ADHD Didn't Break Me–My Parents Did
186 comments
·February 1, 2025lqet
__rito__
There are already some research hinting that ADHD in human population helped human civilization progress. [0][1]
[0]: https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/evolution
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/21/adhd-may-hav...
cromulent
For sure. We need all types. ADHD people would have been naturally de-selected otherwise.
I submitted your [1] here back then, conversation:
swayvil
All the great inventions, great art, great ideas. ADHD. Nobody else has the focus.
In ancient times the Raja Yogis (basically wizards) preferred to recruit from those with ADHD. They called them "habitually one-pointed".
__rito__
I have read much about Yogic traditions, and always thought that people with ADHDs are particularly well-suited for spiritual progress as laid down in core texts and aligned literature.
> In ancient times the Raja Yogis (basically wizards) preferred to recruit from those with ADHD. They called them "habitually one-pointed".
I never knew this. Can you please site some sources/supporting literature? I would like to read much more about this.
Another thing I thought- to be an Advaita Vedantin, to see God in everything (both 'data' and 'code' of everything), one benefits from ADHD, as such person will have expertise or knowledge in many areas. This is helpful, if not required to see an emerging "grand pattern" in things.
Also, if you have somewhat deep knowledge of each school of thoughts of Indian Philosophy, you also begin to see patterns, and get all these divisions are illusory and limited. And hence Bhagavad Gita 4.11.
patcon
Wouldn't "habitually one-pointed" people be very focussed, rather than distracted?
Or is the idea that a very distracted person being honed into a focussed and aware person is a duality that's valued -- able to live in both worlds? (Rather than a very focussed person being taught to be distracted and highly integrative?)
godelski
> People with ADHD - and their parents and teachers - should therefore embrace their individuality as a kind of reservoir talent in the human gene pool.
But actually academia is incredibly stressful and feels hostile. There's the publish or perish, so you can't go down the rabbit holes and deep dive. You don't have time to dig deep. Dealing with review is crazy as you have to argue to people who don't care that your stuff matters even though no one can tell if it does or not and you should just pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake. (We used to not review this way. We used to check for errors and plagiarism and if not, publish). Everything is just hyper metric focused even though everyone knows the metrics mean so little to the actual end goal they are everything to your survival goals. The goals are at odds and I don't think anyone wants to do anything about it even though many will admit it.
I know some people will say I'm naive to think academia should work that way but I think that's naive, so we'll have to agree to disagree. I think academia should be about pursuing knowledge and giving people the environment they need to do that, with the trade being teaching the future generations.
To be honest it feels the world is becoming more hostile to me. There is becoming less flexibility. Fewer opportunities to explore and hire punishments for doing so. Its harder to take things apart (physical or code) as the gardens close more and more. Harder to fix things, harder to make things to things I want (for utility and for fun). It literally feels like the walls are closing in and there's not enough adderal that can fix that.
I think you are right that the chaos helps escape local minima. If I've learned anything in my studies it's that noise is essential in optimization theory. It is also a measurement of error or uncertainty. So unless you can measure something to infinite precision then you should be incorporating noise into your models
ghxst
> It literally feels like the walls are closing in and there's not enough Adderall that can fix that.
My psychiatrist told me that when using any amphetamine-based medication for ADHD, it's important to see it as a way to reinforce routines and habits, whatever they may be, and not necessarily a fix to ADHD itself but rather as a tool to help my brain.
With that in mind, I was advised to take my medication and immediately start doing the things I usually struggle with. For me, that just meant getting to work on specific tasks or studying specific things. Sticking to this approach made a huge difference in how well the medication worked for me.
Over time, I was able to lower my dose, and now I find it much easier to settle into a routine. While the medication can dull my creativity, I've learned to work around that by adjusting when I take it and planning out my work accordingly.
In the case my workload or life changes I tend to get back to my old dosage for a short period until new routines settle, I'm very fortunate to have a family doctor that understands this and is willing to change dosages when needed.
I'm not sure how this would play out with extended-release versions or if this applies to your situation, but I figured it was worth sharing.
Also curious to know if this approach has worked particularly well for me but not for others, or if you take the same approach already.
godelski
Thanks. I do use a similar strategy though I've only been on Adderall for about 2 years. I do take XR and treat it like a baseline. But I also have an instant that allows me to adjust. Getting better at dosing but yeah it definitely requires flexibility. I do notice it depends on lots of things like sleep, exercise, and diet. Doesn't help that human sensitivity is similar to manufacturing tolerances lol. It's hard to find the routine though as there are a lot of external forces and it doesn't help that everyone acts like they need to be done right away (I mean the big issue with ADHD is triage and prioritization). This is worse in academia than when I've worked and honestly I only went to get diagnosed because the environment made everything more difficult.
One thing I found helps is I put desiccant in my bottles and it helps maintain the quality. I do some 3d printing and so store any excess medicine with filament.
UniverseHacker
I think the lowest effective dose of the mildest possible stimulant is a pretty good strategy for people with ADHD doing any type of creative work. It also probably helps to take it intermittently so you can have the benefits of both being with and without it.
I find my creativity is still pretty much 100% on a very low (basically small child level) dose of ritalin. I won't even touch adderall- it completely killed my creativity and ability to sleep soundly.
UniverseHacker
I'm also an academic researcher with ADHD, and feel exactly the same as you. Sometimes my hyperfocus and sense of adventure leads to big discoveries and resulting publications that keep me successful... but that is interspersed with months or years of guilt and terror over not meeting expectations at regular intervals. I love science, but I do feel like my health is suffering from this, and that I'm putting much more energy into trying to hide/mask ADHD than actually doing my job.
Anyways, you are not alone, there are others like you also going through this. I am thinking about how nice it would be to have a community for ADHD academics to share advice and strategies.
godelski
> I'm putting much more energy into trying to hide/mask ADHD than actually doing my job.
> Anyways, you are not alone
thayne
This is actually why I decided not to pursue a career in Academia. I originally wanted to work in acadeemia, but as I finished my undergraduate I realized that while I would love to do research, the other aspects, like applying for grants, constantly having to publish, etc. would be extremely taxing and stressful for me.
godelski
Yeah a lot of the faculty is surprised I don't want to pursue academia. I absolutely love research and I actually like teaching (and my students really like my teaching style too[0]). Grants I can with but yeah it sucks. Why I won't do it though is all the politics. The admins hired to take care of all the bureaucracy just make things take longer as you need to ask approval for things but can't do so through a direct line of communication so it takes all day. I just get nothing done and am having so many interruptions you can't settle into deep work
[0] funny story. My advisor is kinda lazy so pushed it off to me. But he didn't always show up. But he would teach sometimes because the department would get mad if he didn't (politics). But when it'd be just me the student in the front would nervously ask "is it just you?" And when I'd say yes they all relax and get excited lol
patcon
You might get a kick out of this: it's an attempt to remodel funding to reward and reinvigorate research with the intelligence of the folks who straddle fields -- to reward those who make correct predictions about where future "breakthrough innovations" (ie. Intersectional and significant research convergences) will appear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLDNMAOn24
Puja Ohlhaver has some great ideas and interventions in this space <3
godelski
Where she begins the talk made me laugh a lot. I research machine learning and one thing I disagree with a lot of my peers with is the speed in which ML is progressing. I don't disagree that things have changed rapidly, but the underlying work and innovation is rather slow. There's a lot of similarities in frameworks and underlying connections that mean one should be able to transfer a lot of knowledge from one niche to another. (e.g. I was focused on normalizing flows in the beginning of my PhD, while everyone was on GANs, and when diffusion came out I instantly understood it. And now flows are becoming a thing but I still am unable to publish in this area because I cannot obtain a reviewer that understands the base concepts nor the history and context of the papers. It doesn't work if I have to spend 10 pages in background contextualizing everything...).
