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I don’t have anything and I never will because I’m never getting tested. I did get “classified” and never had a fair chance at a real education. Even failure meant I needed to be in the program and every success showed how well the program was working. I grew up thinking I would only be a drag on other people. In high school, I decided to start feeling better about myself. Something those years of being removed from class so I could have meaningless conversations with the school therapist never could. I thought the school would support my efforts to fix my education, but I only got pushed down, told “I would be happier without the risk of failure”, lied to about classes being full, withheld test results when I tried testing into better classes. I would like nothing more then to get the diploma revoked and seeing as how I never fulfilled the basic state requirements, I should be able to, but like with most things, the written law doesn’t matter if no one is willing to enforce it.
Fuck my school. Fuck the “team building” exercises they made me do. Fuck the “opportunities” they provided for me.
As a parent of a child with ADHD, I’m cautious about using stimulant medication unless it’s clearly the best course of action. My main goal is to help my child succeed, and academics is a big component of that.
I see many of my son’s ADHD symptoms in myself, and I believe I may have also had/have ADHD. Despite this, I’ve been successful in my life. This personal experience makes me hesitant to automatically turn to medication as the solution for my child. I prefer to explore other options first, unless there’s a strong reason to consider it, such as struggling academically.
When my son entered high school he became mature enough to participate in the decision-making process regarding his own treatment. Because of that it was easier for me/us to get him a prescription of Adderall and feel good about it as parents.
Edit: since it seems to not be clear, my son is on ADHD meds and has been for the past three or four years. We talked to him about it and he prefers taking the medication and has had input in the dosage that he’s taking.
Unsolicited advice incoming:
Help your kid get a diagnosis ASAP and try to find a medication that works. The drugs are just a tool, but your kid won’t know whether they help without trying them.
At some point, they may find themselves unmedicated and down in an ADHD hole — having the diagnosis and knowing which medications may help is crucial to dig out of the hole.
Sorry, if it wasn’t clear, he has a diagnosis of adhd and he’s on meds.
Counter point.
The medication worked. Suddenly i could pay attention and my grades went up. And those where the main “problems” adults perceived.
My parents where skeptical about medicine first but opted to try because the backlash people gave me for lacking an attention span was affecting me hard. They ultimately believed they where doing the right thing.
I slowly become less social then i already was, lost my appetite, stopped feeling many emotions in general and eventually sank into a deep twisted depression.
I was unable to understand it was the medicine doing this. I was unable to communicate any of it properly because i thought what i was (not) feeling was just normal life and puberty. It was not.
I know and respect that those drugs can help some people. But they completely destroyed me, afterwards it took many years of controversially self medicating with cannabis to restore my original self and feel my emotions properly again. (The mail reason I started was because i read it could be used for adhd/autism and my first experience left me feeling normal and able to take public transport without suffering intens social anxiety)
I fully agree on your diagnosis part though. And i al also not saying medicine cant be the correct tool but its definitely not a clearcut choice.
Seriously. Get them meds and a proper therapist ASAP who has a clue about ADHD. While their brain is still plastic you can train it early with the hope of having a future where coping mechanisms are already there and potentially reducing or getting off their meds entirely. Once you are an adult, it is over. Opportunity lost and time to learn the hard way.
He’s on meds (has been for 3 or 4 years), and he has an ADHD diagnosis… What’s the therapist for? I haven’t seen any actual issues that warrant a therapist, what are you thinking I should be watching out for?
Right now he’s doing pretty good in school, he’s a little less social than I would like, but that’s nothing new. Other than that, he seems a sharp well-rounded kid without any behavioral or emotional issues.
This is probably a good call. In the first place a common problem with stimulant meds for adhd is that tolerance goes up quickly, requiring the user to increase their dose over time. The dependency is hard to break. I was prescribed on it for only a few months and made the mistake of abruptly stopping taking it - and even that was enough to go through one of the worst depressions of my life.
