Me: I need to leave this community. What if these memes are just making me think I have ADHD when I don’t.
Also me on literally every meme that’s posted here: haha, hard rel8
All these ADHD memes have several times made me think if there's a light version?
But from what I understand everyone can experience ADHD "symptoms" from time to time, but people who are diagnosed with it have symptoms that are several orders of magnitude more intense.
I’m gonna sound like a broken record here but my favorite thing is:
Everyone pees but when you pee 60 times a day you go see a doctor
I hate explaining ADHD to people because it's a completely unintuitive disorder. It's like "I'm easily distracted" yet at other times I'm completely incapable of tearing my focus away from something. I have continual thoughts of things unrelated to my current focus, and other times I can't think of anything at all, I just can't hold on to any thoughts. I'm fidgety, almost all the time, but I can sit still and drive a car on the freeway for several hours with absolutely no issues.
It's like, for every symptom I have of the disorder there's always a "but sometimes" caveat that is present. It's just a nightmare to try to make someone understand especially when they've never struggled with the disorder or anything like it. It's a complete conundrum.
I have no problem staying committed to a task when my life depends on it. For all other cases meh.
Oh. Good. I’d gone a few minutes without doing this mental check, thank you for putting it back in there for today. 🫠
i was diagnosed early in childhood. my parents chose to believe it was fake and more than once actually pleaded with me to explain why beating me senseless every other day didn't make the behavior stop.
Fucking hell sorry your parents were abusive monsters.
oh they still are, mom likes to work "subtle" transphobia into every single conversation so she can act like a victim when I point it out, and my dad told me in so many words to go fuck my freeloading self for wanting to crash his guest room and stop being lazy and sensitive when I found myself unemployable and facing homelessness after moving to be closer to family after my wife took her own life and my living situation fell through. good christian folks you know?
Damn that is so fucked up, and I am so sorry to hear that. That family doesn't deserve you. I hope you find your true family someday.
I am very lucky to have landed in a lovely and accepting community where people truly care about each other, and as a bonus the landscape is jawdroppingly beautiful, so at least a there was a good outcome at the end of it. The US South is no place for anyone who isn't cis, het, white, male, nominally "Christian" in a way that would absolutely shock Jesus of Nazereth to his core, and neurotypical, and it's mindblowing to me how much better my general mental state is just for being away from that culture.
I thought this a couple of years ago, even though i was diagnosed at 5 (29 now). It's funny how i went my whole life thinking it was just the stereotypical adhd is just hyperactivity and laziness because the doctors never really tried to explain how this disorder could affect me. I decided to look it up studf about adhd and am deeply conflicted by how it literally explains my entire life and behaviors even though i thought i had it under control. On one hand im glad there is something that explains a lot of my struggles and medical issues but on the other i feel like my entire personality is just dictated by adhd and that i never really had as much freedom of choice as i thought i did.
I feel like the more you understand how your brain works, the more you learn how to work around it.
Full disclosure: I'm not diagnosed, but on a waitlist for ADD - for over a year now and it's not moving, but I digress. I am diagnosed with autism though.
To me it feels like my brain is a wildwater. You can't control it, but if you change the environment around it, you can guide it into useful directions. I'm lucky that by now the people around me have accepted it and are able to laugh with me when I fuck up. We have a lot of systems in place to reign in the worst effects, and the more we get used to it the easier it gets not to fall into traps and not to be unreliable.
I guess I'm working on my skills as a mindbender who tricks my brain into being useful while still allowing it to get that dopamine?
Whether you "officially" have ADHD or just the symptoms, it's not your fault. It's your responsibility.
At age 41, I just figured out I have ADHD, I assumed my entire life that I had a complex set of flaws.
I am 50. After reading a lot about the subject, I also suspect I am affected - my whole life. Getting an appointment with a psychiatrist to be sure right now. It would explain so much...
Well good luck - Vyvanse has a generic version now and has been working wonders for my 40 year old self... Except for the insomnia tonight.
I figured it out last year, I was 39. You're in good company.
I just couldn't figure it out until I came across information about ADHD and everything clicked. I'd be lying to say that I haven't had moments of self doubt and imposter syndrome like the op suggests.
To me, at the end of the day, whether I'm actually ADHD or not, I have very similar tenancies and traits and the treatment works for me. That's all that really matters.
It doesn't help that every asshole on the Internet suddenly has a psychology degree to tell you you don't actually have ADHD/autism.
I absolutely love this take and I can relate.
-- humor dissection to follow --
In reality though, it's possible, but Occam's Razor would have us disagree. And a pragmatic take on all that would be: does it matter, especially if treatment and coping mechanisms also work in both cases?
Also, as a fellow ADHD-er I strongly believe that diagnosis is not an excuse; it merely explains how and why. Responsibility still lies with the afflicted regardless, with an ethical responsibility towards others for those that are self-aware.
This is unironically me. I just went through a lengthy diagnosis process that determined I do not in fact have ADHD, despite ticking an alarming number of boxes. I call myself ADHD-adjacent now.
"What if I don't actually have ADHD, I simply share some behavioral issues that make it seem like ADHD because I was raised by parents who did have ADHD and I just kind of adopted it from them?" - Me, like once a week since getting diagnosed.
If it helps, ADHD has a heritability of 77-88% according to one study. That's on par with height.
Imposter syndrome?
ඞ
Remember watching a video like a year ago about how intelligent people with ADHD do at school and it was like a 17 minute video and it was like the guy was talking about me the whole time, but you know, maybe it's just a coincidence
I'm not officially diagnosed yet, so this is where I live.
Getting diagnosed is a joke. Literally took 10 minutes. They don’t verify or go into depth about anything. At least it was that way for me. They gave me adderall but it made me feel like a crackhead so I only used it for a month. Vynase was better but still didn’t end up liking it too much. These days I let Jesus take the wheel.
I don't think I have AD... Hmm I wonder if I should restart that project I abandoned five years ago?
You could get a real diagnose maybe?
getting a real diagnose in my country means ill be stuck with a mental disability in an extremely psychophobic society with no way to treat it because all adhd meds are banned here
so my only way to cope is to talk to other people who probably have adhd as well and learn how they manage their lives
I would but I can't just seem to be able to get into it for some mysterious reason.
After about a year, I got as far as finding a psychiatrist that specializes in it and used the contacts form on his webpage to ask whether he also diagnoses adults, never got a reply so another year and there will be some progress, just need to find a new one, then contact and setup a meeting, 3 easy steps
Hi, person with high-functioning autism here. I was informed by a therapist that, due to the coping mechanisms most people learn as they grow up with conditions like these, they are incredibly difficult (if not impossible in some cases) to get an official diagnosis for.
My experience may not be relevant in this case but due to the overlap between autism and ADHD, it seemed relevant enough to share.
I was diagnosed as a kid, lost my childhood medical records (no clue how, but it was before I was an adult, I had to be revaccinated when I went through basic), so had to go through it again as an adult.
Yeah, they don’t just… give people diagnoses. They don’t even like screening all that much because there are drug seekers, so they put you off. You have to work at finding someone willing to do it, and that’s in the best case.
I was going through a super straightforward route (through the VA) and that still took a 6 month wait before we could start the process, 5 probing mental health appointments, and then the actual diagnosis appointment. In total it took about a year, and again, that was an easy and straightforward route with a prior diagnosis.
… reading this wondering the same thing as I lay here in bed not wanting to get up and scrolling mindlessly on Lemmy….
Nope I should get up and take my meds … I’m a dufus.
The lighter side of ADHD
