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> Weirdly, he was there due to some sponsorship related to disabilities because he had ADHD. Can I ask why you find that weird? ADHD is, and is also comorbid w

> Weirdly, he was there due to some sponsorship related to disabilities because he had ADHD. Can I ask why you find that weird? ADHD is, and is also comorbid with other learning disabilities. ADHD has so many dimensions and interrelationships between those dimensions that everybody's lived experience is different. If you know one person with ADHD, then you know one person with ADHD, you don't know everyone with ADHD. Heck my best friend growing up had severe ADHD, what used to be called "ring-of-fire". Both his parents are clinical experts in ADHD, and have been since he was young. Yet despite knowing me incredibly well over a couple of decades none of them suspected that I had it. To be fair, three psychiatrists and dozens of psychologists missed it too, until one had a hunch that finally led to me getting diagnosed in my late 30s.

bitexploder 4y ago
I feel the ADHD is a strength not weakness mentality is generally harmful. There are some aspects of it that can help, especially when you are not deep working on one thing, but in general, I think it is unequivocally not a benefit to almost anyone who has it. edit: I would add there is some survivorship bias to it too. Successful CEO says ADHD helped? Huh. Cool. There is a reason alcoholism and substance abuse have significant overlap with ADHD communities. For example, I built and sold an infosec consulting firm and I have ADHD. I could tell you stories about how in some limited circumstances operating a business it helped. But that ignores all the times I struggled and had to dig deep into my well of ADHD management skills to stay focused and efficient on chores I don’t like doing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- triggercut 4y ago
  I generally agree with that. It should not be glamourized. I liken it to being like Cyclops in the X-Men. Sure you can shoot lasers out of your eyes, but you can never look upon the love of your life naturally and unfiltered. That being said, some of most cherished achievements would not have been possible without it, and that's where the cognitive dissonance begins.
  - bitexploder 4y ago
    I feel like I just don’t know. How can I? I can hyperfocus, get into flow, and crank through things that make hours and days and weeks fly by. I can also be deeep in the pit of distraction where it is impossible to start anything and I feel broken and the deeper I get the more I try to avoid doing even the smallest thing that might mean forward progress because everything is already so bad so just go and play some games or something anyway. Granted that was my early 20s and I learned to achieve balance and even now in my early 40s I can focus on demand but it took me a loooong time to get there and I think my approach to how I do that and the way I structure my life is different from a NT persons. And for most people that was their normal their whole life.
    - tstrimple 4y ago
      I very much relate to this. Sometimes challenging and complicated problems come apart easily. Sometimes you waste a week procrastinating something simple. Unfortunately my procrastination has been rewarded so many times. Of you've got a change in scope for the thing I haven't even started yet? No problem! Oh, our priorities have changed and we no longer need that thing? Fantastic! Most recently, I was supposed to be planning a vacation with another family. I procrastinated it long enough that circumstances changed and the other family had to cancel for unrelated reasons. That can be even more frustrating because I know it's just reinforcing those bad behaviors.
      - bitexploder 4y ago
        I am a fan of Jocko. He talks about that very thing with procrastination. You procrastinate so long the thing loses all importance. I notice I had a habit of conveniently only remembering the times it helped and not the significant amount more it hurt.
- grhappl 4y ago
  I agree, and I think it's more harmful coming from successful founders, as so many people naïvely look up to them to provide guidance. It's even worse than their usual "if I can do it - and I certainly have, just look at how awesome I am - then you can do it" spiel about business success.
  - bitexploder 4y ago
    100% ADHD also has a severity spectrum. And clusters of related things Most ADHD is similar at a high level, but some people have some aspects better or worse. And some people can barely function with it. Someone with some mild ADHD symptoms and patterns saying ADHD is not a big deal can be really harmful to people with more severe ADHD for obvious reasons.
