My daughter hit every mark in this essay. She was diagnosed at age 7 with ADHD. I declined medication. She was subsequently diagnosed with sensory processing disorder, which explained a lot! She also has a coordinatuon problem with her eyes which makesb "small work" - reading and math more difficult. She loved math and excelled when she had a teacher she bonded to but shortly after, we were forced down a misguided rabbit hole of hell through our local public school's Special Ed program. (She was super hyperactive and had focus/ attention problems)
I did my best to educate her as she missed almost 4 years of school as we tried and rejected their horrible options as she got tagged as emotionally disturbed. Depression became a huge issue. We finally rented out our house and moved to another district. Boom! One week into the new school they were preparing her move to a program that turned out to be the thing she needed all along. She has improved most emotionally in self esteem and has discovered a love of science. (Another bonding experience with a teacher). She'll be graduating in March. Two years later than normal but with all she missed and Covid closure too, I keep telling her she's done amazingly! She is a very talented artist and has been since early childhood. She paints, draws, makes jewelry and her photography is "exceptional" - quote from a friend who gifted her two Nikon cameras and three lenses after seeing her phone photos.
Never give up! This is a difficult path to walk, though it could be easier with better understanding and articles like this surely can make a difference.
Thank you so much! I subscribed immediately after reading. I can't wait for more!
P S My daughter was adopted at birth so not much family history to go on but I discovered here that there is a term for me too. I am a "piler". 😊🙄😊
WOW! I was diagnosed at age 50, it took another couple decades, plus reading your writing, to understand what that meant. It had a profound negative effect on my work years, and school years too. My entire house, at age 74, is a "piling system." I can no more organize my stuff than I can my time, my executive functioning, and more. And the more structure and demands placed on us, the more of us find out the reason is ADHD. Anecdote of my maternal grandmother: The family always made root beer, that they allowed to age in the basement. One year, (a wartime year, for sure), sugar was in short supply. My grandfather, a chemical engineer who worked on developing such things as margarine and corn sweeteners, brought some of the corn sweetener home from work and they used that. Some time later, my grandmother heard the corks popping and the bottles exploding downstairs. She grabbed a broom and a window screen, proceeded to the basement with that creative "shield and sword," and whacked all the other bottles so it would again be safe to go into the basement. Of course, the cellar stank for months! And I have a Mayflower ancestor, John Howland, who not only came across without any support, as an indentured servant, but inexplicably came up on deck during the worst storm and was freaking washed overboard. Another passenger saw him, and because he'd grabbed a rope or gotten tangled in it, the crew was able to haul him back aboard. If that doesn't reek of ADHD, I don't know what does!
Fellow feeling and respect. I wish I could be more clear about heredity in my case. On one side, impulsivity and poor emotional regulation seems to be highly correlated with authoritarianism (Limbaugh addicts). But the "cerebral" other side seems also to have bought in to racism and reaction against any social resistance.
• “Easily distracted. ADHD people are constantly monitoring the scene; they notice everything that’s going on, and particularly notice changes or quickly changing things in their environment.”
I am often distracted by interior conversations in my head. These are often triggered by sensory input.
• “ADHD adults often have difficulty holding a job for an extended period of time, not because they’re incompetent but because they become “bored.”
In a career that is thankfully over I worked for over thirty employers. The longest I ever worked at one place was about three years, and there were three of those. The average was two years. It wasn’t always boredom. On more than one occasion I was figuratively knifed in the back by coworkers for various reasons. In at least one case I suspect it was racism. More often it was by some who felt threatened by certain gifts I had. More than one was a business that collapsed, as I relate in my own story on Substack about Work Related PTSD.
• “ADHD children and adults are often chronically disorganized.”
I differ from the notion that the ADHD can never find anything. My work involved making things. I was a “Maker” long before it became a catchword used by educators promoting STEM, many of whom didn’t understand “natural makers” like me. I would often misplace things, but learned to compensate by cultivating OCD.
• “Difficulty following directions.”
I am the polar opposite of this. In fact it is part of my giftedness. If the instructions are clear and concise I easily follow them. Often they are not. In those cases I am often able to extract the actual intent. I once took great pride in being able to rewrite much of the curriculum I was handed at the for-profit trade school that was one of my longest employments. It was often poorly written, aimed at instructors whose skills may be lacking and needed rote presentations. It seemed to me that it was written by others not as well versed in the subject matter as I was. I would eventually be fired for complaining about quality. They would be defunded and shut their doors years later for the very things I complained about.
• “Exhibit occasional symptoms of depression, or daydream more than others.”
