6 ms·

One of the best things we can do for people with ADHD is to adjust our expectations of people in general (adults and children). ADHD wasn't identified as a dis

One of the best things we can do for people with ADHD is to adjust our expectations of people in general (adults and children). ADHD wasn't identified as a disorder until recently because it wasn't a disorder until recently. For most of human history, the traits associated with ADHD would have been at worst a wash and in many cases advantageous to have in small numbers within a community. The adults that I know with ADHD are disproportionately likely to be the movers and shakers in their worlds—they work well under pressure and make things happen. You don't want everyone to be that way, but having a portion of the population that can't sit still has huge advantages. That only changed when we moved into the 20th century and started expecting 100% of the population to be okay with sitting quietly in a chair for 6 hours a day for 12 years of their lives and then, if they had any kind of ambition, to do more sitting in chairs working a white collar job until retirement. The people with ADHD aren't a problem, the unnatural world we've created is the problem, and we risk losing an important part of the larger organism that is civilization if we force these people to conform.

halayli 3y ago
Do you have ADHD?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
atlas_hugged 3y ago
I swear, every ADHD post on hacker news, someone comes in here with this uninformed nonsense. For those of you afflicted with this curse, lookup Dr Russell Barkley’s videos on YouTube. He’s retired now, but was a great ADHD researcher. Really helped me understand what was going on.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Care to elaborate, or was your goal just to be insulting for the sake of it? What specifically did I say that was "uninformed nonsense"? What are the facts that contradict what I said? If you can't provide something more substantial than vague insults then you're never going to persuade anyone of anything.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- romeros 3y ago
  Dr. Russell Barkley's brother who had ADHD ended up becoming homeless and dying. He is biased and has a negative outlook on ADD. He talks in a very authoritarian manner. You should look up other prominent ADHD experts like Ed Hallowell who have a more positive take. Richard Feynman famously wrote "Science is the Belief in the Ignorance of the Experts". He meant, and explained that "science - a.k.a. research - is in the making, belongs to the (unknown, yet to be discovered) future, while expertise is based on the past, with in-built obsolescence".
  - flir 3y ago
    I'm ADHD and I don't buy that "would have made great cavemen, natural movers and shakers" rubbish for a minute. Dude above who was worried he wouldn't have electricity when his g/f came over because he just couldn't handle paying the bill on time? Much closer to the mark. When I got together with my now-wife, she sorted out a water bill I'd been paying on my old place for months because I hadn't gotten around to telling them I'd moved. My psychiatrist recommended Gabor Maté for what it's worth, but I prefer a really reductionist "it's all about dopamine" model. It might be simplistic, but it has the advantage of being concrete.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      > I'm ADHD and I don't buy that "would have made great cavemen, natural movers and shakers" rubbish for a minute. Dude above who was worried he wouldn't have electricity when his g/f came over because he just couldn't handle paying the bill on time? Much closer to the mark. When I got together with my now-wife, she sorted out a water bill I'd been paying on my old place for months because I hadn't gotten around to telling them I'd moved. As a preface, just so you don't think I don't understand what you're talking about—my dad struggled to hold down a job for most of my childhood and finally got diagnosed with ADHD and started medication after he turned 50. I'm intimately familiar with the impairments that ADHD can cause and the real harm that is possible. That, said, what you're describing is exactly the kind of modern overhead that I'm talking about—the modern world imposes a million little things to keep track of that ultimately shouldn't be required, which leaves us chronically falling behind on menial tasks. That leads to anxiety and depression that makes things even worse. In the present reality, medication may be an appropriate patch to quickly restore sanity to people who need it, but I'm unconvinced that we should treat medicating a full 5% of the population for ADHD as a reasonable end goal. There are huge social movements for making accommodations for a portion of the population much smaller than that. There's no reason we can't make substantial changes to accommodate ADHD, especially given that said accommodations would really benefit everyone.
TheBen1 3y ago
