The pop-science definition of ADHD has started to stray very far from the science.
There’s a growing tendency for newly diagnosed ADHD patients to try to explain all of their mental habits and preferences through the lens of ADHD. Some times they have helpful feedback for other people with similar habits, but other times they just paint ADHD with an overly broad brush. They often have unrealistically lofty ideals of what a non-ADHD person looks like, or describe basic human nature as ADHD (for example: it's perfectly normal if you'd prefer to play video games than do your homework. We've all been there, ADHD or not)
One thing I would recommend: Don’t let an ADHD diagnosis define your personality. A diagnosis is simply a guide map for treatment. It shouldn’t become a stereotype that defines you as a person. Use the diagnosis to learn techniques to overcome difficulties, but don’t let the diagnosis become a convenient excuse to let yourself off the hook or explain away concerns that would be better served by some personal growth.
"Don’t let an ADHD diagnosis define your personality."
"... but don’t let the diagnosis become a convenient excuse to let yourself off the hook or explain away concerns that would be better served by some personal growth"
I totally understand this perspective and I do think it's a healthy one, but, where do you draw the line?
I've been diagnosed with ADHD but personally hate the diagnosis. I don't want to be viewed through that lens, nor do I want to view myself that way.
That said, there's just no denying that I'm a different (better) person when I'm treating the condition. I get more work done. I fight less with my wife. I'm way less frustrated angry on a daily basis, etc. Small tasks that normally seem like mountains, become mole hills.
I've done counseling and I've done exercise, diet, sleep. I've seen the most dramatic results when I've just accepted I have ADHD and taken medication. Yet comments like yours re-ignite my desire quit taking the medications, and return to what feels normal ... even if feeling normal was so bad for me.
What I'm trying to say is ... I think some people DO need to lean into the diagnosis. Accept that it's part of their life. If treatment improves your life, don't shy away from it.
I don't know. I'm still just trying to figure it all out myself. I hate the idea of being "ADHD" but I'm starting to form the belief that I need to do what's right for my future, and my family, even if it means accepting I have a condition that requires something as dramatic as taking medication.
A word of caution: The pop-culture definition of ADHD has started to drift quite far from the original diagnosis.
Whenever you read someone's personal description of ADHD, it helps to remember that many of the traits they describe are common to everyone, ADHD or not. The distinction lies in the severity of the symptoms, and how resistant those symptoms are to more typical (non-medication) interventions.
The bigger problem is that some of these overly generic descriptions of ADHD are so broad that you'd be hard pressed to find any young person in 2021 who doesn't fit the description.
For example, consider what the inverse of this person's list of bullet points would look like:
- Very, very easy time focusing on things they don't like or don't want to do
- Easy time reading physical books
- Hard to distract with construction noises
- Enjoys sitting still for extended periods of time
- Easily gets back to a flow state after being interrupted
Taken to extremes, overly generic descriptions of ADHD tend to paint unrealistic pictures of what a non-ADHD person looks like. When was the last time you met any young person who is unaffected by distractions, interruptions, sitting still for long periods of time, and has no issues focusing on things they don't like?
The list of recommended techniques provided by the author is excellent. Everyone could benefit from it, frankly. ADHD people especially.
Newly diagnosed (or self-diagnosed) ADHD patients often make the mistake of letting their diagnosis become a convenient excuse. They might start speaking about their ADHD as if it's a separate entity, holding their true self back (For example "It's not my fault I have ADHD" or "If it wasn't for my ADHD, I would be more successful"). While this is short-term satisfying, it can be extremely counterproductive. If anything, an ADHD diagnosis means you need to put more effort into building routines, improving your self-discipline, creating focus-conducive environments, and other healthy habits that everyone benefits from, ADHD or otherwise.
If you find yourself identifying with some of the points in this article, bookmark the article and spend some time implementation the recommended bullet points. If you find the issues are interfering with your life to an unbearable degree, consider engaging with a professional psychiatrist for a conversation on ADHD. You don't want someone who will simply prescribe stimulants and send you on your way. You want someone who will create a long-term plan. Medication can help, but it's not as straightforward as it sounds. Worse yet, some people mistake medication for a free pass around building self-discipline, which fails when tolerance develops (and it will). Healthy habits and self-discipline last a lifetime, so it's worth investing in building those up front.