This, in spades. As my life unfolded the daydreams would often involve “what if.”
What if I had spotted a certain person’s malice earlier and was able to defend myself.
What if I hadn’t acted so stupid that time or two.
What if I had accepted my parents offer to be sent to a private all boys school.
What if I had overcome my insecurity and asked Karen, or Emily, or so many others, out.
It has me working on the seeds of a writing piece, working title “turning points.”
• “Easily frustrated and impatient. To “not suffer fools gladly” is a classic ADD characteristic.
Yesterday I had an incident talking to a stranger on a bus who told me science was just another religion based on blind faith. I managed to get an engineering degree. I blew up. I got off at the next stop and waited for the next one.
So. Am I ADHD? I am fairly certain that I was tested when I was ten years old. The session in an elementary school principal’s office was very memorable. I now suspect that he was at least MEd, possibly DrEd.
*A sense of underachievement, of not meeting one’s goals.
A life lived with alternating success and failure.
*Difficulty getting organized.
Check
*Chronic procrastination or trouble beginning a task.
Often
*Many projects going simultaneously; trouble with follow-through.
I call myself Completion Deficient.
*Tendency to say what comes to mind without necessarily considering the timing or appropriateness of the remark.
I have matured away from this
*A restive search for high stimulation.
I have become addicted to bicycling, as much as two hundred miles a week. It has also served as treatment for obesity, a major driver of depression.
*A tendency to be easily bored.
This was much worse in my youth.
*Easy distractibility, trouble focusing attention, tendency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or a conversation, often coupled with an ability to hyperfocus at times.
This really depends on the subject of the task. Lately I have been able to focus on writing.
*Often creative, intuitive, highly intelligent.
I would have had less trauma in the workplace If I had learned to mask this better around certain people.
*Trouble in going through established channels, following proper procedure. - excitement around novel approaches, and frustration with being unable to do things the way they’re supposed to be done.
ADHD, or working for incompetent people? At times maybe both.
*Impatient; low tolerance for frustration.
Yes
*Impulsive.
Again, this has improved with age.
*Tendency to worry needlessly.
I feel the things I worry about are legitimate cause for concern.
*Sense of impending doom.
After 11/5 doesn’t anyone with an ounce of critical reason sense it?
*Mood swings, depression.
Life long cycles of severity.
*Restlessness. One usually does not see in an adult the full-blown hyperactivity one may see in a child.
I was not physically hyperactive as a child. It was mostly internal. This is possibly what made my mother reject the diagnosis and deny me treatment that I believe may have helped.
*Tendency toward addictive behavior.
I have had episodes where alcohol has gotten me in trouble. I believe this is part of DSM’s definition of alcoholism.
*Chronic problems with self-esteem.
I made it to thirty as a virgin.
*Inaccurate self-observation. People with ADD are poor self-observers.
This was not necessarily the case. It was more a matter of not caring what others thought.
*Family history of ADD or manic-depressive illness or depression.
My mother and her father had depressive behaviors.
When I was 40'ish, I first "encountered" the book "You Mean I'm Not...." in the waiting room of a psychologist who had been running an ad for some time: "Still Crazy After All These Years?" But you have just condensed my biography with exquisite comprehensive clarity. Maybe I can order this post engraved on my tombstone. What is freaky is, I was a Feingold allergy desensitization kid at Kaiser. Yup. that was me too. cue "Twilight Zone" music. I grew out of the hay fever, but it took 30 years for Kaiser - mind you - for Kaiser to finally, reluctantly give up on the dogma that kids grew out of hyperactivity. They treated me quite disrespectfully when I first inquired. Seemed to take it as evidence of whatever neurosis was supposed to be my problem. "Now we know she's a crackpot, she thinks adults didn't outgrow it!" Even troglodyte Kaiser finally formally diagnosed me, after requesting my school records, which my Mom actually had, going all the way back to elementary: "She seems really bright, but....?" to high school: A in German one semester; same desk same teacher next semester: D. Poor prof. always looked at me kind of funny passing in the halls.....But I was hyper-educated by two teachers, and test-taking was never a problem. But always all up or all down: I got the highest score in law school for creativity on a subject I mostly just absorbed the picture captions in the textbook, and got flunked for creativity on the subject I really got in to. (Damn I wish I still had the blue books on that one!) But when you get to "NOT SUFFERING FOOLS GLADLY," man are you hitting the whole cathedral organ chord in Notre Dame on Nazi Liberation Day (was there in 1968) very, especially troubled by that.
