With so many disorder Tiktoks around I can’t help but fail to spot the difference between having actual ADHD vs just having poor focus habits.
I myself have trouble focusing on tasks but I doubt I actually have ADHD given the recent surge of disorder Tiktoks - tho I do have autism - and that my focus is typically normal on tasks I devote to like gaming.
ADHD IS NOT JUST AN INABILITY TO FOCUS. Look up the diagnosis metrics. There are going to be a list of “symptoms” and you have to look at your entire life and analyze if those things have happened to you.
ADHD made me suicidal, and horrifically depressed; as I was unable to focus or stick to anything, which was causing me to fail at every aspect of my life. It was like going through life in a deep fog, with a mind that actively resisted any and all attempts to change. Imagine not having mental control over your own body.
If you’ve every played Silent Hill, I was living my life how it feels to walk through the fog filled town.
I had been on every single anti depressant known to man, stumping my psychiatrist because none of them worked. My hell only ended when I told my Psychiatrist that I was most likely going to be dead within a few months, causing him in desperation (and probably not entirely legally) to prescribe me stimulants without an official diagnosis under the cover that it was off label for my depression.
My life painfully changed over the course of the next 8 months. It was like waking up from a deep coma in which you are aware of everything going on around you, but you are unable to affect it in any way. I essentially metamorphized.
I have since then received an official diagnosis, and my life has been incredible since. It took months of work, and personal growth, but I managed to change.
This organization is incredible, you can find all related information here.
https://chadd.org/for-adults/diagnosis-of-adhd-in-adults/
Yep. All of this, so much. ADHD comes with so many obstacles. Violent mood swings and hyperfixations that in my case were misdiagnosed as bipolar, etc. Easy burnout. Rejection sensitivity that makes communication and goal achievement more difficult. Executive dysfunction where it is harder to do things I want to do. Inability to juggle multiple obligations at once.
In my experience, these are things that everyone deals with on an individual basis to some extent. So for a long time I gaslit myself thinking that I didn’t have it. But after finally being affirmed (the isolation from the pandemic shut-down and I think recovering from COVID infection really destroyed my capacity to mask) I look back on my entire life since childhood and recognize just how much of the trauma I suffered had roots in my untreated ADHD.
I’m sorry to hear you had to go through all that but I’m glad you’re better now and that you shared your story. If you don’t mind answering (please don’t feel obliged at all), can I ask whether you still need simulants or whether that was temporary?
Treatment for ADHD is lifelong. It is like diabetes, when you give a person with diabetes insulin, they will feel better and be a different person, but they cannot just simply stop taking insulin.
I do still take stimulant daily. It is the exact same dosage that me and my doctor worked to find a long while ago. I have no desire to take more, and I no longer have side effects or very minor ones since they petter off after a few months.
It is possible for people to come off stimulants if they wish, but that is rare, and mostly pointless since it’s not as if ADHD is magically going to disappear. It essentially becomes a Plato’s cave scenario.