Views: 5209 Vapora Dork's life "update"
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Is it even an update if I never informed you of what was going on in the first place? Well I give up trying to find a better name for this so if not, rip.
I don't remember when it was exactly, but a while ago, within the past 6 months maybe, I started to seriously consider the possibility that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). I first considered it about 2 years ago but I dismissed it when I realized it shares symptoms with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), which is something I also suffer (not yet diagnosed but fairly obvious), and it seemed to make more sense (how can I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity disorder when I'm not that hyperactive???).
Recently I looked into it again when I realized something just felt wrong with the way I just couldn't pay attention in class no matter how hard I tried, and how I just couldn't bring myself to do anything like do homework or revise; one of the times I recall I managed to force myself to do my French homework before going to bed, it was an exercise that was meant to take 5 minutes, and instead took me over an hour, filled with distractions and unwillingness to write down on the sheet of paper in front of me. I mean, the latter just sounds like it's down to pure laziness, which is what I myself had always assumed was the case; but what I ended up thinking was that if that was just me being lazy and that everyone else feels the same when they have to do a boring task, then how could anyone not be lazy? How on earth was it at all possible to overcome that massive mental barrier so consistently that you count as "not lazy"?
These were things that couldn't be explained by the APD as I could hear the teachers perfectly well when I was getting distracted (it mostly only affects me in social situations where there's many people talking at once rather than just the one teacher speaking to a silent class), and a hearing disorder should certainly not have been affecting my ability to study and work in silence. Looking further into it the possibility of ADHD I discovered that people with ADHD have a high risk of developing other disorders as well, and ADHD & APD very often co-exist. At that point I became fairly sure that I must have both disorders and set up an appointment to begin the process of getting a diagnosis through the NHS, but I was told that the process of diagnosing adult ADHD was suuuuuper slow in the UK, and from what was said it seemed that it was unlikely that any diagnosis I could get (and the subsequent support/treatment it would open me up to) would either occur before the college year ended, or in time to actually help me.
That was in October. By December I was really "struggling" at college; I wasn't doing homework, I wasn't studying, I was missing like 20% of my classes because I would wake up and randomly decide I didn't feel like going that day ("missing one day won't hurt", then 20 total missed days of college later...) and just go back to sleep. I fell super far behind in Business Studies, the class I was skipping the most, to the point where I just knew there was no way I could catch back up. It was really highlighted when we did a test in class, and the vast majority of the questions were things I never remembered having done at all in class, let alone knew the answer to. I ended up with a score of 7 out of 38 or something ridiculously awful like that.
At that point I just gave up. Vapora vs ADHD, ADHD wins. It seemed extremely obvious that there was no way I could pass Business this year, and I didn't know how I was going to pass French either; I'm naturally good at languages and especially French, but that can only help so much, I'm not about to learn a whole language by going to class 4 hours a week, or more like 3 hours a week on average considering how many classes I was skipping. I would get an A* easily in Spanish because I'm already fluent in it, but there was no point going through an entire year of college just to fail 2 out of 3 subjects and get a good grade in the language I already spoke, so I decided I would drop out after the Christmas holidays.
For Christmas I went to stay with my parents in Spain and I told them of my intentions. They'd only really half-***edly supported me with the whole ADHD thing until then, I received the impression that they either didn't believe it's a real condition (unfortunately a very common perception, "you're just lazy", "you just need to pay attention", "everyone feels that way sometimes"), or just didn't believe I had it. But they'd be damned if they were going to let their son become a college drop-out. Suddenly they were very willing to support me, and seeing that getting a diagnosis through the British health care system (free) would take too long they instead paid for me to be seen by a private clinic specializing in ADHD, and got me an appointment for a month later.
A month later was last Wednesday; as expected I was diagnosed with ADHD-PI (Predominantly Inattentive sub-type, meaning my hyperactivity symptoms are fairly mild compared to the more obvious examples of people with ADHD). I'm about to be prescribed medication that I'll hopefully be able to start on Tuesday, or Wednesday at the latest.