- artdigital 4y ago
  I want to emphasize this opinion. There is definitely survivorship bias, and I dislike people calling it a 'superpower'. Yes it can make you more reckless and impulsive to take risks like founding a company, but it's important to keep in mind that ADHD is a serious cognitive disability, and we should treat it as that. There is so much it messes with on a daily basis and it absolutely sucks. So much coping, self-doubt, lack of motivation and drive, procrastination - it's not nice. Yes we get better in managing it over time as we learn about it, but it still comes back and bites us, and it's depressing to see coworkers being so much more organized and 'on top of things' compared to me, no matter how hard I try
  - tonyarkles 4y ago
    > Yes it can make you more reckless and impulsive to take risks like founding a company, but it's important to keep in mind that ADHD is a serious cognitive disability, and we should treat it as that. There is so much it messes with on a daily basis and it absolutely sucks. I think the r/ADHD approach on Reddit nails it: even if it did have benefits for you, please don't refer to it as a superpower because there's a lot of people who will feel even worse about their own experience of the disability when you do that. And, yeah, for me it's been very much a double-edged sword. I started a consulting company while in grad school; it was awesome for my (undiagnosed at the time) ADHD brain: new projects every couple of months! Learn something new every time! Hell, I went to grad school very likely because of ADHD; I couldn't handle the stale "every day is more of the same" feeling I had in the regular working world. I went to study a hard problem, but about 16 months after I started really digging into it, commercial solutions started appearing that essentially did the same thing I was researching... I lost interest quickly, especially when all of the research was done and writing and editing my thesis was all that was left. I've worked on so many wildly varied projects over the years. I've got an EE/CS dual degree, and I've been down at the schematic and PCB design level and up at the web & mobile app level. I'm just as comfortable writing Verilog as I am writing React code. Deep GNSS work and software-defined radio, 2D high resolution imaging, 3D depth field imaging, audio processing, ultra-low-power sensors, level-sensing in 80,000L fuel tanks using a clever pressure-sensing approach, drone flight planning and control algorithms, yadda yadda yadda. And all of those different things all are related to each other in some tangential ways that I pick up on right away while others just scratch their heads. On the other hand, I lose things all the time, forget to pay bills for months, lose touch with people I care about, struggled for years and years to maintain a romantic relationship, forget my bag in the car and forget to lock it (that was an expensive mistake). I've spent a ton of money starting new hobbies only to lose interest. I have a multi-year backlog of projects I've started but not finished. My house is a disaster. I'm almost 40 and have almost nothing saved up for retirement. I got lucky and made it through undergrad and a masters program. Hell, I got lucky and made it through high school... if my teachers had followed their own rules to the letter I probably wouldn't have, but they saw "my spark" and made enough concessions that I ended up, just barely, on the honour roll instead of failing out. I had no insight into any of this being related to a disability until last year.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  I agree, and think it also serves to negate any necessary accomodation you might otherwise get during the struggle to just do a standard job consistently. "Oh, you struggle to show up 100% on time every day to the standup? I saw an article on the top of HN about a CEO that used it to his advantage, so what's your problem?"
- cpsns 4y ago
  > I think it is unequivocally not a benefit to almost anyone who has it. I wouldn’t even be capable of overstating the damage done to my life by it. Inattentive form is a curse in my personal experience, but of course I am one person and not all have such bad experiences. The mentality can be harmful, for some of us there are no strengths and no benefits provided to us, just years of suffering and bad outcomes. Makes me feel worse about myself personally, but I’m glad for those who haven’t had the same issues.
- rtpg 4y ago
  There's a lot of chicken and egg notions to it. Formative years controlled by this can generate certain personalities, so it's hard to disassociate who you are from the difficulties. I think of it like driving a car with busted brakes. You might be able to learn how to cope with that, and maybe you end up being really good at drifting thanks to this! Suddenly you treat the underlying issue, fix your brakes, and it feels like you've lost some superpower. But really you still have these skills somewhere! And you objectively have more control, it's just that the there's going to be a learning curve to find this again as the feedback loop is different now. I like being able to go all out in hyperfocus mode, but I also like being able to have some impulse control for when it's nice to have. After adjusting I think I can do both under treatment.
