Well.

1. Self-diagnosis is not a diagnosis.

2. Things exist on a spectrum. The definition of it becoming a "disorder" is when it negatively affects your life enough.

During diagnosis a psychotherapist will be tasks with identifying traits of ADHD (IE; Markers), you will not have all markers. Everyone will have some.

Then those markers are investigated to discover how much they impact your quality of life. If it is above a certain threshold in aggregate then you are then diagnosed clinically as having "ADHD" and can be medicated.

What I mean is, for example: You can still have autism even if someone has significantly more severe autistic traits than you have.

Exactly. So so so many people do not understand this element of psychological disorders

The D in ADHD is “disorder”, which normally means you can’t function socially, at work, and/or take care of yourself. Normally I don’t consider scatterbrained knowledge workers in the top 5% of the income distribution to be in that category. It is kind of fun so do work on speed though!

There are lots of ways "can't function socially, at work, and/or take care of yourself" can manifest even if you're in the top 5% of the income distribution. For example, that person's house might be an absolute disaster zone, with overgrown lawns, tasks piling up and a million tiny piles of bills and papers to be done "later". They might need 4 separate alarm clocks in 3 different physical places in order to wake up on time every day. They might be constantly forgetting to follow up with family and friends all the time and isolated and alone when they're not in the office. They might be the co-worker that when everyone is talking about what they did over the holiday weekend responds with "not much" because they're otherwise too embarrassed to admit they spent the whole 3 days in a state of paralysis over what to even do. They might be putting all their energy into appearing normal and functional at work because the alternative is being homeless or starving and you might never know because you don't see them outside the office.

All that to basically say income and job descriptions do not inherently say anything about what disorders a person may or may not be suffering from.

In other words, being able to live with a condition is not the same as the condition being debilitating.

A lot of mental illnesses go unnoticed by others because they're often very easy to hide (and you're encouraged to hide them). Thinking that you can't be in the top 5% of earners and are just doing "speed for fun" is like thinking you can't be suicidally depressed just because you are a comedian. Hell, most people were surprised by Anthony Bourdain despite him being open about his depression. What you see is not reality, so don't be quick to judge. You'd be surprised how many peoples mental states are a house of cards but look like they're living in the finest of mansions.

Seriously, comments like the GPs are not only bad takes, but actively harmful. It perpetuates the belief that people should hide rather than seek help. The big issue with mental illnesses is that they are typically extreme versions of normal behavior and we often paint them as unrealistically extreme and constant. They're highly variable and the most common thing to happen is people only seek help when they're in the spiraling states, where they are incapable of getting that help, but will not seek it out when they've normalized.

Plus, you don't know if they're in that top 5% post medication and would not have been prior. You don't have the counterfactual power to make such judgements.

> They might need 4 separate alarm clocks in 3 different physical places in order to wake up on time every day

I don't know if I have ADHD, but I've always been terrible at getting out of bed.

It bugged me so much I ended up building an app[0] to force me to get up. If I didn't get up and scan my toothpaste barcode within a few mins of my alarm, I'd have to pay $10.

It also has cheat detection so I can't just turn off the phone to avoid getting up. Alarms are stored in the cloud and lock 1 hour before going off so they can't be changed.

Many of my users tell me they have ADHD so it seems likely I fall somewhere on the spectrum.

[0] Nuj Alarm Clock - https://nuj.app

It's a good thing no one defines disorders the way you do going through life miserable but have set up your life in such a way and with a set of coping mechanisms that help you stay afloat is apparently fine and your life needs to be in shambles. Do you feel the same way about chronic pain? Is dragging yourself to work despite it prove you don't need help. Clearly you can handle the suffering. It's the exact same.

Surviving only because you've structured your life to revolve around the limitations of your disorder isn't a sign that everything is fine.

Adderall and its contemporaries aren't speed and I promise you it isn't fun. Stimulant medications are miserable to be on, it's just that not being on them is worse. That one time you took high-dose adderall in college is not at all reflective of what the experience is like.

