ADHD memes

I recently did something like this….

I was diagnosed as a young child. I don’t remember an assessment and was never medicated. The coping mechanisms I was taught growing up were not contextualized as “for ADHD” they were just “the way things had to be done to get things done” As I grew into adulthood, I chocked up the behavioral differences to just the way different folks from different families learn to do things differently. Living as an normie, I started to question/forget my diagnosis.

So there I am, rediscovering that I might have ADHD as an adult from memes on the internet. When I mentioned it to my folks my mum emphatically reminded me that I absolutely had an official diagnosis X0 some years ago.

I was diagnosed about 20 years ago. Went through the pharma-go-round and all that. I remember it pretty well considering they the only med to do anything was Adderall and what it did was give me panic attacks for routine work problems.

Fast forward to last year and needing serious mental health treatment. Psychiatrist after talking to me for 20 minutes: "I don't think you have ADHD." APN from a different practice: "You're just trying to get stimulants." I tried tracking down my old doctor, practice was closed. Found him elsewhere, has no access to the old records.

Got myself a full neuropsych exam. ADHD, autism, PTSD, possible bipolar II. Neat.

Fast forward another year. Still on the pharma-go-round. Still not on ADHD meds. Turns out my depression is treatment-resistant. But at least I found providers that aren't writing me off based on vibes or whatever.

I was diagnosed as a child (early elementary school, I don't really remember the details), but my parents took me off the medication because they didn't notice a difference in my grades. I don't know if there was a difference in my behavior, it was too long ago and I don't think I was capable of self reflection.

What I do remember though is when I began taking it again in college and ever since. It's made a big difference.

When being tested for ADHD my mom refused to take part in the interviews and was really reluctant to help me figure out the symptoms I had as a child etc. Funniest thing, she works as a therapist in an asylum for prisoners, so one might think she'd understand how important it is to get help with mental health, yet she was apparently thinking I want to get diagnosed just to get drugs and my problem is that I just don't try enough. And here I'm thinking, ma, have you realized how many different careers and educations you've had, how your relationships are a mess and how anxious you are all the time, not to mention the hoarding of stuff and hobbies etc. we are the same.

When you search for 'signs of dementia' and all the links are purple (visited) already...

Haha nice, I had something similar to this. I'm an accountant/auditor who has ADHD and doing that undiagnosed was a special kind of hell. I was lucky enough to work in a very reputable firm too and the good ones, when you complete your work, will carry out a formal, two-stage review process. They'll write out, on a separate sheet all the errors you made and you have to reply with how you fixed them. First by my line manager or department head and then by the partner who's client it was.

Essentially, I had to have multiple teams of professional auditors telling me, in explicit detail and fully evidenced, that I had a problem with errors of inattention for years before I finally realised that I might have a problem with errors or inattention.

Luckily, I respond particularly well to the medication and things are much better now.

I think the difference is the masking and different freedoms between being a kid and an adult.

Adult ADHD isn’t quite the same as kid ADHD. It just presents differently. IOW, the kid that can’t sit still and can’t focus on boring tasks (the adhd stereotype) with school’s rigid rules or home has grown up and maybe found a job that allows a workaround or maybe ADHD helps a bit, and the other symptoms have morphed into messiness and tardiness - stuff that nobody but the ADHD person and maybe a partner has to deal with. They become quirks vs failing grades.

Yeah, ADHD can be a lot worse as an adult and cause real problems, especially for people who had life progression interrupted because of school failures and maybe substance abuse used to self medicate or even abuse at home when people were verbally or physically abused because they were non-normative.

My entire family is non-norm. One of them was incredibly frustrated, hurt, and angry that their parents knew they were ADHD, didn’t tell them, and did nothing about it. They spent years rudderless and wasting time at schools, never accomplishing anything despite the good resources. They were particularly angry because they knew that if they’d known and been able to be medicated they would have far more likely completed a valuable higher education and likely be in a desirable career far sooner than the twenty-odd years extra it took to get even close.

But back in the day you kept your mouth shut about mental conditions because the prejudice was so much worse than today.

Fuck this is exactly what happened to me.

Reminds me of one of my favorite Louie bits.

I had a childhood diagnoses. Parents took me off meds before i was 10 because they didnt like how i was on them (Straterra appetite suppression mostly, i just wouldn't eat). Puberty then hit, and my newfound appetite leads to me discovering i really like food.

Now adult, symptoms never went away. My childhood medical records AFAIK don't even exist anymore (or if they do, its on the dark web. Thanks, DoD/tricare!) and my parents didnt keep anything.

Lmao when I got diagnosed with adhd, the doctor offered my mom a test. Turns out we both have adhd, who would've thunk

So the shrink did the (billable, assuming US) test knowing the person was already diagnosed?

oh right

I could see this, I actually mourn the time I made friend with a kid in the neighborhood, he gave me a copy of Super Mario World (he had three copies of it) as a token of our friendship and wrote his name on the back.

I forgot he existed and when I remember him I mourn the friendship that could have been.