With so many disorder Tiktoks around I can’t help but fail to spot the difference between having actual ADHD vs just having poor focus habits.
I myself have trouble focusing on tasks but I doubt I actually have ADHD given the recent surge of disorder Tiktoks - tho I do have autism - and that my focus is typically normal on tasks I devote to like gaming.
ADHD IS NOT JUST AN INABILITY TO FOCUS. Look up the diagnosis metrics. There are going to be a list of “symptoms” and you have to look at your entire life and analyze if those things have happened to you.
ADHD made me suicidal, and horrifically depressed; as I was unable to focus or stick to anything, which was causing me to fail at every aspect of my life. It was like going through life in a deep fog, with a mind that actively resisted any and all attempts to change. Imagine not having mental control over your own body.
If you’ve every played Silent Hill, I was living my life how it feels to walk through the fog filled town.
I had been on every single anti depressant known to man, stumping my psychiatrist because none of them worked. My hell only ended when I told my Psychiatrist that I was most likely going to be dead within a few months, causing him in desperation (and probably not entirely legally) to prescribe me stimulants without an official diagnosis under the cover that it was off label for my depression.
My life painfully changed over the course of the next 8 months. It was like waking up from a deep coma in which you are aware of everything going on around you, but you are unable to affect it in any way. I essentially metamorphized.
I have since then received an official diagnosis, and my life has been incredible since. It took months of work, and personal growth, but I managed to change.
This organization is incredible, you can find all related information here.
Yep. All of this, so much. ADHD comes with so many obstacles. Violent mood swings and hyperfixations that in my case were misdiagnosed as bipolar, etc. Easy burnout. Rejection sensitivity that makes communication and goal achievement more difficult. Executive dysfunction where it is harder to do things I want to do. Inability to juggle multiple obligations at once.
In my experience, these are things that everyone deals with on an individual basis to some extent. So for a long time I gaslit myself thinking that I didn’t have it. But after finally being affirmed (the isolation from the pandemic shut-down and I think recovering from COVID infection really destroyed my capacity to mask) I look back on my entire life since childhood and recognize just how much of the trauma I suffered had roots in my untreated ADHD.
Unsolicited advice incoming but you rightfully put a lot of emphasis on the emotional dysregulation aspect of ADHD, which gets chronically overlooked.
Personally I have found that clonidine works really well for my experience of emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity. It’s a boring medication - typically it’s just used for lowering blood pressure and it’s quite safe and generally well tolerated. (Obviously stimulant medications increase your BP so taking something that reduces your BP as a side effect is actually beneficial in the long term.)
It might be something that is worth looking into for yourself given what you wrote here.
As a sidebar, I also experience PTSD and clonidine helps with managing my trauma response. One perk of the medication is that it’s fast acting and you don’t get major withdrawals from it so if I had a ton of trauma nightmares the night before or if I’m struggling with PTSD symptoms during the day for whatever reason, I can just increase my dose as needed on that particular day and it helps keep things manageable for me.
Ah, I’ll definitely look into that. Just got through a night of ptsd nightmares myself. Thank you
Oh, shit. Well I’m glad that I mentioned that last part then because I almost didn’t do it. I hope it turns out to be useful advice for you!
I’m sorry to hear you had to go through all that but I’m glad you’re better now and that you shared your story. If you don’t mind answering (please don’t feel obliged at all), can I ask whether you still need simulants or whether that was temporary?
Treatment for ADHD is lifelong. It is like diabetes, when you give a person with diabetes insulin, they will feel better and be a different person, but they cannot just simply stop taking insulin.
I do still take stimulant daily. It is the exact same dosage that me and my doctor worked to find a long while ago. I have no desire to take more, and I no longer have side effects or very minor ones since they petter off after a few months.
It is possible for people to come off stimulants if they wish, but that is rare, and mostly pointless since it’s not as if ADHD is magically going to disappear. It essentially becomes a Plato’s cave scenario.
It’s a shame that you’ve got to think about taking them everyday but I suppose it becomes habit? And great news that you’ve found the right dosage.
It’s just a habit. You just take one pill as soon as you wake up, that’s it. Same as vitamins, or you can do it with breakfast.
I did not have poor focusing problems until lockdown 3 years ago so that’s immediately a sign I DON’T have ADHD.
Though I do have an Autism diagnosis and still show signs of it today.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/autism/signs/children/ - not sure if the NHS site is reliable.
Focus is not the only symptom, did you read the list on the website I linked? Read the diagnosis section.
Also, autism and ADHD are commonly comorbid.
There needs to be further research on this but ADHD occurs in autistic people at an approximate rate of somewhere between 20-40%.
There’s very little out there about autism or ADHD for adults and almost nothing about comorbid autism and ADHD in adults.
Speaking anecdotally as someone who is autistic and an ADHDer, I fit into neither the ADHD nor the autism categories neatly. My ADHD traits often counterbalance my autistic traits and, likewise, my autistic traits often counterbalance my ADHD traits. (At least when they aren’t ganging up on me.) It’s very complex.
Idk specifically about the difference but the reason there is even a problem differentiating them for most people is that one of the two makes big dollars for the pharmaceutical industry and the other doesn’t. The controllers of society like it being confusing and even more support incorrect diagnoses that gets more people paying for their drugs.
