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"Requiring every building to have a ramp instead of stairs wastes everyone's time and money. Many of the people that need them could get along in crutches long

by saulrh 8y ago

"Requiring every building to have a ramp instead of stairs wastes everyone's time and money. Many of the people that need them could get along in crutches long enough to use the occasional building." People like you are why I went undiagnosed until I was 27. Everyone around me thought that I just needed to focus harder and take better notes and get some exercise. Hell, I thought those things too, which meant I was dealing with burnout and depression on top of everything else. It ruined grad school and it's going to take me decades to catch up with my life goals. You should find a way to contribute that doesn't involve sweeping generalities that make it impossible for people with real problems to realize that they have them.

dorchadas 8y ago
I don't think that's what OP was saying at all, though. I took his comment as saying that we often expect too much structure from kids at too young of an age, then diagnose the worst of them. For example, at age 7 I was still bursting with pent-up energy and often didn't want to sit still, especially if I was bored. My first grade teacher once taped me to my chair to try to get me to sit still during reading time (I was reading at a higher level, and "See Spot Run" bored me to tears). She and my kindergarten teacher probably could have pushed for an ADHD diagnosis, but they didn't because I think they realized that we often shove kids too young and expect them to adapt to a fairly rigid structure too quickly. Now, I'm not saying that nobody has ADHD and that it's not a horrible problem for those who do. Sometimes, I really do wonder if I might have it, though I tend to think against it. But for those who truly do have ADHD, I understand that medicine is needed, and that the sooner we give it, the better off those students can learn. I just feel that OP was saying we test for it way too young, and expect way too much out of kids when testing for it.
jacobolus 8y ago
> You should find a way to contribute that doesn't involve sweeping generalities that make it impossible for people with real problems to realize that they have them. You think that me arguing for more free play for 4–8 year olds makes it impossible for adults with ADHD to realize they “have real problems”? You think it would have made your life significantly better if teachers had started medicating you at age 6 and forced you to spend more time memorizing spelling lists or whatever? I’m not talking about people in grad school here. Or even high school. For whatever it is worth: I am 32, and have undiagnosed ADHD, probably more extreme than yours.
- saulrh 8y ago
  > For whatever it is worth: I am 32, and have undiagnosed ADHD, probably more extreme than yours. If you think that it's significantly affecting your quality of life and none of your existing coping strategies are helping - which is the actual definition of "severity", by the way, not anything about how much you think your brain sucks - you should talk to a competent doctor and/or counselor or therapist. Medical professionals have access to far better ways to address real neurological problems than you can get hold of, ranging from referrals to specialists that work 8-hour days helping people test coping strategies to medication that will directly address the underlying cause to simply being able to approach the problem with a calibrated idea of what "normal" is and deal with it with a brain that isn't affected by the problem. They can probably help you keep your job or your marriage or whatever else it is that's continuously at risk of being derailed and collapsing around you. Yes, I know that it's hard to do. It's hard to remember to make phone calls while businesses are open. It's hard to remember when you have appointments. I know that paperwork is terrifying. It sucks. It gets better if you do it and get help. Get a good friend to sit down and help you do it. Seriously, not having gone to the doctor in years because you couldn't pull together the functional executive capacity to deal with analysis paralysis when you search for "primary care providers $mycity" is unhealthy in a ton of ways. Just call one at random. At worst you'll pick a terrible doctor and have to try again. Get friends to help. They're not crippled like you are. (Though, if I'm going to be honest, I will say that someone self-diagnosing severe ADHD in a thread about overdiagnosis of ADHD is hilariously ironic. Nothing says that the office lifestyle is any better for adults than it is for children, after all. Go read Dilbert or watch The Office or something, we're just as bad at handling it in cubicles as we are at our assigned seats in history class! Get some fresh air, go hiking on the weekends, get your macros right and lose 20 pounds. /s) > You think it would have made your life significantly better if teachers had started medicating you at age 6 and forced you to spend more time memorizing spelling lists or whatever? I did perfectly well on spelling tests and homework and projects during school. In fact, I barely needed to "study" anything at all. Maintained a high A all the way through to the end of my undergraduate. It just turned out that the month-long and semester-long projects sharply limited the scope of the careless mistakes I'd make that would, on real-life-sized projects, cascade into crippling architectural issues. So I just figured I needed to work harder (because "smart people don't work hard") and take better notes and pay more attention to the big picture. And I burned out catastrophically. Those problems all went away overnight when I finally managed to talk to a doctor about it. It was magical. I have so far not been able to identify any side effects rising above the noise floor. So, based on the side effects and benefits of medication so far, yes, I actually really would have liked to have had it earlier. At least ten years earlier. I'd have spent exactly as much time studying - i.e. none - gotten back the 10% of my grade that I usually spent misreading the fucking question, been able to handle personal projects big enough that I'd have been able to get real practice with project management and software architecture, and gotten papers out of the research projects I was involved with during my undergraduate. I'd have been able to go to the doctor reliably and avoid the stress and wasted time I spent dealing with carelessly fucked-up paperwork. And that all would have compounded on itself to improve my life exactly the way the failures compounded the way it actually happened. If I'd had this shit ten years ago I'd probably have my fucking PhD right now and be working on getting tenure, which is what people were expecting when I was in second grade.