There is also evidence of heart risks with long term use, and given that cardiovascular disease is already the western world’s number one killer, another blow to our hearts is that last thing anyone needs.
And then there’s the regulatory and supply issues. Pharmacies often struggle to keep enough of a supply to meet demand, which is the worst thing for a substance with such a high-risk dependency situation. Plus because it’s a schedule 2, you must see a doctor for every refill.
And of course the insurance companies make all of this all the more ugly. Really not worth it.
Edit: oops, didn’t catch the last part. Welp, hope it works well for them.
My experience is completely the opposite of what you describe, not that I disregard anything you’ve stated. I’ve been on nearly the same dose for nearly 40 years and do not perceive any changes in the effect I receive. And I’d rather live without my medication while waiting on temporary shortages than live my life without it.
I suspected i had adhd when i was 16, begged my mom to go to a psychologist. The psychologist told me i was playing too many video games ಠ_ಠ
When the video games were a symptom of the ADHD. Lol
My first and only therapist was totally dismissive of my problems. I left them, but haven’t been able to bring myself to try another one since then 😔
Haha, I raw dogged it until I was 23, horrible grades only
Raw dogged it until 37 years old. Sucks to start life so late 😂
If you can even find someone who does adult diagnosis
For sure. I was lucky I was working for Apple (UK) so they offered private healthcare as mental health support on the NHS isn’t great.
45! At least I somehow got promoted and found a girlfriend. For my Christmas miracle I’m a real boy now I guess.
Gosh 1.1962222087×10⁵⁶ is quite old indeed. 😉
Dude, so fucking real. I just got denied meds because “If you can learn a big part in a play, then you must have very mild adhd.”
I’m convinced that most psychiatrists and psychologists have control issues that they satisfy through their practice. It makes them feel powerful to be able to gatekeep, judge and implicitly control their patient’s life and get paid for it.
I wish I could talk to someone who actually knows what adhd is like, and not just some boomer with a fancy piece of paper
Man if I was a doctor I’d probably get my control kick by giving people what they want and making them happy.
Extend that to anybody involved with patient care and medicine.
It’s weird how many people on here attribute good grades to being good at everything else in life. Or minimizing the probable and unnecessary struggle some individuals go through to get those good grades because of the system they were put in. I got good grades because i worked many times harder than my peers. I shouldn’t have to. No one does. I was privileged enough to have enough resources to do as well as i did. Most people with my condition don’t. I’ve also struggled a lot more at other tasks, and in the work place. But i got good grades, so fuck me right?
Back in school I literally helped other students cram 30 minutes before a test, using flash cards I made and used all week, only to have them breeze in and get a higher score than me.
Do you know how great it would be to only barely try, and succeed anyway? I can’t even imagine.
I breezed through high school, everything was easy, never studied, was never really able to just sit and focus on stuff.
Get to college, calc is hard. Physics is hard. Electronics is hard. I have zero skills from never studying; I have no foundation to learn. Didn’t make it in college. Still really good at mental math though! Still can’t sit and focus on tasks for long.
Hitting that wall is pretty common. You learn the wrong habits as you breeze through and get good grades without effort, then encounter the first subjects that require non-trivial effort. And then maybe you take some bad grades until you eventually learn, or you drop out and never figure out how to work through more difficult learning.
Some smart people might not hit that wall until pretty late (I know people who first encountered it in grad school), but regardless of when they encounter it, whether and how they get over that hump can determine what the rest of that academic path looks like for them.
Lol getting to grad school or a PhD without studying sounds like 90%ing a game or getting stuck at the final boss
Getting that far on the highest difficulty level is already impressive IMO
I don’t think it’s that great. I was able to coast through high school but I was hindered once I reached the edge of my natural talent shortly into college. I had never really learned how to buckle down and study so I ended up struggling a lot. I can still pick things up pretty easily but I often give up when it gets to a certain point. Nowadays I feel kinda inferior to others that learned how to keep trying.
I was all ready to come back at with how I wish I had your problem, but I can honestly see how being unable to buckle down would be a huge impediment.
