I think it's particularly common to see that with people who discover their ADHD in adulthood, and there are a lot of us now that awareness has been raised in recent years.
I went my whole life thinking that I was broken. I had intense anxiety surrounding social interaction, was horribly depressed, got terrible grades through high school, and just generally did not enjoy most of life. I eventually learned how to cope and function normally to an outside observer, but still would go through cycles of intense anxiety and depression that I didn't know how to explain.
A few years ago I finally was diagnosed with ADHD and suddenly everything clicked. My anxiety, my depression, my grades, my intense hyperfocus on one thing at a time but also inability to keep consistently focused on one thing for more than a few weeks. All of that suddenly made sense, and there were people in the world who knew exactly how I felt. And the thing is, the anxiety and depression have largely gone away. Now that I know what's going on inside my brain I don't have to beat myself up about it, instead I can learn from and lean on hundreds of thousands of other people who have to cope with the same thing.
So yeah, today I will often notice "oh, that's an ADHD thing" at random times in my life. But it's not so much that it's an essential part of my identity as it is that it's enormously comforting to finally have an explanation for all of the weird quirks that I have, and it's a huge relief to have a community of people who experience the same things that I do. When I say "that's my ADHD", it's me reminding myself that I am not broken, just different, and different is okay.
To be honest, I thought exactly like you for years. I still benefit from society choosing to label me with something, and that I do not choose to fight. For a while my diagnoses provided so many explanations to my problems and I could live with new purpose.
But a while later, I found it was not enough. I hadn't reached "true happiness" or at least whatever I can call my current state of being. I took a different path, shed all my labels, self-prescribed or otherwise, and am happier than I was before.
I still think I am "different" and have quirks, etc. So in practice, not a whole lot different than before. I just don't use the labels to describe these differences that others might use instead.
I think this only emphasizes that one approach does not necessarily apply when generalized to all people. In my case it only served as one step towards a greater solution, and hopefully even more effective solutions I can build on top of that later.
The same goes for heightened awareness for ADHD. More knowledge can be a blessing (as in your case). At the same time, the population such awareness can serve is shaped like a very complex blob, the form of which nobody truly knows, but I believe some clinicians/promoters see the "blast radius" of promoting awareness as a perfectly round circle overlaid directly onto the population.
My experience also made me realize what one can term "ADHD" may change with overarching cultural shifts or personal growth. I think ADHD should be seen closer to a symptom of a constellation of any number of potentially unrelated causes than a "disorder" to be focused on alone. Unfortunately the established terminology seems to have won out there.
The way we see health conditions and the words we choose to describe them can have profound effects on our understanding of ourselves.
I was going to reply to the same post with similar. If just having a label to apply alleviates the negative emotion, isn't it a placebo?
I think a far far greater number of people experience the exact same problems of focus and distress, and learn to cope effectively in their own deeply personal way. I identify strongly with all the symptoms stated. A label feels useless, or worse - constraining, as it becomes your identity. I still have to drag my ass out of bed, do enough good work everyday next to colleagues who figuratively lap me every day, make a to-do list to remember to buy soap, go without soap for a week, .. etc lol.
> If just having a label to apply alleviates the negative emotion, isn't it a placebo?
You could use the exact same line of reasoning to ask "if just talking about an issue with a professional alleviates an issue, isn't that a placebo?"
And the answer is obviously, "No, talk therapy is an extremely well-known mental health intervention with an extremely high effect size on average"
Anxiety and depression are disorders in the way you think about things. If you provide someone with a different and effective way of thinking about things, your are directly treating the disorder. The "maladaptive pattern" flowchart[1] might be a meme, but it's also a very real concept in psychology.
From a more personal point of view: while a label can defining be used in a confining way where it serves as an excuse to not "have to" do a thing (and I certainly know people like that), I find it's very useful to have something concrete to point at and say "this method that other people claim works great won't work for me because my brain doesn't work like that, I need to find a way to alter the method to make myself successful".
Yea placebo is probably the wrong word here. And I agree with you. Often just recognizing something removes it's power. I'm glad the commenter experienced the change they did. Just makes me wonder in this case, the root of it seems like self acceptance - a major theme in (at least my own) therapy. Perhaps a label is a powerful shortcut.