What if you can function socially, at work, can mostly take care of yourself and generally look the part, but on the inside you are a miserable husk of a person exhausted from the neverending struggle to appear functional and normal?

Is that person just having fun on speed in your view?

Others have responded to you as if you weren’t being disingenuous, so I will respond as one should to people like you: go fuck yourself.

Anyone that dismisses this as being a scatterbrained person that likes to do speed is clearly not trying to help anyone and are only here to tear them down and make them hate themselves more than they already do. The world would be a better place if trash like you was collected and disposed of. Grow up, asshole.

> Self-diagnosis is not a diagnosis.

Nit: Self-diagnosis is the first step towards a formal diagnosis. You don't go to the doctor to get antibiotics before self-diagnosing that you're sick.

That said, as useful as a formal diagnosis is (getting proper help, and even meds), don't skip it if you can afford to do it.

Yes. Thank you for stating it so well. Self diagnosis is like a conjecture based on observation. It needs to be proved out formally to be a working theory. But that’s part of the process and there absolutely is value in self diagnosis. It’s up to professionals to sort the wear from the chaff, webmd be damned.

Similarly anecdotal evidence is just not strong evidence, but it is still evidence. Anecdotal evidence from a lot of people is a dataset and from a wide variety of people is a good dataset. It's all about confidence levels. Consider likelihoods (different from probabilities) and just update your priors but never forget the confidence intervals. They're the most important part!

I still thought "X is a spectrum" is essentially the same as saying that everyone have it, which I don't think is a useful assertion. There should still be a threshold somewhere, something that of course psychology won't try to draw.

It could be, but that's why I think that the "self-diagnosis != diagnosis" statement is important

The threshold for any disorder is usually “is it causing a significant and negative impact on your ability to live a normal life”. And while there are a lot of squishy terms in that statement, it’s about the best we have. We know even less about the workings of the brain than we do about the workings of your body and anyone with a chronic and rare health issue can tell you just how little we know about the workings of the body. So these sorts of “standard normal life” and “significant impact” fuzzy phrases are our best tool.

Everyone is late sometimes, are you so chronically late that you’re losing or at risk of losing your job despite doing things that normal people would do (e.g. getting up earlier, setting alarms etc), that could be (along with other symptoms) an indication of ADHD.

Everyone is sad sometimes, even deeply so. Are you so down that the very act of getting up and making yourself food seems too much? Are you so hopeless that even doing something you love makes you feel nothing? That (along with other symptoms) might indicate you have depression.

Everyone has things that they want to have “just right”, whether it’s a well organized tool box, a clean car or a spotless mirror. Do you find yourself needing to ensure that every dish in your cabinets are sorted properly by size and weight, every day, even if it means missing that important meeting with a friend you haven’t seen in years and even though you already did this yesterday and only used two plates since then? That might (along with other symptoms) indicate that you have OCD.

There are degrees to everything, and the same psych disorder can manifest in very different ways in different people.

I have been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder. I "worry too much", in general, and have the odd panic attack or two per year. Some people have it bad enough they get these attacks daily.

That does not mean I don't have it or that it does not affect me, it just means it's mild in comparison to them, but my anxiety is still high compared to the average person when untreated. It does not have to be crippling to affect you.

Note that ADHD can manifest physically, mentally, or a combination of the two. I've been recently diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30s after finally seeing a psychiatrist, and at most my physical manifestation of it is minor fidgeting.

Where it really burns me is not being able to dedicate brainpower for more than a few minutes at a time, unless I'm in one of my "focus" modes. Similarly, my brain constantly has multiple tasks/"conversations" going on and I'm always thinking of something else. Additionally, I'm always chasing something novel to satisfy some dopamine hit.

I've honestly worked around a lot of the issues I deal with prior to being diagnosed, knowing when I'm not in a "focus" mode and trying to (gently) steer back to being productive. I joke about my "gaming ADHD" where I don't sit with a game for more than a half hour or so before moving on to something else. Internal dialogues are just something I work with.