- resonious 4y ago
  I guess if that stance is harmful then I'd think about why people are having that stance in the first place. If somebody gets told "you have ADHD, a debilitating mental disorder", and then does well in life anyway, what exactly are they supposed to think happened? Why were we telling them they're messed up in the head when clearly they're quite functional? "Wow, maybe ADHD is good" seems like a pretty logical jump to me. Mental health is an important topic, but it's still really wishy-washy. Sometimes I wonder how useful all these vague labels really are. I also got diagnosed with ADHD when I was an adolescent, and I almost feel like that diagnosis just made me do even worse at school. I'd be like "well I have ADHD so it's physically impossible for me to sit down and do algebra. might as well not even try."
  - ip26 4y ago
    It’s also a little hard to call it a debilitating disorder if 10% of people have it. Pale skin puts you at risk of sunburn, but it’s not considered a skin disorder. Why? I’ll leave it to the reader.
    - steve_adams_86 4y ago
      Sun burns are a lot nicer than ADHD. I can manage my day with a sunburn. I can prevent sun burns. I can’t apply lotion to stop ADHD.
    - mod 4y ago
      As a pale person, I can fill everyone in: it's because I can wear clothing, and since it's a social norm, it's not debilitating in the slightest bit whatsoever.
- ip26 4y ago
  I’m starting to think of it as just one of the many underlying pieces that make people different, and drive people different ways. Like how people with glasses actually are on average smarter. Or like how kids of older parents are more studious. I’ve variously read ADHD’s overrepresented in the sciences and immigrants, and shown to be adaptive in hunter gatherer groups but maladaptive in neighboring farming groups. Everybody struggles. Typical people have different struggles. I’m not saying ADHD is equivalent, or easy, but it will invisibly bias people in a different direction with a different set of things that are easy. After all, as far as I understand, we believe the root is simply lower levels of dopamine which tunes you for discontent, alertness, loss aversion, disagreeableness, and so on. It makes it hard to be happy, but genes don’t care. I rankle at the thought that genes could be quietly setting people up to be suited for different roles, but again genes don’t care.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Agreed with you and responders here. I want to add, there's also change in life circumstances aspect to it. Like, it's nice if you can use hyperfocus to do great things, that on the net outweigh the inability to handle "normal life" things like paying bills on time. Then you marry and start a family and at some point wake up realizing this new life is perfectly structured to prevent you from using the positive aspects of your brain, while exacerbating the negatives. I've been thinking recently, how come all those blog posts and stories about success despite (or thanks to) ADHD come from people who are single?
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    This is exactly it. The person who resents me most for my disability is my wife. I don’t blame her, and I do my best to reign in my disability, but it’s not possible for me to function the way she wishes I could. I put everything I’ve got into a) making sure I don’t get fired because I earn about 4x more than her, b) pour all the energy I can into my kids because I see how fast they’re growing up, and by that point, I’ve already disappointed her too much to repair things. I’ve tried countless strategies to get around this, but the unfortunate truth is that I’m a nice person yet an awful partner. I have serious limitations that I wish I was aware of before I “trapped” her in this. Rule one of ADHD: you probably lack a lot of self awareness and it can be genuinely awful for people you live with.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      I feel for you, and I wish things to turn around for the better for you and your wife. Myself, I'm worried I'm 75% there. I.e. I'm also doing your a) and b), but we both still think the overall relationship is salvageable. > I do my best to reign in my disability, but it’s not possible for me to function the way she wishes I could. Same here, and my wife is also willing to adapt to my needs, but here's a thing: I can't always tell whether some adjustment is an actual need, or just some random guess I came up out of frustration. I also have a life-long habit of molding myself into the person the people need me to be, and couple with being diagnosed well into my 30s... things are improving, but it's kind of a random walk. > Rule one of ADHD: you probably lack a lot of self awareness and it can be genuinely awful for people you live with. I'm not the best person to judge this, but I think I actually do have quite a lot of self-awareness, so I hesitantly propose Rule 1A: if you do have a lot of self awareness, it's even worse, because you can see how awful it is for people you live with, and can't do a thing about it.