> the label now makes information a keyword search away
I think this can become a double-edged sword in some cases. When applied to certain problems, especially ones with no clear-cut solution, additional knowledge can end up being misleading. (Disclaimer: this is only my experience, and I do not intend to speak for others!)
Example, I always used to frame issues I worked with in the language of ADHD, because I believed that was what best described my pathology. My lack of efficiency at work was an issue of a faulty "executive function". My ability to work uninterrupted for extended periods of time was "hyperfocus". My inability to accept criticism without feeling dejected is an indicator of "rejection sensitive dysphoria".
Yet, after I got therapy that worked for me, I realized three things in short order:
- In my own view, there were no deficits in my executive function. It had been intact the entire time. It was actually uncontrolled stress that was causing my executive function not to operate at its maximum capacity. Hence my problem had not been one of executive function, but of stress relief.
- "Hyperfocus" was merely another way for me of saying "putting sustained attention on an activity to cope with unchecked stress." I no longer consider myself to hyperfocus (which I define as working 3+ hours straight at a time, only stopping for food in between), but at the same time I don't perceive I've lost any of my abilities. On the contrary, I gained the ability to participate in and actually enjoy a wider variety of activities more consistently (cooking, cleaning, socialization, exercise, reading, and many others), as well as start and stop each activity when I please, without losing too much time to activities I only used as a coping mechanism for stress (doomscrolling, social media, etc.). In a sense, my interests became more balanced, even though I still carry the same level of passion for a few niche activities (arguably even stronger for some).
- Criticism does not hurt me as strongly as it did before, when I am aware the criticism is coming from a constructive place and is not merely the feelings of the other party making themselves clear in dramatic fashion. If it's the latter, I now have the ability to ignore the other party and move on. I am now also motivated to avoid going to places where people are likely to criticize me unconstructively. I understood that this was the way to deal with criticism in the past, but I was unable to internalize how to act and feel about criticism until now. Hence, I am no longer dysphoric in this way, if I ever was.
So at least in my view, after I gained a sense of inner peace not having to deal with runaway stress anymore, several problems that I used to see as pathological - having terms such as "executive function" and "dysphoria" - turned out not to be any kind of pathology at all. They were only the aftereffects of excessive daily stress.
In my case, these terms weren't the most helpful for me to understand and work on the real issues underlying my core self, and thus get back a much greater return for the effort I expended - which was much less effort than spending months, years and a lot of money on recurring therapies tailored towards framing my problems in an ADHD-centric way.
> additional knowledge can end up being misleading
Absolutely! But with a label you have:
- meaningful options you didn't have before
- hope drawn from those around you who have found ways to cope.
- knowing that you are not alone
The label doesn't fix you. But it's a good starting point. Answers don't jump out and grab you; you have to filter and verify.
And from the rest of your post it seems you managed to do that. And by having your experience here you have provided valuable context for others in a similar scenario. Thank you.
Totally agree it was a good starting point. I have made a lot of friends in the communities I gained access to via diagnoses and we're still good friends to this day. It's all part of a journey with multiple stages.
Think of it this way: The shape of a hammer compels you to hammer things down with it, but with sustained effort and creativity you can use it for chiseling marble instead.
To reach where I am now, I had to undo some amount of (but not all!) progress I'd made in one direction (since I had bought into the therapy circuit for treating ADHD already) and actively resist attempts to pathologize my own behaviors.
People say "don't treat ADHD like an identity" like it's easy, but the nature of a label compels you to treat it like an identity sometimes. Especially in the society I live in where awareness and destigmatization of conditions is pushed on social media all the time. And especially when your life lacks other meaning and you crave an identity to anchor yourself onto ("just don't make it your identity" sounded like "just don't be depressed" innumerable times to past depressed me, and I saw little reason not to take hold of a new identity for myself). This is a function of depression so I don't blame anyone for it, but I ultimately felt better served by other movements as far as making tangible gains in my mental health.
To use the metaphor again, the art of chiseling was unlikely to make itself known in my current state, but deep down inside I preferred to be there than where I was, so I had to deliberately seek out a teacher and undo the preconceived notions about myself in order to get there. In reality that was just finding another form of therapy that was more effective for solving my problems.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the "normal things have 'ADHD' translations" bit. It reads the same as trans to me - a counterculture subculture where you get to feel good about things you feel bad about.