Not saying you're right or wrong, but it's difficult to compare someone else's problems with your own (potential) issues.

e: Also note that there are non-stimulants on the market. I'm currently trialing one while I wait for a cardiologist to review some records for possible stimulant conflicts.

Just one data point but my psychiatrist said that in his in clinical experience he’s never seen the non stimulants help

Yeah, mine said it's ~50/50 shot. We're trying the non-stimulant while waiting on the cardiologist to do a deeper look at a potential heart issue. shrug

The most I've felt with the atomoxetine is a loss of appetite, which I'm not opposed to for the time being :)

Did you have the inability to read books? I notice that I simply cannot focus on reading a book to save my life. I can read internet comments and articles all day though. If I try to read a book I get annoyed that they're "not making their point" fast enough, especially with fiction and visual descriptions of people and places. I used to just complain about it, but now I wonder if thats actually pinpointing something wrong with my brain (such as ADHD). If I'm reading fiction, I do not translate the word "red" with the color, things like that. And usually within 2-3 paragraphs, my eyes are reading the text but my brain is thinking about computers or what I need to get done that weekend. It's awful because I'm missing out on an entire mode of art but I dont know what to do about it. I've only been enthralled in a book once or twice in my 40 years of life.

My issue with reading is that my eyes will continue on while my brain has already left the station, so to speak. I'll end up having to go back and re-read sentences/paragraphs.

I started doing some research (prior to speaking with my psychiatrist) and started noticing some ADHD-esque behaviors in my toddler. I'm not looking to get them diagnosed (yet?), because who knows what is "normal young kid inattentiveness and hyperactivity" versus anything else, but ADHD is absolutely hereditary and a family history is one aspect that is/was used to diagnose.

This is a good resource I've read (well, listened to the audiobook of..): https://www.amazon.com/Driven-Distraction-Revised-Recognizin...

I think your situation (especially with your child) outlines one of the insidious challenges we face in our modern society: breaking through the confusion and understanding the nuance of an issue (in this case, ADHD).

We've all heard the misinformation tropes "Back in my day, a kid was hyper because he wanted to play, nowadays $BOGEYMAN says those kids need to be medicated so they can get a 4.0", and they sound so alluring to large groups of people, so they write off ADHD altogether. Yet I distinctly remember kids from my childhood who could not hold a conversation, they would literally break off into a new topic while you were mid-sentence with them. Tell me how that kid can possibly learn anything if he doesn't even know that he vacated a conversation.

This is a parallel to George Carlin's "It's called shell-shock" spiel, or used by people to deny the existence of depression. It's very difficult to both convey nuance, and get people to accept it, even though it (the nuance) abuts life-threatening issues.

> Yet I distinctly remember kids from my childhood who could not hold a conversation, they would literally break off into a new topic while you were mid-sentence with them.

I have some variant of this - I'm constantly, subconsciously cutting in during someone else's sentence just to blurt out what immediately came to my brain, because I usually forget it by the time they are done. It's something I'm really working on, but it gets better day-by-day.

For people my age it was "Back in my day, people applied good old fashioned discipline. That's all ADHD is, a lack of discipline." Often discipline came via the strap or similar.

take good care of the kids nutrition. read up on it. take it serious. let it eat clean. don't fuck this up.

the connection between ADHD and nutrition is brutally underrated, in terms of amounts per meal, intake of food additives and the mix as well. if starchy carbs, then very little fat and little protein. if meat, then no bread, no potatoes, no noodles or similar stuff at all. veggies are always fine except if the digestion of the kid says otherwise. sugar is a tricky thing. timing is important in terms of time of day and time after food intake but it works bad after some foods, which is different depending on geographical origin of grandparents.

you don't need to point a camera on the kid or anything. the effects of foods and the stuff that the body releases to digest the different compounds on body and brain become obvious within an hour or two. but you need to know the baseline(s) of your kid, e.g. time of day, after activities, around certain people, in places, crowds, moods, etc. make sure you do.