I think with funding, the thing is you need to embrace the noise. I don't want to dissuade people from trying to optimize this process. But I think if we don't recognize there is a high amount of noise, that it is doomed to fail. There's things you know you know, there's things you know you don't know, there are things you don't know that you don't know, and there are things you think you know and don't know. Due to the latter two, you have to embrace noise into the system or else you will be limited to the first two. You have to embrace the outside, wild, and crazy. It can be extremely difficult to differentiate genius from craziness, and often there is none. There's always a price, so the question is which is more costly. She picks universities as the great breakthrough place, and to be fair, I mostly agree, but I think there's a lot of metric hacking that she isn't thinking about. That this has been baked in for years. The people that are successful in the system breed that system. Nor does it account for the dark horses, the noise. It reinforces fast timelines, as we're rewarding predictability in domains where it may take several decades for those predictions to be proven accurate or not. There's a certain irony in her mentioning Higgs, as his original paper was in 1964 but we didn't discover the particle until 2012.
Part of the issue she is talking about is solved more easily. Lots of research is rejected for lack of novelty. Why this is even a metric to judge a paper's worth is beyond me, as the foundation of science is about reproducibility. It also encourages obscurification as so much is obvious once you've been told, but not prior. If we go back to the form of publishing where we publish works void of major errors and plagiarism, I bet we would see an increase in innovation again. Another part of the issue is in evaluation itself (similarly solved). We're all under lots of time pressure and so few spend time reviewing carefully (you'd be shocked at some reviews I've gotten and similarly how generic they are: "paper is well written and easy to understand. Not enough experiments, not novel. There are too many writing errors" (points out easily solvable thing like a broken cross reference or an incorrect issue like saying 'these data')). You can see part of this in HN comments too btw. Where people look at benchmarks and read them as answers instead of hints. Which there is an extra problem in that anything sufficiently novel will be unlikely to be state of the art on all things in the initial go. So it is easy to reject. Then the research is not pursued. But this is ludicrous when we're talking about research, which is at a much lower level. The problem is people read research papers as if they are reviewing products. This can only stifle innovation. In machine learning there is the "gpu rich" and the "gpu poor." I can with high confidence say that the "gpu poor" aren't any worse at innovating, but rather that their works are just more likely to be rejected. How can you compete when others can spend 2-5x the money to tune parameters when what the paper is about is an architectural change or a change to optimization methods. We aren't holding variables equal here and very few want to admit it.
RandomWorker
ADHD and PHD here. Somehow I survived and thrived. I think for us it’s important to know that we are extremely slow on one aspect which is reading/acquiring knowledge/editing drafts, but really fast at making connections, writing a first draft, coming up with new ideas. I’ve always felt my input bandwidth is like dial up, but the output is high speed glass fibre. You will meet many people that are the opposite in academia. Just don’t get frustrated when people pull past you at the start, you catch up later
ghxst
I tend to not edit drafts as much anymore and just start over, more of a destructive iterative design approach. It makes it harder to plan projects and colleagues don't always like it but my output is high and I tend to be really good at cutting off things early that won't work. Do you feel similarly?
godelski
I'm not so sure the knowledge acquisition is slower. I'm actually starting to believe it's faster. What my other ADHD friend and I notice is the threshold for thinking you get it is lower. I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand any single thing but I do have a lot of peers which will say yes far earlier and it leads to a lot of confusing experiences.
A common experience we have is that we'll be trying to figure something out then go talk to a larger group or find someone who should understand the thing (e.g. highly relevant publications) and then either "huh, I never thought about that" or they try to answer a different question (I understand they are trying to be helpful but I'd rather "I don't know". It's academia, the whole point is we don't know lol).
Though in other things I fully agree. I'm always slower in "speed to first result" but often that's because I'll write code from scratch, make sure I really understand, and make sure its flexible because I know I'm going to be hacking on it a lot. Others are often forking repos doing a lot of gluing and all that. (When I do that I feel very lost and like I understand nothing). But my experiments end up being more complete and I'm able to answer more questions where someone else would say that's too much work.
I think academia needs both types of people btw. I'm not trying to say I'm better it's just different. There's different advantages. My issue is that the system strongly optimizes for one and not the other. I think the biggest flaw in academia is thinking we know what's a successful line of research and what isn't (along with what's novel, especially post hoc lol). All the evidence seems against this and the high frequency of dark horses suggests it'd be idiotic to rely on predictions to be highly accurate.
meesles
I enjoy this take. As someone who feels like they align with a lot of symptoms associated with ADHD, I thrive in startup environments and would rather be unemployed than work in a corporate environment. That checks out! And there's no harm to it, there are plenty of opportunities for people of all kinds. I think the danger is expecting that any environment fits everyone. We're too many and too diverse for that to be true.
Aurornis
> There has been an interesting result recently, which was discussed here [0]. In an online game where participants had to forage for resources, people with attention deficits scored higher, because they preferred exploration to exploitation.
The “scored higher” part of this study is editorialization. The game was developed in a way that exploration produced a higher numeric result so they could measure something as part of the test. The game was an artificial experiment environment and it was designed to “reward” behavior associated with ADHD, so it would have been more surprising if the game did not result in higher scores for people with ADHD.
The layers of editorialization and hypothesizing built on studies like this remind me of the debate over “depressive realism”. Some researchers put out a study showing that people with depression more accurately interpreted something in some specific scenarios which were designed for the study. It was widely misinterpreted by the public and pop culture science writers as showing that depressed people see the world more accurately, and therefore they are an untapped reservoir for seeing the world as it really is. There’s a huge problem with this interpretation because depression produces a lot of cognitive distortions that make people think things are much worse than they really are, so they’re really only more “accurate” when you have them evaluate situations that are worse than they appear. Yet this nuance is lost in the pop culture debate and many people think “depressive realism” means depressed people have a secret advantage.
I think these ideas have become popular as the diagnostic criteria for ADHD and other conditions have widened to include large percentages of the population. In the past the diagnostic criteria for ADHD was such that it was estimated to have low single digit percentage prevalence in the population. Now we’re at a point where Adderall is the 14th most prescribed drug in America ( https://clincalc.com/DrugStats/Top300Drugs.aspx ).