It would be a placebo if it was intended to do nothing, but it's not, it's intended to help explain what's going on. It's not just a label, it's got meaning, and it's a way to find out more and find other people dealing with similar things.
Russel Barkley, in his book “Leading With ADHD,” actually suggested mentioning or “blaming” your ADHD after a mistake as a way to foster empathy for your personal challenges. It’s not intended to be an excuse, but rather a means for the other person, who assumes XYZ is effortless, to comprehend better/gain empathy.
Update: The title of the book should have been “Taking Charge of Adult ADHD.” It’s a great book; my psychiatrist recommended it, and I’m grateful for it. Full of actionable ideas and suggestions.
Barkley opened the door for me to the term 'executive dysfunction'. This better describes my symptoms than the blanket ADHD term that is now oversaturated IMO. Its given me much better anchors to reason with the issues that mess up my day(s), and ive made notable progress since the discovery of his work, at a time when I had been plateauing.
And then after a while the energy fades..you get distracted again. You get both over stimulated and understimulated and the quest for another thing that gives you the feeling of the world finally clicking into place begins..
And each of these fixes (brain.fm, nootropics, adhd-planner-apps etcetc) give you that feeling just for a little while…
That’s why we crave it..and because we (can) have more energy we talk about those (a lot!!).
But in the end most of us just go from one fix to another..some of us are just really loud about it..
How did the diagnosis help you cope? Did you seek some kind of treatment as a result? Did it help you change your behavior? You are describing a lot of what I experience but having someone say "me too" doesn't help me personally with overcoming these challenges.
I am not on meds—my dad is on Adderall but has had some pretty serious side effects so I've been avoiding it for now.
Mostly it's changed my attitude towards myself. I'm naturally a strong perfectionist, which doesn't combine well with ADHD. That has historically led to me constantly beating myself up when I do anything wrong, ruminating over conversations for days to figure out what I should have said differently, and generally being anxious and depressed. After receiving the diagnosis, I've been able to separate "me" from "my ADHD", which has helped me stop kicking myself while I'm down, which in turn has actually increased my ability to stay functional because I don't get into anxious/depressed spirals.
>my intense hyperfocus on one thing at a time but also inability to keep consistently focused on one thing for more than a few weeks
Sounds extremely normal to me. I wonder what I'm missing.
For example, suppose a typical person decides to learn a new language.
At the beginning, they are very excited and enthusiastic about it. They might buy a textbook, download an app or sign up for language classes, and spend lots of time on it for a couple of days.
After a week or two, as the tediousness sets in and the goal seems farther off than they expected, they start to shift their focus to something else. After a month, there's a 50/50 chance they completely forget about language study and stop doing it. Only a very small minority will last more than a year.
That's what I'd consider normal. How is ADHD different?
Another example: meditation. A new meditation practitioner may try to focus on their breathing, but then find they usually get distracted and start thinking about something else within 10 seconds.
I have a feeling that if I were to say "I find it difficult to focus my attention on something for 10 seconds without getting distracted", many would reply "that sounds like ADHD." But this is, in fact, quite normal.
> That's what I'd consider normal. How is ADHD different?
ADHD is different in that sustained focus takes a ton more of energy than for non-ADHD folks - if you're high functioning. And is almost impossible if you're not high-functioning.
Totally agreed that "can't focus on my breath for 10 seconds today" isn't ADHD. "I have repeatably sub-par executive function" very much is, though.
For your language learning example, it's more that somebody can't stay focused on the learning, even if they want to/have to and are aware their focus is sliding away.
There's a reason ADHD diagnosis is technically a process that's a bit involved, you're trying to test for both sub-par function, and for the repeatable part. I'd take self-diagnosis with a bit more salt, especially it's of the "I often forget my car keys" kind.
> I have a feeling that if I were to say "I find it difficult to focus my attention on something for 10 seconds without getting distracted", many would reply "that sounds like ADHD." But this is, in fact, quite normal.
That would be quite normal. A determination of ADHD is made based upon the severity of impact. Everyone gets distracted to some extent, but is it significant enough to be destroying your life, Y/N?
I have ADHD and while you're right that everyone experiences some of these things occasionally, for those with ADHD our emotion regulation system is fundamentally different.
As a kid, you build your identity and coping mechanisms through emotional experiences, but when your emotion engine is 'broken' or works differently, you develop differently.