this is something I have long thought about. carbs make me batty.

doing keto made my skin look much better, but also helped me focus, and I found it was easier to sleep. whenever I had cheat days and crushed like half a pizza I found I immediately was exhausted and had trouble focusing.

also coffee vs. tea. switching to tea every other day instead of coffee really dove home how much of an impact coffee has on things like serotonin[1].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35345760/#:~:text=Excessive%....

interesting. will definitely take a look at caffeine's effect on serotonin. thank you.

most tea brands have a bad impact on my digestion and while I thought it must be the theine, which, as I learned, is just caffeine, I now believe it's connected to residue pesticides[1] since "homegrown teas" don't have the same highly undesirable impact.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36537161/

anything that screws with my digestion makes my gut, the literal and metaphorical one, itchy and I get nervous. similar things happen when I eat short-chained carbs in amounts over 100g in one meal but the negative effect disappears after an at least 13h fasting period or 16h+ if I drank liquor the night before. so I assume it has to do with enzymes released in the mouth and in later stages of digestion since I sometimes start to feel itchy even though I only started chewing oats for example.

I believe my sensitivity and ADHD are linked to the amount of enzymes produced by my body during digestion and or some genetic mutation in an enzyme associated with the respective metabolisms.

somewhat related: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?type=printabl...

https://www.nysca.com/index.php?option=com_dailyplanetblog&v...

the lack of focus and the exhaustion after eating carbs are relatable, but again , only if the fasting period wasn't long enough.

I tried Keto, but it made me quite a bit slower, which wasn't bad in terms of performance, but my cognitive processing speed was so much slower that I could not get used to it.

I have a 9 year old dyslexic boy with solid ADHD (impulsive). It’s been quite the journey (so far). He is heading back to ‘normal’ school next semester with no special support and fully integrated almost like a neurotypical. Sort of.

I have the same ADHD style:

Overall lessons: 1. Sleep. Melatonin. Transformational 2. Love. Love and more love. 3. Forgiveness and understanding 4. Throwing the kitchen sink at him for finding the outlet (sport) he loved. Gave him a sense of direction. 5. Ritalin: assists with ability to concentrate and therefore learn. Used only for education. 6. Educate yourself and get diagnosed yourself if you have. 7. Be the change in yourself and mirror and explain what you know (and don’t know) 8. Full spectrum intelligence test. Know where the issues are (processing speed, etc) and also where the strengths are.

We got a semi diagnosis at 5, then year on year assessments to see what we could know.

I wish there was a better support and road map for the steps to go through as a parent. I feel very lucky to be a dad of a child with ADHD in this time though.

This is good to hear that you have a solid foundation of how to best work with your son. I definitely wish I had that level of support growing up! I'm hoping to do the same with my kid.

The challenging kids split you apart and help you work out what needs to happen. THE definitive life experience for me. Good luck!!

I have this happen, I noticed reading is something I kind of need to practice. Maybe short comments ruined my brain lol.

I started getting into reading long books again last year. The beginning was rough, I was starting to think there was something wrong me. Sometimes I still do, but just being consistent and not hard on my self, I'm able to focus longer on reading and enjoy it. Some books and authors are easier then others too. LOTR series was work at times, enders game was pretty easy.

Alot if non fiction sucks too though and is pretty long winded.

If your worried about missing out on writing, there are short stories, and novellas to read

I can read novels I'm interested in. I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, but DNF a LOT of books that I cannot get into. My wife cannot not finish a book. Doesn't matter how bad it is, if she starts it she will eventually make her way through the book. She may put it down for a while and read something else in between but she persists. Regardless, we both average a little over a book a week. The game changer for me was shifting from reading at night (often well into the morning) to switching to audiobooks that I can listen to while hauling kids around, working in the garage or doing chores. Now I can DNF audiobooks because the narrator pronounces a word weird.