A similar thing has happened with Autism Spectrum diagnoses, where the criteria were once so strict that it was very rare for someone to get a diagnosis. Now I’m hearing fellow parents casually mention that their young children got an Autism Spectrum diagnosis after simply visiting a medical professional (found on internet listings) and suggesting it. Meanwhile my family friends with a severe autistic child are increasingly frustrated that pop culture idea of autism has shifted so far into the population that people are seemingly forgetting that severe autism is actually very debilitating, much like severe ADHD.
93po
> I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.
I have had life-long crippling ADHD that I am only now, in my 30s, starting to learn to cope with. My biggest thing was educating myself on what ADHD actually was so that I was better able to spot it in my own life, and then apply strategies to address it.
I'm not sure the above is relevant, but what I wanted to say is in response to this:
> I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.
My life has been really difficult because I simply cannot, ever, force myself to do something I don't want to do. I think there are cool goals in life I'd really appreciate - playing an instrument, learning a language, gettign a PhD, etc. But each of these goals involves an activity that I inherently don't want to do and therefore cannot make myself do them. Studying for exams to get into a grad program, practicing consistently for an instrument, studying a language that has no real applicable use in my life. I simply cannot do these things.
On one hand, that sucks. I wish my brain needed less short-term reward. I wish I was able to hold long term goals in my head as a motivation to get stuff done. But ADHD brains are famously very bad at this, mine included.
On the other hand, ADHD, to your point, has forced a LOT of growth and movement in my life. I cannot sit in one job, town, relationship, friendship, forever. I get antsy. I have to try new things. I crave novelty, and I seek it out in every aspect of my life. I do weird, crazy things, and I meet people who also do those things, and we get along just great. I live a very nontraditional lifestyle. And I've tried a million different things, hobbies, people, cities. I know a little bit about absolutely everything and can talk to almost anyone about something they're interested in because I know just enough to ask interesting questions that they enjoy answering.
It's a shame that my ADHD is pretty incompatible with capitalism. I work for a couple years then take a year or more off work, rinse and repeat. I've done this my entire life. Thankfully I work in software that pays well enough, and I'm frugal enough, to make this work. But job hopping plus not caring that much about my work means I don't get FAANG bucks or anything, in fact my salary has always been pretty below average for the work I do. But I make it work.
TeMPOraL
> My life has been really difficult because I simply cannot, ever, force myself to do something I don't want to do. I think there are cool goals in life I'd really appreciate (...). But each of these goals involves an activity that I inherently don't want to do and therefore cannot make myself do them. Studying for exams to get into a grad program, practicing consistently for an instrument, studying a language that has no real applicable use in my life. I simply cannot do these things.
This is 100% accurate description of me, too. Except, I somehow managed to finish my masters' studies, start a career in software and eventually get a decent job, then get married and had a kid before I got diagnosed and realized where all my anguish comes from, why I barely hold on.
On the one hand, that sucks. On the other hand, this still sucks. I really wish I'd been diagnosed a bit earlier, because even if the kind of lifestyle and perspective you described would've worked for me too, it's too late for me now. I can't afford to try any nontrivial novelty, try different hobbies, or do anything else I've been denying myself, with the intensity I actually need.
No, an hour a week of a new hobby will not do; nothing short of frequent binges lasting uninterrupted for days would do. It's how I learned everything, including the knowledge and experience to give me a solid start in software. I thought I don't need it, I denied myself it to fit better with normal society and regular people, and now it's too late - too many loved ones depend on me not just bailing out and reinventing myself in another industry.
> It's a shame that my ADHD is pretty incompatible with capitalism. I work for a couple years then take a year or more off work, rinse and repeat. I've done this my entire life. Thankfully I work in software that pays well enough, and I'm frugal enough, to make this work. But job hopping plus not caring that much about my work means I don't get FAANG bucks or anything, in fact my salary has always been pretty below average for the work I do. But I make it work.
Yes, like this, and I wish I could do it like you. Wonder if there is another way.
93po
I think the success we see despite ADHD is that people are bright enough or resourceful enough to brute force their way through schools and careers.
I had a vasectomy around age 30 knowing kids would make my life really difficult, I think for the same reasons you're seeing right now. It's a lot of responsibility and I frankly struggle to take care of myself as it is. I'd be a really good parent and I take phenomenal care of my partners, but my financial variability would cause me too much stress if I had a kid.
patcon
STRONG agree with your sentiments btw
kmfrk
The "Double Empathy Problem" is a great way to conceptualize this, both to educate neurotypical people, but also to get over shame associated with neurodiversity. It's usually brought up in relation to people on the spectrum:
This theory proposes that many of the difficulties autistic individuals face
when socializing with non-autistic individuals are due, in part, to a lack
of mutual understanding between the two groups, meaning that most autistic
people struggle to understand and empathize with non-autistic people,
whereas most non-autistic people also struggle to understand and empathize
with autistic people. This lack of mutual understanding may stem from
bidirectional differences in dispositions (e.g., communication style,
social-cognitive characteristics), and experiences between autistic and non-
autistic individuals, as opposed to always being an inherent deficit.
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-p...
tfigueroa
What you have here is essentially a tragedy.
I totally sympathize with the author as someone who is (probably) neurodivergent but had accommodating parents. Being given space to better understand myself and my value was integral to my success and in being ok being different.
But as a dad to a neurodivergent kid, I impose structure - sometimes to discomfort, never intentionally to pain - because structure is imposed upon us all. I mean, if I could stop time, that would fix most of the issues with my kid’s ADHD. Same if I could make less the impositions of having to do chores, or to eat, sleep, bathe. But there is no easy escape from those things. So, I impose, despite not wanting to, because the imposition is coming anyway.
jappgar
Yes I think this is the correct take.
"It shouldn't be this way!"
But it is. As others have said in comments, ADHD actually may be an optimization in certain environments, but do those environments actually exist in 2024? Even if they exist Are they preferable, overall, to the typical alternative?
There may be jobs that are better suited to someone with ADHD, but do they pay a living wage? Are they precarious? Are they dangerous?
Maybe those jobs "should" pay more. But, as a parent, your job is to prepare your kids for reality, not sell them a fantasy.
dublinben
There's no shortage of careers with fast-paced work environments requiring creative problem solving that would be well-suited to a person with ADHD.
Anything creative or artistic, healthcare, tech, sales, skilled trades, restaurants, etc.
If the "reality" you are trying to prepare your child for is becoming an accountant/banker/lawyer/bureaucrat, then you will probably all be disappointed.
nradov
Most people with a formal ADHD diagnosis are likely to require some medication in order to make it through the training for a career in healthcare. There is typically a lot of study and rote memorization required. Even a relatively simple job like phlebotomist requires an ability to focus and consistently follow fixed procedures without getting distracted.
mnky9800n
Not to nitpick but it’s 2025
ghxst
I sometimes look back on my childhood and think about what might have helped me beyond just having structure - which, for the record, I do agree is very important. I think the biggest thing would have been understanding earlier that I was naturally going to struggle with certain things and that it was okay to ask for help.
To be clear, I don't mean just telling a child they can blame ADHD for their difficulties. Rather, helping them recognize that ADHD is often the reason behind their struggles with certain things and encouraging them to ask people around them for reminders, support, or ways in general to create accountability.