- conradev 4y ago
  Another reason I find that mentality harmful is because it treats ADHD as a separable “thing”, as if I could imagine what kind of person I’d be without it. It’s fundamental to my cognition! It just is. I find it a waste of time to try to assign “good” or “bad” labels to different parts of my lived experience. That is why I dislike it being called a “superpower”. Not because it is “bad”, but because it is just is who I am.
- ekanes 4y ago
  You might be right, but some of it is also mentally making the best of your situation. If you tell yourself the story that it has pluses and minuses, you might be happier and even more successful than if you tell yourself you lost a genetic lottery. You might feel lower-potential and that might work against you.
listenallyall 4y ago
If 2 clinical experts, 3 psychiatrists and dozens of psychologists didn't think you had ADHD, but eventually one person did, how do you know with certainty you actually have it?
- triggercut 4y ago
  Before explaining it's important to note that even if it wasn't intended to be, comments such as this can be incredibly harmful, especially with people who are preparing too to get diagnosed, or who have recently been diagnosed. Doubting your diagnosis (or any mental health diagnosis) is an incredibly common and damaging thing for treatment. Please be mindful in avoiding activating that negative belief. It's not that they didn't think I had it. It never occurred to them that it might be the problem, for several reasons. I presented very clearly suffering from MDD and general anxiety and have been medicated for that my entire adult life. But in fact the MDD and anxiety were just symptoms of living undiagnosed and trying to live as best I could with what worked for me.
  - listenallyall 4y ago
    I'm objectively responding to an anonymous comment in an internet forum, with no knowledge whatsoever about your background, sex, gender, race, age, location, or anything about your mental condition. It would be impossible for me to diagnose you or to question such a diagnosis. > comments such as this can be incredibly harmful For anyone reading this exchange, ignoring, or going against, the opinion of 30+ mental health professionals can also potentially be harmful.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      > For anyone reading his exchange, ignoring, or going against, the opinion of 30+ mental health professionals can also be harmful. In defense of GP, I want to caveat with this: if you go to a random psychiatrist and tell them about your issues, it's quite likely you'll get evaluated for the "usual suspects", such as depression. A proper evaluation (not just initial diagnosis, but matching treatment and noticing effects) can easily take over a year, since medication used in depression treatment usually take a month to kick in, and you might need to go through several before finding one that works for you, if at all - while also dealing with some nasty side effects. Now, imagine a person with ADHD staring this path. How likely is it they'll go through the process diligently for a year or more, until the doctor figures out something else is going on? What's more likely to happen is, the person will keep taking the meds for a while, then forget to schedule a visit before running out, run out, enter withdrawal, then be unable to schedule a visit, leave withdrawal few weeks later, and feel too ashamed to talk to that doctor again. So in a few months or more, they may go to another psychiatrist... ... who will want to re-examine them for depression just to be sure, starting the cycle anew. I wasted a decade of my life on exactly this. Hence my standing recommendation: if you suspect ADHD, find a psychiatrist who's actually specializing in adult ADHD (and not just has it on a list of things they can help you with). ADHD can often be diagnosed or ruled out in days to weeks; going to an ADHD specialist isn't about trying to "get your favored diagnosis" (if you feel worried about this, just be up-front with them) - it's about minimizing the chance they'll dismiss this as an option, as (from copious anecdotal evidence) most other psychiatrists do.
ttcbj 4y ago
Fair question. I think I used that word because at the beginning of the talk, the person who had organized the talk gave a five minute ibtro about how admirable it was that he was willing to acknowledge the difficulty of his ADHD, etc. Then he stood up, was clearly having none of it, said he thought it was an advantage, and then gave a long talk with no reference to it. I guess it was weird because he didn’t seem into that angle at all. But he was a great speaker, really inspiring. Edit: I wasn’t necessarily trying to advocate that his perspective was correct for anyone else, but just reporting that this is what happened as a matter of fact.