My results may not be as good as my peers and I may take longer, but I am able to get there eventually.
For instance, I am currently on day 4 of 25 of the Advent of Code competition, haha.
Good for you. Good luck!
Yeah. It’s so fucking shortsighted to be like, “Eh, you did fine, look at your grades. You can’t be that disabled.” Like, you putzes, are you kidding me? If I hadn’t been spending all my mental energy clearing all these pointless obstacles, I might have cured fucking pancreatic cancer by now. It’s not just about what’s convenient for caretakers, teachers, and a health team, it’s about being denied the opportunity that most other people are handed without asking to achieve everything they’re capable of doing.
being good at shit doesn’t mean I can have good grades either
My autism allows me to do it work, create servers, host websites and make my own Foss projects
This won’t however mean I’ll be getting 100 from my chemistry exam just because I can loop hello world a hundred times
Same with autism.
If you get low grades, off to special ed with you.
High grades? Oh you’re just a socially awkward dork or quirky nerd or something.
It’s like the Halo effect, but with grades.
Goddamn, this innocuous post brought me to tears. Been having a rough time, I guess
Hugs.
You can’t change the past but you can change the future.
Can you though? At least in most of the US if you aren’t already getting psychological help, you have to pay for it yourself, and will just have to figure out a self medication schedule that works for you.
I pay for both a psychiatrist and a psychologist and while my psychologist knows for sure I have ADHD neither of then can prescribe me stimulants so instead I’m on Lexapro so at least I don’t have to care.
Right but your scenario presumes a great deal, and millions of Americans can’t pay for therapy, nor the medicines required to live a better quality of life. Even people with “good jobs” can have awful health coverage with enormous deductibles and other hoops to jump through.
And the kicker is that we pay more than any other industrialized country and get the worst ROI because it’s all been allowed to be run by private corporations, for maximum profit.
As long as you’re not disruptive, they don’t give a shit.
If you’re malleable enough, the machine will mash you into place.
And if you are disruptive, they diagnose you with odd and beat you to make you shut up. You can’t win
Truth. I remember being in school in the 90s when they were giving Ritalin to everyone who didn’t want to sit still in class. Shit was wild. And then you have me, with a healthy case of ADD but since I wasn’t a social butterfly, that just meant I wasn’t motivated.
Oh man, one of my people! My parents, my school, my teachers just watched me fail with an under 1.0 average, while I scored 95th percentile in every standardized test. I was lazy, undisciplined, and unmotivated, and it made me hate myself.
I feel like this would be a red flag now, but back then, even the school counselors were only worried about my impact on other students. Since it was minimal, they let me just stay there and fail… my best friend, who’s every bit at sharp as me, got Ritalined into fucking oblivion and put in remedial classes. Jokes on me tho, he got a diploma from HS.
GED is just another standardized test. If I knew how easy it was back in my junior year, I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble.
Dude, all the same here. I tested insanely high on that aptitude test in elementary school and was placed in their version of honors. But the teachers would get pissed because I wouldn’t do any homework, yet somehow aced all my tests and scored minimum 90th percentile on all standardized tests. I just paid attention to the lessons but had no interest in the busy work.
I ended up just doing the CA proficiency exam and got out of high school on my 17th birthday, and then got a diploma at 25 to make my mom happy.
Consider that the 90s was when most early Boomers had their kids in school, and of course, they didn’t want to deal with their children’s problems. So yeah, throw some drugs at them, the teacher is always right, and shut up now- Mommy and Daddy are focused on themselves.
Ritalin made me a zombie. Thankfully Adderall existed. I wish I could get some as an adult. That shit made me superhuman.
They had me and my brother on I think it was Concerta, and yeah there was something not right about that stuff. Adderall was great for getting shit done, but no way I’d want to take it everyday.
T breaks from amphetamines are (hopefully) encouraged.
T break?
Tolerance break. Even a one day weekly washout can be good enough.