For example, my first job, a paper route when I was ~14, was a nightmare until I asked a friend to do his at the same time as mine and pick me up. Even though we had separate routes, just knowing I had to be ready when he arrived created enough accountability that I didn’t struggle with it as much, and it didn't require me to rely on my parents to impose that structure on me.
Imposing structure is helpful, but it only lasts as long as they have someone imposing it. Ideally, they learn how to build that structure for themselves before they have to navigate everything on their own.
wonder_er
you're describing to me what sounds like "it would be nice to sometimes be taking seriously, be treated gently, and helped in certain ways".
Often emotional aid is simply a compassionate and present person who sometimes helps a bit. maybe doing their own thing at the same time you're doing your thing, and they know what you're doing or trying to do, and they are not evaluating you for failure but being peaceful within themselves. it's sometimes a really nice thing.
We all deserve to at least sometimes have time with people like this!
loganc2342
I’m with you. The author makes bold claims about not following the assumptions imposed upon you about success and productivity, but what, exactly, is the alternative? Maybe I could go live in the wilderness, hunting and foraging at my own pace, instead of the pace imposed upon me. Of course, that isn’t realistic for the vast majority of people.
> Instead of feeling bad, examine the gap between your current life and the one you yearn for.
Say, for example, my definition of fulfillment is having a large array of close friends. If I find myself distracted from or am unwilling to shower, that will drive many people off. If I miss social cues and communicate “in a different language,” so to speak, that will make it difficult to relate to people and become close with them. If I don’t let myself sleep, I’ll be robbed of the motivation and energy I need to pursue this goal or any other.
That’s just an example. But the vast majority of people, regardless of how they define fulfillment, will have to “play society’s game” to some extent.
wonder_er
I propose that it could be possible to reduce your imposed structure around eating, sleeping, and bathing.
Let a kid go a few days without a bath. Don't shame them if/when odors eventually emerge. At least be willing to. But I've never had issues. Same with sleeping. And the only real reason sleep is urgent is because waking up at a certain time might be urgent, but if one gets to the evening time tired, they'll take themselves to bed early.
So, I donno.
I basically think you're defending something that's not true. You _are_ imposing all of those things. There would be an easy escape from all of it, for your kid, but for you. Could you see you and the kid as working together to avoid the pressure _from the world_?
"OK, no bathing, no problem. When I don't bath I make sure to put on fresh clothes before going out the next time... usually, but absolutely not always..."
I think you are over-relying on the concept of 'authority'. "I, adult, do this to you, child, because some external authority is making me."
I don't buy it. could you get more creative? or ask them for ideas?
"sometimes I don't wanna shower either. So I don't. because I usually have the power within me to do things that I want to do only when I want to do them."
And now you might be talking (openly, without pushy energy) why you _want_ to shower. Ever. Do you always do it out of obligation exclusively? Is it sometimes relaxing or could be made more relaxing? Turning the light off and lighting a candle can make it super peaceful, and everyone deserves a few minutes of peace.
Also, sometimes we do shower out of obligation, bc we're stinky, but it's totally fine to push the distance between those showers. I've done some long times without bathing, and would feel it important to point out that it's often FINE to not bath for a day or even two, especially if fresh/clean clothing is being worn.
I could prob think of books for creative problem solving. I, personally, would start with "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" by David Friedman. It's available for free on his website, or amazon/library/whatever. Tons of ideas of collaborative problem solving, if you go through it with the lense of sifting for ideas you might be able to implement around you, to reduce conflict/coercive energy.
good luck to us all.
hkpack
The person blaming his parents because they tried to do their job of, well, parenting a child with ADHD.
I’ve read that psychotherapy is much more difficult when there is no-one to blame. So it might help for him, until he will have his own kids with ADHD and fail in a completely opposite way.
I would not recommend anyone to blame parents of neurodivergent kids, as it is a very difficult job to do right.
sibeliuss
The point is: there isn't a "right" way. That's exactly what the author is trying to say. By failing to recognize the ways in which they were different, they forced a mode upon them and here we are. A whole medicalized generation addicted to stimulants trying to fit in where in past generations you had artists and rebels and seekers and every other kind of misfit that made life interesting and unique and challenging to the status quo.
jader201
> in past generations you had artists and rebels and seekers and every other kind of misfit that made life interesting and unique and challenging to the status quo
I get what you’re saying, but parents of ADHD children are looking to help them become adults that can function in society and be independent without the struggles that are often accompanied with ADHD: addiction and self-destructive choices.
A lot of the types of people that you mention — rebels, seekers, misfits — I feel are generally less happy individuals, and might chose a different path for themselves if they had the right opportunities and tools.
Sure they might make life interesting for others, and maybe “interesting” is a word they might describe for their own life. And what often makes them “interesting”, looking from the outside, is that they are addicted and/or self-destructive.
But are they ultimately happy, and is it the life they really wanted for themselves?
That’s what parents struggle with. If they know their child will be happy with addiction, self-destruction, and being “interesting”, maybe it would be easier to not worry about or try to help them with their struggles with ADHD.
But most parents think their children will want a different life, and so they also want that for them.
galleywest200
Maybe it is just my subjective experiences in life and who I happened to meet, but people most would classify as "seekers and misfits" tend to have smiles on their faces more often than people who look just like everyone else.
SteveNuts
> The point is: there isn't a "right" way.
I can tell you at least one “wrong way” though, which is to completely ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist.
That’s what my parents did and it’s extremely frustrating to deal with as an adult. Logically I understand there’s no value in living in the past, but the “what if” thoughts will nag me forever.
What if instead of failing out of high school and getting a GED, I could have been an honor roll student and go to the college of my dreams? Things like that.
The other problem is that I somehow lucked into a great, well-paying career, so now they just say “what’s the problem, everything worked out!”.
from-nibly
Right? Like what if the parents of a child who's legs didn't work just pretended they did? How would that play out? Probably would end with a phone call to CPS.
Ignoring mental differences is not a solution to the problem. I've met too many parents who are afraid to get a diagnosis because "what if they have it".
There isn't a right way yo parent kids with ADHD. It's going to be something you have to work on together. But pretending it doesn't exist can only bring misery for all involved.
olddustytrail
Well why don't you go to the college of your dreams now? Or does it only work when other people work and pay for it?
StefanBatory
I don't think you meant it but I don't like how you phrased it. That in the past if you were to have ADHD, you'd be an artist or a rebel and so on, implying that it is something cool. And that nowadays it's just addiction to stimulants.
I know of quite few colleagues and friends with ADHD who need stimulants to get anything done at all, even to get out from their bed. Who were treated unsuccessfully for anxiety, depression, when all their symptoms vanished after getting on meds.
ADHD not to everyone is something quirky, to some people it can be utterly debilitating and devastating condition.
icnexbe7
[flagged]
sibeliuss
[flagged]
TeMPOraL
> had artists and rebels and seekers and every other kind of misfit that made life interesting and unique and challenging to the status quo.
It's definitely interesting to read stories about such people, especially those that lived long ago or are fictional characters in the first place. The notion of being a misfit is romantic and gratifies our imagination. However, what those "misfits" and "rebels" actually were is people who suffered, or caused everyone around them to suffer, or both. Few of them, or those in their proximity, enjoyed their fate.