bitexploder 4y ago

I feel the ADHD is a strength not weakness mentality is generally harmful. There are some aspects of it that can help, especially when you are not deep working on one thing, but in general, I think it is unequivocally not a benefit to almost anyone who has it. edit: I would add there is some survivorship bias to it too. Successful CEO says ADHD helped? Huh. Cool. There is a reason alcoholism and substance abuse have significant overlap with ADHD communities. For example, I built and sold an infosec consulting firm and I have ADHD. I could tell you stories about how in some limited circumstances operating a business it helped. But that ignores all the times I struggled and had to dig deep into my well of ADHD management skills to stay focused and efficient on chores I don’t like doing.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
triggercut 4y ago
I generally agree with that. It should not be glamourized. I liken it to being like Cyclops in the X-Men. Sure you can shoot lasers out of your eyes, but you can never look upon the love of your life naturally and unfiltered. That being said, some of most cherished achievements would not have been possible without it, and that's where the cognitive dissonance begins.
- bitexploder 4y ago
  I feel like I just don’t know. How can I? I can hyperfocus, get into flow, and crank through things that make hours and days and weeks fly by. I can also be deeep in the pit of distraction where it is impossible to start anything and I feel broken and the deeper I get the more I try to avoid doing even the smallest thing that might mean forward progress because everything is already so bad so just go and play some games or something anyway. Granted that was my early 20s and I learned to achieve balance and even now in my early 40s I can focus on demand but it took me a loooong time to get there and I think my approach to how I do that and the way I structure my life is different from a NT persons. And for most people that was their normal their whole life.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    I very much relate to this. Sometimes challenging and complicated problems come apart easily. Sometimes you waste a week procrastinating something simple. Unfortunately my procrastination has been rewarded so many times. Of you've got a change in scope for the thing I haven't even started yet? No problem! Oh, our priorities have changed and we no longer need that thing? Fantastic! Most recently, I was supposed to be planning a vacation with another family. I procrastinated it long enough that circumstances changed and the other family had to cancel for unrelated reasons. That can be even more frustrating because I know it's just reinforcing those bad behaviors.
    - bitexploder 4y ago
      I am a fan of Jocko. He talks about that very thing with procrastination. You procrastinate so long the thing loses all importance. I notice I had a habit of conveniently only remembering the times it helped and not the significant amount more it hurt.
grhappl 4y ago
I agree, and I think it's more harmful coming from successful founders, as so many people naïvely look up to them to provide guidance. It's even worse than their usual "if I can do it - and I certainly have, just look at how awesome I am - then you can do it" spiel about business success.
- bitexploder 4y ago
  100% ADHD also has a severity spectrum. And clusters of related things Most ADHD is similar at a high level, but some people have some aspects better or worse. And some people can barely function with it. Someone with some mild ADHD symptoms and patterns saying ADHD is not a big deal can be really harmful to people with more severe ADHD for obvious reasons.
