Yes. Most disorders are built of characteristics the almost all humans share. The difference is that the expression of it is so extreme that it active prevents you from functioning on a regular basis.
I was explaining to my sister about how my diagnosis, as an older adult, was going, and how it explained many things in my life. She immediately told me she suspects she has it, because she has a short attention span.
She is an elementary school principal, who leads a perfectly organized life, set on a path in her 20’s and has followed it to the letter, she has an insanely well set up financial structure, budgets to the cent, is learning a third language in her spare time, leads a regimented daily schedule, even on weekends and vacations.
Yeah.
I mean, it’s not a contest.
I feel like people might have said the same thing about me before I started burning out and had to go back on the stimulants.
If this is your biological sister, keep in mind that ADHD runs in families and presents differently in women.
Before this everyone had OCD.
Could everyone get something I don’t have?
I would sort of do that in a “well yeah I do that too” sort of way but just recently found out I actually have ADHD lol
Isnt it why its called a spectrum
The last D is for disorder. If you have ADHD, it’s not cute and relatable, it’s making your life worse to the point of needing to be addressed. Everybody having “a little ADHD” is a way of trivializing the level of actual problems that are required for it to be called a disorder.
This is the correct answer and I feel it’s very important to emphasize this point. You can have “symptoms” of whatever the fuck, but in order for it to be considered a disorder, it must disrupt your life in some way. I usually lean more into the camp of just trying to be supportive of people when they speak about mental health disorders, but there are definitely those kids out there self-diagnosing disorders like they’re collecting pokemon. As someone who legitimately has been diagnosed with multiple disorders by actual licensed psychological professionals, it’s aggravating to see those kids infantilize mental health in that capacity, where it perpetuates the already uphill battle for many of us to be taken seriously in the first place. ADHD has absolutely ruined my life and I would absolutely(in a hypothetical) take a relatively high chance of death at “curing” my ADHD without a single hesitation. Life is hard enough with all these fucking disorders, definitely don’t need the added burden of always feeling like I have to prove that I really am that fucked up.
Fucking spot on. I feel this way about most of my disorders, except ASD. My ASD is a part of me, though it does have its downsides.
The ADHD is the most significant, though. If I could just remove this anchor from my brain, my quality of life would skyrocket. I don’t find it a “superpower” at all. I am not exaggerating when I say that it has stolen my childhood and early adulthood, and from the outside it looks like laziness or a lack of discipline. Solidarity.
There’s an element at play here that communicates an issue with how society treats you. I would argue that ADHD just by the curiosity and random attention it can focus on spawns an interesting idea of creativity in being drawn by and interested in all sorts of ideas that may have no overlap.
To be fair, with the amount of shit bombarded in your face with a dozen devices, everything fighting for your attention including ads on your vehicle infotainment, there is a zero chance that most people havent developed some sort of ADHD, whether clinically diagnosed or not. Disorders evolved also.
Try sitting in a room for 10-15 minutes and do absolutely nothing, just sit with your thoughts. I’m willing to bet most people can’t.
As someone diagnosed with ADHD, I can easily sit quietly in a room with my own thoughts for 20+ minutes.
What I can’t seem to do is make the two simple phone calls I need to make and write the one page report that I need to write before the end of the week. That’s literally all I need to do today, I’ve been at my desk for two hours and have done none of it. If I got that done now, I could coast the rest of my work day but instead I’m going to sit here and stress for a few more hours before I finally do any of it. Why? I can’t tell you because I don’t know.
The symptoms of ADHD happen to be things all people deal with. The inability to pay attention to things, or the restlessness of a quiet room are universal experiences. In that part you are kind of right. However ADHD specifically refers to the actual clinical deficit in executive function representing a chemical difference in the brain. Saying “Everyone has a little ADHD” is just a condescending way to put it. Different people may have different levels of annoyance with the phrase.
Everyone gets sad, not everyone has depression. Everyone worries, not everyone has General Anxiety Disorder. Everyone has pains sometimes, not everyone has Chronic Pain.
The sentiment isnt necessarily wrong, and the colloquial meaning still comes across, but it’s just degrading to hear. I hate hearing someone call out a disorder as one of their quirks as much as the next guy, but more than being mildly annoying it can stand to change the perception of the thing in the public consciousness enough that someone that has a disorder might believe they are just making a big deal out of something that “everyone” deals with. Whether intended or not just keep that in mind.