Are such people important to society? In some cases, yes. Do I want to be such an important person? No thank you, I'll happily read about them on the news.
nradov
I agree that we have over medicalized many conditions and over prescribed psychoactive drugs but let's not romanticize past generations. Very few of those misfits became artists or rebels or seekers who did anything interesting or challenged the status quo. Lots of them ended up homeless or addicted or incarcerated or dead in motorcycle crashes. I have some of those in my own extended family and it's tragic to see them continuously fail, sometimes in ways that have disastrous consequences for the innocent people around them. You're looking for the successes and not seeing the failures (selection bias).
null
nijuashi
I disagree. The author is clearly stating that he was not compatible with his parents’ way of raising him. So he is saying their way was “wrong”, and this implies that there is a “right” way, or at least “not wrong” way. I just feel really bad for the parents.
exceptione
I wonder how much room there is for misfits these days. Young people have to nail it or fail with a high student debt burden.
I think in the past we missed a language to label the "weird" and unproductive people. But I know of communities were it was common for an employer to "hire" such people for a period, then pass the buck to another employer. Now the thing is, in the past, it was for the public normal to see a commercial enterprise as a social enterprise too.
Nothing of that is left anymore in today's Management Schools. In the technocratic thought of Nazism it started by just killing "unsocial elements" (read: people with disabilities).
The Euthanasia Program required the cooperation of many German doctors, who reviewed the medical files of patients in institutions to determine which individuals with disabilities should be killed. The doctors also supervised the actual killings. Doomed patients were transferred to six institutions in Germany and Austria, where they were killed in specially constructed gas chambers. Infants and small children with disabilities were also killed by injection with a deadly dose of drugs or by starvation. The bodies of the victims were burned in large ovens called crematoria.
(https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-murder-of-people-with-disabilities)
willy_k
That hasn’t entirely gone away, it’s just taken up the guise of empathy now. Canada’s MAID program seeks to euthanize people for mental health issues, and it is my believe that it has already been successful in suckering many that would not otherwise go through with anything into ending their lives.
Although it is ostensibly not yet approved for mental illness, it appears that the standards in practice are lax, and that some amount of patients that start out seeking treatment for depression are convinced by their doctors to exaggerate other conditions to get approved for MAID.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted...
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/vancouve...
al_borland
I tried therapy for a couple years and it seemed like any time I brought up anything, I was being pushed to blame my dad. I felt like it was going to drive a wedge between us and my opinion of who he is today would be colored by who he was 30-40 years ago due to all this blame. He has changed a lot in those decades and I think his heart is in the right place, even if his actions sometimes call that into question.
Keyed off by a YouTube video, I thought there is a good chance I have autism and ADHD. I brought this up to the therapist and it was mostly dismissed, while my dad shouldered the blame. I went and got tested anyway, and it turns out I was right, and stopped seeing the therapist.
When I told my dad about my diagnosis he almost instantly started to question if he has the same things, and started opening up about how he feels, that he works hard to hide/mask. The more he’s looked into it, the more he believes this to be true. Looking back at where we had friction when I was a kid, they can pretty much all be explained by his own neurodivergence. Even issues today make significantly more sense.
While it is easy to say the parents should have done this or that and we need to have empathy for these kids with “bad” parents. I think we also need to have empathy for these undiagnosed parents who were doing the best they could without any tools, support, or even knowledge of what was going on… as the diagnosis criteria was either non-existent or only recognized extreme cases.
mnky9800n
Blaming the parents doesn’t matter anyways. The author, and the rest of us, are adults and responsible for ourselves. If those problems we bear are a byproduct of our upbringing we still are the ones responsible for dealing with those problems. Sure it’s unfair but you can complain about it or learn to accept those experiences made you who you are.
fisherjeff
I would not recommend anyone to massively oversimplify and pass judgement on someone else’s life situation
fzeroracer
From the article:
> Instead, they relied on discipline as the only solution: withholding rights, denying privileges, banning books outside the curriculum because they "caused inattention," cutting off the internet, locking TV channels with passwords, and limiting socialization during study time.
I'm perfectly inclined here to agree with the author in blaming the parents for putting the child in a borderline abusive environment because they were unable to look outside their own views for the sake of their child.
treis
It really depends on how long study time is. That sounds like proper parenting so long as we're talking like an hour or two.
graemep
Limiting socialisation for short time to focus is one thing, but a complete ban on reading outside the curriculum is hugely damaging to a child's education and happiness.
albedoa
Wait where did you go little boy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42899018
ghssds
Are you sure banning books outside the curriculum is proper parenting because what I'm reading is thought control.
Viliam1234
Punishment should never be so big that it cripples the child. Social deprivation as a punishment (no socialization, no internet, even no books), how could that possibly not harm someone's development?
baq
if the author really has ADHD, he's blind to half (or more) the things the parents did and especially to why they did them. not his choice, that's how ADHD works, doesn't make it any easier for anyone.
you'd want to read parents' rebuttal, or at least commentary before judging them based on this post.
tremon
The text doesn't read as if he's blaming his parents for anything. It seems to be a pretty neutral acknowledgement of past harms so he can move past them. Any "blame" you're reading into it is purely coming from your own perspective. He's pretty explicit about that:
> Yet I forgave: I have other things to attend to if I truly want to get over what happened.
I'd say his recovery/therapy is going pretty well. His perspective on the situation seems healthier than yours.
julianeon
They f you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had, And add some extra just for you.
But they were f'd up in their turn, By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern, And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
- Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse
bluesounddirect
i would recommend two things for adhd . labels diagnosis lables are waste of time . if you are lucky enough to live somewhere where the schools will provide evidence based help amazing. if not and you have the double dose of adhd and dyslexia, do your own research find other people / families with similar issues . it's amazing to watch two kids with adhd realizing they actually like the other kid and they think like me.
lsecondario
> diagnosis [...] are waste of time
> schools will provide evidence based help
In many places you need the former to get the latter.
pugets
My experience with my ADHD diagnosis and the 25 years of Adderall that followed have left me jaded at the state of psychiatry.
The focus of my attention does indeed change at a rate which is faster than average. If something can distract me from a task, then it usually does, at least for a few moments. But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?
To me, it seems obvious. My attention is considered deficient because we have constructed a society in which we expect children as young as 8 (that was the age I was diagnosed) to focus in a classroom on highly abstract topics (history, language, math, etc.) for hours at a time without issue. If a child can’t meet that expectation, then they will be medicated until they do.
But if we lived in a different society, especially one set in pre-modern times, then my kind of attention might not be considered a disorder. It could even be advantageous. How many early humans suffered a premature death because their hyper-focus on gathering berries left them oblivious to the rustling of leaves?
oytis
Disability is in general relative to the expextations of a particular society. There are people who can't tell a minor and a major third apart - they won't make a career in music probably, but it's not considered a disability or disorder.
nijuashi
Being unable to focus attention is not a beneficial trait in current society. Imagine having to have to take regular medication to control your blood pressure but cannot keep track of your regimen. It requires extra effort to keep the person healthy. Another is tackling difficult and long-term cognitive tasks, which is often necessary to function in society nowadays (I dread filing taxes). This may change in the future (especially with AI) but right now it is the way it is.