Something that's important to note is that with ADHD, medication is pretty much the only way to deal with it. There are behavioural therapies and other kinds of treatment that can help, but any such treatment has very little benefit unless paired with medication, and medication on its own is infinitely more helpful than all other treatment put together. A lot of parents of ADHD children are opposed to medication and try to force their children to try and learn to cope without it, but it seems like such an awful thing to be putting their children through. I recently read a story about the mother of an ADHD child that used to be that way. For years she tried everything and everything to help her son cope with ADHD that wasn't medication; she had the teachers give her son a lot of special attention in class to make sure he was keeping up, paying attention, doing the homework, etc. and at home she would spend hours with him helping him with school work, and all this was alongside behavioural therapy I believe. He was able to keep up with school and such thanks to all the help, but after years of this it didn't seem to have had any effective on helping his actual disorder, so she finally gave in and decided to try medication: the first day she got a call from the teacher, expecting it to be one of the regular calls of "your son has said/done something very mean to another child, we need you to come pick him up" that she got so often, but instead the teacher just said "It's incredible, all of a sudden your son is just like all the other children! What did you do?". In that kid's case, the improvement in medication vs no medication was just that obvious.
The effectiveness of medication varies depending on each person; in some people it completely removes all symptoms of ADHD for as long as the medication is active (8-10 hours usually I think), while in others rather than a 100% improvement it's a 60-90% improvement. Either way it's still always a huge improvement over not being medicated at all.
The same medication doesn't always work for everyone, but in 99% of cases, one kind of medication or the other will work, and is found through a process of trial and error. I may find that what I'm going to be prescribed won't work for me and I'll have to try something else in the future, but with any luck that won't be the case.
So how exactly does ADHD affect me? There's a lot more to it than just "always distracted", but that's the most obvious symptom, especially in my case, and here's the explanation for that, given by someone who understands it better than I do: "Basically, the dopamine and norepinephrine levels in my brain are low and the prevailing theory is that because the brain requires these hormones to regulate things like memory, emotion, and motivation I will search for whatever is most stimulating in order to increase the levels of those hormones. That's why one of the symptoms of ADHD is inattention and fidgeting and people with ADHD find it near impossible to combat this search for stimulus."
I fidget, all the time. Mainly with my legs, I'll bounce them up and down quickly until they get too tired then switch to some other less-tiring action. If possible, rather than fidget sitting down I'll just pace around the room. I do that while listening to music, and while eating anything that doesn't require me to sit down for, and just for thinking in general.
"I will search for whatever is most stimulating in order to increase the levels of those hormones". Whatever is most stimulating. My parents always used to think (and possibly still do) that I'm addicted to video games, and to computer games, and to computers/the Internet in general. I've given it a lot of thought myself over the years, given that I do spend a lot of time on them and nowhere near enough time on productive things like homework and studying, but the prospect never really made sense to me. I felt like a more fitting explanation would be that I was addicted to entertainment, because if you took away my computer or playstation or whatever, I sure as hell wouldn't suddenly think "well I guess I may as well do my homework and revise so I can get good grades", I'd just move onto the next most entertaining thing, which is TV or reading, whichever I feel like at the time.
Whatever is most stimulating really makes a whole lot of sense in this context; I never felt like video game addiction really explained what was going on in my head when I spent a lot of time playing video games, whereas the idea that my ADHD brain is constantly pushing me to do the most stimulating activity available makes perfect sense considering that I always thought of "my addiction" as just always wanting to be doing the most entertaining activity available, and that was almost always playing on one console or another, while nowadays it's a mix of League, browsing Internet forums such as Reddit or MOBAFire, and the occasional wiki-researching tangent when I get curious about some random subject like black holes and read the first page, then end up opening up every other link on the page when I get curious about those links too. And funnily enough that's actually how I became aware of ADHD, years before considering that I myself might have it.
Another way it affects me is that I have basically no long-term motivation. I'll only do things that give instant gratification. And likewise, punishment and consequences are only motivators if they're immediate consequences, not long-term. Not studying will make my life as an adult very hard? Okay whatever, there's still a long time to go until that happens (except I'm already an adult HELP). When I was younger I was a lot more hard working, and that's because I was scared of the consequences of not bringing in the homework, or my parents' reaction if I failed an exam. At some point I got used to those consequences/realized they weren't really that scary, and they stopped being motivators. I could study for an exam the day I had to take it, but I couldn't bring myself to study it the day before when it was "still so far away", a whole 24 hours before I had to really worry about it.
I often forget what sentence I wanted to say; while mid-sentence. I have to pause to remember what it is that I wanted to say then continue. I also commonly forget random words like "umbrella", which are not used every day but still not that rare and not really hard to remember. It makes me get "stuck" when I'm speaking and suddenly I can't continue because I can't remember what the word I'm looking for is, sometimes I might remember it after thinking on it, or sometimes I'll have to define the word to the other person and hope they understand and point the word out, or if it's written I can try googling the definition and hope the right word comes up.
