Just like with depression, everyone sometimes feels sad. It's the intensity and how much your life is affected by it that's the differentiating factor. There also often isn't a logical reason. When you have ADD proper, you just can't help it.

For a person with ADD, if there was a gun held to their head to stay on a task, they will soon forget that there's a gun and become distracted. They can't help it. Their mind is racing. The only way to stay on task is to be constantly tapped on the head with the gun. At this point, it's the periodic reminder that's doing the trick. This is why people with ADD often require external structure to keep them focused.

There's a lot of positives for people with ADD, such as increased creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. Problem is that a lot of societal institutions, such as school, are not adapted to it.

> This is why people with ADD often require external structure to keep them focused.

It's not so much about keeping focus it's the executive function part of it: keeping focused on the right thing. People with ADD can definitely focus, they just can't control it. That's why parents can easily dismiss it as lack of motivation. "he focuses just fine playing soccer" (a sport with adrenaline that gives results like stimulants)

Years back, when being treated for major clinical depression, someone asked how you could tell if someone was clinically depressed. Someone else (and I forget exactly where I was for this) said, "You respond well to anti-depressants."

The average person, given various antidepressants (or at least certain ones; I've not kept up on all the research) would not get any benefit. Desipramine, for example, is not some all-around, casual-use pick-me-up.

I think this is true for at least some ADD drugs; how does a person respond to stimulants? Do they calm down, or do they get wired? Ritalin and Adderall used to calm me down; so did black beauties when I was self-medicating. Eventually they stopped doing anything for me.

Unfortunately there is, to my knowledge, no objective marker for various mental conditions. You have to try things and consider the context and see what works or doesn't, and you may never really know exactly why, or what the underlying problem is.

ADD? Occasional distraction? Depression? Bad time in your life? Bi-polar?

The lines are blurry.

how did they manage to teach this little discourse to everyone? Incredible.

My personal opinion, evidently a minority view these days, is that there's no such thing.

The ability to concentrate is like a muscle. If it's weak, the way to strengthen it is exercise. If you went to a gym and found you could only bench-press 20 pounds, would we say you have Muscular Weakness Syndrome and suggest medical treatment? While it's possible your weakness might be caused by some disease, and that should perhaps be looked into, it's also possible that the sole cause is that you don't get much exercise.

The way to exercise the concentration muscle is, of course, meditation.

This is just my opinion and I could be wrong, but I think it's a possibility that should be kept in mind.

Unlike many diagnosed with A.D.D., I wasn't indoctrinated with medication or treatment at an early age, so I've lived for 25 years without treatment and can speak to the differences. They are great. You can't see depression, mental illness, sexual orientation. Not being able to see something for yourself doesn't eliminate the possibility of its existence. That should be kept in mind.

Like a lot of mental illnesses, the diagnosis is determined by symptoms that show up in "normal" people also. If there isn't a physical test, how would you propose we determine which people need help?

qEEG has been very good at matching up people who have been diagnosed with ADD versus normal people. It's the first real test that provides some indication without going off behavior.

It's a catch all diagnosis these days. which is sad because my parents that teach see children that they legitimately think have ADD and need to be tested and possibly take medication. But due to the fact that they are so quick to label any problems with school as ADD, the parents tend to refuse to have the child tested.

ADHD is kind of interesting because I think it's significantly under- and over-diagnosed. That said, I don't think it's as over-diagnosed as it's made out to be. More than anything, I expect it's just pretty common.

> ADHD is kind of interesting because I think it's significantly under- and over-diagnosed.

I thought this was one of the better comments regarding the diagnosis of A.D.D.

Why? I was diagnosed late, so I was missed – and yet, I cannot ignore the obvious over-diagnosis of A.D.D. It seems if you're hyper, you have attention deficits. For me, I was never hyper so I completely missed the radar. That's also why I feel that there is an over-diagnosis – and why people feel that it isn't a legitimate diagnosis.

I was diagnosed with a less-noticed blend of A.D.D., more commonly known as ADHD-PI or "predominately inattentive". I actually could sit still, I didn't move around all the time. But the slight movement of a foot in a classroom would completely take me away from any focus. Most people can say that they have those experiences, but these people can also get into extreme focus later on for other things they actually love to do. That's the marker, for me, as a diagnosis.