There are many traits that are advantageous in one environment and not in another: for example, sickle-cell phenotype became prevalent in regions where malaria was common, because you are likely to survive the infection. But otherwise the individual is likely to suffer from sickle cell anemia. People who have low calorie requirement may survive a famine, but may suffer from obesity in calorie-rich environment.
Many things are hard enough for “normal” person who would not be perceived as having ADHD, but it’s more so for people with it. The expectations are set by the modern society, but the actual challenges for ADHD are naturally present - thus they are classified as disorder. It’s commonly debilitating enough to be recognized as one.
methyl
> But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder
I think it’s because it’s outside of your control. Ideally you would be able to choose which impulses you want to respond to, and with ADHD that’s extremely hard.
tgv
ADHD for academic performance is not a problem, but it can be disruptive in a classroom. Until fairly recently, it wasn't medicated. Can't follow along? You'll just have to do lower levels. If you're medicated out of expectation, that's on your parents.
> How many early humans ...
That's a highly speculative argument for returning to the stone age?
tbrownaw
> But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?
"In other words"... no, those are separate things.
"Normal" means being like most of the rest of the group. My being 6'3" isn't normal here, but iirc would be normal in parts of the Netherlands.
A deficiency or disorder is something that causes problems. And getting people to just declare that something isn't a disorder won't actually change anything, because the language is downstream of the reality of what skills or abilities are needed for what roles in society.
SmirkingRevenge
A lot of that is true. Evolutionary advantage is always relative to the environment.
ADHD can have material impact on other aspects of your life though not just stuff related to studies or cognitive jobs.
A recent bit of research linked ADHD to shorter life expectancy (7-9 years). Reasons probably vary but I'd wager a big part of it is that those with ADHD can have a much harder time keeping up with regular life maintenance, including matters of personal health.
Making that doctor's appointment for a checkup or cancer screening is always 5 minutes away. Encountering even the least bit of unexpected friction can derail you even when you manage to get moving. Next thing you know, 6 months have gone by.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/23/adults-diagn...
loloquwowndueo
I’m curious to know if medication helped you conform to the societal expectation regarding attention, and whether you experienced other effects from it (positive, negative).
I’d value anecdata to know more and decide whether to push back if school starts pressuring for an adhd evaluation which is usually for an ulterior goal of medicating the kid.
robocat
This is blaming the parents for society, and the complaints appears to not be specific to ADHD.
Parents do their best within the knowledge they have. Blaming your parents for the outcomes of society is childish.
Fortunately the author is maturing out of childhood - and discovering as we all do that they are the only person that has the motivation and ability to find their own solutions to their own problems.
Society definitely fucks us up, and most people are trying hard to help improve their little corners, but it's a devil's problem.
Education systems do unfortunately feel so retardedly broken from the inside as users.
WarOnPrivacy
>This is blaming the parents for society
Pragmatically speaking: I offer that society isn't going to read the article but some parents will.
And parents won't change the direction of society but they can parent differently.
That's where I see potential value in the article.
robocat
On rereading, I can't see anything actionable for parents. Article says:
The whole experience was abusive.
[my parents] relied on discipline as the only solution: withholding rights, denying privileges, banning books outside the curriculum because they "caused inattention," cutting off the internet, locking TV channels with passwords, and limiting socialization during study time.
but strict ("authoritarian") parents do not change their habits easily. In my experience parents don't know how to teach independence (the key to adulthood).
My smartest friends left home at 15, to avoid their loving but overbearing/overcontrolling parents.
nijuashi
Yes, this article has the value of having a child’s perspective in form of an adult prose. It’s difficult to sympathize with him as an adult but gives insight on how some children see their parents during their adolescence.
itronitron
The author focuses on their experience as a teen with ADHD, but having been a parent of three teenagers, and having been a teenager myself, I think that the educational system is generally asking something of teenagers that they (the teenagers) can't yet provide.
But that is minor compared to how badly some classes are taught. Every time I've helped one of my children with a class in which they were genuinely struggling I realized that the instructor was not capable of teaching the material (usually because they assumed the students already knew what they were talking about).
avereveard
As a neuroatypical I feel this. But also society has to happen, even if I am at the outskirts of it. As a neuroatypical parent of a neuroatypical children, I still have to guide them understanding the structures and expectations of society, and I see often time that she resents me for it, as the autor resent their upbringing.
Society just don't care, and blaming parent for trying to impart that lesson is harsh, and while I don't know and I cannot judge author own experiences, I can see the one sidedness narrative that's at play, and wonder how much of this is the narrator own issues in processing a faceted issue, writing for himself a easy way out, and I wonder what parents would write about their experiences.
Overall the post address nothing about the thing that still needs to happen to function in the society, only a long unjustified self pity trip where each paragraph ends with an "I was right all along" that doesn't actually feel like it due the onesidedness of the narrative.
kerkeslager
> As a neuroatypical parent of a neuroatypical children, I still have to guide them understanding the structures and expectations of society, and I see often time that she resents me for it, as the autor resent their upbringing.
I think where a lot of parents go wrong is representing things as "because I said so" when in fact, there is a very good reason for what the parent is doing and explaining that reason to the child would both reduce resentment and be more valuable than the discipline being given. And the corollary to that is, if you can't explain to your child why you're doing something they don't like, maybe what you're doing isn't actually good parenting.
"Society expects this, society is probably wrong and it isn't fair, but it's not within our immediate capability to change it so we have to find ways to function around society's expectations at the current time" is a hugely valuable lesson to teach kids.
Without this explanation, your kid just has to come up with their own explanation for why you're doing what you're doing, and a lot of the time they're just going to conclude that you're wrong or you're just being mean, which unfortunately is sometimes true with some parents (I'm not saying it's true of you).
And sometimes, with the explanation, you're still going to be wrong, and you may never figure that out what you did wrong. But at least if you've explained why you did what you did, your child understands that so when they begin the process of realizing their parents aren't perfect they have some reason to empathize for the mistakes you made.
avereveard
That's not how neuroatypical children operate. Explaining whys will just disconnect them.
You need extra work to embed the explanation as experiences in the field they currently relate to.
That doesn't always works, or you get caught in situation where there's just no time to go the extra mile: today conflict was because she decided running into pool of a busy parking lot was what she wanted and she would ignore / shut out me, mommy, the cars, everything else was irrelevant at that moment.
I will find out other ways to explain later on, but the fact remain that I had to act to prevent harm, and it generated resentement. We got to puddles later, but things don't cancel out that way.
kerkeslager
> That's not how neuroatypical children operate. Explaining whys will just disconnect them.
Given "neuroatypical" encompasses a pretty wide variety of neurologies, it's pretty clear that you're speaking far too broadly here. There's no possible way you could know this. It's just plain not correct.
That might be true for your daughter, but it certainly wasn't true for me as a child.