My daughter hit every mark in this essay. She was diagnosed at age 7 with ADHD. I declined medication. She was subsequently diagnosed with sensory processing disorder, which explained a lot! She also has a coordinatuon problem with her eyes which makesb "small work" - reading and math more difficult. She loved math and excelled when she had a teacher she bonded to but shortly after, we were forced down a misguided rabbit hole of hell through our local public school's Special Ed program. (She was super hyperactive and had focus/ attention problems)
I did my best to educate her as she missed almost 4 years of school as we tried and rejected their horrible options as she got tagged as emotionally disturbed. Depression became a huge issue. We finally rented out our house and moved to another district. Boom! One week into the new school they were preparing her move to a program that turned out to be the thing she needed all along. She has improved most emotionally in self esteem and has discovered a love of science. (Another bonding experience with a teacher). She'll be graduating in March. Two years later than normal but with all she missed and Covid closure too, I keep telling her she's done amazingly! She is a very talented artist and has been since early childhood. She paints, draws, makes jewelry and her photography is "exceptional" - quote from a friend who gifted her two Nikon cameras and three lenses after seeing her phone photos.
Never give up! This is a difficult path to walk, though it could be easier with better understanding and articles like this surely can make a difference.
Thank you so much! I subscribed immediately after reading. I can't wait for more!
P S My daughter was adopted at birth so not much family history to go on but I discovered here that there is a term for me too. I am a "piler". 😊🙄😊
WOW! I was diagnosed at age 50, it took another couple decades, plus reading your writing, to understand what that meant. It had a profound negative effect on my work years, and school years too. My entire house, at age 74, is a "piling system." I can no more organize my stuff than I can my time, my executive functioning, and more. And the more structure and demands placed on us, the more of us find out the reason is ADHD. Anecdote of my maternal grandmother: The family always made root beer, that they allowed to age in the basement. One year, (a wartime year, for sure), sugar was in short supply. My grandfather, a chemical engineer who worked on developing such things as margarine and corn sweeteners, brought some of the corn sweetener home from work and they used that. Some time later, my grandmother heard the corks popping and the bottles exploding downstairs. She grabbed a broom and a window screen, proceeded to the basement with that creative "shield and sword," and whacked all the other bottles so it would again be safe to go into the basement. Of course, the cellar stank for months! And I have a Mayflower ancestor, John Howland, who not only came across without any support, as an indentured servant, but inexplicably came up on deck during the worst storm and was freaking washed overboard. Another passenger saw him, and because he'd grabbed a rope or gotten tangled in it, the crew was able to haul him back aboard. If that doesn't reek of ADHD, I don't know what does!
Fellow feeling and respect. I wish I could be more clear about heredity in my case. On one side, impulsivity and poor emotional regulation seems to be highly correlated with authoritarianism (Limbaugh addicts). But the "cerebral" other side seems also to have bought in to racism and reaction against any social resistance.
This was a joy to read and very informative. Thank you.
• “Easily distracted. ADHD people are constantly monitoring the scene; they notice everything that’s going on, and particularly notice changes or quickly changing things in their environment.”
I am often distracted by interior conversations in my head. These are often triggered by sensory input.
• “ADHD adults often have difficulty holding a job for an extended period of time, not because they’re incompetent but because they become “bored.”
In a career that is thankfully over I worked for over thirty employers. The longest I ever worked at one place was about three years, and there were three of those. The average was two years. It wasn’t always boredom. On more than one occasion I was figuratively knifed in the back by coworkers for various reasons. In at least one case I suspect it was racism. More often it was by some who felt threatened by certain gifts I had. More than one was a business that collapsed, as I relate in my own story on Substack about Work Related PTSD.
• “ADHD children and adults are often chronically disorganized.”
I differ from the notion that the ADHD can never find anything. My work involved making things. I was a “Maker” long before it became a catchword used by educators promoting STEM, many of whom didn’t understand “natural makers” like me. I would often misplace things, but learned to compensate by cultivating OCD.
• “Difficulty following directions.”
I am the polar opposite of this. In fact it is part of my giftedness. If the instructions are clear and concise I easily follow them. Often they are not. In those cases I am often able to extract the actual intent. I once took great pride in being able to rewrite much of the curriculum I was handed at the for-profit trade school that was one of my longest employments. It was often poorly written, aimed at instructors whose skills may be lacking and needed rote presentations. It seemed to me that it was written by others not as well versed in the subject matter as I was. I would eventually be fired for complaining about quality. They would be defunded and shut their doors years later for the very things I complained about.
