Is it fair to label it a 'disorder'? Or is it an evolutionary variation?
I would not willingly surrender my condition.
In school it was a benefit. In the military, well... those of my social strata who had to opt for military never see ADHD in the ranks since it largely occurs "among upper-income people of European ancestry".
The United States Marine Corps are beginning to tap into this resource as they have the luxury of choice in recruiting.
It's different in everyone. I did horribly in the military. Depression was a major factor. It was brought on, in part, by bullying by some senior petty officers who were threatened by my intellect that I have never been good at masking.
I was diagnosed as hyperactive in 1965 at the age of ten. My parents hid it from me because they did not trust what they were told. I have pieced it together as an adult from several memories, including the session where I was tested in a grade school principal’s office, and overhearing my mother emphatically state “my kid isn’t hyperactive.”
This happened in the town of Barstow California where the largest employers were the Santa Fe Railroad and supporting businesses. One grandfather was a foreman in the large switching yard where the Union Pacific line came from Chicago via Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. Santa Fe, which owned the yard, came from Chicago via a southern route through Amarillo and Albuquerque.
Very working class. My dad was a skilled tradesman. Starting as a diesel mechanic apprentice for Santa Fe, he would become one of the first Mexican Americans to get into the plumber’s union.
The strongest memory of the testing session was of a component I was able to find by web searching for a description of what I remembered. The Kohs Block Test evaluates the test subject’s speed at learning unfamiliar tasks. I remembered it as well as I did because I felt I was doing very well. I would later overhear an aunt mentioning to my mother an IQ of 140. I do not think I was meant to hear that.
What my research led me to discover is that this test was given to evaluate mental processing speed without being swayed by language ability or other cultural biases. The town had a large Mexican American population, and research indicates my score was weighed against that demographic.
The test was part of something called the Stanford Binet Scale. I would have done well against Anglos, since we were raised to assimilate into American culture and did not speak Spanish as both parents did.
Thanks to becoming a plumber My father was able to move us to a wealthier town on the coast. I wound up being treated horribly in that school system. My race may have been a factor, but I suspect there were other reasons. These may have included not being able to live up to the potential expressed in my diagnosis. There may have been antipathy to the notion of ADHD.
Is it fair to label it a 'disorder'? Or is it an evolutionary variation?
I would not willingly surrender my condition.
In school it was a benefit. In the military, well... those of my social strata who had to opt for military never see ADHD in the ranks since it largely occurs "among upper-income people of European ancestry".
The United States Marine Corps are beginning to tap into this resource as they have the luxury of choice in recruiting.
It's different in everyone. I did horribly in the military. Depression was a major factor. It was brought on, in part, by bullying by some senior petty officers who were threatened by my intellect that I have never been good at masking.
I was diagnosed as hyperactive in 1965 at the age of ten. My parents hid it from me because they did not trust what they were told. I have pieced it together as an adult from several memories, including the session where I was tested in a grade school principal’s office, and overhearing my mother emphatically state “my kid isn’t hyperactive.”
This happened in the town of Barstow California where the largest employers were the Santa Fe Railroad and supporting businesses. One grandfather was a foreman in the large switching yard where the Union Pacific line came from Chicago via Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. Santa Fe, which owned the yard, came from Chicago via a southern route through Amarillo and Albuquerque.
Very working class. My dad was a skilled tradesman. Starting as a diesel mechanic apprentice for Santa Fe, he would become one of the first Mexican Americans to get into the plumber’s union.
The strongest memory of the testing session was of a component I was able to find by web searching for a description of what I remembered. The Kohs Block Test evaluates the test subject’s speed at learning unfamiliar tasks. I remembered it as well as I did because I felt I was doing very well. I would later overhear an aunt mentioning to my mother an IQ of 140. I do not think I was meant to hear that.
What my research led me to discover is that this test was given to evaluate mental processing speed without being swayed by language ability or other cultural biases. The town had a large Mexican American population, and research indicates my score was weighed against that demographic.
The test was part of something called the Stanford Binet Scale. I would have done well against Anglos, since we were raised to assimilate into American culture and did not speak Spanish as both parents did.
Thanks to becoming a plumber My father was able to move us to a wealthier town on the coast. I wound up being treated horribly in that school system. My race may have been a factor, but I suspect there were other reasons. These may have included not being able to live up to the potential expressed in my diagnosis. There may have been antipathy to the notion of ADHD.
I detail what happened there in my own Substack.