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I have ADHD, and most people _mis_understand it. They are familiar with some of the symptoms, like that it’s hard to focus, but completely unfamiliar with others, like that having an hour appointment in the afternoon can basically block out your entire day. I rely on and even thrive with medication, but there’s a nationwide Ritalin shortage that has basically kept me from working for the past month while I figure out a new medication.
having an hour appointment in the afternoon can basically block out your entire day
I feel this bullshit so hard. Nobody gets it
Came here to see if anyone had mentioned ADHD. So much misunderstanding. The name of it doesn't help either.
Sorry to hear about the Ritalin shortage. Going without meds for more than a week super sucks. (I'm on vyvanse though).
Call it EDD (executive dysfunction disorder) which is a part of ADD and you'll find more people want to know what it is and don't just assume.
EDD sounds similar enough to ED that people might get the wrong idea.
With that being said, I'm not going to use the term extensively.
The other one that people never understand is the hyper focus side of ADHD. If I get rolling on a task: 1, don’t stop me I will not get back on task. 2, I will forget that planet earth exists, food becomes an afterthought, and breaks, even restroom breaks simply don’t happen.
At first I thought "no, but I'll read the comments. Maybe it'll help me understand my fellow man." Then the top comment was ADHD and I was like, " oh yeah I do have that lol."
It’s super frustrating when people are like “oh sure I know about how ADHD works”, when in reality they skimmed the webmd or wiki page for it that mostly just enumerates various ways in which it may present, without even registering that the implications of how the symptoms affect my life.
Appointment inertia is the worst. I can't do more than one appointment in a day. It's not like a cute lil 'oh it's so hard' thing, I literally cannot do the cognitive processing required to do more than one appointment a day.
people misunderstand it
are familiar with some of the symptoms
On that note, I want to mention that I have seen and heard of a lot of people (mostly online) who self-diagnose with ADHD. Believe it or not, extended social media use (I'm not sure if Lemmy falls into this, it mostly refers to places made to be addictive like TikTok, Instagram and others) has apparently been shown to cause some symptoms of ADHD. I'm just using this comment to tell anyone reading it: if you think you have ADHD or any other mental health issue, talk to a professional, don't self diagnose. It can be destructive to yourself to think you do or don't, without checking. If you have symptoms, talk to a professional. And I'm sure OP whose comment I'm responding to will agree with me on this. Thank you. And you will one day thank yourself too.
Yes, I agree, if you think you have it, you should get in touch with a professional. If you don’t have it, you may have some other condition that can be treated, or there may be ways a psychiatrist can help. And if you do have it, treatment can make a huge difference to your quality of life.
having an hour appointment in the afternoon can basically block out your entire day
I'm curious...what do you mean by this? I don't have ADHD, but I do find it very difficult to relax if I know I have to be somewhere later in the day. Is it anything like that? Or is it something else? Just wondering!
I’ve heard it’s related to time blindness. Basically I can’t become invested in a project if I know I’ll have to break out of it shortly. So if I have an appointment at like 1pm, I either have to start my day really early to make sure I can get like 6 hours of work done before noon, or start my day after the appointment and work into the night.
It’s a lot easier when I’m on Ritalin, but it’s still difficult to plan around.
That’s basically why I always schedule any appointment for early in the morning, if I can.
Thankfully I am not that bad but I absolutely relate. One simple task turns into three or four and you often forget about the original task in the first place.
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Sadly psychiatrists and counselors don't help here. They see one symptom and think "oh let's add ADHD to this person's diagnosis list". And they wonder why the ritalin shortage exists.
Wait, really? I just posted a comment about how it's better to talk to a professional instead of self-diagnosing. Your comment makes me question my other comment.
Yes really. It largely depends on the place, but I can absolutely positively confirm this is how many of them operate. Not just with ADHD either. I've known people with TBI whose TBI is treated as bipolar on the sole basis that people hear bipolar and think mood swings. There's one person I know who was put on two lithiums a day for it and then yanked off of it and had to endure a whole month of hallucinations, only to be put on half of the original lithium dose again, all because they didn't properly insert TBI into the diagnostic list and thereupon this one psychiatrist just assumed it was bipolar (when there are differences in how mood swings from both manifest; TBI is rapid fire and bipolar is more like a long storm).
Every time I mention psychiatrists on this website, I get hated on, but I know my experience and the things I say are not going away. They and counselors DO overstep, they DO take on each others' roles and functions, and they DO conflict with each other at times. Glad to know though the same people here who say the US health system is shit also claim the psychiatry system is somehow a perfect well-oiled machine, free from people acting outside of their jurisdictions.
in my experience, there's not even as much consistency therapist to therapist, psychiatrist to psychiatrist, as there is in the rest of the medical field.
I love my psychiatrist, but what I love is that she's very much about staying up to date and knowing what she's prescribing, and probing to see if it's working (I am a terrible judge the worse off I am. no, really, it's fine, I can just wake up a little earlier and add a panic attack to my morning routine, don't change my drugs. huh..ok, since we upped the dose, I haven't had a panic attack, I guess that was a good idea.)
That may have been true in the 80s and early 90s.
It's still true. There are soooooo many people with diagnoses that don't match what they actually have. And some consulted professionals are way too quick to diagnose these things, especially in the child psychiatry industry, especially with child psychiatrists (who often put too much emphasis on one family member), especially with things like what I described. It's far from an archaic experience.