- cross-posted to:
- adhd@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- adhd@lemmy.world
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I don’t have anything and I never will because I’m never getting tested. I did get “classified” and never had a fair chance at a real education. Even failure meant I needed to be in the program and every success showed how well the program was working. I grew up thinking I would only be a drag on other people. In high school, I decided to start feeling better about myself. Something those years of being removed from class so I could have meaningless conversations with the school therapist never could. I thought the school would support my efforts to fix my education, but I only got pushed down, told “I would be happier without the risk of failure”, lied to about classes being full, withheld test results when I tried testing into better classes. I would like nothing more then to get the diploma revoked and seeing as how I never fulfilled the basic state requirements, I should be able to, but like with most things, the written law doesn’t matter if no one is willing to enforce it.
Fuck my school. Fuck the “team building” exercises they made me do. Fuck the “opportunities” they provided for me.
As a parent of a child with ADHD, I’m cautious about using stimulant medication unless it’s clearly the best course of action. My main goal is to help my child succeed, and academics is a big component of that.
I see many of my son’s ADHD symptoms in myself, and I believe I may have also had/have ADHD. Despite this, I’ve been successful in my life. This personal experience makes me hesitant to automatically turn to medication as the solution for my child. I prefer to explore other options first, unless there’s a strong reason to consider it, such as struggling academically.
When my son entered high school he became mature enough to participate in the decision-making process regarding his own treatment. Because of that it was easier for me/us to get him a prescription of Adderall and feel good about it as parents.
Edit: since it seems to not be clear, my son is on ADHD meds and has been for the past three or four years. We talked to him about it and he prefers taking the medication and has had input in the dosage that he’s taking.
Unsolicited advice incoming:
Help your kid get a diagnosis ASAP and try to find a medication that works. The drugs are just a tool, but your kid won’t know whether they help without trying them.
At some point, they may find themselves unmedicated and down in an ADHD hole — having the diagnosis and knowing which medications may help is crucial to dig out of the hole.
Sorry, if it wasn’t clear, he has a diagnosis of adhd and he’s on meds.
Counter point.
The medication worked. Suddenly i could pay attention and my grades went up. And those where the main “problems” adults perceived.
My parents where skeptical about medicine first but opted to try because the backlash people gave me for lacking an attention span was affecting me hard. They ultimately believed they where doing the right thing.
I slowly become less social then i already was, lost my appetite, stopped feeling many emotions in general and eventually sank into a deep twisted depression.
I was unable to understand it was the medicine doing this. I was unable to communicate any of it properly because i thought what i was (not) feeling was just normal life and puberty. It was not.
I know and respect that those drugs can help some people. But they completely destroyed me, afterwards it took many years of controversially self medicating with cannabis to restore my original self and feel my emotions properly again. (The mail reason I started was because i read it could be used for adhd/autism and my first experience left me feeling normal and able to take public transport without suffering intens social anxiety)
I fully agree on your diagnosis part though. And i al also not saying medicine cant be the correct tool but its definitely not a clearcut choice.
Seriously. Get them meds and a proper therapist ASAP who has a clue about ADHD. While their brain is still plastic you can train it early with the hope of having a future where coping mechanisms are already there and potentially reducing or getting off their meds entirely. Once you are an adult, it is over. Opportunity lost and time to learn the hard way.
He’s on meds (has been for 3 or 4 years), and he has an ADHD diagnosis… What’s the therapist for? I haven’t seen any actual issues that warrant a therapist, what are you thinking I should be watching out for?
Right now he’s doing pretty good in school, he’s a little less social than I would like, but that’s nothing new. Other than that, he seems a sharp well-rounded kid without any behavioral or emotional issues.
This is probably a good call. In the first place a common problem with stimulant meds for adhd is that tolerance goes up quickly, requiring the user to increase their dose over time. The dependency is hard to break. I was prescribed on it for only a few months and made the mistake of abruptly stopping taking it - and even that was enough to go through one of the worst depressions of my life.
There is also evidence of heart risks with long term use, and given that cardiovascular disease is already the western world’s number one killer, another blow to our hearts is that last thing anyone needs.