artdigital 4y ago
I want to emphasize this opinion. There is definitely survivorship bias, and I dislike people calling it a 'superpower'. Yes it can make you more reckless and impulsive to take risks like founding a company, but it's important to keep in mind that ADHD is a serious cognitive disability, and we should treat it as that. There is so much it messes with on a daily basis and it absolutely sucks. So much coping, self-doubt, lack of motivation and drive, procrastination - it's not nice. Yes we get better in managing it over time as we learn about it, but it still comes back and bites us, and it's depressing to see coworkers being so much more organized and 'on top of things' compared to me, no matter how hard I try
- tonyarkles 4y ago
  > Yes it can make you more reckless and impulsive to take risks like founding a company, but it's important to keep in mind that ADHD is a serious cognitive disability, and we should treat it as that. There is so much it messes with on a daily basis and it absolutely sucks. I think the r/ADHD approach on Reddit nails it: even if it did have benefits for you, please don't refer to it as a superpower because there's a lot of people who will feel even worse about their own experience of the disability when you do that. And, yeah, for me it's been very much a double-edged sword. I started a consulting company while in grad school; it was awesome for my (undiagnosed at the time) ADHD brain: new projects every couple of months! Learn something new every time! Hell, I went to grad school very likely because of ADHD; I couldn't handle the stale "every day is more of the same" feeling I had in the regular working world. I went to study a hard problem, but about 16 months after I started really digging into it, commercial solutions started appearing that essentially did the same thing I was researching... I lost interest quickly, especially when all of the research was done and writing and editing my thesis was all that was left. I've worked on so many wildly varied projects over the years. I've got an EE/CS dual degree, and I've been down at the schematic and PCB design level and up at the web & mobile app level. I'm just as comfortable writing Verilog as I am writing React code. Deep GNSS work and software-defined radio, 2D high resolution imaging, 3D depth field imaging, audio processing, ultra-low-power sensors, level-sensing in 80,000L fuel tanks using a clever pressure-sensing approach, drone flight planning and control algorithms, yadda yadda yadda. And all of those different things all are related to each other in some tangential ways that I pick up on right away while others just scratch their heads. On the other hand, I lose things all the time, forget to pay bills for months, lose touch with people I care about, struggled for years and years to maintain a romantic relationship, forget my bag in the car and forget to lock it (that was an expensive mistake). I've spent a ton of money starting new hobbies only to lose interest. I have a multi-year backlog of projects I've started but not finished. My house is a disaster. I'm almost 40 and have almost nothing saved up for retirement. I got lucky and made it through undergrad and a masters program. Hell, I got lucky and made it through high school... if my teachers had followed their own rules to the letter I probably wouldn't have, but they saw "my spark" and made enough concessions that I ended up, just barely, on the honour roll instead of failing out. I had no insight into any of this being related to a disability until last year.
brailsafe 4y ago
I agree, and think it also serves to negate any necessary accomodation you might otherwise get during the struggle to just do a standard job consistently. "Oh, you struggle to show up 100% on time every day to the standup? I saw an article on the top of HN about a CEO that used it to his advantage, so what's your problem?"
cpsns 4y ago
> I think it is unequivocally not a benefit to almost anyone who has it. I wouldn’t even be capable of overstating the damage done to my life by it. Inattentive form is a curse in my personal experience, but of course I am one person and not all have such bad experiences. The mentality can be harmful, for some of us there are no strengths and no benefits provided to us, just years of suffering and bad outcomes. Makes me feel worse about myself personally, but I’m glad for those who haven’t had the same issues.
rtpg 4y ago
There's a lot of chicken and egg notions to it. Formative years controlled by this can generate certain personalities, so it's hard to disassociate who you are from the difficulties. I think of it like driving a car with busted brakes. You might be able to learn how to cope with that, and maybe you end up being really good at drifting thanks to this! Suddenly you treat the underlying issue, fix your brakes, and it feels like you've lost some superpower. But really you still have these skills somewhere! And you objectively have more control, it's just that the there's going to be a learning curve to find this again as the feedback loop is different now. I like being able to go all out in hyperfocus mode, but I also like being able to have some impulse control for when it's nice to have. After adjusting I think I can do both under treatment.
resonious 4y ago
I guess if that stance is harmful then I'd think about why people are having that stance in the first place. If somebody gets told "you have ADHD, a debilitating mental disorder", and then does well in life anyway, what exactly are they supposed to think happened? Why were we telling them they're messed up in the head when clearly they're quite functional? "Wow, maybe ADHD is good" seems like a pretty logical jump to me. Mental health is an important topic, but it's still really wishy-washy. Sometimes I wonder how useful all these vague labels really are. I also got diagnosed with ADHD when I was an adolescent, and I almost feel like that diagnosis just made me do even worse at school. I'd be like "well I have ADHD so it's physically impossible for me to sit down and do algebra. might as well not even try."