I have music playing in my head 24/7, almost all day as far as I can tell. When I wake up, when I'm in the shower, when I'm in class, and when I'm trying to fall asleep. I can stop it if I directly focus on it but the moment I get distracted it starts playing again. It's not annoying really, I love music. Apparently having music playing in the mind's background is something that's common when people are bored, and it's the mind's way of keeping you entertained. I'm always bored if I'm not doing something stimulating, so I almost always have music playing at the back of my mind. It's not happening right now though, I've been effortlessly writing this for 3 hours now because I like the subject. If I were doing something boring, like trying to fall asleep, I would probably have this part of this song looping over and over in my head. And yes, I have that **** involuntarily playing in my head all day long when I'm at college, whether I like it or not. Try concentrating through that.
I lose things all the time; don't know how, they're just gone and don't turn up and I have to replace them or live without them. I've had to replace the same Business booklet like 4 times (although once it did turn up again so now I have 2 =D). I also lost my student ID for about 6 months and found it a week ago, the day after I'd paid for a replacement.
Impulsiveness is a big issue for a lot of people with ADHD, especially the more hyperactive ones. I'm not the most hyperactive of ADHD'ers and also not the most impulsive which is kind of a blessing hearing other people's stories of their impulsiveness, but it's still kind of annoying. Impulsiveness is when you act before you think; most immediately suppress impulses long enough to think before they act. People with ADHD often don't have that same immediate reaction and just go ahead and do whatever comes into their head. You ever seen me
Rocket Jump into the enemy team to auto-attack someone in-game before? Ever seen me do it 5 times in one game? Well yeah, that's one way the impulsiveness affects me... Another is what I mentioned earlier, skipping class. I wake up one day feeling really tired? Ahh who cares it's just one day, I'll pretend to be sick. *goes back to sleep*
Another big issue is emotional impulsiveness, which can cause people with ADHD to get into a lot of fights, say upsetting things without thinking of the consequence, and generally emotionally over-react. I think this only really happens to me when I'm very distressed, like either when I'm very angry, or very sad, etc. I've never been the kind of person to jump to violence or verbal aggression over small things, although a lot of people with ADHD often appear to have anger management issues, especially when they're younger, hence the mother from the story earlier expecting her teacher to be calling because her son had got into trouble again.
Sometimes I'm distracted when homework is being set so I'm not even aware of it. Sometimes I forget that there was homework. I try to write it down on my phone as soon as it's set but I often forget to do that so when I get home I forget there was homework.
And now my mind is blank. There was probably more I wanted to talk about when I started but now I've been writing for nearly 4 hours and I'm bored and I just want to get this post over with. It's probably horribly written overall, but oh well.
In conclusion: It took about 6 months but I've finally been diagnosed with ADHD, this is great news as it opens up the possibility of medication to help deal with the condition I've been unknowingly struggling with my whole life, and this should hopefully cause a massive improvement in my quality of life and help me aim to actually do well in my studies rather than just scrape by.
If reading this post awakened a "holy **** this is me..." sensation, or if you're just interested in the subject of ADHD, I heavily recommend watching this video, as it's extremely informative on the subject. /r/adhd is also a subreddit I browse often which can help you learn about it, I mainly just browse it nowadays because I like being able to relate to the people that post there.
If you got this far, thanks for reading. :)
I don't remember when it was exactly, but a while ago, within the past 6 months maybe, I started to seriously consider the possibility that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). I first considered it about 2 years ago but I dismissed it when I realized it shares symptoms with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), which is something I also suffer (not yet diagnosed but fairly obvious), and it seemed to make more sense (how can I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity disorder when I'm not that hyperactive???).
Recently I looked into it again when I realized something just felt wrong with the way I just couldn't pay attention in class no matter how hard I tried, and how I just couldn't bring myself to do anything like do homework or revise; one of the times I recall I managed to force myself to do my French homework before going to bed, it was an exercise that was meant to take 5 minutes, and instead took me over an hour, filled with distractions and unwillingness to write down on the sheet of paper in front of me. I mean, the latter just sounds like it's down to pure laziness, which is what I myself had always assumed was the case; but what I ended up thinking was that if that was just me being lazy and that everyone else feels the same when they have to do a boring task, then how could anyone not be lazy? How on earth was it at all possible to overcome that massive mental barrier so consistently that you count as "not lazy"?
