[gyulai]

If there's a program to create work environments for people who experience mortal battles with burnout, procrastination and self-doubt when things are stale and there's nothing to do but boring forms, then that sounds like something I'd quite like to get into myself, even without having ADHD.

[adhd_thraway]

It's quite interesting, but I believe that procrastination and burnout are rather obvious signs of ADHD and if you experience this you should verify this.

I'm a huge mental health advocate and I've been such for years (I worked with a lot of psychiatrists and psychologists when doing deep interpersonal training for business purposes and I built a lot of trust toward field) and I've been working constantly with therapists, have friends who are psychiatrists etc.

Yet no one, at any point suggested this might be ADHD because:

- ADHD has a lot of bad press (as something that is result of bad parenthood - which is false, that's genetics)

- ADHD in adults is somewhat new (where I live there all the meds are prescription only for children with note that they shouldn't be used for adults)

- ADHD adults are either successful (because they overcame hardships and are perceived as very interesting people in general) so they don't seek help or very miserable (dropping jobs, partners etc.) - they can't afford diagnosis and treatment

- ADHD in women is severely underdiagnosed (because it's attributed to hormonal mood swings)

- ADHD is often used as a joke, so people treat it as joke

- ADHD often gives symptoms that might be diagnosed as substance addiction, bi-polar personality, neuroticism, anger issues etc., people treat this for years and it doesn't help

- If you get in the wrong basket it's really hard to get out of it (I was working with different set of issues)

And that was for more then a decade. I decided to diagnose myself with specialist only after lately I couldn't focus on anything absolutely at all. I had weeks were I didn't do anything I really wanted - that wasn't normal and I went to a huge stretch to find out what that was.

[burntoutfire]

> It's quite interesting, but I believe that procrastination and burnout are rather obvious signs of ADHD and if you experience this you should verify this.

My guess is that procrastination and burnout are signs that work in our society is just not a good fit for our mental needs (see also immense popularity of video games, which provide "fake work" that is closer to what we need). I suspect there were no procrastination, burnout, ADHD and other mental afflictions among hunters-gatherers.

[gyulai]

Couldn't agree more. I don't see it as a reflection of my own mental state or mental health at all, just as a reflection of the fact that it's time to start looking for a new job.

I think that it is quite common for software engineers to have a feeling of being badly attuned to their work environments and then misattribute that as a problem that lies within themselves rather than their work environments.

I even feel that some management practices common to our field are basically a form of psychological abuse, akin to gaslighting, which provide to the employee a false reality where everything that goes wrong is their own fault. For example yearly reviews and institutionalized continuous feedback cultures tend to create a lot of salience around what an employee is doing wrong and should do differently in the eyes of management, while seldom allowing any iota of attention to fall on questions about what the company is doing wrong and should do differently in the eyes of the employee.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was something that ended up actually causing mental disorders in employees. This is pure speculation, but our field does have very poor stats on mental health [1]. A competing explanation is that our field is attractive to people with pre-existing problems and therefore draws in people with mental disorder, rather than creating mental disorder. Or maybe it's a combination of both.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-demog...

[gyulai]

BTW: adhd_thraway Can you provide an e-mail or other way to reach out 1:1? There might be an opportunity for a collaboration here.

[adhd_thraway]

Sure, it's anonymized though, cause I'd rather this thread to drown slightly so it's harder to link to (yeah, I can reply btw. from same address):

koncha_slizga_0b (at) icloud.com

[Zababa]

> see also immense popularity of video games, which provide "fake work" that is closer to what we need

Or sports, or hobbies in general.

[pseudalopex]

ADHD brains are physically different. You can see it with MRI. I suspect ADHD hunter gatherers hated weaving.

[gyulai]

I wonder how robust those findings actually are, especially for high-functioning persons in the ADHD spectrum where the symptoms are not clinically debilitating.

I'm thinking now of how f-MRI is notoriously difficult to get right in methodological terms [1] while at the same time providing an all-to-convenient path for psychologists wanting to add credibility to their claims by tying them into physiological manifestation. I know next to nothing about the field though, so who knows. ...just expressing baseline scepticism I guess.

[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/fmri-gets-slap-in-the-...

[pseudalopex]

The problem with FMRI is fishing for correlations in an ocean of variables without adjusting the calculations. Structural MRI finding physical differences where older evidence predicted is very different.

Organisms are analog. Why would you expect marginally symptomatic brains to be clearly distinct?