- ip26 4y ago
  It’s also a little hard to call it a debilitating disorder if 10% of people have it. Pale skin puts you at risk of sunburn, but it’s not considered a skin disorder. Why? I’ll leave it to the reader.
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    Sun burns are a lot nicer than ADHD. I can manage my day with a sunburn. I can prevent sun burns. I can’t apply lotion to stop ADHD.
  - mod 4y ago
    As a pale person, I can fill everyone in: it's because I can wear clothing, and since it's a social norm, it's not debilitating in the slightest bit whatsoever.
ip26 4y ago
I’m starting to think of it as just one of the many underlying pieces that make people different, and drive people different ways. Like how people with glasses actually are on average smarter. Or like how kids of older parents are more studious. I’ve variously read ADHD’s overrepresented in the sciences and immigrants, and shown to be adaptive in hunter gatherer groups but maladaptive in neighboring farming groups. Everybody struggles. Typical people have different struggles. I’m not saying ADHD is equivalent, or easy, but it will invisibly bias people in a different direction with a different set of things that are easy. After all, as far as I understand, we believe the root is simply lower levels of dopamine which tunes you for discontent, alertness, loss aversion, disagreeableness, and so on. It makes it hard to be happy, but genes don’t care. I rankle at the thought that genes could be quietly setting people up to be suited for different roles, but again genes don’t care.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
Agreed with you and responders here. I want to add, there's also change in life circumstances aspect to it. Like, it's nice if you can use hyperfocus to do great things, that on the net outweigh the inability to handle "normal life" things like paying bills on time. Then you marry and start a family and at some point wake up realizing this new life is perfectly structured to prevent you from using the positive aspects of your brain, while exacerbating the negatives. I've been thinking recently, how come all those blog posts and stories about success despite (or thanks to) ADHD come from people who are single?
- steve_adams_86 4y ago
  This is exactly it. The person who resents me most for my disability is my wife. I don’t blame her, and I do my best to reign in my disability, but it’s not possible for me to function the way she wishes I could. I put everything I’ve got into a) making sure I don’t get fired because I earn about 4x more than her, b) pour all the energy I can into my kids because I see how fast they’re growing up, and by that point, I’ve already disappointed her too much to repair things. I’ve tried countless strategies to get around this, but the unfortunate truth is that I’m a nice person yet an awful partner. I have serious limitations that I wish I was aware of before I “trapped” her in this. Rule one of ADHD: you probably lack a lot of self awareness and it can be genuinely awful for people you live with.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    I feel for you, and I wish things to turn around for the better for you and your wife. Myself, I'm worried I'm 75% there. I.e. I'm also doing your a) and b), but we both still think the overall relationship is salvageable. > I do my best to reign in my disability, but it’s not possible for me to function the way she wishes I could. Same here, and my wife is also willing to adapt to my needs, but here's a thing: I can't always tell whether some adjustment is an actual need, or just some random guess I came up out of frustration. I also have a life-long habit of molding myself into the person the people need me to be, and couple with being diagnosed well into my 30s... things are improving, but it's kind of a random walk. > Rule one of ADHD: you probably lack a lot of self awareness and it can be genuinely awful for people you live with. I'm not the best person to judge this, but I think I actually do have quite a lot of self-awareness, so I hesitantly propose Rule 1A: if you do have a lot of self awareness, it's even worse, because you can see how awful it is for people you live with, and can't do a thing about it.