These were things that couldn't be explained by the APD as I could hear the teachers perfectly well when I was getting distracted (it mostly only affects me in social situations where there's many people talking at once rather than just the one teacher speaking to a silent class), and a hearing disorder should certainly not have been affecting my ability to study and work in silence. Looking further into it the possibility of ADHD I discovered that people with ADHD have a high risk of developing other disorders as well, and ADHD & APD very often co-exist. At that point I became fairly sure that I must have both disorders and set up an appointment to begin the process of getting a diagnosis through the NHS, but I was told that the process of diagnosing adult ADHD was suuuuuper slow in the UK, and from what was said it seemed that it was unlikely that any diagnosis I could get (and the subsequent support/treatment it would open me up to) would either occur before the college year ended, or in time to actually help me.
That was in October. By December I was really "struggling" at college; I wasn't doing homework, I wasn't studying, I was missing like 20% of my classes because I would wake up and randomly decide I didn't feel like going that day ("missing one day won't hurt", then 20 total missed days of college later...) and just go back to sleep. I fell super far behind in Business Studies, the class I was skipping the most, to the point where I just knew there was no way I could catch back up. It was really highlighted when we did a test in class, and the vast majority of the questions were things I never remembered having done at all in class, let alone knew the answer to. I ended up with a score of 7 out of 38 or something ridiculously awful like that.
At that point I just gave up. Vapora vs ADHD, ADHD wins. It seemed extremely obvious that there was no way I could pass Business this year, and I didn't know how I was going to pass French either; I'm naturally good at languages and especially French, but that can only help so much, I'm not about to learn a whole language by going to class 4 hours a week, or more like 3 hours a week on average considering how many classes I was skipping. I would get an A* easily in Spanish because I'm already fluent in it, but there was no point going through an entire year of college just to fail 2 out of 3 subjects and get a good grade in the language I already spoke, so I decided I would drop out after the Christmas holidays.
For Christmas I went to stay with my parents in Spain and I told them of my intentions. They'd only really half-***edly supported me with the whole ADHD thing until then, I received the impression that they either didn't believe it's a real condition (unfortunately a very common perception, "you're just lazy", "you just need to pay attention", "everyone feels that way sometimes"), or just didn't believe I had it. But they'd be damned if they were going to let their son become a college drop-out. Suddenly they were very willing to support me, and seeing that getting a diagnosis through the British health care system (free) would take too long they instead paid for me to be seen by a private clinic specializing in ADHD, and got me an appointment for a month later.
A month later was last Wednesday; as expected I was diagnosed with ADHD-PI (Predominantly Inattentive sub-type, meaning my hyperactivity symptoms are fairly mild compared to the more obvious examples of people with ADHD). I'm about to be prescribed medication that I'll hopefully be able to start on Tuesday, or Wednesday at the latest.
Something that's important to note is that with ADHD, medication is pretty much the only way to deal with it. There are behavioural therapies and other kinds of treatment that can help, but any such treatment has very little benefit unless paired with medication, and medication on its own is infinitely more helpful than all other treatment put together. A lot of parents of ADHD children are opposed to medication and try to force their children to try and learn to cope without it, but it seems like such an awful thing to be putting their children through. I recently read a story about the mother of an ADHD child that used to be that way. For years she tried everything and everything to help her son cope with ADHD that wasn't medication; she had the teachers give her son a lot of special attention in class to make sure he was keeping up, paying attention, doing the homework, etc. and at home she would spend hours with him helping him with school work, and all this was alongside behavioural therapy I believe. He was able to keep up with school and such thanks to all the help, but after years of this it didn't seem to have had any effective on helping his actual disorder, so she finally gave in and decided to try medication: the first day she got a call from the teacher, expecting it to be one of the regular calls of "your son has said/done something very mean to another child, we need you to come pick him up" that she got so often, but instead the teacher just said "It's incredible, all of a sudden your son is just like all the other children! What did you do?". In that kid's case, the improvement in medication vs no medication was just that obvious.
The effectiveness of medication varies depending on each person; in some people it completely removes all symptoms of ADHD for as long as the medication is active (8-10 hours usually I think), while in others rather than a 100% improvement it's a 60-90% improvement. Either way it's still always a huge improvement over not being medicated at all.