by saulrh 8y ago

dorchadas 8y ago

I don't think that's what OP was saying at all, though. I took his comment as saying that we often expect too much structure from kids at too young of an age, then diagnose the worst of them. For example, at age 7 I was still bursting with pent-up energy and often didn't want to sit still, especially if I was bored. My first grade teacher once taped me to my chair to try to get me to sit still during reading time (I was reading at a higher level, and "See Spot Run" bored me to tears). She and my kindergarten teacher probably could have pushed for an ADHD diagnosis, but they didn't because I think they realized that we often shove kids too young and expect them to adapt to a fairly rigid structure too quickly. Now, I'm not saying that nobody has ADHD and that it's not a horrible problem for those who do. Sometimes, I really do wonder if I might have it, though I tend to think against it. But for those who truly do have ADHD, I understand that medicine is needed, and that the sooner we give it, the better off those students can learn. I just feel that OP was saying we test for it way too young, and expect way too much out of kids when testing for it.

jacobolus 8y ago

> You should find a way to contribute that doesn't involve sweeping generalities that make it impossible for people with real problems to realize that they have them. You think that me arguing for more free play for 4–8 year olds makes it impossible for adults with ADHD to realize they “have real problems”? You think it would have made your life significantly better if teachers had started medicating you at age 6 and forced you to spend more time memorizing spelling lists or whatever? I’m not talking about people in grad school here. Or even high school. For whatever it is worth: I am 32, and have undiagnosed ADHD, probably more extreme than yours.

saulrh 8y ago
> For whatever it is worth: I am 32, and have undiagnosed ADHD, probably more extreme than yours. If you think that it's significantly affecting your quality of life and none of your existing coping strategies are helping - which is the actual definition of "severity", by the way, not anything about how much you think your brain sucks - you should talk to a competent doctor and/or counselor or therapist. Medical professionals have access to far better ways to address real neurological problems than you can get hold of, ranging from referrals to specialists that work 8-hour days helping people test coping strategies to medication that will directly address the underlying cause to simply being able to approach the problem with a calibrated idea of what "normal" is and deal with it with a brain that isn't affected by the problem. They can probably help you keep your job or your marriage or whatever else it is that's continuously at risk of being derailed and collapsing around you. Yes, I know that it's hard to do. It's hard to remember to make phone calls while businesses are open. It's hard to remember when you have appointments. I know that paperwork is terrifying. It sucks. It gets better if you do it and get help. Get a good friend to sit down and help you do it. Seriously, not having gone to the doctor in years because you couldn't pull together the functional executive capacity to deal with analysis paralysis when you search for "primary care providers $mycity" is unhealthy in a ton of ways. Just call one at random. At worst you'll pick a terrible doctor and have to try again. Get friends to help. They're not crippled like you are. (Though, if I'm going to be honest, I will say that someone self-diagnosing severe ADHD in a thread about overdiagnosis of ADHD is hilariously ironic. Nothing says that the office lifestyle is any better for adults than it is for children, after all. Go read Dilbert or watch The Office or something, we're just as bad at handling it in cubicles as we are at our assigned seats in history class! Get some fresh air, go hiking on the weekends, get your macros right and lose 20 pounds. /s) > You think it would have made your life significantly better if teachers had started medicating you at age 6 and forced you to spend more time memorizing spelling lists or whatever? I did perfectly well on spelling tests and homework and projects during school. In fact, I barely needed to "study" anything at all. Maintained a high A all the way through to the end of my undergraduate. It just turned out that the month-long and semester-long projects sharply limited the scope of the careless mistakes I'd make that would, on real-life-sized projects, cascade into crippling architectural issues. So I just figured I needed to work harder (because "smart people don't work hard") and take better notes and pay more attention to the big picture. And I burned out catastrophically. Those problems all went away overnight when I finally managed to talk to a doctor about it. It was magical. I have so far not been able to identify any side effects rising above the noise floor. So, based on the side effects and benefits of medication so far, yes, I actually really would have liked to have had it earlier. At least ten years earlier. I'd have spent exactly as much time studying - i.e. none - gotten back the 10% of my grade that I usually spent misreading the fucking question, been able to handle personal projects big enough that I'd have been able to get real practice with project management and software architecture, and gotten papers out of the research projects I was involved with during my undergraduate. I'd have been able to go to the doctor reliably and avoid the stress and wasted time I spent dealing with carelessly fucked-up paperwork. And that all would have compounded on itself to improve my life exactly the way the failures compounded the way it actually happened. If I'd had this shit ten years ago I'd probably have my fucking PhD right now and be working on getting tenure, which is what people were expecting when I was in second grade.