conradev 4y ago
Another reason I find that mentality harmful is because it treats ADHD as a separable “thing”, as if I could imagine what kind of person I’d be without it. It’s fundamental to my cognition! It just is. I find it a waste of time to try to assign “good” or “bad” labels to different parts of my lived experience. That is why I dislike it being called a “superpower”. Not because it is “bad”, but because it is just is who I am.
ekanes 4y ago
You might be right, but some of it is also mentally making the best of your situation. If you tell yourself the story that it has pluses and minuses, you might be happier and even more successful than if you tell yourself you lost a genetic lottery. You might feel lower-potential and that might work against you.

listenallyall 4y ago

If 2 clinical experts, 3 psychiatrists and dozens of psychologists didn't think you had ADHD, but eventually one person did, how do you know with certainty you actually have it?

triggercut 4y ago
Before explaining it's important to note that even if it wasn't intended to be, comments such as this can be incredibly harmful, especially with people who are preparing too to get diagnosed, or who have recently been diagnosed. Doubting your diagnosis (or any mental health diagnosis) is an incredibly common and damaging thing for treatment. Please be mindful in avoiding activating that negative belief. It's not that they didn't think I had it. It never occurred to them that it might be the problem, for several reasons. I presented very clearly suffering from MDD and general anxiety and have been medicated for that my entire adult life. But in fact the MDD and anxiety were just symptoms of living undiagnosed and trying to live as best I could with what worked for me.
- listenallyall 4y ago
  I'm objectively responding to an anonymous comment in an internet forum, with no knowledge whatsoever about your background, sex, gender, race, age, location, or anything about your mental condition. It would be impossible for me to diagnose you or to question such a diagnosis. > comments such as this can be incredibly harmful For anyone reading this exchange, ignoring, or going against, the opinion of 30+ mental health professionals can also potentially be harmful.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > For anyone reading his exchange, ignoring, or going against, the opinion of 30+ mental health professionals can also be harmful. In defense of GP, I want to caveat with this: if you go to a random psychiatrist and tell them about your issues, it's quite likely you'll get evaluated for the "usual suspects", such as depression. A proper evaluation (not just initial diagnosis, but matching treatment and noticing effects) can easily take over a year, since medication used in depression treatment usually take a month to kick in, and you might need to go through several before finding one that works for you, if at all - while also dealing with some nasty side effects. Now, imagine a person with ADHD staring this path. How likely is it they'll go through the process diligently for a year or more, until the doctor figures out something else is going on? What's more likely to happen is, the person will keep taking the meds for a while, then forget to schedule a visit before running out, run out, enter withdrawal, then be unable to schedule a visit, leave withdrawal few weeks later, and feel too ashamed to talk to that doctor again. So in a few months or more, they may go to another psychiatrist... ... who will want to re-examine them for depression just to be sure, starting the cycle anew. I wasted a decade of my life on exactly this. Hence my standing recommendation: if you suspect ADHD, find a psychiatrist who's actually specializing in adult ADHD (and not just has it on a list of things they can help you with). ADHD can often be diagnosed or ruled out in days to weeks; going to an ADHD specialist isn't about trying to "get your favored diagnosis" (if you feel worried about this, just be up-front with them) - it's about minimizing the chance they'll dismiss this as an option, as (from copious anecdotal evidence) most other psychiatrists do.

ttcbj 4y ago

Fair question. I think I used that word because at the beginning of the talk, the person who had organized the talk gave a five minute ibtro about how admirable it was that he was willing to acknowledge the difficulty of his ADHD, etc. Then he stood up, was clearly having none of it, said he thought it was an advantage, and then gave a long talk with no reference to it. I guess it was weird because he didn’t seem into that angle at all. But he was a great speaker, really inspiring. Edit: I wasn’t necessarily trying to advocate that his perspective was correct for anyone else, but just reporting that this is what happened as a matter of fact.