The same medication doesn't always work for everyone, but in 99% of cases, one kind of medication or the other will work, and is found through a process of trial and error. I may find that what I'm going to be prescribed won't work for me and I'll have to try something else in the future, but with any luck that won't be the case.
So how exactly does ADHD affect me? There's a lot more to it than just "always distracted", but that's the most obvious symptom, especially in my case, and here's the explanation for that, given by someone who understands it better than I do: "Basically, the dopamine and norepinephrine levels in my brain are low and the prevailing theory is that because the brain requires these hormones to regulate things like memory, emotion, and motivation I will search for whatever is most stimulating in order to increase the levels of those hormones. That's why one of the symptoms of ADHD is inattention and fidgeting and people with ADHD find it near impossible to combat this search for stimulus."
I fidget, all the time. Mainly with my legs, I'll bounce them up and down quickly until they get too tired then switch to some other less-tiring action. If possible, rather than fidget sitting down I'll just pace around the room. I do that while listening to music, and while eating anything that doesn't require me to sit down for, and just for thinking in general.
"I will search for whatever is most stimulating in order to increase the levels of those hormones". Whatever is most stimulating. My parents always used to think (and possibly still do) that I'm addicted to video games, and to computer games, and to computers/the Internet in general. I've given it a lot of thought myself over the years, given that I do spend a lot of time on them and nowhere near enough time on productive things like homework and studying, but the prospect never really made sense to me. I felt like a more fitting explanation would be that I was addicted to entertainment, because if you took away my computer or playstation or whatever, I sure as hell wouldn't suddenly think "well I guess I may as well do my homework and revise so I can get good grades", I'd just move onto the next most entertaining thing, which is TV or reading, whichever I feel like at the time.
Whatever is most stimulating really makes a whole lot of sense in this context; I never felt like video game addiction really explained what was going on in my head when I spent a lot of time playing video games, whereas the idea that my ADHD brain is constantly pushing me to do the most stimulating activity available makes perfect sense considering that I always thought of "my addiction" as just always wanting to be doing the most entertaining activity available, and that was almost always playing on one console or another, while nowadays it's a mix of League, browsing Internet forums such as Reddit or MOBAFire, and the occasional wiki-researching tangent when I get curious about some random subject like black holes and read the first page, then end up opening up every other link on the page when I get curious about those links too. And funnily enough that's actually how I became aware of ADHD, years before considering that I myself might have it.
Another way it affects me is that I have basically no long-term motivation. I'll only do things that give instant gratification. And likewise, punishment and consequences are only motivators if they're immediate consequences, not long-term. Not studying will make my life as an adult very hard? Okay whatever, there's still a long time to go until that happens (except I'm already an adult HELP). When I was younger I was a lot more hard working, and that's because I was scared of the consequences of not bringing in the homework, or my parents' reaction if I failed an exam. At some point I got used to those consequences/realized they weren't really that scary, and they stopped being motivators. I could study for an exam the day I had to take it, but I couldn't bring myself to study it the day before when it was "still so far away", a whole 24 hours before I had to really worry about it.
I often forget what sentence I wanted to say; while mid-sentence. I have to pause to remember what it is that I wanted to say then continue. I also commonly forget random words like "umbrella", which are not used every day but still not that rare and not really hard to remember. It makes me get "stuck" when I'm speaking and suddenly I can't continue because I can't remember what the word I'm looking for is, sometimes I might remember it after thinking on it, or sometimes I'll have to define the word to the other person and hope they understand and point the word out, or if it's written I can try googling the definition and hope the right word comes up.
I have music playing in my head 24/7, almost all day as far as I can tell. When I wake up, when I'm in the shower, when I'm in class, and when I'm trying to fall asleep. I can stop it if I directly focus on it but the moment I get distracted it starts playing again. It's not annoying really, I love music. Apparently having music playing in the mind's background is something that's common when people are bored, and it's the mind's way of keeping you entertained. I'm always bored if I'm not doing something stimulating, so I almost always have music playing at the back of my mind. It's not happening right now though, I've been effortlessly writing this for 3 hours now because I like the subject. If I were doing something boring, like trying to fall asleep, I would probably have this part of this song looping over and over in my head. And yes, I have that **** involuntarily playing in my head all day long when I'm at college, whether I like it or not. Try concentrating through that.
