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TBF if any condition isn't causing problems then it doesn't need treatment. Don't get me wrong, ADHD can cause problems beyond just school/work, but often that's one of the most common primary problems it causes
Who says it isn’t causing problems? We had a similar issue with my oldest. He is a brilliant kid who can’t get his shit together because of his disability. However he can skate through school.
It was a constant battle to get him services and accommodations, because he “is not failing”. The school system thinks he doesn’t need treatment because he’s not failing. We think he deserves treatment because he isn’t living up to his abilities and struggles to do basic stuff
Thank you for fighting for your son.
I never really had issues in school, I was doing fine. But teachers kept telling me I wasn't living up to my potential. I was chaotic. Forgetful. Years later, I developed an anxiety disorder I didn't understand so I went to therapy. Turns out I also have chronic depression (oh, life is not so bleak for everyone??) and it's all because of severe ADHD and the attached problems. I'm almost 30 now. And while my therapist did a lot of structured tests, she is not qualified to actually diagnose ADHD. It's gonna be another year until I can get my formal diagnosis and medication.
I often wonder what could have been had the adults in my childhood been more attentive to my -in hindsight- obvious and severe problems.
This was me. Had some good, caring teachers, and some bad, but I was really struggling. Ended up going to a private school on student aid because the public schools didn't care to help. Started caring a lot more about school. Things also got a lot easier when I moved out of the house and had more space to collect my thoughts and goals.
Absolutely, and inner conflict, constant struggle and unhappiness counts as a huge problem, even when external appearances are kept and things run relatively smoothly. Internal peace should always be the primary goal, and not just fitting into the gears of routine life.
Life is a constant struggle and was for basically all of our ancestors.
If you think life is only happy and free of inner conflict then that's only because the drugs.
Why don't you go chop off one of your arms. Since life is a constant struggle, more struggle must be good right? You should definitely make your life HARDER.
In my opinion life not being 100% free of inner conflict vs life being full of it are very different things.
The goal being inner peace doesn't mean that one thinks absolute inner peace is possible. At least I tend to reach a bit higher than what I'm only happy with.
I mean this is technically right (so the best kind of right) but as someone that got okay grades in school and only passed because I could ace a test on pretty much anything, knowing I had ADHD before I was in my mid 30s, stressing over why work was getting harder and harder and trying to explain to my wife that i genuinely just forget to clean up after a project is done would have been hugely helpful. So diagnosing ADHD in kids and teens getting good grades may end with just therapy as treatment if they are otherwise doing well, knowing that other treatments (like medication) are options if after school they start struggling more. Keep in mind it’s much more difficult to get an ADHD diagnosis as an adult than as a kid.
I got diagnosed and medicated at 39. A couple of years go by and I’ve improved my shit enough that I get offered a promotion from tools to office.
“Great”, I think, because I’m finally getting my shit together.
Couple more years have passed, and it turns out that even with medication it’s real fucking hard to be self-led management when you’ve got a brane that is not at all interested in working with you.
Unmedicated me got reasonable grades at school, then managed a respectable 2:1 degree. That would have been a first class degree if I’d been medicated. But all of that shit is basically on rails, people guiding you in the right direction. I don’t have those rails anymore.
My parents just didn’t know what to do and dropped me out of school at 14. I made good grades for the first semester in school every year, then I was moved beside the teacher’s desk and had straight Fs for the rest of the year.
My daughter has developed the same problems as me, mostly after her mom was diagnosed with cancer and then passed away, but I’m trying to get her medicated (if that’s what she needs, and I think it ultimately is). She’s 16 now, on mood stabilizers as of a month ago. The doctor seems to think that will do it.
She ticked every box for adhd which didn’t surprise me at all. I think they’re afraid to give her anything too big because of a history of addiction in the family.
I don’t know. I just hope she ends up doing better than I have since she’s actually being treated.
After I got diagnosed, my kid began the journey towards assessment. Sadly for him his mother didn’t take it too seriously and delayed making a GP appointment for a few months, by which time Covid had happened. The end result is that he got formally diagnosed last February, but because of the waiting lists and a change of our county’s ADHD service provider in April, he’s still not been prescribed any medication.
It’s doubly frustrating because he’s half way through his final year of a law degree. I desperately want him to graduate knowing he did his very best, but without meds I know how impossible that might feel.
Why did you attribute a ratio to your degree? What do you mean first class degree?
In the UK (and maybe other places?) an honours degree can be passed at different levels depending on how well you do.
Top marks is a 1st Class Honours Degree, good marks gets you an Upper Second Class Degree (2:1), okay marks gets you a Lower Second Class Degree (2:2). A 3rd class also degree exists.
