I'm just saying, along with the author of the article 'In Praise of ADHD', that we shouldn't just label it a disorder if there are positive aspects of it as well. Our society needs to learn how to value creative individuals, and not try to get them to submit to authority.
Please understand that I didn't mean to insult you; I didn't mean to say that your struggle is not real. I just don't think its right to administer amphetamine to kids in order to 'fix' them.
People have clearly described the severe life limiting impairment caused by ADHD, and these have fuck all to do with "submitting to authority".
People with ADHD are more likely to have a drug or alcohol addiction; less likely to complete education; less likely to have a job; more likely to die in accidents; more likely to die by suicide.
Taking medication is a small price to pay to fix that.
AFAIK giving kids help, either medicines or otherwise makes kids lives better and reduces the risk of "self-medication".
Here's the problem: it doesn't take an external authority figure. It is sometimes enough to try to get yourself to do something you absolutely should be doing anyway.
Like so many things, ADHD is just part of a natural spectrum of cognitive differences. In the world that humans evolved to live in, the hunter gatherer world, it doesn't have as many disadvantages and it has some advantages. It's good to have diversity in populations, even in things like cognition. But in a modern industrial world it has a lot more disadvantages. And given that that's the world we live in, we have to acknowledge that reality. ADHD is very much an attention based system of cognition, but that's not really suited to the modern world particularly well. There are lots of things that people need to learn, and cognitive tasks that people need to perform, that still need to get done regardless of whether they are interesting or not. People with ADHD can develop coping skills or use drugs that make that much easier, but it's still necessary.
It might not be 100% fair to call it a "disorder" so much as a kind of impedance mismatch with modern society, but the mismatch still exists and still needs to be addressed.
I completely understand that we can't all run around without any discipline, but I have a hard time with the idea of doping kids.
I do have several family members who are ADHD and it profoundly limits their lives when not well-treated.
ADHD is a complex disorder. There are at least 7 different so-called "executive function" cognitive abilities that can be affected, each to a varying degree. But the most common one people discuss is inability to control focus. This can mean that you can't finish reading a single page of something you really want to understand, or that you can't stop reading something that's completely not what you should be doing. Hyperfocus and inability to focus are parts of the same disorder. Imagine spending a week, 8-10 hours per day, sitting at your computer trying to get a couple hour task done and never succeeding even though it is well within your skill, ability, and training, just because you can't concentrate.
Also affected are things like time awareness, planning, visualizing outcomes, controlling impulses, and a few others. Many of these things fall in to what people steeped in the Western "protestant work ethic" see as moral failings; lack of effort, lack of "will", letting people down, etc. The irony is that folks with ADHD will actually work far harder to accomplish things than neurotypicals, while being labeled as lazy, worthless, unreliable, etc.
ADHD is also often found with co-morbidities, that is disorders that show up together. Most frequent of these are generalized anxiety, and depression. This is why it takes a very well trained and experienced professional to be able to tease out a good diagnosis and treatment plan, because treating the underlying condition is required, not the symptoms.
Once you become aware of how it can affect people it becomes rather easy to see it in folks, or at least to be aware that they could be struggling with it. That's why you see me, for instance, suggest to some folks they get evaluated by a professional when they ask for help in certain circumstances.
Your ability to understand and relate to a lot of the people around you will be enhanced if you take the time and effort to understand what ADHD is, and how it affects folks, so I urge you to continue to do so.
It's an incorrect opinion. Please do a little bit of research
Quote from article: The educational psychologist Bonnie Cramond, for example, tested a group of children in Louisiana who had been determined to have A.D.H.D. and found that an astonishingly high number — 32 percent — did well enough to qualify for an elite creative scholars program in the Louisiana schools.
I did extremely well in tests but was bad with homework.
Here's the problem: many ADHDers have high iq and can easily pass tests but might have huge problems coping with the boredoom of ordinary days.
A) program for 8 hours a day and produce nothing
B) program for 8 hours a day and produce something
I actually love programming, so this may sound critical.