspect they do.
Thankfully, all the ADD sufferers in this thread will likely be distracted by all the squiggling worms, allowing me to slip away unscathed.
Did you miss the bits about the hyperfocus, Vinyl Turnip? You’d best move quickly.
I had a problem with my diagnosis for a long time because I resented being labeled with a ‘disorder’. But almost every diagnosable psychological syndrome has a large variety of symptoms that are on a spectrum, and usually fairly common in the general population. That’s part of why misdiagnosis often happens. But we need to have ways to diagnose so that the people who have their lives severely affected by these traits or symptoms, can get services to assist in building a better and more functional life for themselves.
I’ve had a long struggle with some very basic aspects of living and it’s caused me much unhappiness. It’s certainly been more helpful for me to be labeled ‘ADD’ (with the vast body of research on how it works and how I can try to help myself, as well as the many formal treatment options) than being labeled ‘just lazy’. What the hell can anyone do with a ‘diagnosis’ of ‘just lazy’?
In my case, I was NOT “officially” diagnosed until I was nearly 48, and I had not even heard of ADD until I was out of college. And I got my degree in Psychology(!)
Let me ask you -
Have you ever been told “You would have done so well if you had just gotten it in on time”
More than five times? (nearly every teacher I had until college; and a couple of bosses since)
Have you ever found spending more than 10 minutes doing something like washing dishes made you feel stressed? (Not bored, but antsy)
Did you have any teacher who make a special effort to deal with you specifically? (I had a teacher who made a screened off area that she would put me behind when I was having problems. I only just recently realized that it was to keep the rest of the class in line, not me)
Have you ever been in a meeting or other situation and realized that you just lost 5 or 10 minutes and you aren’t sleepy? (It’s a struggle for me to avoid this)
Do you get hypnotized by moving screensavers?
That was a joke, dear. 
The individual symptoms relate to issues that everybody has. The severity does not.
It’s not about spending a morning putting off work and then realising you’ve not got anything done, it’s about that happening every, single, day, of your life.
It’s about needing to work on your thesis and arranging to stop over at someone’s house to work while they are on holiday, removing every single possible distraction, and then whittling away two weeks in twenty minute intervals sat at your computer terminal, often physically shaking with frustration at your inability to work properly, and then ending up staring at a couple of paragraphs of work and seriously contemplating suicide.
There are different receptor patterns in the brain, the drugs produce different effects in people who are sufferers. I have no doubt that my brain works in a different way to many other peoples, I believe that many of those differences are, positive, but not generally in ways that are advantageous in todays society.
That isn’t to say that it is never misdiagnosed, and that there aren’t people chasing a diagnosis for the wrong reason.
But I get so very angry when I hear “it’s all about filling our children with drugs until they behave”, because that completely ignore the possibility that the child in question might actually have some opinion regarding their life being allowed to implode in a “more natural” way.
This may be true, but it is often the case that, in early adult life one can arrange one’s life, albeit unwittingly, so as to avoid situations where ADD is an issue. You choose an occupation that doesn’t normally involve information overload or numerous competing demands on your time and attention. This works fine until you get promoted to manager, or someone decides to make you a “coordinator” of some kind or another, and you’re now tasked with tracking issues, or other people’s results.
So the net effect is many people really don’t become aware of it until mid-life.
No. Clinical ADHD is very obvious in late childhood.
Weirdly enough, my father, who has very similar behavioural tendencies to me (although probably a bit less severe and obviously not diagnosed), managed to have a pretty successful career (he’s just retired) by finding himself in a management role at quite a young age and then being fortunate enough to quickly build a solid administrative and support team that knew how to effectively “manage” him.
It was very obvious for me in terms of the effect on my life, and the certainty that there was a problem of some kind.
But if you have people constantly telling you that you are just lazy it can take a surprisingly long time to realise that you are putting a lot more effort into your laziness than is generally considered traditional.
Did your father smoke? The nicotine in cigarettes can have a calming effect for some ADD people, and increase their ability to focus.
Nope, he just managed to find a position where coming up with innovative strategies was a plus and then hired people who would make him actually do them, possibly at gunpoint. I suspect he was probably underemployed (he was a head teacher) but he was definitely managing to be a successful.
He’s talking about consultancy type stuff, but I suspect that will somehow not really happen.
I’ll agree with this as long as you are clearly including the hyperactivity component. Attention Deficit disorder can be overlooked, especially if the child has some coping mechanisms or is fairly bright.
That’s a good point, it’s the attention deficit component that has caused all the problems, but the hyperactivity stuff which isn’t really an issue now was very obvious in school.
Yes. I am a girl after all and it seems somewhat rare for us to have true hyperactive ADHD. I was indeed highly hyperactive as a toddler and young child (my mom said she only ever held me in her arms when I was deathly ill, after I learned to crawl - I would scream if I couldn’t move around) and didn’t attend kindergarten until I was 6 years old mostly because of that. I learned to read and write before kindergarten, and after I had access to so much information the rest of my life has been one big blur of hyperfocus - and while I was hyperfocusing in school I was a very quiet child who rarely engaged with anyone, so I was rarely noted by my teachers to be a trouble-maker or disturbance (they were too busy with the bad kids of the class, some who undoubtably had hyperactive ADHD!). I was so busy with my own books, drawings, writing and ideas while in school that I still maintain I learned nothing taught in class, unless you count what I learned from reading the textbooks on the first day of every new class, and from reading books from the school library. Needless to say once into 4th grade where absorbing the basics from skimming reading material and doing well on tests was no longer enough, I started to flunk because I didn’t do a bit of school work ever unless an adult forced me. Despite being in my school’s Gifted program. This is when I got my formal testing and diagnosis. Unfortunately it didn’t do me much good, due to many other factors (my mom and I had a rough relationship, for one). I flunked miserably through the rest of school until I finally was old enough to withdraw myself.
That’s why I specified late childhood. Bright children can learn coping mechanisms, but they can’t learn to have more nonverbal working memory or executive function. I will add the qualifier that ADHD is obvious in late childhood if you know what you’re looking for, but I don’t think hyperactivity is all that essential.
Incidentally, Russell Barkley–one of the top researchers on ADHD–has written that he thinks that the inattentive and hyperactive types are actually separate disorders. There’s a lot more detail in this pdf, which is definitely worth reading.
I’m another one who cannot follow other people’s spoken words to save my life. In meetings at work I used to be constantly spaced out, my mind on anything unrelated to the task at hand. Movie plots are basically incomprehensible too. Another thing I don’t like is it takes all my willpower to read through all the posts in a thread, and I usually miss a lot of what other posters are saying.
I disagree that ADD isn’t a disorder; for me it does no good, only makes life harder. I often wish I didn’t have it.