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Feb. 19th, 2003 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnpalmerWhat is ADHD?
You can read the diagnostic criteria in DSM-IV, and you can get a bit of an idea. But, those are only things that can be used by a doctor to decide that, if a troubled person is complaining of these things as the trouble, that ADHD is the name of the disorder that most likely is causing it. (Once other problems have been ruled out, of course.)
But that's where psychiatry is a bit like veterinary medicine. You can't ask a dog "is your hip hurting?" but if you see certain things, and notice certain reactions, you can guess that the dog has hip problems.
Just as you can't ask a dog a specific question, you can't ask a patient certain questions, and have the answers make sense.
What is ADHD?
Well, once I described it as highway hypnosis. Though I can't be sure it's the same for everyone, I have a feeling that it's close enough.
You're tired... and you're trying to keep awake. You try to think, hard, about something besides the hypnotic pattern of the center lines passing by, and the landscape as a big blur. You know if you can just get excited about something, this terrible weariness will pass. And you have to... you *HAVE* to. You could kill yourself, or someone else if you don't! You try to make that fact important to yourself, but you just can't. Maybe you grit your teeth and get angry, or shout at yourself... or maybe you sing loudly. You discover that you can do all of those things through a deep, heavy haze.
And the anger fades, just a bit, you stop shouting, just for a moment, or you spend a few moments deciding what song to sing next... and you drift. You never told your eyes to close, but...
Thankfully, the wheel is still tight in your grip, so the sudden jerk of the wheel pulls you out of it, but if that had been a steep mountain curve, you'd be flying through the air right now. Your heart is pounding, and you're really angry now, and your head is clear... but just for a moment.
And then the fog slowly rolls back in.
That's not ADHD; that's highway hypnosis. But there are some striking similarities.
Willpower can keep you awake when you're driving in that situation. It really can, though you might be amazed at how small 'willpower' seems right then, and how, last week, you probably thought you had *plenty* of willpower.
And willpower can keep you focused, as well. But when you need that focus, your willpower can seem awfully small, even though you were sure you had *plenty* last week.
That's the problem... willpower drains, and needs to be recharged. You only really know this when you've been using it, and you find yourself starting to drain the dregs.
Anger can give it a boost. So can desperation, or 'grim determination'. (The last is a kind of private phrase for me, because it is the image I have when I get up, and am going to do something, but I'm not especially angry. I don't know how 'grim' it is, but then, I grew up reading comic books, and there, determination is usually 'grim'.)
But it's limited. Behind the wall of willpower, you have someone who wants to collapse, crying, realizing that s/he's beaten, and simply can't make things better. Or, maybe you have some other image of complete despair and surrender.
Spybooks, military fiction, and other such things all insist that any person can be 'broken', and I don't have a hard time believing that. I do believe that some people can't be broken in any reasonable time, using reasonable methods, but I've come precariously close to running out of willpower, and I realized that, although it had seemed infinite at one point, it wasn't.
Okay, the key is, willpower is limited, and although you can 'spend' it to stay on task, you can't use it forever.
Well, now, think about ADHD. A person with ADHD has a harder time controlling focus than a normal person. A normal person might be able shut out a distraction, and an ADHDer might not be able to, or might not be able to as easily. A normal person might be able to concentrate on a task, and an ADHDer might not be able to, or might not be able to as easily.
In each case, if the ADHDer is working on these things, the ADHDer is trying harder, and spending willpower, to keep going.
An ADHDer has good days and bad days, of course. Some days, I can sit down and read page after page, and the information just flows into me. Some days, reading a couple pages makes me tired. Now, a friend of mine mentions that, when you're reading too far ahead of your knowledge level, that's not unusual... but sometimes I can be going over old material, and still getting tired, just from the effort of making sure I'm actually *reading* the material, not just letting it run past my eyes.
ADHD means wanting to do something, and, if that something doesn't have a well-defined beginning and end, finding it almost impossible to do that something. Most people have a bit of "blank page syndrome", but with ADHDers, it can be devastating.
This is why ADHD-folk can be good procrastinators... if you wait until the last minute, the penalty of not writing is as big as the penalty of writing, and it's easier to overcome your reluctance to start. Also, you've defined your end point by the rapidly approaching deadline.
ADHD can mean forcing yourself to do things you enjoy, and want to do, over and over, because right now, you're not ready to do them, but they have to be done.
ADHD can mean feeling yourself ready to cry over an unwanted task.
ADHD can mean feeling helpless a lot of the time, because a lot of things you want to do are things you've tried to do, over and over, and never been able to finish. It's not "giving up easily" after you've tried several times, and failed over and over.
