[romwell]

A bunch of memes? There are 20,000+ words of notes there that are accompanied by comics (made specifically to raise ADHD awareness) and relatable memes. But hey, sure :)

If you find the memes interesting, but more importantly - relatable, my best tip for managing would be to get an ADHD evaluation[1] and see if medication[2] works for you.

You can also use this list to tell your therapist/coach about the issues you are struggling with - it's much easier when there's a list at hand. I simply pointed mine to this page.

If you relate to just a couple of entries, then I don't have much advice. If you find many entries relatable on most days, then joining ADHD groups on social media, learning about it, getting self-help books specifically for people with ADHD, and, yes, medication will be a life-changing experience.

Which case is it for you?

[1]http://romankogan.net/adhd/#Diagnosis

[2]http://romankogan.net/adhd/#Medication

[grillvogel]

i can relate to most of the entries but i don't buy into medication. pretty much everyone would be more productive on amphetamines

[romwell]

If you relate to most of the entries, then you should definitely consider talking to a professional.

There are many resources available to help with ADHD, first and foremost being understanding what works and what doesn't work with your ADHD brain.

Regarding medication, there is a lot of unnecessary stigma around it. Please consider my experience with it: [1] to understand what I'm about to say.

It's not about productivity. It's about not feeling pain associated with initiating, finishing, or switching tasks. It's about slowing the thoughts in your brain a bit so that you could find the first step more easily, and have more control over either not initiating other tasks, or switching out of something that you can't stop doing.

You have to understand that most people don't have these issues to begin with. I have no idea what amphetamines do for them.

For people with ADHD, medication is like glasses for the brain. It helps us see better. If somebody takes your glasses, they won't improve their vision - in fact, they will probably mess up their own. That's why both glasses and medication have to be prescribed by a professional.

There is much more than medication though. It's about approaching the things you face in ways that work for you. It's understanding what strengths you have (e.g. acting efficiently in emergencies or under high pressure in critical tasks) vs. things that your brain isn't good at (estimating time, doing the same thing consistently, etc.)

Going into that is way beyond the scope of a comment. There is a lot to learn.

[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd#Medication

[anonymous-9932]

>If you relate to most of the entries, then you should definitely consider talking to a professional.

Doesn't it have to be debilitating though? I relate to a lot of those things, read some books, and nod along, etc., and even talked to a psychiatrist about it, but he was pretty dismissive about it.

[taurath]

There's been a groundswell on social media wherein everything functionally becomes ADHD, ASD, neurodivergent etc. - many people have taken up these diagnoses as a self-identity, and I don't think thats a bad thing to try to build community around an idea.

However, the net of symptoms and behaviors is cast really widely, and I think overall the definitions really start to lose their usefulness when so many traits are bucketed into these categories. To start, a disorder is only that if it is causing difficulty in your life, in reaching your goals, doing what you want or taking care of yourself. Most people identify as that but can't necessarily put a name on it.

My personal experience is I was Dx'd with ADHD, and then ASD (then Aspergers) at an early age of 10. The reasoning was I presented with some oversensitivity to sensory input (loud noises, etc) and had trouble socializing. I internally accepted (or was forced to accept) this definition for myself for a very long time - I was literally told as a child I couldn't read faces, and so I never really tried until I rebelled from the given model that I was somehow incapable in my late teens.

It turns out, at the very minimum the ASD diagnoses couldn't be further from the truth. I am just a very sensitive person, I read faces and expressions extremely well and if anything I'm a natural social butterfly, though emotionally very anxious.

A good few differential diagnoses for anyone looking at what they might identify with include both CPTSD and Attachment Disorders. The commonality between them is that both of those are caused environmentally rather than some innate genetic trait which is usually proposed regarding ASD/ADHD. And its also true that two people in the same environment won't necessarily develop the same disorders, or any. This is a bit of a long rant, but for me a CPTSD diagnosis and related treatment modalities has helped me develop more in the past year or two than literal decades of work around ASD/ADHD - everyone is different and YMMV, just wanted to show that there are some other options.

[romwell]

>There's been a groundswell on social media wherein everything functionally becomes ADHD

That sounds needlessly dismissive in the context of the link that I posted. It does not help constructively (unlike you sharing your story - thank you for that!).