I lose things all the time; don't know how, they're just gone and don't turn up and I have to replace them or live without them. I've had to replace the same Business booklet like 4 times (although once it did turn up again so now I have 2 =D). I also lost my student ID for about 6 months and found it a week ago, the day after I'd paid for a replacement.
Impulsiveness is a big issue for a lot of people with ADHD, especially the more hyperactive ones. I'm not the most hyperactive of ADHD'ers and also not the most impulsive which is kind of a blessing hearing other people's stories of their impulsiveness, but it's still kind of annoying. Impulsiveness is when you act before you think; most immediately suppress impulses long enough to think before they act. People with ADHD often don't have that same immediate reaction and just go ahead and do whatever comes into their head. You ever seen me
Rocket Jump into the enemy team to auto-attack someone in-game before? Ever seen me do it 5 times in one game? Well yeah, that's one way the impulsiveness affects me... Another is what I mentioned earlier, skipping class. I wake up one day feeling really tired? Ahh who cares it's just one day, I'll pretend to be sick. *goes back to sleep*Another big issue is emotional impulsiveness, which can cause people with ADHD to get into a lot of fights, say upsetting things without thinking of the consequence, and generally emotionally over-react. I think this only really happens to me when I'm very distressed, like either when I'm very angry, or very sad, etc. I've never been the kind of person to jump to violence or verbal aggression over small things, although a lot of people with ADHD often appear to have anger management issues, especially when they're younger, hence the mother from the story earlier expecting her teacher to be calling because her son had got into trouble again.
Sometimes I'm distracted when homework is being set so I'm not even aware of it. Sometimes I forget that there was homework. I try to write it down on my phone as soon as it's set but I often forget to do that so when I get home I forget there was homework.
And now my mind is blank. There was probably more I wanted to talk about when I started but now I've been writing for nearly 4 hours and I'm bored and I just want to get this post over with. It's probably horribly written overall, but oh well.
In conclusion: It took about 6 months but I've finally been diagnosed with ADHD, this is great news as it opens up the possibility of medication to help deal with the condition I've been unknowingly struggling with my whole life, and this should hopefully cause a massive improvement in my quality of life and help me aim to actually do well in my studies rather than just scrape by.
If reading this post awakened a "holy **** this is me..." sensation, or if you're just interested in the subject of ADHD, I heavily recommend watching this video, as it's extremely informative on the subject. /r/adhd is also a subreddit I browse often which can help you learn about it, I mainly just browse it nowadays because I like being able to relate to the people that post there.
If you got this far, thanks for reading. :)
I was lucky enough to be diagnosed with and medicated for ADHD at the age of 14. It's wonderful that you realize that medication is the only way to combat this disorder. Hopefully you'll be able to avoid some of the pitfalls I fell into on my journey.
One of the saddest times of my life was a three month period after my previous Doctor left and I established care with a new primary doctor. My new doctor (who really is a very nice person) pushed for me to try to wean myself off of my meds. He and I worked on lowering my already low dosage, then eventually took a three month trial of me not taking my meds. The time I had "reverted" back to my old self - the self I consider to be a broken version of me (unmedicated)... the transition was so slow and so subtle, I didn't recognize how miserable (nearly depressed) I was until I was back on my meds.
You touched on the sad truth - many people don't recognize ADHD as "real". And in a certain sense, it's not... it's not a disease or a virus. It's not something you catch one day or you get better from. It's a disorder... there's a bell curve of "normalcy" and we just happen to be on the edges. The idea that ADHD isn't "real" isn't one that just average people subscribe to, but even some misguided medical professionals - I'm very happy for you that you were correctly diagnosed.
If you're not used to taking daily medications, try not to skip any days (dumb advice, I know). It'll make the change easier. Just part of your normal morning routine. If I'm running behind, I consider it more important than showering or brushing.
This last point is incredibly important: I used to work in pharmaceuticals. I don't know if the stigma is the same in Europe, but here in the states, the medications for ADHD (specifically the ones with Methylphenidate as the active ingredient such as Concerta and Ritalin... I don't know the main brands in EU) are controlled substances and are sometimes illegally sold. Take very good care of your meds - do your best not to lose them, or you may start to lose the trust of your doctor or pharmacist.
Take care, and let us know how things progress :)
Ronyk
What is the origin of the universe and life ?
Are we alone in this universe ?
How does work the brain ?