ADHD can mean being unable to 'walk away' from emotional hurt, because you can't stop focusing on it. Simultaneously, it can be frustrating when you find yourself unable to focus on something specific, and can feel guilty over not crying over the death of a loved one... maybe you're shying away from focusing on it, because it's too big, or maybe you just can't get yourself to focus on it.
Now, there are people who consider ADHD to be either a mixed blessing, or a pure blessing, or even a perfectly neutral 'other way of being' that simply isn't accepted in the modern world. I can't deny that those folks might be closer to the truth than I am. The fact of the matter is, we don't really know what ADHD is, so we don't know what would happen to a person if you could subtract it out of them. I can only think about what it does to me, and those with similar experiences. To me, the "disorder" part of ADHD is blatant and obvious, and painful. I don't deny that it might have had good effects... but I can't go further than 'mixed blessing', myself.
Some folks reading this may know that there was an argument in a newsgroup. A person was talking about the fact that stimulants produce focus in anyone, which is true. The person then suggested that folks who didn't use meds in ways that had specifically been proven as effective for ADHD were as likely as not to be simply using stimulants in the same way other people do... for an energy/focus boost.
Now, in one sense, that has some validity. Nearly everyone will get a mild performance boost from taking stimulants in proper doses.
However, people who take the right kind of painkillers can probably walk further and faster than someone without painkillers, because of the effect the painkillers have on the normal aches and pains of a long walk. But if a person had arthritis, and would ache throughout the entire walk, there is an obvious (or, at least, one I feel *should* be obvious) difference in that person's use of painkillers to be able to walk further and faster.
A suggestion that the arthritic person's use of painkillers is no different from the healthy person's use would get a lot of people angry. But then, nearly everyone understands physical pain.
ADHD is on the inside, and unless you have it, you probably don't understand it, and might not be able to understand the relief from suffering that can come from medication.
And it's funny... but the pain that comes from this 'casual non-understanding' is a lot worse than the pain from the violent rejectors - those who insist ADHD doesn't exist at all. Perhaps it's because it's the "ever-so-reasonable" folks who just don't get it who are the biggest danger to continued legal treatment of ADHD, without new hassles, and restrictions.
You can read the diagnostic criteria in DSM-IV, and you can get a bit of an idea. But, those are only things that can be used by a doctor to decide that, if a troubled person is complaining of these things as the trouble, that ADHD is the name of the disorder that most likely is causing it. (Once other problems have been ruled out, of course.)
But that's where psychiatry is a bit like veterinary medicine. You can't ask a dog "is your hip hurting?" but if you see certain things, and notice certain reactions, you can guess that the dog has hip problems.
Just as you can't ask a dog a specific question, you can't ask a patient certain questions, and have the answers make sense.
What is ADHD?
Well, once I described it as highway hypnosis. Though I can't be sure it's the same for everyone, I have a feeling that it's close enough.
You're tired... and you're trying to keep awake. You try to think, hard, about something besides the hypnotic pattern of the center lines passing by, and the landscape as a big blur. You know if you can just get excited about something, this terrible weariness will pass. And you have to... you *HAVE* to. You could kill yourself, or someone else if you don't! You try to make that fact important to yourself, but you just can't. Maybe you grit your teeth and get angry, or shout at yourself... or maybe you sing loudly. You discover that you can do all of those things through a deep, heavy haze.
And the anger fades, just a bit, you stop shouting, just for a moment, or you spend a few moments deciding what song to sing next... and you drift. You never told your eyes to close, but...
Thankfully, the wheel is still tight in your grip, so the sudden jerk of the wheel pulls you out of it, but if that had been a steep mountain curve, you'd be flying through the air right now. Your heart is pounding, and you're really angry now, and your head is clear... but just for a moment.
And then the fog slowly rolls back in.
That's not ADHD; that's highway hypnosis. But there are some striking similarities.
Willpower can keep you awake when you're driving in that situation. It really can, though you might be amazed at how small 'willpower' seems right then, and how, last week, you probably thought you had *plenty* of willpower.
And willpower can keep you focused, as well. But when you need that focus, your willpower can seem awfully small, even though you were sure you had *plenty* last week.
That's the problem... willpower drains, and needs to be recharged. You only really know this when you've been using it, and you find yourself starting to drain the dregs.
Anger can give it a boost. So can desperation, or 'grim determination'. (The last is a kind of private phrase for me, because it is the image I have when I get up, and am going to do something, but I'm not especially angry. I don't know how 'grim' it is, but then, I grew up reading comic books, and there, determination is usually 'grim'.)