> That doesn't always works, or you get caught in situation where there's just no time to go the extra mile: today conflict was because she decided running into pool of a busy parking lot was what she wanted and she would ignore / shut out me, mommy, the cars, everything else was irrelevant at that moment.
I'm not sure how you could read my comment and conclude I think you should calmly explain to a child that they are in imminent danger. Obviously you should get her out of danger first, then explain.
bitwize
"Because I said so" means "My authority as a parent should be sufficient reason for compliance. You asking for additional justification threatens my shifgrethor." Shifgrethor -- Ursula K. LeGuin's word meaning, roughly, authority simultaneously as the bedrock of the organization of society and as a measure of personal self-worth, is widely perceived as bullshit by neurodivergents, and it mostly probably is. But it is of prime importance to normies and if you challenge it, normies will inflict severe consequences. This is such a powerful lesson parents feel the need to instill it early on.
amluto
Except for the times when “because I said so” means “you are about to incur risk of permanent disability or death to yourself and/or someone else, and by the time we can have a reasoned discussion about it, it will be too late.” Cars, fire, heavy machinery, electricity are not “normies” and do not care whether anyone is neurotypical.
jappgar
"Normies" don't actually think it's a good moral justification, they just understand that disobedience to power has consequences.
A lot of typical and atypical people have fought and died side-by-side to fight tyrannical abuses of power.
graemep
I am neuro typical and always regarded “because I said so” as, at best, a last resort.
Your idea of normies seem to very controlling people.
kerkeslager
People are speaking faaaaar too broadly in this thread. "Normies", just like neurodivergent people, are a pretty wide group and don't all think alike--certainly they don't all put any importance on "shifgrethor".
And yeah, teaching your children how to interact with authority is obviously important. But notably, having any respect at all for authority isn't a requirement: I can obey an authority figure says even if it's stupid and terrible, if it benefits my goals. There are plenty of times in my career where I've done things I didn't agree with for bosses and clients I didn't respect, because other aspects of the job made it worth it, and they weren't worth risking my job over. Succinctly, "pick your battles".
Sure, as a parent, you need to teach your kids how to interact with authorities they don't respect, but being the authority they don't respect is a pretty terrible way to do that, and is going to have a lot of negative effects on your relationship with your child.
nijuashi
“I think where a lot of parents go wrong is representing things as "because I said so" when in fact, there is a very good reason for what the parent is doing and explaining that reason to the child would both reduce resentment and be more valuable than the discipline being given. ” Oh boy…if kids were that reasonable I would overlook almost any other deficiency. I don’t think this isn’t what you are implying, I think the author’s parents DID explain things to him. He just didn’t like what he heard.
je42
Explainations need to be 2-3 short sentences. Longer, and even teenagers with Ahdh may not follow or retain the explanation offered.
kerkeslager
That's a pretty broad statement.
Obviously you need to gauge whether your child is engaged in what you're saying. Maybe you have some experience that leads you to believe this, but I would encourage you to stop speaking for all neuroatypical people. Your experience is limited.
My personal experience with ADHD is that my focus latches on to certain things, which may not be the thing I want them to latch on to, or the thing that is most urgent to focus on. But often a conversation, particularly a conflict, is the thing my focus latches on to most readily.
riedel
Admittedly due to the recent hype about adult ADHD, I got myself tested to understand that I am likely to have it to some degree. However, it proved difficult to diagnose as I found my niche to function as part of society (if you assume that a university is no ivory tower) I had a mother that actually in hindsight devoted her life pretty much to make life work for me. Before she died she actually told my to be wife to take care of me. As much as I am thankful about having people who cover my ass, I would expect it from anyone. Also the right balance between structure and 'affirmative action' is close to impossible to find. One of the most important things though my mother told me over and over as a child was that I should not compare myself to others and that I am in the end responsible for myself (also to find my place in society)
void-pointer
I feel like I’m going mad.
Is ADHD a debilitating condition that can be consistently and independently diagnosed, with verifiable symptoms and clear criteria as to who _has_ ADHD and, more importantly, who _hasn’t_?
or is it a loosely defined group of behaviours that all people experience at different severities at some point in their lives, which have all been grouped into a nebulous so-called disorder (although many neurodivergent people now don’t like it being called that) so that doctors can quickly and efficiently work through the ever-growing mountain of patients who struggle with concentration in a world that is constantly and systematically trying to distract them?
I don’t want to insult people and I don’t want to be rude. But the more I read about ADHD, the more it feels like a meaningless diagnosis to absolve people of the responsibility to work on their concentration, and absolve them of blame if they can’t.
UniverseHacker
ADHD is ultimately a disability of reduced executive function, and all of the seemingly disconnected symptoms are connected by that common fact. Everyone has challenges with executive function in life - especially if chronically sleep deprived, but the degree of severity varies substantially to the point where people with ADHD are radically different from people without on a lot of axes.
It's quite the opposite of "absolve[ing] people of the responsibility to work on their concentration." Instead the diagnosis shows that this is indeed the reason why people with ADHD have been struggling to meet expectation their whole life, and there are specific actionable things they can do to fix it, that aren't the same thing that work for people without ADHD.
I had a huge amount of guilt and shame that comes from having tried every productivity, organization, and concentration technique to no avail. I felt like I was pushing against an invisible brick wall that nobody else had. I could deeply care about something, focus all of my energy on it, and yet fail to do it for reasons that remained a mystery to me- when peers with less innate ability and less motivation/drive still did it easily. The diagnosis made sense of this, and pointed me to solutions that actually work.
As a parent of a young child with ADHD that was kicked out of 5 schools before getting a diagnosis that led to him thriving... the idea that it is just an excuse to avoid personal responsibility seems absurd. I could (and have) guilted myself into thinking this way about myself, but can't really apply that to an innocent young kid trying their hardest to fit in, and constantly being rejected and abused by adults and peers due to their brain just working so differently.
void-pointer
But how does “there are specific, actionable things they can do to fix it” mesh with the declaration that people with ADHD are part of a community of neurodivergent people who seem to actively push against the idea that they need fixing?
UniverseHacker
I don't think that's a fair way to characterize the ADHD community's stance. I follow some of the 'leaders' of the ADHD community including William Curb (Hacking your ADHD) and Jessica McCabe (How to ADHD) and they are extremely focused on specific strategies and techniques that enable ADHD people to live more effectively in a neurotypical world.
These strategies don't "fix" or "cure" ADHD, but allow us to do what we want in our life, and are generally very different from productivity and life strategies that work best for non-ADHD people.
One could imagine a world where ADHD was the norm, and things would work out just fine, with a lot less stress for those with ADHD. However, that simply isn't the case, and the ADHD community is quite realistic about that.
tbrownaw
It doesn't.
Kirth
I always seem to upset a lot of people when I bring up my take/experience on this because they seem to find it (psychologically) threatening. Labels such as ADHD seem to have value for those who use them and want not further examine themselves or their situation.