This is my problem with a lot of mental health issues in the west and how they are treated. The healthcare system isn’t designed to actually properly diagnose and treat people’s issues in the best way for them. It is to sell product. So you can never be too trusting with any diagnosis. Plain and simple. The pharmaceutical industry is probably the most evil industry in the west because it takes advantage of the most vulnerable. Real cures for issues, many of which do NOT require lifetime treatment, are sequestered in favor of medicines that you have to take forever and don’t work half the time anyway. New treatments or better treatments aren’t researched because why look for something new when you can keep pumping the same cash cow even if it barely can be considered a real treatment?
It is this way with all of them. The mental health sector is rampant with misdiagnoses that make things so much worse for everyone. Most of depression and anxiety is caused by this hellish capitalist society, but we will never fix that society so instead we pump people full of drugs that turns them into zombies or act like children. I have seen these meds destroy my mother. They almost destroyed me. I also have a theory that a large number of disorders are exacerbated by the stress and anxiety we all feel. That many of these issues wouldn’t be nearly as bad for the people with them, and wouldn’t even need medication type treatments were it not for the compounding stressors of the society we live in.
Sorry for the rambling rant. Moral of the story, capitalism sucks and ruins everything.
I also have a theory that a large number of disorders are exacerbated by the stress and anxiety we all feel.
I have a mental illness level that is monumentally higher post-COVID than the before times, so this tracks with me.
Like, i mostly had my add and anxiety whipped thru EOOD and healthier eating habits, kicked booze to the curb.
Now i feel horrible again, like i used to feel back when i was a teenager. Its so much more than i can handle alone. Med’d up with a drug that makes me feel “off”. Fighting agoraphobia daily.
Yeah it’s not just my chemistry, not anymore. Maybe it never was. My old eyes see clearly now the world we suffer in is actually horseshit.
I also have a theory that a large number of disorders are exacerbated by the stress and anxiety we all feel.
This is how I feel too. There are tonnes of societal factors making mental illnesses more prevalent.
This does not make them less real obviously. But the field of medicine here faces the same issue that it does in the case of physical ailments—zero focus on prevention. The current model is allowing corporations to wreak havoc on our bodies and minds and hope that some silver bullet chemical compound or some, may Allah forgive me for saying this, app might save us.
It sucks.
I wonder what the stats are in China and Cuba. Both very different countries to each other and in comparison to western states. But things like efficient public transport and walkable cities must make a difference for some conditions.
If an autistic person or someone with anxiety, for example, could work mainly from home (at their choice) and go into the office at a quieter time, not in rush hour, I imagine their anxiety and overstimulation would be that much easier to manage. That’s why I’m thinking of China, because the infrastructure means not having to drive or worry about missing a bus and being late or about not being able to get home or to somewhere quiet.
If the office also had quiet spaces with dim lights? Separate offices and booths in the canteen rather than open seating? Imagine living in a society where some of the main things that use your spoons just don’t exist. I don’t know if most of this does apply in China yet (except the transport in major cities). But I’d like to see whether the current infrastructure makes a difference.
This is extremely off base and harmful for ADHD. Many health problems require lifelong treatment, diabetes, ADHD, HIV treatment, and countless more. Some things cannot be fixed with just “lifestyle changes”.
There are also no “treatments” that can help or be researched. At least with our current medical progress. Amphetamines are about as good as we can go. It’s a developmental disorder and not a disease. You can never fix that unless you can somehow change the structure of the brain, something we are decades away from understanding.
Do not push people away from psychiatry if they have legitimate concern and mental illnesses. The system is broken, but it still works.
There is also not much money in ADHD medication, there are limitations on the amount of production, there are many generics that sap money away from massive companies. They are price controlled, and many other elements that make them a poor choice for profitability.
You are right in a lot of what you say, and I agree with you so much. But there are some problems that people must seek help for.
I never made any claims to push people away from treatment, nor tell them not to seek help. In fact I give no treatment seeking advice whatsoever. You are basically putting a bunch of words in my mouth.
I only state that treatments and advancements in them are drastically harmed by capitalism and that you can never fully trust what you are given because of it. You can’t always know if your doctor actually cares about your problem or is just pushing drugs for their personal gain. This is dually harmful to people with legitimate problems because it takes away from the seriousness of the condition. The point being the system is fucked up and harmful and has done a great deal of harm to both people that do have a legitimate problem and those that do not but treated as if they were.
I don’t disagree with what you’ve said here entirely. Capitalism absolutely aggravates mental illness and it produces conditions that generate mental ill health.
But ascertaining the correct etiology of a condition doesn’t necessarily have an impact on the treatment. Say a person is experiencing liver failure due to alcoholism. The cause is alcoholism, the condition is liver failure, and yet the treatment remains the same whether or not it was alcoholism that brought about the condition.
In the same way, we can attribute much of psychiatric disorders to capitalism but, at least for the individual, the treatment remains the same.
I think we need to be cautious to avoid a puritanical attitude towards psychiatric meds. I could write a book based on my criticisms of psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry and how they operate, however at the same time we shouldn’t discourage people from the appropriate use of medications to improve their wellbeing regardless of how ruthless and exploitative the pharmaceutical industry itself is. The system is going to be fucked whether or not someone has an appropriate medication regime for their mental health. The only difference is that one option means an improved quality of life.
It’s also important to keep in mind though that there are certain mental illnesses that do require an ongoing medication regime for maintenance and that this would persist under socialism. Schizophrenia and bipolar are two very obvious examples here. Even under fully automated luxury gay space communism, the overwhelming majority of cases of bipolar and schizophrenia are going to require ongoing medication regimes.