But it's limited. Behind the wall of willpower, you have someone who wants to collapse, crying, realizing that s/he's beaten, and simply can't make things better. Or, maybe you have some other image of complete despair and surrender.
Spybooks, military fiction, and other such things all insist that any person can be 'broken', and I don't have a hard time believing that. I do believe that some people can't be broken in any reasonable time, using reasonable methods, but I've come precariously close to running out of willpower, and I realized that, although it had seemed infinite at one point, it wasn't.
Okay, the key is, willpower is limited, and although you can 'spend' it to stay on task, you can't use it forever.
Well, now, think about ADHD. A person with ADHD has a harder time controlling focus than a normal person. A normal person might be able shut out a distraction, and an ADHDer might not be able to, or might not be able to as easily. A normal person might be able to concentrate on a task, and an ADHDer might not be able to, or might not be able to as easily.
In each case, if the ADHDer is working on these things, the ADHDer is trying harder, and spending willpower, to keep going.
An ADHDer has good days and bad days, of course. Some days, I can sit down and read page after page, and the information just flows into me. Some days, reading a couple pages makes me tired. Now, a friend of mine mentions that, when you're reading too far ahead of your knowledge level, that's not unusual... but sometimes I can be going over old material, and still getting tired, just from the effort of making sure I'm actually *reading* the material, not just letting it run past my eyes.
ADHD means wanting to do something, and, if that something doesn't have a well-defined beginning and end, finding it almost impossible to do that something. Most people have a bit of "blank page syndrome", but with ADHDers, it can be devastating.
This is why ADHD-folk can be good procrastinators... if you wait until the last minute, the penalty of not writing is as big as the penalty of writing, and it's easier to overcome your reluctance to start. Also, you've defined your end point by the rapidly approaching deadline.
ADHD can mean forcing yourself to do things you enjoy, and want to do, over and over, because right now, you're not ready to do them, but they have to be done.
ADHD can mean feeling yourself ready to cry over an unwanted task.
ADHD can mean feeling helpless a lot of the time, because a lot of things you want to do are things you've tried to do, over and over, and never been able to finish. It's not "giving up easily" after you've tried several times, and failed over and over.
ADHD can mean being unable to 'walk away' from emotional hurt, because you can't stop focusing on it. Simultaneously, it can be frustrating when you find yourself unable to focus on something specific, and can feel guilty over not crying over the death of a loved one... maybe you're shying away from focusing on it, because it's too big, or maybe you just can't get yourself to focus on it.
Now, there are people who consider ADHD to be either a mixed blessing, or a pure blessing, or even a perfectly neutral 'other way of being' that simply isn't accepted in the modern world. I can't deny that those folks might be closer to the truth than I am. The fact of the matter is, we don't really know what ADHD is, so we don't know what would happen to a person if you could subtract it out of them. I can only think about what it does to me, and those with similar experiences. To me, the "disorder" part of ADHD is blatant and obvious, and painful. I don't deny that it might have had good effects... but I can't go further than 'mixed blessing', myself.
Some folks reading this may know that there was an argument in a newsgroup. A person was talking about the fact that stimulants produce focus in anyone, which is true. The person then suggested that folks who didn't use meds in ways that had specifically been proven as effective for ADHD were as likely as not to be simply using stimulants in the same way other people do... for an energy/focus boost.
Now, in one sense, that has some validity. Nearly everyone will get a mild performance boost from taking stimulants in proper doses.
However, people who take the right kind of painkillers can probably walk further and faster than someone without painkillers, because of the effect the painkillers have on the normal aches and pains of a long walk. But if a person had arthritis, and would ache throughout the entire walk, there is an obvious (or, at least, one I feel *should* be obvious) difference in that person's use of painkillers to be able to walk further and faster.
A suggestion that the arthritic person's use of painkillers is no different from the healthy person's use would get a lot of people angry. But then, nearly everyone understands physical pain.
ADHD is on the inside, and unless you have it, you probably don't understand it, and might not be able to understand the relief from suffering that can come from medication.
And it's funny... but the pain that comes from this 'casual non-understanding' is a lot worse than the pain from the violent rejectors - those who insist ADHD doesn't exist at all. Perhaps it's because it's the "ever-so-reasonable" folks who just don't get it who are the biggest danger to continued legal treatment of ADHD, without new hassles, and restrictions.
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no subject
Date: 2003-02-20 10:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-20 11:22 am (UTC)