Most post-grad courses and some jobs would expect a 2:1 or above to let you apply.
My marks were mere points away from being in First range. It’s frustrating as hell to look back on.
It’s a testament to how hard I worked on the course submissions (in the 12 hours before the handing in deadline) that I did as well as I did. Because honestly, when I think back to that final year of being sat in front of my computer screen, the overwhelming memory is having four different browsers open, logged into four different Facebook accounts that I used to be a dickhead troll in racist groups, winding up the racists.
None of that had anything to do with the radio production degree that I’d paid good money to study towards.
A 2:2 is also known as a Desmond, for fairly obvious reasons.
Take a guess how many doctors and dentists you worked with barely passed medical schools, or politicians you voted for still passed with mediocre subpar scores. Hint: not zero.
You'll do fine. So stop under selling yourself
What do you call a doctor that graduated last in their class? Doctor
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. Did this reply go to the wrong person?
Nope it went to the correct person (you).
What don't you understand, so I may elaborate? Apologies, English is my first language and I'm dumb.
You replied to someone else, and appeared not to know what a 2:1 and a 1st was. I (perhaps wrongly?) assumed you were from a country which used a different system, so I attempted to explain what they were, e.g. they are different grades for honours degrees, 2:1 is not a ratio, it's what the grade is called, it's the 2nd highest grade you can receive for a degree, and so on etc
You then answered with something about doctors and politicians and "underselling myself", which, as I had not mentioned anything about doctors and politicians or "selling myself", but had only explained "these are the names of the different degree marks you can get", appeared completely unrelated to what I had written - therefore I assumed perhaps you were meaning to reply to someone else.
Sorry if I wasn't clear.
But even if the results are good, the process can still be very draining on the individual.
It didn't get recognized in me until 10th or 11th grade. My grades started to slip fast when the ways I adapted to school stopped helping me keep up.
Arguably, if it's not causing behavioral concerns, educational concerns, emotional concerns, social concerns, or physical concerns... It's not really a condition is it?
For lack of a more relatable analogy, I've been using this race based one.
Imagine you're a black child in America in the 1960s and 1970s, but you somehow managed to remain ignorant of that fact until sometime in your teens or early adulthood. Maybe the area was really progressive, parents wanted to shield you from reality, whatever you need to imagine is fine. You end up not understanding this fact about yourself, and then you end up in the racist public. Now, imagine that the racist public never comes outright and says anything directly racist to you, but all of their other behavior is exactly like what you'd expect from racists in the 1970s. How do you come to terms with this reality? You must be doing something wrong for people to treat you this way.
Obviously not a perfect analogy, and I don't really like to compare my issues as a ND person with the awful stuff done to black people back then, and that continues to be done today. Anyway, it's not inaccurate, if anything, the differences between ND people and NT people are greater than any outward racial appearance, and worse, ND people aren't really aware they are being marginalized, and NT people don't really understand that they are marginalizing.
I think... you should probably stop using that analogy.
A good analogy would be being forced to use your non-dominant hand to write, maybe to play guitar, paint, use a right-handed mouse with your left, etc...
Over time and practice, you may get pretty good at it. But, you want to ask if you think you'll ever get the speed with the smoothness and precision you would have gotten if you've been using your dominant hand. You'd be doing what a lot of ND people have to do, which is put a lot of valuable concentration and energy into adapting to something that while NT people have no issue, it's completely foreign to you.
You can also think of getting the proper treatment as, at worst, switching that incorrect 5-button ergonomic mouse for a basic 3-button ambidextrous one, and at best give you the forward/back buttons, but ignoring the ergonomic design. I.E. The treatment should help lessen the disadvantages, but they would still be present.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I think it's too shallow vs the actual experience. The depth at which ND people are marginalized is so far and away under presented today. Most of the established science is just wrong and resistant to the reality that ND led researchers are presenting. We need to do better at advocating for ourselves as an entire group with shared experiences and unique mental and physical health issues.
The next best analogy I've heard so far is NT people are Windows based software running in a Windows based world, ND people are MacOS software being forced to run on Windows (suspend your IT mind about how it wouldn't work at all, and understand that for a lot of ND folks, it doesn't). Get on the correct runtime environment and a lot of issues go away. That's just really hard to do when the world is primarily built for the 85%-95% NT population, and many of the most capable in the ND population are either ignorant or in denial due to lack of acknowledgement, and stigmatization of anything that would be acknowledged.
People can not agree with what I'm saying, I'm sure it sounds absurd especially if you are NT. I doubt I would have agreed with it two years ago, but introspection after my own realizations that I'm autistic, after over 30+ years of living with this brain, I understand things quite differently now.