I read a ludicrous amount of books as a kid. Stuff like The Wheel of Time, 1000+ page books.

Now I just buy books and don't read them. I'll also buy audiobooks and bounce between them not really remembering much of the plots until I fall asleep.

I think the instant gratification of refreshing reddit/digg(rip)/instagram and having completely new things to see/read has destroyed my long term attention span.

I don't really like watching TV or playing consoles without having my laptop on my lap so that I can multitask and if I get bored for a minute refresh and see new things. It's bad. I'm single right now so I haven't actually used my living room TV in months. I do everything on my computer.

I feel claustrophobic if I can't multitask.

I've downloaded terabytes of ebooks (cause I'm a data hoarder) but I've read pretty much none of them.

fuck, are you me?

This is definitely a common thing these days. I'll mention that as someone diagnosed (within the last year) the same is true about me. But what's also distinguishing is that there's hyper-observant behavior. For example I might be out with friends and having a hard time maintaining a conversation because I'm queued into the conversations at the table to my left and to my right. Not because I want to, but because I can't turn it off. I've been like that since a kid too. Even back in 2005 I'd have the TV on, my laptop out, and be doing homework while clicking through Stumble Upon. So I definitely think there are aspects of our modern society that are creating an attention deficit disorder at a larger level but I think there are still things that distinguish ADHD from attention/novelty addiction. But don't be afraid to get tested if you think you have ADHD, it'll be covered by your insurance and can help you learn to better handle your issues.

But I definitely think we do need a discussion, especially as the people developing these addictive technologies, as to the consequences of what we build. Maybe you shouldn't take that job at TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, or Facebook, maybe you should. Just consider more than the money because if you can get one of those jobs you can probably get another high paying job. Or maybe question certain features and/or metrics and ask if they actually align with your real goals and if those goals are actually beneficial or harmful (it's frequently not obvious a priori). Move fast and break things is a useful strategy but not in every situation. Not everything can be repaired as easily as they can be broken.

> Now I just buy books and don't read them. I'll also buy audiobooks and bounce between them not really remembering much of the plots until I fall asleep.

I'm sorta addicted to Audio books. I apparently listened to slightly over 2000 one year on Audible.

Though for me, I can have half a dozen books and remember most of the plot(s). Smaller details will slip my mind, but the overall plot gist is just like a fun puzzle for my ADHD brain and it's back within minutes. Though for the life of me I can't recall if I took my medication today.

> I don't really like watching TV ...

Ugh, I've gotten that way in the past few years. It's kinda annoying, and I can only "focus" if it's a really good TV show.

I think this is pretty common. I can read certain rare books that really capture my attention, and often I read hundreds of pages at a time.

Typically, requiring complete silence.

This is me now, but I used to be great at reading books as a kid/teenager.

You might check out BeeLine Reader (I am the creator). [1] It's fairly popular in the ADHD community because it enhances visual focus while you're reading. Some people are able to read for 2x-10x as long with BeeLine versus without. I'm always happy to help out HNers with a free code for our browser plugin, just shoot me an email (contact in profile).

1: http://www.beelinereader.com

If you run Lighthouse against that website it will provide actionable suggestions for improving it. More info: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/

Appreciate it — will take a look!

Is this the same beeline from 10 years ago? I sort of remember installing it back in middle school and really loving it and helping my ability to read walls of text. I never knew it got popular within the ADHD community or that it was still around.

Another reader helper I liked was the one that flashed words in place but that seemed more like a speed read hack rather than actually comprehending what you read, never used it seriously like BeeLine

Yep, the same one. You probably heard of us from our Show HN, [1] which I later found out was the 9th-most-popular Show HN, by upvote count. It really gave us a boost, and led to a flurry of media coverage!

We still have our browser plugins for web [2] and PDF, [3] but are now also integrated into education platforms, [4] and even some news websites. [5]

I've been bootstrapping it (and raising a family) so growth has not been as meteoric as some other startups, but it's been consistently up-and-to-the-right!