I had undiagnosed ADHD for 35 years and I suffered a lot. When my future girlfriend came to visit my place for the first time, I feard that we would not have electricity because I did not pay the bills. Not a money issue, but between all the daunting daily tasks I just was not able to accomplish that task for MONTHs. I was working on my PhD in CS and didn't get anything done at all. I was in constant fear of getting a task related to Excel, because all these little cells have always made me nervous and furious. I would invest 2-3 hours working around a repetitive task of maybe 20 minutes, because doing it was unbearable. I had always been socially anxious, because for being socially active you need that type of attention that is just hard to maintain. I love being in nature, but going for a walk through the woods? Not possible, because it's "not exciting" enough. Then a friend gave me some of his pills. I took them for a few days and for the first day of my life I understood how everybody else was feeling, how everybody else could be so confident, behaving confident, just being and feeling normal. I knew that feeling from rare occasions, the absence of all that struggle you are constantly feeling in your body. I had my first normal workday ever. Just going to work, doing work, having a break, later going home. I had never experienced that ever before. And still I didn't believe I had ADHD, never slipped my mind, lol. But then COVID hit and we went into lockdown and homeoffice and I could not work at all and I suffered immensly. I knew that feeling of "I want to do it SO hard, but I just CAN'T" very well, but this time it hit me very hard, for weeks. She convinced me to get diagnosed and here I am, it feels like a distant past already. It was like an instant switch, even though it's a journey to retrain my brain after for decades it had to come up with mechanics to deal with the disorder. I know there many out there that are/were like me and I know there are many out there that had a quite different experience with their ADHD. Please don't walk around saying society is the problem. Society is not the problem when it comes to depression and it's not the problem when it comes to ADHD. A lot of people would benefit from a different society for sure, but for me and many others it's nothing more than a disorder. It was a miracle I could start a PhD to begin with (and of course getting my Master's was a constant struggle, just as my whole life had been miserable and a struggle). Many others end up drug addicted, dropping out ot school, having a clinical depression, and other nasty stuff. As all mental disorders, we do not know too much about it, but as a matter of fact the medication helps greatly and I am so glad I got finally diagnosed. Some that have ADHD do not suffer that much as I did, but a lot of do. I only wish that my disorder does not get misrepresented as "wouldn't be a big deal in a more open society".
mhss 3y ago
As someone with family members with ADHD and as a manager who has had employees with ADHD, the challenge is differentiate and find those cases where it can be "advantageous". Is not easy at all. Also, there are different types and levels of ADHD. It's not a super power to forget things you wanted to remember and being late all the time, there's no benefit on that for anyone. Sometimes the extra creativity or hyper-focus on things that are not a goal for an organization is not an advantage. It's very complicated. I wish I had a solution.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Yeah, agreed. My dad had undiagnosed ADHD until a year or so ago. He loved research and got a PhD, but couldn't do the tasks that were expected of a professor and ended up not getting tenure. After that he struggled to hold a job for most of my childhood. It's definitely not all upside, especially in modern contexts. But I do believe what I said—he would have thrived in the more Wild West academia of Isaac Newton and John Locke. The things he struggled to do were the accidental complexities of the job of professor, not the truly important aspects of that role.
  - mhss 3y ago
    > He loved research and got a PhD, but couldn't do the tasks that were expected of a professor and ended up not getting tenure. After that he struggled to hold a job for most of my childhood. This sounds horrific for both the individuals and their families. Talented individuals with so much to offer not finding their place. > He would have thrived in the more Wild West academia of Isaac Newton and John Locke. Yes, I agree. I just don't know how to create a system where the strengths of such individuals are leveraged. If an organization of 100 people is trying to build a bridge and the tasks required are challenging for the 1-5 ADHD individuals in the group, the persons will struggle and the organization will struggle. Both individuals and organizations need to get better at routing those individuals to the right places to leverage their strengths. This is true of anyone but 10x more important for ADHD or other disabilities. > The things he struggled to do were the accidental complexities of the job of professor, not the truly important aspects of that role. I have mixed feelings about this because sometimes I have heard people dismiss aspects of work they're not good at as not important. E.g I have had sw engineers claim they solved the problem in their head and writing it down and communicating it to others is not important. At large organizations is just as important unfortunately.
ddmf 3y ago
> The people with ADHD aren't a problem, the unnatural world we've created is the problem, and we risk losing an important part of the larger organism that is civilization if we force these people to conform. This is pretty much what the social model of disability pushes: if society changed with a thought for all some of us wouldn't be as disabled - in my specific case reducing bright lighting, reducing noise pollution, and reducing specific smells would help me a stupendous amount.