The medication (methylphenidate hydrochloride) works very well for anyone wondering, but you need a diagnosis. It mostly seems to make everything equally stimulating (it increases dopamine in the synapses, not really sure why that works and noone seems to be able to explain it) and allows you to feel reasonably good about doing tasks I would usually consider pointless (maths homework).
You can overcome it (my parents are really strict on grades but are also doctors).
Recently it seems to get stronger and weaker like a sin(x) curve but its been one of my defining behavioural factors my whole life, and only now started treatment.
TL;DR he wrote a good guide and the meds work well.
That said, I had experienced most of the symptoms you (and anyone else with ADHD) claim to have. I also have parents that are convinced that it is "just laziness". This is one of the reasons why I tried to face the problem alone. And even though I've made some progress it's good to be remembered that getting help from someone else is often the best choice. Thanks for that.
About APD... I've never heard of it, but the symptoms are the ones that I felt more identified with. My parents used to think I had some degree of deafness when I ignored most of the stuff they said whenever I was hearing something else and I have to guess what people are saying to me way too often. Sooo, thanks for introducing me into that disorder.
I really hope the meds work on you. And if they don't, remember you can always make some rituals to cope with the consequences.
What's your source on that, and how up to date is it? Because last I heard, ADHD is one of the most well understood mental disorders, and I've heard that multiple times from multiple sources, including the professional that diagnosed me.
So apparently the disorder is more solid than I thought. The treatment remains controversial, even those treatments that have apparently reverted the symptoms (because of unknown side-effects or lack of proper studies).
Particular professionals aren't trusty sources because they are economically involved, not to mention their openness to critics as "experts" in the topic would always be doubtful. Science keeps changing and this kind of stuff is always controversial because psychology is just that complicated. Even as the most well understood mental disorder, it's only a convenient grouping of symptoms without a proper biological explanation that may forcefully group a bunch of different disorders. Some treatments have proven to work on some people, that's for sure (I've skimmed through a couple of NCBI papers), and Leon Eisenberg is known as the first person to make proper studies in the field of psychology.
This was a tangential remark, mostly so that you keep some skepticism on ADHD professionals. Some treatments have doubtful efficiency but can be prescribed because of the fuzzyness of the definition of ADHD. Don't be afraid to change the meds if they don't have a noticeable effect after some time (or if the side effects are too bad).
From what I understand, ADHD isn't so much a specific biological problem with specific symptoms, it's simply the name given to symptoms that can be caused by different biological problems. I don't fully know the specifics but from what I understand the issues can be anywhere from not generating enough dopamine, to your brain discarding lots of the generated dopamine, to areas of the brain simply not developing properly.
I know there are definitely some people even in the science world that doubt the existence of ADHD just because there is no single defining cause. But to my knowledge, saying ADHD doesn't exist is like saying headaches don't exist. Just because there can be different causes and variations in the specifics of the symptoms, doesn't mean there isn't a problem. The problem isn't the same every time, and it can be hard to understand exactly what's the cause every single time, but even so you never question someone when they claim to have a headache, you just take their word for it.
ADHD is a lot less specific and clear than "my head hurts" which is why there's so much controversy surrounding it and its existence ("stop making up excuses for yourself" etc.), but the main symptoms that tend to be grouped into the term ADHD are all disruptive to a person's life, and there are known neurological causes for it, enough to prove that it's real and not just a fabrication/misunderstanding. It's just that if you think it's one specific condition with one single cause, you're not really understanding what ADHD actually is, and could then understandably think that it's made up if you hear all the different possible biological causes and assume they just can't make their minds up on the cause.
In a way you could say ADHD isn't real in that it's not a disorder, as you said, it's a convenient grouping of symptoms that may group a bunch of different 'disorders', but as these specific disorders aren't too well understood, but are known to have different biological causes and very similar symptoms that are all similarly treated (some experimentation may be needed to find the right medication for each individual patient, but over half the time there's a very noticeable improvement from the get go), for now it's just all grouped up as "ADHD".
The most widely respected mind in the ADHD field, Dr. Russel Barkley, considers the term "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" to be an unfitting name for the condition and a name that was given when ADHD was a lot less understood than it is now (and that's saying something), but despite the misnaming, the condition itself is still decently understood. To the extent that we know it's real, but the specifics are hard to figure out given that there's different causes and variances in symptoms depending on what the problem is and how severe it is.