If there's ever a platform you'd like to see us work with, just let us know and we'll get on it.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784

2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...

3: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader-pdf...

4: https://help.perlego.com/en/articles/6386814-read-faster-wit...

5: https://inewsource.org/2023/01/25/san-diego-unified-students...

I am the same, I found a book I could hyper focus on. That was the Chaos Walking by Patrick Ness

I was so fully pulled into that world I was quite sad once I got to the end because I know I'm not probably never going to find a book like that again.

I do this with most texts I have to read each sentence 3-4 times because I know I will have made up half of the words I just read.

I have the same issue with my brain not really thinking about the current situation, if I'm talking to someone I will get bored in a minute or two and it's a real effort to force myself to pay attention.

There's a good chance you do have ADHD. I was in a similar place to you, and it's important to know that it manifests differently in different people, and that there is a rebound effect when you stop your meds so what you might have seen may have been much worse than their unmedicated state. If you have the money I'd suggest just getting tested.

Yup! I wish more people who say they have ADHD could have that experience. If someone says they have ADHD but they are unmedicated and they already are holding down a decent job but are only recently kind of struggling with something they called distraction or issues with focus... Then I say they don't have ADHD because it's so much more than that. It is issues with actual executive function. It is being unable to put your shoes on because you can't keep a straight train of thought because someone else is distracting you and you can't help but following all those threads of distraction while you are trying to perform a manual task.

This is not fair, there are definitely people who struggle with ADHD and do so with the belief they are lazy or internalise their issue as a problem that is due to personality or not being organised enough.

My psychotherapist said something along those same lines but it was in order to force me to answer the question why is it a problem.

For me, in my life, I have always "worked" during the day in an easily distractible state and without being able to commit effort to anything substantial or focus. I self-medicated with caffeine to get anything resembling focus and did all of my actual daily tasks in a 3hr window when I got home and worked into the late evening. Usually with a massive sense of guilt about how I didn't really do anything during the day.

This was ADHD, I could not control when or how I focused. It gets worse with open office environments, but that's not the cause. I have an issue with executive function and delayed gratification. I do not have the ability fundamentally (even when motivated!) to task my brain with working.

But I can hold down a job and have done so for 16 years at this point and I am very successful in my career. That is not a good judge, you work around your issues if you have them- in my case I just don't have anything resembling a life outside of work in order to paper over my executive function disorders.

I wouldn't go as far as to neglect someone elses experience because as with other disorders, people with ADHD can all be quite different. I understand you because for myself it absolutely affects my executive function and I've been diagnosed as a young child, pretty much coping ever since. Could I get a decent job and hold it down though? Yes, probably. Getting and staying in a job has many many more factors and making that part of the criteria only makes things more complicated.

I don't know, I held down a decent job without meds before starting a family. I definitely have days where my executive functioning is as bad as you mention, but it varies. I've known many people with worse ADHD symptoms than I have, but I'm also not a marginal case. I'm also fortunate to have a rather high IQ.

It took me 11 semesters (plus two summer terms) to finish my undergrad with a low C grade average. Prior to kids, I would get to work between 7 and 8. If I was having trouble focusing that day, I'd leave between 4 and 5pm. If I was having a good day for focus, I'd stay as late as 10pm. Two "good days" in a week would put me at over 20 productive hours, which is a pretty solid foundation for being at least in the "not fired" category. If I didn't have two "good days," well that's what the weekends are for.

Reading the above, I think I understand why "burn out" is mentioned in TFA as something ADHD can lead to...

This isn’t accurate. Holding down a job is not a criteria because people learn to compensate.

But those compensation mechanisms eventually stop working and I guarantee that persons life outside of their job is a complete dumpster fire.

I wish you wouldn't say things like this. It seems to fuel a popular narrative that's leading to underdiagnosis and treatment.