Ah gotcha, thanks
Turns out, the teachers just do their job. And most of the time just the bare minimum, just like almost everyone else.
And if you want to teach and a student is a pain and hindering/distracting everyone else, then you kinda have to intervene. If the student isn’t motivated/concentrated its easy for the teacher to just say that the student doesnt wanna learn so he gets just bad grades.
At least thats how I see it sometimes.
And if you had ADD, ODD, and breaking the curve grades, they took every opportunity to lock you up in jail that they could.
At least that’s what happened to me.
TBF if any condition isn’t causing problems then it doesn’t need treatment. Don’t get me wrong, ADHD can cause problems beyond just school/work, but often that’s one of the most common primary problems it causes
Who says it isn’t causing problems? We had a similar issue with my oldest. He is a brilliant kid who can’t get his shit together because of his disability. However he can skate through school.
It was a constant battle to get him services and accommodations, because he “is not failing”. The school system thinks he doesn’t need treatment because he’s not failing. We think he deserves treatment because he isn’t living up to his abilities and struggles to do basic stuff
Thank you for fighting for your son.
I never really had issues in school, I was doing fine. But teachers kept telling me I wasn’t living up to my potential. I was chaotic. Forgetful. Years later, I developed an anxiety disorder I didn’t understand so I went to therapy. Turns out I also have chronic depression (oh, life is not so bleak for everyone??) and it’s all because of severe ADHD and the attached problems. I’m almost 30 now. And while my therapist did a lot of structured tests, she is not qualified to actually diagnose ADHD. It’s gonna be another year until I can get my formal diagnosis and medication.
I often wonder what could have been had the adults in my childhood been more attentive to my -in hindsight- obvious and severe problems.
This was me. Had some good, caring teachers, and some bad, but I was really struggling. Ended up going to a private school on student aid because the public schools didn’t care to help. Started caring a lot more about school. Things also got a lot easier when I moved out of the house and had more space to collect my thoughts and goals.
Absolutely, and inner conflict, constant struggle and unhappiness counts as a huge problem, even when external appearances are kept and things run relatively smoothly. Internal peace should always be the primary goal, and not just fitting into the gears of routine life.
Life is a constant struggle and was for basically all of our ancestors.
If you think life is only happy and free of inner conflict then that’s only because the drugs.
Why don’t you go chop off one of your arms. Since life is a constant struggle, more struggle must be good right? You should definitely make your life HARDER.
In my opinion life not being 100% free of inner conflict vs life being full of it are very different things.
The goal being inner peace doesn’t mean that one thinks absolute inner peace is possible. At least I tend to reach a bit higher than what I’m only happy with.
I mean this is technically right (so the best kind of right) but as someone that got okay grades in school and only passed because I could ace a test on pretty much anything, knowing I had ADHD before I was in my mid 30s, stressing over why work was getting harder and harder and trying to explain to my wife that i genuinely just forget to clean up after a project is done would have been hugely helpful. So diagnosing ADHD in kids and teens getting good grades may end with just therapy as treatment if they are otherwise doing well, knowing that other treatments (like medication) are options if after school they start struggling more. Keep in mind it’s much more difficult to get an ADHD diagnosis as an adult than as a kid.
I got diagnosed and medicated at 39. A couple of years go by and I’ve improved my shit enough that I get offered a promotion from tools to office.
“Great”, I think, because I’m finally getting my shit together.
Couple more years have passed, and it turns out that even with medication it’s real fucking hard to be self-led management when you’ve got a brane that is not at all interested in working with you.
Unmedicated me got reasonable grades at school, then managed a respectable 2:1 degree. That would have been a first class degree if I’d been medicated. But all of that shit is basically on rails, people guiding you in the right direction. I don’t have those rails anymore.
My parents just didn’t know what to do and dropped me out of school at 14. I made good grades for the first semester in school every year, then I was moved beside the teacher’s desk and had straight Fs for the rest of the year.