I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and after a few years of psychotherapy (and trying medication) it's becoming clear to me that a lot of what people call adhd, people with adhd, ... is an external observation of an internal experience of emotional management issues with regards to anxiety and anger: impulsively responding to these emotions in a way that was learned during an earlier developmental stage, that now no longer leads to desirable outcomes (often hiding, running away, not getting externally angry when it is appropriate or desired). A lot of self-deceit and unworkable mental models seem to be involved. I hope I'm not projecting myself too much :).
cromulent
This is a good point, and why so many ADHD people feel guilty or unsure about their diagnosis. Doesn't everyone feel like this?
Adrian Chiles' "inner chimp" and other columns [1] helped me understand it. Also, when I laughed off my psychologists' questions ("oh, everyone would answer these questions the same way, this is silly"). Oh no they don't, she said.
There will be a grey area for sure. But for people who have it, it is real, and it is different to how other people experience the world.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/30/my-treatment...
nijuashi
It’s just that ADHD was not recognized until recently. We as a society is not well informed about this. But it’s important for us to feel the need to address this problem.
I think the best analogy is myopia. Until glasses were invented, people with poor eyesight were very limited in what they can do. People with glasses were stigmatized (remember “four-eyes”?). We didn’t know what caused it. Then things became normalized and lens making techniques became so advanced and ubiquitous that it no longer became such a big deal to see people with glasses. Then things like contact lenses and surgical procedures that came along which can correct it, making the person with myopia indistinguishable from one without. We are now starting to reach a stage where people can prevent the condition from developing because we have a better understanding of the disorder (although there are a lot of snake oils out there).
ADHD is like myopia, which limits the range of things that people are capable of. We have imperfect tools like adderall which has a lot of unwanted side effects. My hope is that technologies like AI personal assistants geared toward helping people with ADHD will act as a way to augment these deficiencies, much in the way glasses have. We as a civilization simply did not reach that stage.
o11c
I must disagree with this very strongly; this attitude of "the problem isn't me, the problem is other people" is exceedingly harmful.
You cannot blame others for their (alleged) inflexibility when you yourself are incapable of flexibility.
Consider: you fly to the UK and try to drive on the right side of the road like you always have. Do you have the right to blame everyone for driving toward you? Or should you adapt and drive on the left side of the road for once? Yes, the rule is arbitrary, but that doesn't make it valueless.
WarOnPrivacy
> "the problem isn't me, the problem is other people" is exceedingly harmful.
I can still work with it though. I recognize that I can't fix their flaws and the power I have is to adapt.
Recognizing flaws in others was gateway thinking for me. It lead to me seeking and finding flaw-groups that I'm a member of. That led to me seeking reasonable causes for mass flaws.
And that led me to a small group of causes. They center around individual capacity (everyone is doing ~the best they can) and reactions to feelings of helplessness (the other end of a bad behavior chain).
FF to now. I'm considering a unified flaw that seems to hobble every group eventually.
No one anywhere wants to clean their own house
Viliam1234
> Yes, the rule is arbitrary, but that doesn't make it valueless.
We need to distinguish between the rules that make sense (everyone driving on the same side of the road) and those that don't (everyone writing using the same hand). Often the existence of the former is used as an excuse for the latter.
o11c
The problem is that very often people can't distinguish ... or perhaps, refuse to acknowledge the importance of the particular rules they are personally inclined to reject.
Rzor
So the dude goes on and on about how his upbringing set him up for some misery and all you have to say is that he's a hypocrite and should suck it up and move on. Nice.
93po
People who can't walk would struggle a lot in a world where society didn't make accommodations for them to enter buildings, use restrooms, etc. The problem is that society is decently good at accommodating the very visible and tangible, but terrible at accommodating anything they don't understand. ADHD is hard to understand for most people and therefore they have no interesting in flexibility in the way they do for things they do understand.
Going through the treadmill of school followed by a career that all require strict schedules, punctuality, meetings, note-taking, difficult conversations, social norms, and hard focus-heavy work is really difficult for people with untreated ADHD. It's all extremely hard for me, and it's doubly hard because if I don't do this I will literally be homeless and starve and have no healthcare, and there's not a single employer or coworker that has ever given two shits about how hard this may be for me, and in fact some of them have actively punished me for vulnerability around this
o11c
You don't see people who can't walk saying "there's nothing wrong with me."
I'm not saying society can't or shouldn't adapt to neurodivergent people, but it is absolutely necessary for all such adaptations to be made with the understanding "this is a problem with the individual, but we have the good will to make life easier for them anyway."
93po
it's only a problem because the neurotypical vastly outnumber the neurodivergent.
if most people couldn't walk, the world could be difficult for people who can. it doesn't make one group "correct", it just means the world is shaped better for them
lsecondario
As a parent of kids with ADHD I've come to believe that it is disabling in two ways: an actual deficit in attention that makes it more difficult to complete tasks AND an incompatibility with an inflexible society.
I see both of these in my kids' experience at school:
The true deficit can be seen in inability to complete schoolwork on time. Sure, homework is artificial, but I have no doubt the same difficulties would apply to - say - planting and harvesting crops on a schedule
The societal incompatibility is seen in relatively benign "behavior issues" like difficulty sitting still. The idea that children should sit at attention for hours seems bizarre unless you accept that school is training an obedient factory/cubical workforce.
aorist
> I have no doubt the same difficulties would apply to - say - planting and harvesting crops on a schedule
Not necessarily. Before the Industrial Revolution artisans were paid by the piece and peasants harvested between the crop being ripe and it being damaged by the weather. <https://dhayton.haverford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Tho...>
Both of those have immediate rather than delayed (artificial?) consequences, which might have been easier to handle.
When factories tried paying peasants by the hour, they would work as much as they felt like (e.g. not showing up at all on "Saint" Monday) until they were taught time-discipline.
notacoward
Came here to say basically the same thing. It is possible both that ADHD itself negatively impacts some people and that other people's (especially parents') reactions to ADHD negatively impact some people. They're not incompatible beliefs at all. Same for autism, and also personality disorders like BPD. Putting all of the blame on either side seems overly simplistic and unhelpful. Identifying which issues stem from which causes seems much more likely to yield solutions (or at least coping mechanisms).
WarOnPrivacy
I'm not a fan of single-reason causes but in this case I suspect the harms are explained in this one quote.
Instead, they [parents] relied on discipline as the only solution:
What did I do? Maybe I punished them(singular). Maybe I took them out of school for a day we spent together.
One solution will be a wrong solution most of the time. Kids are continually a new person and continually need new approaches.
Since society has moved from muti-generation families to just ≤2 parents, it falls on those ≤2 parents to perform the roles of many different adults. We can't ever stop rethinking our methods.
> John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down perfectly captured this when he noticed that schools, another place where authority figures hang out, ruthlessly disciplined any child who tried to assert individuality.
There has been an interesting result recently, which was discussed here [0]. In an online game where participants had to forage for resources, people with attention deficits scored higher, because they preferred exploration to exploitation.
I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.
Having ADHD is then of course a major disadvantage in environments where there is only one global optimum. Examples include highly regulated and deterministic academic environments (school, undergraduate studies) or corporate environments.
But in human history, environments with a single global optimum have been the exception, not the rule.
People with ADHD - and their parents and teachers - should therefore embrace their individuality as a kind of reservoir talent in the human gene pool. We need these individuals in the future.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39508573