There's a good chance that much of the ADHD behavior is being written off, eg. as a moral failing, when it's really a disorder that's really harmful to the person.

My wife has a copy of the DSM 5 on our bookshelf, and flipping through it I noted that very many disorders have diagnostic criteria that, beyond just having some symptoms, they cause significant distress or impairment of functioning.

I had a friend growing up who was diagnosed with ADHD quite young whose experience was similar to your story–he had major issues with school that ultimately led to him being expelled, not going to college, having trouble with work and family etc. I thought of him a lot as so many of my classmates in a hyper-competitive school environment discussed how they could get a diagnosis and medication to have an edge on college admissions or whatever.

Its the significant distress or impairment which is key. As an example most people will put off doing things like sorting out an issue with their electricity provider, but I took that to the degree where I only sorted it when someone literally turned up on my doorstep to disconnect the supply.

Throughout my life I've found myself in situations where most people would go "well, this seems to be getting out of hand" and just carried on, getting ever more stressed and angry and seemingly being unable to get on with fixing it, whilst variously losing jobs, friendships, and a marriage. It was honestly a huge relief to discover the likely cause is ADHD rather than just being a failure of a human being.

I assume that is how most people get through high-school and university? Intense focus on the couple days before finals / final projects. I too did that. Is that not the case or is that warning lights for ADHD?

High school you can get away with it because the course content is easier - college is much more challenging...

i did that all throughout university and graduated with honors in an engineering program. it really depends on your coping strategies / personality / luck / etc. i definitely have adhd, it just took a few boring jobs for it to blow up my life in any real way. (i completely burned out, turns out relying on adrenaline as an adhd medication is not a great long term coping strategy.) some people will hit that wall earlier or later than others.

once, i accidentally dragged a lab partner into doing work the way i did. we turned in the assignment with less than a minute on the clock, and he nearly had an anxiety attack (i was feeling pretty great about things)

Fair - I also graduated from an engineering program - though the intensity around finals was grueling. Somehow I think the 80-100% finals weighting might have made it that way.

Why does the boring job blow it up? Not enough stimulation?

it ended up being a confluence of personal life stuff plus how pointless the jobs felt (especially after what a slog university was, i was basically already burnt out going into my first job.) i think boring meant adrenaline didn't kick in as much, and my first few jobs didn't really try to incentivize caring about work in ways that weren't blatantly exploitative or "on trust."

honestly, idk that it was really anything specific, so much as a bunch of different things finally catching up to me mixed with some bad luck

in grad school the intense few days becomes intense few months, but close enough

At least for me it wasn't just finals and final projects, it was everything. No assignment was done until just before it was due because (looking back now and applying an adult's logic to it) it wasn't high enough priority until then. It didn't matter whether it was every day/week assignments, long term projects or final exams. The only way I could make any significant progress was to be under a hard and short deadline.

IIUC, there are two main components to ADHD, and you can have one, the other or both. And all qualify as ADHD.

I'm likely ADHD, and the majority of my siblings have it. There's a night and day difference though between me, who in a questionnaire scored high on both, and me who scored high only in one[1].

[1] Well, borderline in one and not the other. Immediately after taking the questionnaire I attended a work meeting and realized that there were at least a half dozen questions that I answered optimistically through rose-tinted glasses.

With all that said, I'm working to address my sleep apnea before getting a diagnosis because I've heard that sleep deprivation can manifest similar to ADHD.

classic gatekeeping. Its a defense mechanism, "I'm not an alcoholic, I hold down a job, there's people who pass out in a puddle of vomit. now that's an alcoholic. Me? I just drink an 18-pack of light beer per night, I always make it to work. nothing wrong with that".

whats paradoxical about it is that the "real alcoholic" is just as inclined to gatekeep as well.

Sourced from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38162133

>Self diagnoses (and diagnoses over the internet) are pretty harmful

Self-diagnoses can be legitimate or not - depends on the person doing them. They are often a necessity, in an environment where a professional diagnosis takes thousands of dollars or years in waiting (and is often done badly, by ill-informed professionals, like the many-decades prevailing myth that women/girls "can't be autistic", or that "ADD and autism can't coincide").

