Sorry for the negative post but this disorder is genuinely terrible. I was diagnosed a few months ago and from the report I received it seems like I have an extremely bad case of it.
I lost 8 percent of my final grade in an operating system class because I submitted the wrong file.
Fine, I have syncthing setup between my desktop and laptop so I’ll just check if the assignment is on my shared folder in my desktop. It’s not.
Ok, I’ll turn on my laptop and grab the file itself. Oh, I have a boot error and now I need to open up the recovery environment to see if the hard drive is even being recognized.
It’s not. Now I have to open up the laptop and reconnect it.
At this point it’s been 30 minutes of me scrambling to get my laptop up and working again and I found the damn assignment there. I emailed my professor and I’m praying that he reevaluates the assignment because the earlier submission had nothing on it. It was just the default assignment.
None of this shit would have happened had I taken just one second to check over what I submitted a month earlier.
I hate reading articles pertaining to ADHD as if it’s some quirky condition that just takes a little bit of time and medication to work through. Its not. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m even conscious in order to function at all, and now I have to sustain extra mental effort to do a relatively hard task.
The only thing that keeps me going is my boss saying “nice work” when I diagnose an issue successfully. It feels infantilizing, as if he knows there’s something going on with me that’s making it hard to cope with the demands of life but “atleast he’s trying his best, atleast he shows up to work, this customer said he had a friendly attitude”.
This may be a not well-liked opinion, but I think ADHD is severely overdiagnosed. And I believe the biggest reason for that is our extremely competitive society. And also a misunderstanding about what it means to be happy or fulfilled.
Another reason could be that people who do not have ADHD share some of the symptoms because of how our society interacts with technology/media.
People are looking for an explanation why they can’t reach what they believe is a necessity. But it’s often just a bar that is way too high for the average person. And it should actually be okay to not reach it.
There is probably a bunch of other health issues that also share this problem.
If ADHD is a superpower for someone, it quite obviously isn’t a mental health issue for them (anymore). They either never had it in the first place or they have gotten rid of it.
ADHD may be overdiagnosed in some ways eg. children young for their grade, hyperactive boys etc. but it is definitely underdiagnosed in other ways eg. primarily inattentive, girls/women etc.
It is clear from research that men and women are probably equally likely or close to it, to have ADHD but the ADHD tends to manifest differently due to socialization. i.e boys tend to exhibit outward hyperactivity and impulsivity while girls tend to exhibit inattention and inner hyperactivity i.e restless mind, squirm in their seat etc. and are more commonly misdiagnosed as having anxiety, depression and other conditions that can mimic aspects of ADHD.
Inattentive ADHD (which is what I have) tends to be underdiagnosed because quite frankly, people tend not to care that much about you having ADHD until you inconvenience them because of it. Inattention is arguably less disruptive to others than hyperativity. i.e the space cadet vs the kid bouncing off the walls.