#diagnostic issues
Tim Beshara, on what it’s like to have inattentive ADHD. Some of my favorite parts.
This description of inattentive ADHD symptoms is accurate:
Inattentive ADHD put simply, means your brain is rubbish at choosing what you focus on. It’s the daydreaming type of ADHD, not the can’t-sit-still type.It’s not that you can’t focus at all. You can focus alright, just not always on what you need to focus on. Sometimes the problem is when you get stuck focusing on the wrong things.
For people with inattentive ADHD, repetitive tasks become hyper-boring and mentally exhausting to stick with. Yet with the tasks you are interested in, you can barely notice the outside world for eight hours straight.
You also have a rubbish working memory. Your long-term memory can be excellent, but your ability to temporarily hold two or three pieces of information in your mind at any one time is limited.
Aligned with this is a deficiency in your prospective memory. Prospective memory is all about being good at remembering to remember.
you often can have a crappy executive function, i.e. your brain is really bad at directing you through a series of sub-tasks to get the main task complete. It can do each sub-task fine, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone in charge in there to lead you through the steps.
But it’s the part about the psychological impact of having late-diagnosed ADHD that hit home the hardest:
The ADHD wears you down but it’s the secondary psychological impact that hits you the hardest. You get judged by your friends, colleagues, teachers, partners and relatives as being weak in character or lazy. … The only honest answer you ever have for giving someone about why you stuffed up is “I don’t know”.
Andwhat makes it worse is than when you find a topic or task engaging you really can perform. Like exceptionally so. Everyone sees this and uses that as your benchmark and then assumes that when you fail at a boring task it is because you are weak-willed.
People diagnosed with ADHD later on in life, like I was, wear the scars of a lifetime of judgement from failures you can never explain. It’s genuinely traumatic.
It is big things like struggling through university and failing to have a career that matches your potential. And it is little things like forgetting birthdays and people’s names and all seven items on the grocery list to bring back from the shops.
(Finally, someone who understands getting traumatized for an hour over a minor faux pas!).
I’m also glad he mentioned the gap between what you can accomplish when engaged versus when your brain is turned off, and its psychological effects. I believe being twice exceptional (gifted + ADHD) magnifies this gap.
I have a habit of starting strong and fizzling out, in every lab job I’ve had, and many friendships. I’m TERRIFIED of not living up to the expectations I’ve inadvertently set for myself. But I also can’t stop overperforming, because if everyone thinks I’m brilliant and perfectionistic about my work, they’ll forgive me annoying eccentricities like showing up late or occasionally forgetting to turn something in. (That “eccentric genius” stereotype doesn’t just benefit men). So, constant paranoia ensues. And then people tell me I’m too anxious and need to relax. You can’t win with ADHD.
I’m so glad so many people have read this little piece I wrote. And even more glad a few of you got something useful from it. The link the original posting is here https://medium.com/@Tim_Beshara/inattentive-adhd-and-me-85366344460a?source=linkShare-2cfb1e5327a9-1468844933
Wow! Thank you for adding the link–which I hit “post” before including in true inattentive ADHD fashion.
I love this post! I just wanted to add a little something to this line:
People diagnosed with ADHD later on in life, like I was, wear the scars of a lifetime of judgement from failures you can never explain. It’s genuinely traumatic.
I was actually diagnosed fairly early, but that wasn’t enough to prevent the unexplainable failures and ensuing trauma as that adds up.
I can’t even count how many adults thought that just being diagnosed should have solved the problem- they seemed to believe that the fact that stimulants exist means that ADHD can be cured with a pill like a disease. Other times adults believed in some of the symptoms (prospective memory they would believe, “I forgot” became an hourly mantra in school), but they weren’t willing to understand/believe the others. No one believed how hard planning was (“Why are you taking so long with that? You know how to do this!”) or the literal and painful exhaustion of repetitive tasks (“well NO ONE likes homework! you just have to do it anyway!”).
So I played up the symptoms that were easy for the adults around me to understand, and lied about the ones they didn’t. It made it feel like I was faking the whole thing. To me my failures were perfectly explainable- I was just “lazy,” but had figured out how to trick adults into thinking I had a realproblem.
(This is all, of course, not counting the caretakers and professional educators that would imply to my face that ADHD isn’t real, or that my problem was actually one of willpower or character. Christ. There’s a head trip.)
Not able to comment much now. But, I ended up in a similar situation, with actually getting that MBD/“hyperactivity” dx before I was old enough to start school (which didn’t actually match exactly to current ideas about ADHD).
But, also ending up with closer to the experiences of later diagnosed people, because it was treated as weirdly irrelevant to anything. After my mother wouldn’t let the school system stick me into segregated special ed and offered to sue their pants off if they kept insisting I couldn’t attend unmedicated, I just got treated as gifted and lazy/crazy/stubbornly underachieving.
I didn’t know accommodations were even a thing until I finally got a pretty comprehensive independent LD assessment in high school. They denied that I could possibly have anything needing any accommodations going on, refused to provide any, and my family…just didn’t push at all. With the ADA in effect by then. I don’t think they wanted to accept that I had some legitimate problems going either, or at least none that couldn’t be “fixed” by focusing on the depression.
I finally got a few accommodations in college, but ended up crashing out anyway for a variety of reasons. I never even ran across the term “executive function” until I started looking into ADHD more on my own once I was trying hard not to crash and burn in college. (Not even kidding.)
The executive function stuff kept getting interpreted as symptoms of depression, through my teens and early 20s–when that was just my baseline, and it was never going to magically go away with the “right” depression treatment. Glad I finally found out a little better what was even going on there, and some workarounds which do help some. Nobody was mentioning any before I knew what to call it and started specifically looking, that’s for sure.
All kinds of different experiences, yeah. And plenty of different kinds of negative messages going around, for people to internalize. :/