> by getting diagnosed and telling people your diagnosis
One of the things I try to emphasize with newly diagnosed young people is that they should not make their diagnosis an outward part of their personality.
There's a trend of putting your diagnoses in everything from your LinkedIn profile to your resume lately. I've been helping with resume review in a group and I've been stunned by how many times I've had to tell people that they need to remove their ADHD diagnosis from their resume.
People love to label things, and parents overlabelling ADHD has been a common warning among anyone working with kids now.
In broader context I think we are now finally starting to pay attention to the fact every single human is subtly or not so subtly different, and we haven't even scratched the surface of mapping all those particularities and so we put people into categories we know, not necessarily where the actually belong.
It's great were slowly letting go of 'normalising' ourselves, but we're going to have to learn entirely news vocabularies to says describe who we then are. Also, by thinking about yourself you define yourself, so if you think differently you define differently. I.e. we are fluid, to a certain extent.
The big question for us is, do we consider the parts of our behavior caused by whatever we suffer from to be part of our identity or personality?
I do not now. I used to -- I had a fairly major crisis of identity after my diagnosis, because a very large chunk of what I considered to be my personality turned out to be ADHD symptoms. I literally had to refind myself.
But it turned out very well, because now I define myself based upon what my actual qualities are, rather than defining myself based on symptoms of a disorder. I no longer feel like everything about who I am changed after meds; I'm still the same person I was ten years ago, I'm just now more easily able to express that self without ADHD getting in the way.
Also, in almost all cases, the "new qualities" are better than the old ones. Whereas before, "I just can't finish things" was unfortunately something I considered to be part of me, now I am able to finish things mostly the same as neurotypical people. That leaves me free to define myself based on positive qualities -- good humor, optimism, and so on.
The thing is, it became much easier for me to feel okay about taking medicine when I realized that the goal of medicine is simply to bring me back to a "normal" level. I had been operating at a deficiency of certain neurotransmitters; the medication simply brings those levels closer to normal. Once I had adopted a more biochemical perspective on my brain and identity, my initial reluctance disappeared.
A side effect of this is that I kind of no longer believe personality is fixed. I really don't find that the things we tend to call 'personality' are the sort of permanent identifying landmarks to a person we want them to be. Now I've adopted a view that puts a much stronger emphasis on the actions a person chooses to take, which I think is a better way to identify a person's qualities anyways.
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I would hesitate though with ADHD in particular, because untreated ADHD reduces your lifespan in a statistically significant way, is literal hell to live through, and the treatments are perfectly safe and extremely effective. If someone has a child who is diagnosed with ADHD, I would beg them to not let their personal prejudices against medicine keep them from getting the child the help they need. As someone who lived through it as a kid, it was physically torture. The word "restlessness" sounds benign, but I find it to be quite similar to akathisia on bad days, which is really horrific.
"Real" disability, a.k.a. defined by the DSM, an agreement between psychiatrists and the insurance industry. These checklists are laughable. They diagnose based on surface criteria. There is no underlying cause or understanding. There is a set of behavioral traits. You can't assume these are intrinsic to someone. You have to at least consider that they are learned, and if they are learned, it's not helpful to tell people that's who they are. It's cementing the whole they are in.
Don't take it personal. Both things can be true, you can have adhd and adhd can be overdiagnosed, doesn't mean that none of those diagnostics are valid.
I'm sure you must be tired of people telling you about how overdiagnosed adhd is, I'm sorry about that, but don't take it personal, it's just a person on the internet.
It's a totally coherent position to hold that the name 'ADHD' gestures at a real thing, but also reject the medicalization of that thing (or, more weakly, that that thing can/should be addressed solely medically). The predominance of the 'medical lens' in addressing cognitive differences is reflected in the language available for naming and describing those things, whether you actually agree with it or not.
The notion that ADHD 'really is' a neurological disorder and 'really isn't' anything else misunderstands the purpose of psychiatric diagnostic categories like ADHD in the first place. Psychiatrists and psychologists aren't in the business of ontology, and clinicians especially aren't.
