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It's a disability. You don't overcome it you find accommodations and supports that allow you to meet your goals and & obligations. The experience of having adh

It's a disability. You don't overcome it you find accommodations and supports that allow you to meet your goals and & obligations. The experience of having adhd for me is mostly that it is primarily an emotional regulation disorder. The focus and attention problems are downstream of that, and are prioritized because that's how a parent or employer experiences adhd.

ldom66 2y ago
Completely agree with your second paragraph. I don't think it's helpful to label it as a "disability". Although the medical term is "disorder", at least for me, this kind of thinking got me digging a hole for myself that I had to climb out of. According to recent research, ADHD may be the fruit of evolution, making us focus on what's important and discarding the mundane. This makes us incredibly creative, out-of-the box thinkers and very efficient at tasks that truly engage us. Once I focused on that idea, I could start working on my strength, and stop "curing" my shortcomings.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Unfortunately, Jira work is sometimes massively important (to your boss), and also tremendously boring. That was the biggest obstacle I had, and the biggest improvement after medication – the ability to easily do work I’d rather not be doing.
  - onemoresoop 2y ago
    But do you agree that not everyone is meant to work on Jira tickets? I think a lot of people's ADHD flies under the radar until they face the unescapable tedium of corporate work and bureaucracy. Perhaps under different circumstances people with ADHD would shine without needing any medication.
    - sgarland 2y ago
      > But do you agree that not everyone is meant to work on Jira tickets? Most definitely. There is probably some archetype of person who delights in creating tasks, epics, etc. More power to them. > Perhaps under different circumstances people with ADHD would shine without needing any medication. When I first got into tech (I did a mid-career shift), I was a shining star that would grind out ticket after ticket, so long as the work was interesting. It helped that we did Kanban, so there was always work to do. The first time I had to do some monotonous administrative work, though, I just kept putting it off, and putting it off, and putting it off... then when the deadline loomed, I suddenly had motivation to get it done. As an aside, this style of work did _not_ do well with Scrum, because of the absurd insistence on sizing tickets based on the average team member's capabilities. I have no idea how long it will take Person Foo to get that done; I already know exactly how to do it, and can knock it out in a few hours. Why don't you let Person Foo figure out how long things will take _them_, instead of making me artificially slow down? Presumably they have some specialties they could also zero in on, and the entire team would then move faster.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  For me it is helpful to think of it as a disability in the social model of disability. I wear glasses too and it's interesting to compare these two things. Having poor vision doesn't negatively affect me much because I can easily access effective accommodations for it. ADHD can be the same, and is not mostly because of my lack of power & rights in respect to choices my employers make.
mrguyorama 2y ago
A huuuuuuuuge note for others: Woman and men (on average) experience and present symptoms very differently for the "four" mental disorders, ie anxiety, autism, ADHD, and bipolar disorder. For a lot of women this sucks, because most medical professionals have been trained on the "male" symptoms, and basically left in the dark about how to properly assess/diagnose a female patient. My mother and girlfriend and sister have all been misdiagnosed because of this for decades. If you are a woman and struggle with anxiety, it might actually "be" caused by ADHD or autism and struggles around those, and there is some play going the other direction too. If you are experiencing mental struggles that is "medication resistant", consider seeking a more thorough psych eval. In my case: I am near physically incapable of doing things that I "need" to do, with the more I "need" to do something, the harder by brain and body will rebel against doing it. For most of my life this has mostly resulted in me being a very unregimented student who struggled with large projects and time management. I was lucky to have one of my main interests being "learning" so I basically independently excelled in school, so nobody even thought to ask for me to be tested. I finally reached my personal mental/autodidactic limits in college, and only made it through with luck and a good support network and privilege. The hardest part for me is getting treatment. One of the things I "need" to do is find a psychiatrist who can fully diagnose me and prescribe me something. My doctor is, rather unhelpful, or doesn't realize she needs to help me. Either way, that struggle plus the state of undersupply in psychiatric workers, plus the fact that pretty much no pharmacy in the southern half of my state has any supply of any ADHD meds means that even if I could pull myself together to get that help, I couldn't get any medicine anyway. The disability part is terrifying. I will never be "fixed". Roughly only 2% of the population is ADHD, and the zeitgeist in most of America, no matter how mildly progressive we get on things like gay marriage, continues to be "if you aren't perfectly productive in the system, you are lazy, bad, and deserve suffering". I don't expect anyone to ever legislate employers to just deal with ADHD employees, so I figure I'm going to get fired eventually. If I wasn't into books and then reading things on the internet when I was 10 as a form of escapism from home life, I would not have lucked into a lucrative job as a programmer, and already would likely be homeless. I've only ever been told I'm extremely, and obviously technically excellent, but because I struggle with time management and struggle to gain access to the medicine I need, society's opinion is that people like me aren't worth the trouble.