The page I linked has over 100 entries about specific ways in which ADHD makes adult life difficult. Specifically, I have written a long list of reasons why I consider it a disorder that impairs me in certain scenarios [1].

I ask you to read [1] before replying to this comment, so that we have a common context.

I am guessing that you haven't done so yet, because struggling with executive dysfunction, time blindness, and five dozen other traits/symptoms on a daily basis would surely not be "casting the net too widely" to say that it might be ADHD :)

And on the other hand, while there's an overlap with CPTSD and ASD, seeing that you don't experience things the same way might help someone who has been incorrectly diagnosed with ADHD.

I am terribly sorry that you didn't get the care that you needed — but neither did I, until I learned more about ADHD from social media posts like the one I'm making now.

You see a flurry of these posts because the medical community has failed to diagnose it in many people (as well as diagnosing others incorrectly!), leaving many people without help, and is still very much ignorant about it. They didn't even believe that adults can have ADHD all the way into 1970s!

So quite a few adults — women in particular — are only getting diagnosis and care now, because of ADHD advocacy on social media.

The reason why people identify as ADHD/ASD is because getting care/meds/restructuring their lives accordingly makes life significantly less painful for them. The most common sentiment in late-diagnosed people is grief over all the years they've been needlessly living life on "hard mode", all the struggles they didn't need to face, all the opportunities missed.

The diagnosis, as you mentioned, is only useful insofar as it helps people improve their lives. I'm sorry for your experience; not seeing improvement is the reason to challenge the diagnosis.

This is why I believe the page I made could be useful to someone like you. Maybe if you saw more personal accounts of people with ADHD and CPTSD, you would have realized that CPTSD is the correct diagnosis sooner.

ADHD in particular seems to be diagnosed from the perspective of "how is this making the lives of their parents difficult". There are still too few resources dedicated to helping adults live their lives.

Again, thank you for sharing your story and perspective. It's very interesting because my case seems to be a mirror image: an unsuccessful struggle with anxiety and depression, until consequences of undiagnosed ADHD were revealed to be the root cause.

One of the ways in which the diagnosis made my life better is knowing that my brain will simply sabotage any work that I don't believe in. When I was trying to force myself to do something that I believed should not be done, no matter how big or small, I suffered greatly.

In one case, it seemed that doing X to stay at company Y with great coworkers made all the sense even if X did not (it's just one project, I'll get over it!). Now I know to quit before being assigned to something that I can't stand behind — and am living a happier (and must I say, better paid) life. Simply knowing that already changed my life for the better.

Oh, and ADHD meds have helped with my sleep issues that I've had for as long as I can remember myself.

That alone was worth it.

I can enjoy mornings on a regular basis for the first time in my life, at 34, because of that social media groundswell :)

[1]http://romankogan.net/adhd/#Awfully%20Described%20Human%20Di...

[taurath]

> That sounds needlessly dismissive in the context of the link that I posted

Sorry not my intention at all, I was responding to move of a peeve I'd had recently getting stuck in ADHD tiktok.

I really appreciate your post here - I do agree that it MIGHT be ADHD, it might be related to ADHD, etc - I suppose my instinctive pushback is due that so many of these things can be ADHD, and they can be other things as well. In my case: capital "t" Trauma seems to fit better - but the differential is really difficult. I've been through the ringer trying to understand the source of my problems and ADHD was useful for some things, and it took me a long time to figure out it wasn't the full story.

The fun part with CPTSD is it effects your long term memory formation whenever you have a trigger or flashback so that you can have been going off the walls with anxiety for an entire evening and the next day not even remember what caused it, only that you "had a bad night". This creates a massive depression and anxiety complex where you don't feel you can trust any of your feelings.

> This is why I believe the page I made could be useful to someone like you. Maybe if you saw more personal accounts of people with ADHD and CPTSD, you would have realized that CPTSD is the correct diagnosis sooner.