As (in this case) they are also based not on bloodwork or some physical indicators, but on a subjective assessment of a person's way of thinking, the person having the actual experience is often more qualified than the professional. Same to how you don't really need a doctor to tell you you're gay.

>One might even argue that the labeling aspect of a certain disorder (particularly a mental one) by a "professional" to not be particularly helpful too in addressing ones problems

One might argue that the false dichotomy between professionals and laymen, where the former is supposed to hold all the keys to knowledge and the latter to passively consult and follow the advice of the former, is a problem in itself.

And a little outdated in modern societies where the "laymen" are not some mud dwelling peasants who never went to school and only know farm work, but univercity-educated (even over-educated) in their own right, and libraries are not confined to the rich or the scholars, but every book ever written is a click away.

In any case, a self-diagnosis doesn't give you the required paperwork to get drugs, or to get benefits, or specific accomondations, or anything like that. So it's not like it hurts society by taking resources from "legitimate" diagnoses.

Last, but not least, pointing that X symptoms is "quite common to ADD/ADHD" is not self-diagnosis, it's not even diagnosing. It's a suggestion hinting to a possible condition. It could very well be used for seeking a professional diagnosis.

Or do you think people with ADD/ADHD just go to the doctor to get diagnosed out of the blue, and not because of some similar suspicion, spotting some unexplained symptoms or themselves, or identification with some symptoms they've read about?

There are a lot of problems with this comment. It might touch on a few legitimate ideas, like that we should probably consider the value of the patient's actual experience of course.

But even in light of ideas like that, this whole idea has resulted in people getting pills from people they know or websites based in less-scrupulous nations.

There are similar problems with most of the statements here - they make sense on the surface, but once you consider second- and third-order effects, it falls apart. We should not be encouraging moving away from professionals giving medical diagnoses. It may be a necessary evil at times, but it's a bad idea to encourage.

I’d also suggest that any high IQ individual will by the very nature of being in an extreme of that IQ distribution exhibit some other behaviors that are in tails of the “normal” distribution for various behaviors.

I’ve had multiple people suggest to me I might have ADHD, it’s nonsense, I remember everything and don’t miss any deadlines. They observe me working simultaneously on many projects and since that is impossible for them, and frankly their memory is horrible, they don’t even remember correctly about the one project they are currently focused on, so suddenly they think this person is abnormal and hyper, ok they have ADHD.

I’ve occasionally had people with ADHD or Autism try to diagnose me with it. I took it seriously and read up all about it, watched YouTube videos where people explain their experience, and did the screening questionnaires. And I don’t think I’m even close to having either ADHD or Autism.

Just seems like people see something they can relate too, like listening to fast pace music, or ordering the same thing at the restaurant every time, and then link that to their condition/project it on you.

It presents in different ways. Someone isn't having 5 conversations, but could be drifting in and out of thoughts. It might just look like they aren't very interested. If it's more severe you would have more trouble controlling these kinds of things for a number of reasons related to the condition (poor executive function and impulse control).

I've met "people with ADHD" who seem to not have the condition at all, though pretty much always medicated. On the other hand, I've met people with far more clearcut symptoms, and I felt like I had way more in common with them. It sounded like they were living the exact same life.

My foot hurts everyday but next to someone who had their's amputated I'm okay; therefore, my foot is fine.

I was this person most of my life until medication in my late 30s. For some reason (probably the ADHD) I never really payed attention to it but was always kind of vaguely aware that doing simple things like getting ready for the day, or any kind of planning always seemed much more difficult for me than most others. The worst is the kind of decision paralysis that would happen where you have all of these competing priorities shouting for your attention at once, and your mind rapidly flits between them until you are so exhausted you just check out and go read some hacker news... oh that's how I ended up here.

id wager any human would increase in productivity when given speed