ldom66 2y ago

Completely agree with your second paragraph. I don't think it's helpful to label it as a "disability". Although the medical term is "disorder", at least for me, this kind of thinking got me digging a hole for myself that I had to climb out of. According to recent research, ADHD may be the fruit of evolution, making us focus on what's important and discarding the mundane. This makes us incredibly creative, out-of-the box thinkers and very efficient at tasks that truly engage us. Once I focused on that idea, I could start working on my strength, and stop "curing" my shortcomings.

sgarland 2y ago
Unfortunately, Jira work is sometimes massively important (to your boss), and also tremendously boring. That was the biggest obstacle I had, and the biggest improvement after medication – the ability to easily do work I’d rather not be doing.
- onemoresoop 2y ago
  But do you agree that not everyone is meant to work on Jira tickets? I think a lot of people's ADHD flies under the radar until they face the unescapable tedium of corporate work and bureaucracy. Perhaps under different circumstances people with ADHD would shine without needing any medication.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    > But do you agree that not everyone is meant to work on Jira tickets? Most definitely. There is probably some archetype of person who delights in creating tasks, epics, etc. More power to them. > Perhaps under different circumstances people with ADHD would shine without needing any medication. When I first got into tech (I did a mid-career shift), I was a shining star that would grind out ticket after ticket, so long as the work was interesting. It helped that we did Kanban, so there was always work to do. The first time I had to do some monotonous administrative work, though, I just kept putting it off, and putting it off, and putting it off... then when the deadline loomed, I suddenly had motivation to get it done. As an aside, this style of work did _not_ do well with Scrum, because of the absurd insistence on sizing tickets based on the average team member's capabilities. I have no idea how long it will take Person Foo to get that done; I already know exactly how to do it, and can knock it out in a few hours. Why don't you let Person Foo figure out how long things will take _them_, instead of making me artificially slow down? Presumably they have some specialties they could also zero in on, and the entire team would then move faster.
giraffe_lady 2y ago
For me it is helpful to think of it as a disability in the social model of disability. I wear glasses too and it's interesting to compare these two things. Having poor vision doesn't negatively affect me much because I can easily access effective accommodations for it. ADHD can be the same, and is not mostly because of my lack of power & rights in respect to choices my employers make.

mrguyorama 2y ago

A huuuuuuuuge note for others: Woman and men (on average) experience and present symptoms very differently for the "four" mental disorders, ie anxiety, autism, ADHD, and bipolar disorder. For a lot of women this sucks, because most medical professionals have been trained on the "male" symptoms, and basically left in the dark about how to properly assess/diagnose a female patient. My mother and girlfriend and sister have all been misdiagnosed because of this for decades. If you are a woman and struggle with anxiety, it might actually "be" caused by ADHD or autism and struggles around those, and there is some play going the other direction too. If you are experiencing mental struggles that is "medication resistant", consider seeking a more thorough psych eval. In my case: I am near physically incapable of doing things that I "need" to do, with the more I "need" to do something, the harder by brain and body will rebel against doing it. For most of my life this has mostly resulted in me being a very unregimented student who struggled with large projects and time management. I was lucky to have one of my main interests being "learning" so I basically independently excelled in school, so nobody even thought to ask for me to be tested. I finally reached my personal mental/autodidactic limits in college, and only made it through with luck and a good support network and privilege. The hardest part for me is getting treatment. One of the things I "need" to do is find a psychiatrist who can fully diagnose me and prescribe me something. My doctor is, rather unhelpful, or doesn't realize she needs to help me. Either way, that struggle plus the state of undersupply in psychiatric workers, plus the fact that pretty much no pharmacy in the southern half of my state has any supply of any ADHD meds means that even if I could pull myself together to get that help, I couldn't get any medicine anyway. The disability part is terrifying. I will never be "fixed". Roughly only 2% of the population is ADHD, and the zeitgeist in most of America, no matter how mildly progressive we get on things like gay marriage, continues to be "if you aren't perfectly productive in the system, you are lazy, bad, and deserve suffering". I don't expect anyone to ever legislate employers to just deal with ADHD employees, so I figure I'm going to get fired eventually. If I wasn't into books and then reading things on the internet when I was 10 as a form of escapism from home life, I would not have lucked into a lucrative job as a programmer, and already would likely be homeless. I've only ever been told I'm extremely, and obviously technically excellent, but because I struggle with time management and struggle to gain access to the medicine I need, society's opinion is that people like me aren't worth the trouble.