Take it from someone who has it: this is a stupidly narrow way to think about ADHD.
So you, a non-professional, casually diagnosed your friend with ADHD, and then went on to explain his behavior with this.
If there’s one thing my psychologist friends tell me not to do, it’s exactly this: make up diagnoses for myself and others around me to explain behaviors post hoc.
Psychologists used to be people that listened to other people's problems and helped them out. Problems started to arise when they started thinking they are doctors and even started prescribing drugs to 'patients'. If you are given the label of ADHD or any of the new fancy labels, know that you are not 'sick'. Life is in your own hands and you can do something about it. The only benefit I see from this labeling is that it helps you find a community of like minded people. But still, it's a double-edged sword and many people treat it like a disease.
No you are wrong. The fact that ADHD is a mostly subjective collection of behavioral traits, many people get lumped in as ADHD. So many people called ADHD would have normal brains.
There are a core set of people who definitely have brains that are different and need medication etc.But the way it is currently diagnosed lumps too many people and makes it useless to call all people with ADHD the same.
My son with Generalized Anxiety Disorder was diagnosed with severe ADHD. This is the problem because many things can cause the same set of behaviors so a diagnosis of ADHD is not accurate enough.
To say that it's been criticized doesn't mean anything, because there are skeptics who criticize ADHD diagnoses with zero understanding of the literature. If you actually read the experts on the subject, for instance my advisor Dr. Weyandt who wrote a very in-depth book overviewing the literature on ADHD, you'll see that over-diagnosis is not a commonly held view amongst actual experts. But, like climate change skepticism, many people think they can make a claim about over-diagnosis with zero expertise.
It's ADHD when it affects the individual's ability to achieve their goals, otherwise, yes, it is just a normal state of being.
However this classification schema is not necessarily well abided. And so diagnostics can become an expedient.
What we end up with is a rather confusing dreck that is more consistent with art than it is a science - rightly so. However, scientific justification seems to be increasingly necessitous in academia and is permeating more and more into the commons. The consequence of this is a whole field of people who may well be great artists posing as rigid empiricists and this retards both the development of the art while complicating the science by shear bulk, and jointly discrediting it.
The healthy thing to do, I think, is just pointing out that everyone is peculiar, strange, twisted, traumatized and that's simply the human condition. There really isn't a great deal of normal when we consider the multidimensional nature of a person, and existence in even a single tail in some distribution can drastically alter one's inclinations and abilities or cast them deeply into stigma.
In turn I think we would then necessarily have to accept the cold hard fact that a society fit for the human can't be engineered with mechanical expectations, which is a great deal of where these disorders stem from in the first place, the abstraction of man into a mechanical unit, for the sake of expedience.
>You can't totally reject some of these diagnoses, regardless of how porous the boundaries, without depriving a lot of people of the care they need.
Which is precisely why the DSM is a political document and not a scientific one.
I will however mention that several of the barriers to create we create to care are artificial. One of the most common fears I've heard from those with ADHD is that without their diagnosis being taken seriously they will lose access to their medication. Yet that's only an issue because we force people to get a disorder diagnosis to access drugs they find helpful in the first place.
I think this is a good example of how we mix up concepts: ADHD is just a phenotype. Then, our society classifies it as a condition because it does not go well with current circumstances. Although, both are separate things.
There’s a growing tendency for newly diagnosed ADHD patients to try to explain all of their mental habits and preferences through the lens of ADHD. Some times they have helpful feedback for other people with similar habits, but other times they just paint ADHD with an overly broad brush. They often have unrealistically lofty ideals of what a non-ADHD person looks like, or describe basic human nature as ADHD (for example: it's perfectly normal if you'd prefer to play video games than do your homework. We've all been there, ADHD or not)
One thing I would recommend: Don’t let an ADHD diagnosis define your personality. A diagnosis is simply a guide map for treatment. It shouldn’t become a stereotype that defines you as a person. Use the diagnosis to learn techniques to overcome difficulties, but don’t let the diagnosis become a convenient excuse to let yourself off the hook or explain away concerns that would be better served by some personal growth.
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