I'm of the opinion that there's nothing wrong with that. I lean more towards the acceptance side of things. Humans are diverse in many ways. I don't believe we should be attempting to stifle that with drugs. Maybe there's value in your inability to sit still and flaws in the paradigm that asks you to?
>Medication that I’ve seen change my sons life at school, how he interacts with his peers, his ability to constructively participate in Boy Scouts, his ability to be more patient with his older sister and younger brother. He still struggles, the medication isn’t a panacea, but it has given him the ability to improve himself.
Is it not possible that your son would have developed these skills with age, without the aid of amphetamine? Kids are kids. They have a lot to learn. We shouldn't expect, or desire, every child to develop in the same ways at the same time. What would be left to celebrate? Normies don't change the world.
You’re right, normies don’t run the world. Be different, be you, don’t let others tell you what to like or what not to like. I have told my children this and they know they have my unconditional support and acceptance. But don’t expect acceptance from everyone, our society is not so enlightened. Especially not children. Kids want to be liked, they want to be loved, they want the acceptance of their peers and those that they admire or look up to. Children can also be cruel to one another, not intentionally, they often have a lack of matured empathy. You have to be able to choose your battles.
It’s not about making him normal, it’s about giving him the tools to be who he wants to be. It’s about giving him the control he otherwise lacks.
However, that’s where you have to meet reality where it is, not where you want it to be. Mental illness typically begins not with the condition but when that condition impairs the individuals ability to operate within the parameters of the society they are a member of. When the condition impairs their ability to meet their own definition of success or happiness.
My son was not happy with the way other kids treated him, it hurt me to see him hurt. My son was not happy in school, he thought the teacher was mean and didn’t like him because she wouldn’t give him enough time to finish his school work, and would force him to switch tasks with the rest of the class. My son was not happy that his older sister often didn’t want to play with him.
Was my son doing something wrong?
He just wanted to play, he wanted to run the fastest, bounce the ball the most, just go crazy. But sometimes the other kids wanted a break, sometimes they wanted rules to the game, sometimes they wanted him to stop. He could get so worked up he couldn’t just “stop”.
In school he understood all the material, it was easy for him, he could read better than most of his peers, critical thinking tasks were easy for him. However, focus and time management were completely out of his grasp. The teacher wasn’t mean, she just had more material to teach him, they had to move in to the next topic.
When he would get excited, that excitement would become intensity, that intensity would alienate him from his peers and sometimes from his older sister. His biggest advocate and ardent defender would want space away from him.
Maybe the paradigm is flawed, but sometimes a train without brakes is just a train without brakes.
For the first time in my life, with decades of experience dealing with and managing ADHD with soft skills and sheer stubbornness I started medications for ADHD last year. The significant changes and disruptions to society and daily life of the COVID 19 pandemic left me in a position where my skills were no longer adequate to deal with my condition. A loss of focus helpers (like a dedicated working environment, commute times, access to fellow co-workers etc), added stresses caused by dealing with other medical issues in the new paradigm, easy access to other distractions and more added up to a crippling depression and self loathing as I became less and less capable of performing to the standards that I knew I was capable of and had performed at even just a couple years before.
I tried anti-depressants because I was depressed, so of course that seems the right way to go. But no amount of anti-depressant or counseling will fix self disappointment and frustration at being unable to bring yourself to perform to your known potential. There was no "value" in my inability to do my job, to do the things I'm good at and the things I enjoy. I wasn't doing something else that was more fulfilling. I wasn't learning something new about myself, or finding an alternative path to success. I was spinning in circles trying ot do what I wanted to do and failing at it over and over again for no other reason than decades of skills and practice were no longer effective in the world I found myself in.
Maybe, on a long enough time scale, I could have learned new strategies. I could have spent large enough sums of money to build a new and different environment around me to support those new skills. And in the mean time I would have spent years spiraling further and further into depression for failing to be the person I wanted to be and was capable of being.
Taking ADHD medications helped. The struggle to deal with the way life is no longer the same is still there, but I'm not having to fight my own head at the struggles at the same time. The week I started it, for the first time in my entire life I thought to myself "I need to do task A" and then just got up and did that thing to its completion, and then I did it again for task B, and again for task C. No minutes to hours prepping myself, working up the energy and mental gumption to do the thing. No mental dance to shift between tasks. No fight to stay on task A instead of jumping between A, B and C. I don't think it's possible for me to explain how incredible it felt to be able to just "decide" to do a task, or how it feels now to know I've never actually been able to do something that way before.