I see really little differentiation in ADHD/CPTSD social media discourse so I was trying to provide my own. Its really easy to mistake dissociation with an attention disorder. If one treats it as ADHD, they might find it never really gets better despite all sorts of treatments, which let me tell you after a decade of expert level therapy can be really disheartening. I can roll down the entire list you posted and pick out one thing after another that might be related to CPTSD. I'm not saying its definitely one thing or another, I really just wanted to say that it can get really hard to differentiate, even with experienced professionals diagnosing people.

And who knows, ADHD might be a co-factor in all of this for me. One can have both, and they can feed off each other.

> ADHD in particular seems to be diagnosed from the perspective of "how is this making the lives of their parents difficult". There are still too few resources dedicated to helping adults live their lives.

I agree entirely - its really similar for people with ASD - so many of the resources are there for teaching parents how to manage a child, not even for the child, let alone how to manage things as an adult.

> One of the ways in which the diagnosis made my life better is knowing that my brain will simply sabotage any work that I don't believe in. When I was trying to force myself to do something that I believed should not be done, no matter how big or small, I suffered greatly.

I think this is good advice - I do the same with jobs as well. I think most people do struggle with this but they probably don't allow themselves to think deeply enough about the work to ever assign a value judgement, or they let the work be framed in the best possible light as if a detrimental thing is actually beneficial. I don't really have the ability to do either of those things.

[romwell]

Thanks for this response!

Re: CPTSD vs ADHD vs ASD, I do run into discussion of differences and overlaps on social media; there is also a correlation (ASD and ADHD traits can lead to adverse treatment by parents and peers, resulting in CPTSD).

I have two cousins (siblings); one has ADHD, and by the looks of it, the way she's treated for her symptoms is going to land her with CPTSD if she's not already there.

FWIW, my treatment started with trauma, and then I realized that it's not all there is to it. I don't feel ADHD contributed to it that much, but in any case, I am getting help with both.

>The fun part with CPTSD is it effects your long term memory formation whenever you have a trigger or flashback so that you can have been going off the walls with anxiety for an entire evening and the next day not even remember what caused it, only that you "had a bad night".

Much fun, can relate; keeping a log helps.

> I can roll down the entire list you posted and pick out one thing after another that might be related to CPTSD ... it can get really hard to differentiate, even with experienced professionals diagnosing people.

I wouldn't put that much trust in experienced professionals, who, until not long ago, thought that ADHD magically evaporates when people grow into adulthood :)

Legit, adult ADHD was not believed to exist until the 1970s. And it's pretty common! Last week, a woman who got her diagnosis in her 40s said that it came as a surprise to her husband, who was a psychology professor (the discussion was in one of the ADHD groups on FB). The said psychology professor, educator, was looking ADHD in the eye for decades and didn't see it. The woman tried ADHD medication for the first time, and was flabbergasted by the positive effect it had on her.

While the overlap is sizable, I feel like differentiation is only hard because the professionals are, well, not that professional.

I would be very curious to know which things you don't relate to, just to get one data point on ADHD vs CPTSD differences.

To my knowledge, the following are traits of ADHD, but not CPTSD:

* Hyperfocus/Hyperfixation: being able, under the right circumstances to develop a seemingly sudden and very intense focus/state of flow, during which you go deep into whatever caught your attention (be it a work project, or an all-night Wikipedia binge to find out all there is to know about three-speed planetary gears). This includes picking up hobbies, getting reasonably good at them very fast (and at the expense of everything else), then dropping them to pick up another hobby. Hyperfocus on an activity comes with not having control over where it goes. Need to fill out taxes? Too bad, need to research the harmony of Girl From Ipanema and the history of that jazz standard in as much detail as is humanly possible!

* Time blindness: not being able to estimate the time it takes to do anything (underestimating usually), not perceiving much difference between events that happened a long time ago and last week, non-chronological organization of events in memory

* Taking 11 years to mail a package: people with ADHD have tons of unfinished projects due to running out of hyperfocus and executive dysfunction. However, these projects are never truly abandoned - and sometimes, they are brought to completion, years later. My favorite example is a gift I meant to mail to a friend for 11 years... and actually did it! The trait here is not abandoning incomplete projects way past the point where most people would.

* Paradoxical reaction to stimulants (in particular, amphetamines, anesthesia, caffeine). In practical terms: coffee can make me sleepy if it's very strong, so does Adderall.