Maybe in the future when it's better understood there'll be no more ADHD and rather specific disorders that are similar to each other but better understood as to how to treat them than this general "ADHD" concept, but even so, ADHD right now is well understood enough that medication is the best treatment by far in ~80% of cases IIRC, and there are very few people diagnosed with ADHD that don't actually benefit from it.
Personally I can never tell the difference between being on medication and being off it, but apparently the difference after starting it was very noticeable to my parents and teachers, and my grades and performance in class undeniably improved despite not feeling any different. So even as someone who was disappointed and sceptic about medication after trying it, since I had higher expectations from what I'd heard from other ADHD'ers that found medication that worked for them, I do have to admit that it does seem to have made an improvement for me, even if subtly so. I even notice occasionally that I seem to perform better in League on medication than I do off it, even though I don't feel like I'm doing anything different in-game. I just look at my match history on the days where I skipped it and my match history on the days where I took it and I'm like "wait a minute...".
Anyway I can't say you're wrong or that I'm right, but all this is what I've come to understand about ADHD. I'm just taking other people's words for it though, most of which comes from Dr. Barkley. It seems to make sense and I haven't seen any good reason to doubt him. I've heard plenty about ADHD sceptics in the science world but with my limited understanding of human biology I can't really see any reason to trust their word over someone like Barkley's.
As you quoted from Russel Barkley, the definition of ADHD has changed and its name isn't an exact description of the symptoms anymore. This is actually a good sign, and even in spite of some mild criticism he might have for advocating the use of meds his science seems solid, which is a refreshing sight considering he's an old, famous person in the field of psychology.
Excuse my extreme skepticism in the field, it's just that a very influencial bunch of mainstream psychology completely ignores the scientific method (hi Freud), and I was under the wrong impression that a major part of ADHD studies were like that too.
It's good to know that the meds are having a good effect in your life. I'm seriously thinking of looking for some counseling on the matter. Hopefully there are good professionals in the field here too.
Great to hear you'll get your medication =)
I "suffer" from ADD
Brother!
But it's soooo boring. ;-; Writing new guides is way more fun than updating old ones.
You'd think it'd work like that, but it doesn't. The thought of grinding my way through hundreds of Diamond and Master to get to Challenger as Talon sounds so boring. I have no motivation to reach Challenger other than for bragging rights, so it's not something I'm currently wanting to put so much time into. I'd rather just play dynamic queue with friends for fun on ADC.
One thing that helped me with the "laziness" aspect was to do things with friends. During exams I always found it difficult to get myself studying, but once I got my friends together to study, I found it a lot easier to get past that initial "hurdle" of starting to study.
My mom's actually been staying with me for the past 3 weeks and another week remaining to "force" me to do homework and catch up, which is similar enough. I've been working for hours every day and I'm pretty much fully caught up in Business already, which is something I would have thought impossible in December, and would have been had I been on my own.
You should definitely get it checked, only good can come from a diagnosis if you're willing to use medication. If you're not then okay, I see why you might be subconsciously inclined to just use a diagnosis as an excuse for not working hard, but there's really no reason why you should not use medication to fight ADHD if you do have it, it can be a hugely positive change in your life.
I used to be like that too, I'm a competitive person and I loved competing with my friends academically, but at some point it just stopped being enough of a motivator.
Both things are meant to be motivators for anyone, but people with ADHD find it hard to focus on both long-term benefits and long-term consequences, and instead only find it easy to work when the consequence or benefit is immediate.
[DOPAMINE LEVEL INTENSIFIES]
Interesting post. Glad to hear things are going well and I hope you get the medication right the first time!
Eventually though, I started slacking again and that continued till high school. I still managed to get my desired grades with a lot less effort, and it was a very painfully boring and aggravating procedure. But come highschool, I set up some goals for myself and now studying isn't all that bad :3
Maybe it could help you, or anyone really, to focus more on the reward if you pass rather than the consequences of failure?
Wish you all the best and good luck in laifu mr vaporai!
One thing that helped me with the "laziness" aspect was to do things with friends. During exams I always found it difficult to get myself studying, but once I got my friends together to study, I found it a lot easier to get past that initial "hurdle" of starting to study.
Good luck dealing with the challenges disorders bring you. I strongly believe that if you overcome these challenges in life then you will become a more mature person compared to your peers.
Well, I hope you'll get fine, bully
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As you have to cope with ADHD anyway, might as well take advantage of it and use those distraction powers to become challenger Talon <3
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