My daughter has developed the same problems as me, mostly after her mom was diagnosed with cancer and then passed away, but I’m trying to get her medicated (if that’s what she needs, and I think it ultimately is). She’s 16 now, on mood stabilizers as of a month ago. The doctor seems to think that will do it.
She ticked every box for adhd which didn’t surprise me at all. I think they’re afraid to give her anything too big because of a history of addiction in the family.
I don’t know. I just hope she ends up doing better than I have since she’s actually being treated.
After I got diagnosed, my kid began the journey towards assessment. Sadly for him his mother didn’t take it too seriously and delayed making a GP appointment for a few months, by which time Covid had happened. The end result is that he got formally diagnosed last February, but because of the waiting lists and a change of our county’s ADHD service provider in April, he’s still not been prescribed any medication.
It’s doubly frustrating because he’s half way through his final year of a law degree. I desperately want him to graduate knowing he did his very best, but without meds I know how impossible that might feel.
Why did you attribute a ratio to your degree? What do you mean first class degree?
In the UK (and maybe other places?) an honours degree can be passed at different levels depending on how well you do.
Top marks is a 1st Class Honours Degree, good marks gets you an Upper Second Class Degree (2:1), okay marks gets you a Lower Second Class Degree (2:2). A 3rd class also degree exists.
Most post-grad courses and some jobs would expect a 2:1 or above to let you apply.
My marks were mere points away from being in First range. It’s frustrating as hell to look back on.
It’s a testament to how hard I worked on the course submissions (in the 12 hours before the handing in deadline) that I did as well as I did. Because honestly, when I think back to that final year of being sat in front of my computer screen, the overwhelming memory is having four different browsers open, logged into four different Facebook accounts that I used to be a dickhead troll in racist groups, winding up the racists.
None of that had anything to do with the radio production degree that I’d paid good money to study towards.
A 2:2 is also known as a Desmond, for fairly obvious reasons.
Take a guess how many doctors and dentists you worked with barely passed medical schools, or politicians you voted for still passed with mediocre subpar scores. Hint: not zero.
You’ll do fine. So stop under selling yourself
What do you call a doctor that graduated last in their class? Doctor
Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean. Did this reply go to the wrong person?
Nope it went to the correct person (you).
What don’t you understand, so I may elaborate? Apologies, English is my first language and I’m dumb.
But even if the results are good, the process can still be very draining on the individual.
It didn’t get recognized in me until 10th or 11th grade. My grades started to slip fast when the ways I adapted to school stopped helping me keep up.
Arguably, if it’s not causing behavioral concerns, educational concerns, emotional concerns, social concerns, or physical concerns… It’s not really a condition is it?
For lack of a more relatable analogy, I’ve been using this race based one.
Imagine you’re a black child in America in the 1960s and 1970s, but you somehow managed to remain ignorant of that fact until sometime in your teens or early adulthood. Maybe the area was really progressive, parents wanted to shield you from reality, whatever you need to imagine is fine. You end up not understanding this fact about yourself, and then you end up in the racist public. Now, imagine that the racist public never comes outright and says anything directly racist to you, but all of their other behavior is exactly like what you’d expect from racists in the 1970s. How do you come to terms with this reality? You must be doing something wrong for people to treat you this way.
Obviously not a perfect analogy, and I don’t really like to compare my issues as a ND person with the awful stuff done to black people back then, and that continues to be done today. Anyway, it’s not inaccurate, if anything, the differences between ND people and NT people are greater than any outward racial appearance, and worse, ND people aren’t really aware they are being marginalized, and NT people don’t really understand that they are marginalizing.
I think… you should probably stop using that analogy.
A good analogy would be being forced to use your non-dominant hand to write, maybe to play guitar, paint, use a right-handed mouse with your left, etc…
Over time and practice, you may get pretty good at it. But, you want to ask if you think you’ll ever get the speed with the smoothness and precision you would have gotten if you’ve been using your dominant hand. You’d be doing what a lot of ND people have to do, which is put a lot of valuable concentration and energy into adapting to something that while NT people have no issue, it’s completely foreign to you.