Skills are useful, and knowing the ones I do make it easier to deal with the days where even with the medications I still struggle. But a key component to diagnosing a disorder is "does it negatively impact your ability to conduct your life". Diversity is one thing, but no one should have to fight their own head to live the life they want just for the sake of "diversity".
Even if society placed zero demands on me whatsoever and I never had to worry about being anywhere at a specific date/time, or ever had to sit still for any length of time if I didn't feel like it, I still wouldn't be happy suffering from ADHD.
ADHD is not some perfectly normal but uncommon personality quirk that our narrow minded society has cruelly chosen to punish, it's a neurodevelopmental disorder impacting executive function making it difficult for people to accomplish the things they want to even entirely on their own terms.
Some people can find coping strategies that let them get by with only minor difficulty, but for others there is no amount of skill development or accommodation that is going to make up for their malfunctioning brains.
Medication isn't for everyone. It's not effective for everyone, and isn't necessary for everyone, but it'd be wrong to think that without the expectations imposed on us by society medication would never be necessary or that ADHD isn't really a problem because it's just a different way of doing things or looking at the world. It's mental illness, and one way or another symptoms will typically need to be treated or it will cause the mentally ill person needless suffering.
Everyone is different, and most people experience a stimulant effect from amphetamines. I do not, my son does not, amphetamines significantly calm and slow us down. With the correct time delayed dosage, the world feels less “exciting” and things that were distractions or often stole my focus just become background noise. It’s not a feeling I particularly like, but the best thing I can compare it to is like a washing machine getting off balance and locking around, sometimes you just need to slow it down and let it settle for a little bit.
The whole concept that a doctor has to say there's something wrong with you to get drugs I find to be very patronising. If somebody has trouble focusing, they can just take some drugs and fill out some planners, they don't need to be labelled using an acronym.
I'm not convinced ADHD is an illness either, but this isn't really specific to ADHD, I'm pretty sceptical of the entire DSM model and our need to give people a label or a combination of labels. I was diagnosed with ADHD in the aftermath of the most extreme abuse of my life because I didn't focus in class. I think a lot of the point of the label was making the adults feel like they were "helping me with an illness" rather than making an abused kid swallow strong drugs in order to keep up in this unforgiving world. In the entire diagnostic process nobody so much as asked me what had happened in the previous year.
Even when I hear arguments like this, it's pleading practicality and nessecity. We need the label so he can get these drugs. We need the label so we can do X and Y. Only the label can give me true understanding of who I really am. But the label is incidental to all of this stuff, there's no reason you actually need this specific label. I'm almost certain the main reason we have these labels at all is so present the labelled as pathetic enough to be worthy of insurance coverage.
Do you believe you have ADHD now?
I was fortunate to have some FMRI (I believe that's the tech) work done years ago, shortly after I was diagnosed with ADHD. The imagining made it so blatantly obvious that my brain was different than normal brains. Where a normal brain would light up like crazy for a given stimulus, mine looked like a black hole.
There are certainly bio/physical differences.
That said, I came into this comment thinking I'd take the stance of "of course it's a disease," but I think I've warmed up somewhat to what I think is your argument: lets stop with the labels.
What holds me back from getting on board is that it's not like a headache. I can't just be like "oh, I'm feeling scattered" and take a pill when I need to. That "I'm feeling scattered" is 100% of the time.
So I'm still in the "it's for sure a disease" camp. But I really don't care all that much in the end - I just want to make sure people stop hogging what allows me to even have a job and family.
I'd be careful about this. I've never seen anything to suggest that we could screen every child with FMRI scans to catch blatantly obvious indicators of ADHD or use scans as a definitive test for who should get medications. I honestly wish it really worked that way because it'd end all the hand-wringing about overprescribed medications and prevent a lot of kids from struggling unnecessarily, but unless something's changed pretty recently there's no one test that identify someone with ADHD.
Do I believe I still have ADHD now? Sure I "have it" based on how the word is commonly understood. But the thing is, in practice, almost everybody I talk to from friends to doctors to family has a different set of labels they think of me as having, and I change which labels I use to describe myself to accomplish different goals, and deep down I don't think anybody really has a clue what they're talking about.
Would you feel the same way about appendicitis? Like, there's zero reason for a diagnosis or a "label" and if your side hurts you should just be able to get whatever you want cut out of you until you feel better?
Labels are important for a lot of reasons. It's human nature to classify things and it's a whole lot easier when we do. By taking a list of symptoms and assigning one or more labels to it we can differentiate between the various causes of a person's symptoms. Someone might improve their symptoms by popping stimulants all day long, but it's possible that by identifying the cause of their symptoms and finding the right label a doctor could make taking all those pills and dealing with their side effects unnecessary. A diagnosis helps doctors select the most effective treatments without nearly as much trail and error.