* Feeling calm in emergencies: that's the situations where ADHD people thrive in. Particularly, jobs like EMT seem to be a great fit.

* Speaking faster than other people, and preferring to listening to videos at 1.5x - 2x speed, otherwise it feels "too slow"

* Completing other person's sentences

* Empathizing with other people by immediately bringing up a similar/relatable story from your own past to show that you have a basis on which you can relate (also in ASD)

* Auditory Processing Disorder, aka audio buffering: someone tells you something, you don't hear it and ask them to repeat. Then as they start repeating, what they said finally loads in your brain and you answer their question (before they repeated it). (also in ASD)

* Infodumping: someone brought up a special interest or a recent hyperfixation of yours? Well, well, well. If they didn't want to know the history of the golden age of hydrogen-filled rigid airships, they shouldn't have mentioned Zeppelins, and now they better be prepared to listen up for the next 30 minutes or so. (also in ASD)

* Writing overly long messages and comments compared to most of people (high five here :D )

OK, that should be enough to start. Many other ADHD traits (particularly, executive dysfunction, prioritizing, planning, initiating/switching/completing tasks, memory issues, etc etc) are, to my knowledge, exacerbated by trauma, unlike the above.

As in, trauma is not going to make you speak faster, or fall asleep from a double espresso, or give you a sudden ability to laser-focus on things (often the exciting, challenging things - but not necessarily important ones), and so on.

Thanks again for your comment, would be really curious about your take on the above!

[taurath]

I have about half of those traits - again I’m not saying ADHD isn’t a possible factor to some level :). I have a laser focus, but no time blindness (just memory gaps related to dissociation), I don’t have a ton of in progress projects, I feel calm in emergencies (every emergency is simpler than my catastrophizing mind has already come up with), I have a hypersensitivity to some stimulants and normal w others, I don’t really speak too fast for people nor listen to vids at 1.5/2x, I can infodump but don’t unless I’m damn sure they wanna hear it, I have auditory sensitivity/a bit of a filtering problem in loud places but rarely miss what someone in front of me is saying, I don’t complete others sentences often (it’s usually rude), and I like writing long messages about things I have spent a lot of my life learning about. I also do relate things to myself when empathizing but also sometimes don’t if someone is in obvious distress.

Broadly a lot of those can come from different sources I think. A lot of mental horsepower could explain many of them, in a way?

Otoh, I basically raised myself emotionally - I had absent (emotionally) or commandeering parents and had a very insecure early attachment. I spent most of my time from middle and high school drugged up on medications and spent a ton of time alone - a big factor there was it was I was raised in an extreme religious environment and told I was better than everyone else and that I should act in an extremely specific “godly” way that opened me up for lots of bullying. Pulling apart the pieces of “what happened” has been a lifelong task.

[eponai]

romwell, I'd just like to say your comments here on this topic are stellar, relatable, and 100% true for me.

>* Paradoxical reaction to stimulants (in particular, amphetamines, anesthesia, caffeine). In practical terms: coffee can make me sleepy if it's very strong, so does Adderall.

:nods: My psychiatrist was waffling between cPTSD and ADHD as a cause of my concentration issues until I told her that one time I tried cocaine and promptly took a nap.

>* Feeling calm in emergencies: that's the situations where ADHD people thrive in. Particularly, jobs like EMT seem to be a great fit.

Oh hey, I've worked in tech support for the past 20 years where high profile clients are freaking out when their servers go down, everything is an emergency, and every day is different. :)

There's one thing that's been left out of this discussion thus far, relating to this comment:

>> I can roll down the entire list you posted and pick out one thing after another that might be related to CPTSD ... it can get really hard to differentiate, even with experienced professionals diagnosing people.

ADHD is caused by a dysfunctioning pre-frontal cortex. [1] cPTSD is caused by ongoing chronic trauma. I had a QEEG done and it was clearly apparent my pre-frontal cortex was low-activity.

I also agree with the theory that cPTSD and ADHD/ASD can go hand in hand, because the ADHD or ASD can cause mal-treatment. I was severely abused as a child precisely because of my (un-diagnosed at the time, because girl) ASD and ADHD.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2894421/