You can also think of getting the proper treatment as, at worst, switching that incorrect 5-button ergonomic mouse for a basic 3-button ambidextrous one, and at best give you the forward/back buttons, but ignoring the ergonomic design. I.E. The treatment should help lessen the disadvantages, but they would still be present.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I think it’s too shallow vs the actual experience. The depth at which ND people are marginalized is so far and away under presented today. Most of the established science is just wrong and resistant to the reality that ND led researchers are presenting. We need to do better at advocating for ourselves as an entire group with shared experiences and unique mental and physical health issues.
The next best analogy I’ve heard so far is NT people are Windows based software running in a Windows based world, ND people are MacOS software being forced to run on Windows (suspend your IT mind about how it wouldn’t work at all, and understand that for a lot of ND folks, it doesn’t). Get on the correct runtime environment and a lot of issues go away. That’s just really hard to do when the world is primarily built for the 85%-95% NT population, and many of the most capable in the ND population are either ignorant or in denial due to lack of acknowledgement, and stigmatization of anything that would be acknowledged.
People can not agree with what I’m saying, I’m sure it sounds absurd especially if you are NT. I doubt I would have agreed with it two years ago, but introspection after my own realizations that I’m autistic, after over 30+ years of living with this brain, I understand things quite differently now.
Wait till you see what they let you do if you’re good at sports.
Wait till you see what they let you
doraw dog if you’re good at sports.Ftfy
Cheerleaders, teachers, whatever you want. The football players at my high school could do no wrong because they won state once.
Does anyone else have the incling ADHD and PTSD are the same thing? Human brain thinks it’s in danger and kicks into survival mode
Adhd kids get told negative things way more often that other kids, and that is traumatic. Undiagnosed Adhd leads to anxiety and depression because of it, which makes it very similar to ptsd. But since it’s chronic and over a long time period, it is separate from ptsd, as the cause is Adhd, and not the trauma itself.
ADHD can lead to C-PTSD if untreated
Especially when RSD is present.
Most of the symptoms commonly associated with ASD are shared with PTSD
Pretty much, my mom didn’t notice that I had adhd. But my little brother was a poor student, and ended up on several different medications for his adhd… meanwhile, my mom made fun of me for having like 5 water glasses scattered throughout the house all the time bcz I forgot I had a water glass, and where it was.
I don’t know how the fuck I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD (or autism or BPD) until I was in my late 30’s, when my parents had taken me to the same therapist my younger sibling was diagnosed with ADHD by as a child.
Adhd was demonized back then. I was diagnosed and my parents decided to do nothing because the media was telling them that Ritalin was the devil. Hard to blame them given the climate but man I coulda used the help back then.
That and most people’s idea (including some doctors) was that unless the person was hyperactive, they couldn’t have ADHD. Happened to me. And rather than being diagnosed and treated correctly for the problems I did need help with, I got diagnosed with
Asperger’s[ASD] and was put in a curriculum well below my level not because I didn’t understand the subjects, but because they just didn’t interest me.
Probably because you were the easy one? That was what it was for me, didn’t realize until my mid 20s (covid really wrecked havoc with my studying in college because I couldn’t go to a physically separate space that I had designated as a place I couldn’t goof off).
Exactly. My younger brother and I both have pretty bad ADHD. I am Primarily Inattentive but he got the hyperactivity and ODD. Guess who got diagnosed at 9 and who got diagnosed at 32?
Samsies, my sister had other issues and was for sure the one who needed more effort from my parents. Meanwhile, I got A’s without much effort in HS and for the most part in college (until Masters, which of course landed me with a bit of a breakdown and being depressed for a long while). I’m not formally diagnosed, but that’s mostly because I feel it’s largely a waste of money for my case (I checked into it a while back when I had terrible insurance, and it was gonna cost me something like $1200).
Tbf same if you are ‘slower’