halayli 3y ago

Do you have ADHD?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

atlas_hugged 3y ago

I swear, every ADHD post on hacker news, someone comes in here with this uninformed nonsense. For those of you afflicted with this curse, lookup Dr Russell Barkley’s videos on YouTube. He’s retired now, but was a great ADHD researcher. Really helped me understand what was going on.

lolinder 3y ago
Care to elaborate, or was your goal just to be insulting for the sake of it? What specifically did I say that was "uninformed nonsense"? What are the facts that contradict what I said? If you can't provide something more substantial than vague insults then you're never going to persuade anyone of anything.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
romeros 3y ago
Dr. Russell Barkley's brother who had ADHD ended up becoming homeless and dying. He is biased and has a negative outlook on ADD. He talks in a very authoritarian manner. You should look up other prominent ADHD experts like Ed Hallowell who have a more positive take. Richard Feynman famously wrote "Science is the Belief in the Ignorance of the Experts". He meant, and explained that "science - a.k.a. research - is in the making, belongs to the (unknown, yet to be discovered) future, while expertise is based on the past, with in-built obsolescence".
- flir 3y ago
  I'm ADHD and I don't buy that "would have made great cavemen, natural movers and shakers" rubbish for a minute. Dude above who was worried he wouldn't have electricity when his g/f came over because he just couldn't handle paying the bill on time? Much closer to the mark. When I got together with my now-wife, she sorted out a water bill I'd been paying on my old place for months because I hadn't gotten around to telling them I'd moved. My psychiatrist recommended Gabor Maté for what it's worth, but I prefer a really reductionist "it's all about dopamine" model. It might be simplistic, but it has the advantage of being concrete.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > I'm ADHD and I don't buy that "would have made great cavemen, natural movers and shakers" rubbish for a minute. Dude above who was worried he wouldn't have electricity when his g/f came over because he just couldn't handle paying the bill on time? Much closer to the mark. When I got together with my now-wife, she sorted out a water bill I'd been paying on my old place for months because I hadn't gotten around to telling them I'd moved. As a preface, just so you don't think I don't understand what you're talking about—my dad struggled to hold down a job for most of my childhood and finally got diagnosed with ADHD and started medication after he turned 50. I'm intimately familiar with the impairments that ADHD can cause and the real harm that is possible. That, said, what you're describing is exactly the kind of modern overhead that I'm talking about—the modern world imposes a million little things to keep track of that ultimately shouldn't be required, which leaves us chronically falling behind on menial tasks. That leads to anxiety and depression that makes things even worse. In the present reality, medication may be an appropriate patch to quickly restore sanity to people who need it, but I'm unconvinced that we should treat medicating a full 5% of the population for ADHD as a reasonable end goal. There are huge social movements for making accommodations for a portion of the population much smaller than that. There's no reason we can't make substantial changes to accommodate ADHD, especially given that said accommodations would really benefit everyone.