The diagnosis is also extremely helpful for the patient! It helps them to explain (to themselves and others) why it is that they are different, it sets expectations for what problems their condition might bring them, and helps them identify others who struggle similarly so that they can commiserate and gain insights and strategies for dealing with those problems.
It's terrible if you were misdiagnosed once and that the experience has soured you to the entire idea of diagnostic medicine but as imperfect as that science is, it's still the best we've managed to come up with, it solves a lot more problems than it causes, and those solutions help with a lot more than just sorting out the billing.
ADHD is absolutely a mental illness. I can't say if you actually have it or not. It is possible that your problems were entirely from your recent abuse and ADHD was total misdiagnosis, or maybe your recent abuse was what made your ADHD symptoms bad enough that they became unmanageable. You're right about one thing though, the label you were given matters very little compared to how well your executive functioning is working today. If you're functioning to your satisfaction then the label doesn't matter much. If you're still struggling, your doctor can use your label or assign new ones to help guide you towards the best treatments to get you where you want to be. People shouldn't fear a label any more than they should let one become their identity or blind them to other possible causes for their problems.
I didn't want to be diagnosed, I didn't want the treatment (And it never did end up helping), and none of this actually got to the root of my problems. I ran an experiment soon after diagnosis. I gummed my medication one week, and told the teacher I took it, and asked them how I thought I was doing. They thought I was doing great! I then took it, and said I stopped taking it due to side effects. They said I was really struggling. I stopped taking the drug after that, and got an angry response in return, as now that I was diagnosed, I had a moral obligation to treat myself. Do recall I was a recent victim of severe abuse when I say all this.
I got another label later, I took one psychiatric medication, I reacted to it badly right away and called the doctor to report this in 2 days, something I virtually never do. He just told me to tough it out for a month to see if it worked. It was a month of hell I felt I was morally obliged to go through to "Get better" because as my doctor says, the evidence says I have to give it time.
My issue isn't being misdiagnosed, it's being correctly diagnosed and the prescribed approaches not working. I've grown to see these labels as just packages of prejudices and I've had quite a bit of distaste for. I wish I could just be misdiagnosed, but it was only two years ago a coworker approached me and confided in how they had ADHD and thought I did too, so I don't have any ability to truly convince people I don't have these labels anyways. So long as this system is useful for other peoples purposes, my opinion and my experiences don't matter.
You know what my username is a reference too? It's a reference to folklore about stolen children. At first children would appear normal, but when the faeries "stole" the child in early childhood, they would start exhibiting bizarre traits like obsessively counting seeds, jumping and dancing about, and unusual intelligence for their age. The people of the time figured these children must not really be human, but changelings, replaced by faeries. Martin Luther of protestant fame figured they were children replaced by satan who could only be cured through murder. So that's what my username is, a reference to a label for children who acted differently which justified their murder.
As a child I struggled with ADHD, it’s not a state of mind. It’s not a decision. It’s a chemical imbalance that make a child’s innate lack of self control, and poor ability to self regulate something as simple as idle movements, orders of magnitude more difficult. I’m not commenting on over/under diagnosing of ADHD, I’m commenting on a condition that some individuals legitimately deal with. Some find themselves unable to focus on tasks, or get labeled the weird kid in their peer group because of behaviors they don’t even realize they’re doing.
Now I am older, I’ve learned strategies to self regulate. I’ve learned how to turn that energy into a strength. Often times I can channel that energy into my work, but I’ve also learned when I need to seek assistance either through medication, or taking some time away from work, or using my partner as a sounding board. I have 3 kids of my own now, and I see the same struggles in one of my sons. I see it now from the perspective my parent saw it from.
As a parent I didn’t want to medicate my child if it wasn’t necessary, I wanted to help him develop his own strategies to deal with his condition. But he lacks the insight and self-awareness that I developed with age and with the help of the medication. Medication that helped me to see what was possible, helped me to slow down, and helped me to understand myself and how my behaviors were affecting the world around me. Medication that I’ve seen change my sons life at school, how he interacts with his peers, his ability to constructively participate in Boy Scouts, his ability to be more patient with his older sister and younger brother. He still struggles, the medication isn’t a panacea, but it has given him the ability to improve himself.
Hopefully, one day he won’t need the medication regularly. He will make that decision when the time comes. But right now, nobody needs people like you saying “ADHD is a fictional illness”. Your opinion does not convey any value to those who have to deal with it in their daily lives. Just because it isn’t your reality does not make it a non-real issue.