(TLDR I have ADHD please don’t minimize it by saying stuff like “lol computers destroy attention span”, you’re not wrong, just condescending.)
Christ, that is a trite oversimplification or complete misunderstanding. ADHD includes worse outcomes in employment (lower wages, difficulty keeping jobs), relationships (impulsivity can lead to anything from speaking before processing to forgetting plans to seeking out more stimulating things in lieu of relationships), health (higher rates of car accidents, higher use of recreational drugs, difficulty with self care), and a bunch of other things. It doesn’t “develop” over time from looking at your phone. Please please please do some actual reading of things by experts in the field on it before saying this sort of thing again.
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder, either you’re born with it or you’re not. Sure, lots of things fight for our attention and that probably affects us in some way, but distractability isn’t the same thing as ADHD. It’s primarily a regulation disorder rather than ‘can’t focus disease’. Where I think you bring up a good point in a mechanism that probably reveals ADHD in some people, I would definitely give pushback on what appears to be a suggestion that the advertising industry as it exists causes ADHD. I don’t think any serious psychological professional would make that assertion.
“D” is “disorder”. This means that the symptoms need to be clinically significant.
Everyone has occasional symptoms ghat are consistent with ADHD, but they need to be clinically significant to be considered ADHD.
I do think these sorts of memes are a bit… Icky. It kind of has the same vibes as the stories of women coming out as gay and their grandmother’s saying “well everyone is attracted to women”. Because it’s very possible that the person downplaying the significance is themselves undiagnosed or in denial. Or maybe the individual thinks their symptoms are not severe enough to be diagnosed when, in reality, it would be. And that also leads into discussions about the difficulty of diagnosis, the way it changes over time, the way that ADHD is considers by many ti be over-diagnosed in young boys and under-diagnosed in young girls, etc.
I also think that there’s it’s dangerous to try to carve up humanity with stark lines. That leads to societal divisions and dehumanization. The sentiment of “everyone is a little bit ADHD” can often come from a place of “we are all humans and I am trying to relate to you the best that I can”. The sentiment CAN be harmful when people are trying to downplay the significance, or even deny the existence of, disorders.
Spectrum doesn’t mean the average person experiences the regular disruption to their lives.
“Spectrum” refers to how much it interferes with a person’s ability to function.
The average person also doesn’t have the comorbidities - so clearly they don’t have “a little ADHD”.
That doesn’t mean everyone is in it.
Exactly.
Everyone certainly experience aspects of ADHD (distraction, loss of focus, etc) to some degree during their lives, but not on a continuous basis, sufficient to disrupt their lives.
People who say dumb shit like this can kiss my ass. They need to have their dominant arm tied behind their back for a month, just to get some idea how difficult it can be.
Whenever people say dumb shit around me I usually just say “everybody goes to the toilet, but if you do it 20 times a day there might be a problem” and then they usually shut up.
I don’t really believe it’s a spectrum. I believe that you either have a dopamine processing deficiency, or you don’t. I think the differences we see are the result of how well some of us learn to cope, or devise self protecting strategies.
I mean, there may be slight differences, but I wouldn’t call it a spectrum, at least in the way that autism is, where you have mildly socially incompetent people to nearly non functional people.
I was undiagnosed bipolar for over 40 years, masked by my success in employment and entrepreneurship, which lasted about 2-5 years every stage, when tedium became unbearable, and had to look for other challenges to fuel my dopamine. No one, even myself, connected the dots between my intense drive, and the following depressive stage, and the next jump. I finally crashed hard, and sought a psychiatryst. Once properly medicated, my mood swings normalized, the ADHD symptoms were unmasked.
Now we are working on dialing in meds for ADHD. Pretty hard to balance.
In my case I belive I don’t more or less ADHD than others, but that I was good at (extreme) damage control.
My opinion.
The problem is that “ADHD” is not defined as a dopamine processing deficiency. It’s defined as a cluster of symptoms that exceed a certain level. Those symptoms could be related to dopamine processing, or something else! So you’re not wrong, in any real sense, but you are wrong by the definition set out by those who say what ADHD is.
I hate the DSM.
Yeah, my comeback to this is usually “and some of us have plenty to spare”