TheBen1 3y ago

I had undiagnosed ADHD for 35 years and I suffered a lot. When my future girlfriend came to visit my place for the first time, I feard that we would not have electricity because I did not pay the bills. Not a money issue, but between all the daunting daily tasks I just was not able to accomplish that task for MONTHs. I was working on my PhD in CS and didn't get anything done at all. I was in constant fear of getting a task related to Excel, because all these little cells have always made me nervous and furious. I would invest 2-3 hours working around a repetitive task of maybe 20 minutes, because doing it was unbearable. I had always been socially anxious, because for being socially active you need that type of attention that is just hard to maintain. I love being in nature, but going for a walk through the woods? Not possible, because it's "not exciting" enough. Then a friend gave me some of his pills. I took them for a few days and for the first day of my life I understood how everybody else was feeling, how everybody else could be so confident, behaving confident, just being and feeling normal. I knew that feeling from rare occasions, the absence of all that struggle you are constantly feeling in your body. I had my first normal workday ever. Just going to work, doing work, having a break, later going home. I had never experienced that ever before. And still I didn't believe I had ADHD, never slipped my mind, lol. But then COVID hit and we went into lockdown and homeoffice and I could not work at all and I suffered immensly. I knew that feeling of "I want to do it SO hard, but I just CAN'T" very well, but this time it hit me very hard, for weeks. She convinced me to get diagnosed and here I am, it feels like a distant past already. It was like an instant switch, even though it's a journey to retrain my brain after for decades it had to come up with mechanics to deal with the disorder. I know there many out there that are/were like me and I know there are many out there that had a quite different experience with their ADHD. Please don't walk around saying society is the problem. Society is not the problem when it comes to depression and it's not the problem when it comes to ADHD. A lot of people would benefit from a different society for sure, but for me and many others it's nothing more than a disorder. It was a miracle I could start a PhD to begin with (and of course getting my Master's was a constant struggle, just as my whole life had been miserable and a struggle). Many others end up drug addicted, dropping out ot school, having a clinical depression, and other nasty stuff. As all mental disorders, we do not know too much about it, but as a matter of fact the medication helps greatly and I am so glad I got finally diagnosed. Some that have ADHD do not suffer that much as I did, but a lot of do. I only wish that my disorder does not get misrepresented as "wouldn't be a big deal in a more open society".

mhss 3y ago

As someone with family members with ADHD and as a manager who has had employees with ADHD, the challenge is differentiate and find those cases where it can be "advantageous". Is not easy at all. Also, there are different types and levels of ADHD. It's not a super power to forget things you wanted to remember and being late all the time, there's no benefit on that for anyone. Sometimes the extra creativity or hyper-focus on things that are not a goal for an organization is not an advantage. It's very complicated. I wish I had a solution.

lolinder 3y ago
Yeah, agreed. My dad had undiagnosed ADHD until a year or so ago. He loved research and got a PhD, but couldn't do the tasks that were expected of a professor and ended up not getting tenure. After that he struggled to hold a job for most of my childhood. It's definitely not all upside, especially in modern contexts. But I do believe what I said—he would have thrived in the more Wild West academia of Isaac Newton and John Locke. The things he struggled to do were the accidental complexities of the job of professor, not the truly important aspects of that role.
- mhss 3y ago
  > He loved research and got a PhD, but couldn't do the tasks that were expected of a professor and ended up not getting tenure. After that he struggled to hold a job for most of my childhood. This sounds horrific for both the individuals and their families. Talented individuals with so much to offer not finding their place. > He would have thrived in the more Wild West academia of Isaac Newton and John Locke. Yes, I agree. I just don't know how to create a system where the strengths of such individuals are leveraged. If an organization of 100 people is trying to build a bridge and the tasks required are challenging for the 1-5 ADHD individuals in the group, the persons will struggle and the organization will struggle. Both individuals and organizations need to get better at routing those individuals to the right places to leverage their strengths. This is true of anyone but 10x more important for ADHD or other disabilities. > The things he struggled to do were the accidental complexities of the job of professor, not the truly important aspects of that role. I have mixed feelings about this because sometimes I have heard people dismiss aspects of work they're not good at as not important. E.g I have had sw engineers claim they solved the problem in their head and writing it down and communicating it to others is not important. At large organizations is just as important unfortunately.

ddmf 3y ago

> The people with ADHD aren't a problem, the unnatural world we've created is the problem, and we risk losing an important part of the larger organism that is civilization if we force these people to conform. This is pretty much what the social model of disability pushes: if society changed with a thought for all some of us wouldn't be as disabled - in my specific case reducing bright lighting, reducing noise pollution, and reducing specific smells would help me a stupendous amount.