• “Exhibit occasional symptoms of depression, or daydream more than others.”
This, in spades. As my life unfolded the daydreams would often involve “what if.”
What if I had spotted a certain person’s malice earlier and was able to defend myself.
What if I hadn’t acted so stupid that time or two.
What if I had accepted my parents offer to be sent to a private all boys school.
What if I had overcome my insecurity and asked Karen, or Emily, or so many others, out.
It has me working on the seeds of a writing piece, working title “turning points.”
• “Easily frustrated and impatient. To “not suffer fools gladly” is a classic ADD characteristic.
Yesterday I had an incident talking to a stranger on a bus who told me science was just another religion based on blind faith. I managed to get an engineering degree. I blew up. I got off at the next stop and waited for the next one.
So. Am I ADHD? I am fairly certain that I was tested when I was ten years old. The session in an elementary school principal’s office was very memorable. I now suspect that he was at least MEd, possibly DrEd.
*A sense of underachievement, of not meeting one’s goals.
A life lived with alternating success and failure.
*Difficulty getting organized.
Check
*Chronic procrastination or trouble beginning a task.
Often
*Many projects going simultaneously; trouble with follow-through.
I call myself Completion Deficient.
*Tendency to say what comes to mind without necessarily considering the timing or appropriateness of the remark.
I have matured away from this
*A restive search for high stimulation.
I have become addicted to bicycling, as much as two hundred miles a week. It has also served as treatment for obesity, a major driver of depression.
*A tendency to be easily bored.
This was much worse in my youth.
*Easy distractibility, trouble focusing attention, tendency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or a conversation, often coupled with an ability to hyperfocus at times.
This really depends on the subject of the task. Lately I have been able to focus on writing.
*Often creative, intuitive, highly intelligent.
I would have had less trauma in the workplace If I had learned to mask this better around certain people.
*Trouble in going through established channels, following proper procedure. - excitement around novel approaches, and frustration with being unable to do things the way they’re supposed to be done.
ADHD, or working for incompetent people? At times maybe both.
*Impatient; low tolerance for frustration.
Yes
*Impulsive.
Again, this has improved with age.
*Tendency to worry needlessly.
I feel the things I worry about are legitimate cause for concern.
*Sense of impending doom.
After 11/5 doesn’t anyone with an ounce of critical reason sense it?
*Mood swings, depression.
Life long cycles of severity.
*Restlessness. One usually does not see in an adult the full-blown hyperactivity one may see in a child.
I was not physically hyperactive as a child. It was mostly internal. This is possibly what made my mother reject the diagnosis and deny me treatment that I believe may have helped.
*Tendency toward addictive behavior.
I have had episodes where alcohol has gotten me in trouble. I believe this is part of DSM’s definition of alcoholism.
*Chronic problems with self-esteem.
I made it to thirty as a virgin.
*Inaccurate self-observation. People with ADD are poor self-observers.
This was not necessarily the case. It was more a matter of not caring what others thought.
*Family history of ADD or manic-depressive illness or depression.
My mother and her father had depressive behaviors.
When I was 40'ish, I first "encountered" the book "You Mean I'm Not...." in the waiting room of a psychologist who had been running an ad for some time: "Still Crazy After All These Years?" But you have just condensed my biography with exquisite comprehensive clarity. Maybe I can order this post engraved on my tombstone. What is freaky is, I was a Feingold allergy desensitization kid at Kaiser. Yup. that was me too. cue "Twilight Zone" music. I grew out of the hay fever, but it took 30 years for Kaiser - mind you - for Kaiser to finally, reluctantly give up on the dogma that kids grew out of hyperactivity. They treated me quite disrespectfully when I first inquired. Seemed to take it as evidence of whatever neurosis was supposed to be my problem. "Now we know she's a crackpot, she thinks adults didn't outgrow it!" Even troglodyte Kaiser finally formally diagnosed me, after requesting my school records, which my Mom actually had, going all the way back to elementary: "She seems really bright, but....?" to high school: A in German one semester; same desk same teacher next semester: D. Poor prof. always looked at me kind of funny passing in the halls.....But I was hyper-educated by two teachers, and test-taking was never a problem. But always all up or all down: I got the highest score in law school for creativity on a subject I mostly just absorbed the picture captions in the textbook, and got flunked for creativity on the subject I really got in to. (Damn I wish I still had the blue books on that one!) But when you get to "NOT SUFFERING FOOLS GLADLY," man are you hitting the whole cathedral organ chord in Notre Dame on Nazi Liberation Day (was there in 1968) very, especially troubled by that.