The intensity, frequency, and impact of these experiences for someone with ADHD is far beyond what neurotypical people experience.
It's not about occasional forgetfulness or distraction - it's about a brain that's structurally and functionally different, affecting every aspect of daily functioning.
Getting diagnosed isn't about finding an excuse, it's about finally understanding why basic things others find easy have always been so much harder for you.
I was diagnosed with ADHD because I scored in the 10th percentile for some totally normal use cases of the human brain. You know, normal “being human” stuff. Evidently I can’t do normal human stuff.
I think getting ADHD isn’t special or interesting at the population level—when you aren’t face to face with it—but it certainly matters to individuals. I wanted to believe I was just being a human, but the reality is that I don’t have a typical human experience. I have a lot of overlap with everyone I know, but most people I meet genuinely can’t understand the experience at all. However, they are often confident that they get it. Meanwhile, they would not qualify as disabled on cognitive assessments.
To me that’s the big difference. People with ADHD often carry around legitimate, often hidden disabilities. Usually more than one.
is tenth percentile for some measures really that bad? hard to say, but i don't think that if double-digit percentages of people have some attribute that it should be labeled a disease or exceptional.
i have been diagnosed as having ADHD multiple times, both as a kid as well as an adult. my parents decided not to put me on drugs, and as an adult, i have found behavioral interventions to be the most useful. i have not found perceiving it as a disability to be very helpful.
For what it's worth, I was using the tenth as a category of 0–10. I actually scored lower (3rd and 7th). Kind of giving myself a nominal leg up here, haha. My brain is running on half a cylinder sometimes, I guess.
A couple scores were still quite low at the 15th and 22nd. Those are clearly issues for me as well, though nowhere near as much. I don't know, I think this stuff makes a meaningful difference. For the cognitive attributes I scored far higher in (high 90s in some cases), it's abundantly clear what a disadvantage many people are at in that regard. Even someone scoring closer to the 50th.
You could say it all balances out, but it doesn't seem to. The high scores I get are all undermined significantly outside of test settings. Major deficits have a serious toll on you. I'm not complaining at all, though. To me it's a fact of life, something to accept and address (with behavioural interventions as you mentioned), and try to find strategies to move forward. You get what life gives you. Generally speaking, it could be a lot worse. I'm very grateful for the parts of my brain that work well.
Ah, so anything that people could have given themselves is not a disease? Heart disease can be caused by lifestyle, so it's not a disease? And you can't give yourself ADHD so it is a disease? Or is your point and the point I was responding totally unrelated?
Except that isn't how neurodivergence works. Yes, everything that the commenter originally posted are things that happen to normal people as well. The difference is in the intensity and duration of these symptoms.
Your comment is overly idealistic about neurodivergent people dealing with their problems. If it was a simple as accepting that our symptoms are normal, don't you think that we would gladly take that as an option? Psychologically, it just isn't a very effective tactic for dealing with our symptoms.
Yes. Identifying it as just part of being human doesn't explain at all why I, in particular, am regularly incapacitated by these things, and it's the sense of incapacity that causes the shame.
You can absolutely rephrase "that's my ADHD" to "that's within the range of normal after all", but having a proper label for a cluster of people who stand out as a clearly distinct normal curve from the rest of the population is helpful.
I like to frame it as a disability. I fought it for ages and wanted to believe I was normal.
This is like trying to climb a tree with one arm. It won’t work. You need to take a step back, look at the problem, and develop systems which accommodate the missing arm.
ADHD only works well for us when we involve ourselves in activities which benefit from having one, extremely well-practiced arm. That’s usually our happy place. The world typically asks for all limbs in tact, though. We inevitably hit those walls.
If we pretend we won’t hit those walls and we don’t prepare ourselves, life is disproportionately hard.
We also need to ensure we accept the disability such that when we do our best to be prepared, but we fail to be, we recognize that it’s a fact of life and we do our best with what we’ve got.
I’m not a fan of the super power framing. I’m a fan of looking at it as a disability with positive, optimistic framing. When we get it right, life can work really well for us. We will always be at a disadvantage in some ways, but the skills and experiences we get because of that can be invaluable.
I most likely would be diagnosed with ADHD if I sought a formal diagnosis (my ex, who I was with for over a decade is a clinical psychologist and said I most likely have ADHD; my brother is diagnosed with it and my mom's ADHD traits make the both of us look tame). The thing is, I just don't buy into the rampant pathologizing that's so prevalent these days.
It's really a societal problem, and is being treated as a human failing. I contend that it's society that's expecting humans to behave in a way we haven't needed for most of our evolution.
These include: having exacting time standards disconnected from seasons and day/night cycles, having to juggle many more cognitively intense tasks that we need to quickly switch amongst, being exposed to media and technology specifically designed to capture your attention for as long as possible, etc.
It's not "a societal problem" if I forget, for a week, that I've left out a yogurt on the counter, and it spreads mold.
It's not "a societal problem" if I fail to notice my body getting hungry for 6 hours as I try to work out a particularly enticing programming problem, and end up irritable and headachy.
It's not "a societal problem" if I blow up at a friend (or partner, or coworker, etc) because I have trouble regulating emotions, and trouble recognizing what's happening inside until it's too late.
There are certainly some symptoms of ADHD, and some ways that they manifest, that are, indeed, only a problem (or vastly exacerbated) by current societal expectations. But many of the symptoms just make life harder no matter what society is like.
ADHD is a disability, and should be treated as such.
Unfortunately, it's the kind of disability whose most common manifestations mostly make even very well-meaning people think that those who suffer from it are lazy, immature, or lacking in willpower.
As the parent of a teen with ADHD, I find myself comparing my growing-up experiences and anxieties with his. I'm confident that if I were coming of age today, I would probably have been diagnosed with something because I was firmly a couple standard deviations away from the societal mean.
Because we didn't have as extensive diagnoses or therapies back in the 80s compared to now, I had my own phase of wondering what was wrong with me. There weren't any peer or adult role models available to me that really related to my experiences. As a result, there were some difficult years in there...but also, I had to find my own resiliency and ways of mapping my worldview to other people.
Fast forward 40 years. I am conflicted about which is better: to be left to figure it out on your own, or to have a support system that is (at times) overly biased towards leaning on the diagnosis as the explanation. But I can say with high confidence that at least for the coming-of-age years of my child, I am far more thankful that his experiences are different than mine.
"Being a human" is grossly inadequate as a lowest common denominator definition of the needs and experiences of children. Even as broadly discussed as it is, it's still only ~11% of US children and that's still a challenging hill to climb if their peer culture doesn't provide some sort of explanation or incentives for understanding each other.
11% is cited as the percentage that have been diagnosed, so ostensibly the 'true' percentage is even higher. i feel that if such a huge proportion of people (let's say somewhere between 1 in 5 ~ 1 in 10) have an attribute, we shouldn't be treating it as some exceptional thing that requires special care but rather a normal part of what it means to be a human.
it's crazy that there's so much focus on adhd but comparitively little on dyslexia, which by most estimations has similar prevalence but arguably even more child impact. i'm sure there's many more of disadvantages all across the spectrum that we haven't even classified / become aware of.
If ADHD-oriented media and discussions provide neurodivergent adults a means to work through decades of internalized shame and anxiety, why get in the way of that?
I went my whole life thinking that I was broken. I had intense anxiety surrounding social interaction, was horribly depressed, got terrible grades through high school, and just generally did not enjoy most of life. I eventually learned how to cope and function normally to an outside observer, but still would go through cycles of intense anxiety and depression that I didn't know how to explain.
A few years ago I finally was diagnosed with ADHD and suddenly everything clicked. My anxiety, my depression, my grades, my intense hyperfocus on one thing at a time but also inability to keep consistently focused on one thing for more than a few weeks. All of that suddenly made sense, and there were people in the world who knew exactly how I felt. And the thing is, the anxiety and depression have largely gone away. Now that I know what's going on inside my brain I don't have to beat myself up about it, instead I can learn from and lean on hundreds of thousands of other people who have to cope with the same thing.
So yeah, today I will often notice "oh, that's an ADHD thing" at random times in my life. But it's not so much that it's an essential part of my identity as it is that it's enormously comforting to finally have an explanation for all of the weird quirks that I have, and it's a huge relief to have a community of people who experience the same things that I do. When I say "that's my ADHD", it's me reminding myself that I am not broken, just different, and different is okay.