And then there’s the regulatory and supply issues. Pharmacies often struggle to keep enough of a supply to meet demand, which is the worst thing for a substance with such a high-risk dependency situation. Plus because it’s a schedule 2, you must see a doctor for every refill.
And of course the insurance companies make all of this all the more ugly. Really not worth it.
Edit: oops, didn’t catch the last part. Welp, hope it works well for them.
My experience is completely the opposite of what you describe, not that I disregard anything you’ve stated. I’ve been on nearly the same dose for nearly 40 years and do not perceive any changes in the effect I receive. And I’d rather live without my medication while waiting on temporary shortages than live my life without it.
I suspected i had adhd when i was 16, begged my mom to go to a psychologist. The psychologist told me i was playing too many video games ಠ_ಠ
When the video games were a symptom of the ADHD. Lol
My first and only therapist was totally dismissive of my problems. I left them, but haven’t been able to bring myself to try another one since then 😔
Same with autism. It wasn’t until I had my master’s degree in math and teaching high school at age 39 that it ever occurred to me that I was autistic. A colleague and I had a mutual student, and he told me that he thought she might be autistic and that he was going to refer her to the school’s diagnostician for testing.
So I found myself curious about the symptoms of autism, because Rain Man was my frame of reference. I researched the symptoms in the middle of a Geometry team meeting, and everything I read had my sitting up further and further in my seat, until I just blurted out “Oh my GAWD…?!” My colleagues asked what, and I said “Y’all…I think I might be autistic?” They looked at one another quizzically, like they were shocked at my personal revelation. One of them replied, “Wait…you didn’t know?!” I said, “…what, you DID know?!?” She was like “Yes! We all know that about you! You seriously didn’t know? 😂” HELL NO I DIDN’T KNOW!
I immediately called my mom on the phone to tell her that I thought I might be autistic. “Yyyyyeah…your dad and I always thought you might be.” HOLY FUCKING SHIT MOM WTF??? 😲😲😲WHY DIDN’T YOU EVER GET ME TESTED?!? "Well, you always made such good grades that we just didn’t think it mattered that much.
I have since been diagnosed with ASD Level 1, and I think back a lot on my life lived. I marvel at how much easier my life would have been if I hadn’t had to develop all of these coping mechanisms myself. I did well in school despite my autism. I earned two degrees despite my autism. I hold down teaching jobs despite my autism. The biggest problems I’ve had in my life, though, have been personal relationships. I can’t imagine how much richer my life might be right now had I known all along how to exist as a self-aware autist in a neurotypical world.
I don’t know the popular opinion on this, but I personally think you did a great job learning how to be your best self without having a label. Everyone is unique and everyone will have to learn how to do things their way, having children labeled as something when they already do well might just make them feel more alienated, or be like “I’m X that’s why I’m like this” instead of finding their way to be productive/have fun.
Of course it’ll help people struggling but not knowing what’s wrong. But if you’re a type of person who can feel/see what works for you and what doesn’t and find solutions for yourself, you might even make your quirks your strength. One frequent thought I have is, how many of the scientists or philosophers in the past were actually autistic? Or had quirks that made them who they are, but would definitely be “problematic” when they were young by today’s standards.
TLDR: My opinion is everyone is unique, using your quirks to do things others can’t is what makes some people great. Making everyone fit a “normal”, and medicating/… everyone else doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Would you tell someone who doesn’t have legs that they’d be better off without a wheelchair because then they’d be free to “find their own way to be productive/have fun”? Or is this reserved for disorders that you can’t see?
My medication doesn’t fundamentally change who I am, it just makes me less shit at the things I am most shit at, so that my daily life is less of a constant struggle.
And sure, it’s possible to imagine a world where having ADHD wouldn’t be such a problem, just like it’s possible to imagine a world where not having legs wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not the world we live in!
Try not paying your bills and telling your landlord and credit card company that it’s fine, you’re just not one for rigid schedules and you’re finding your own way. Or instead of doing your job at work, do something completely different and see if your boss accepts that you’re just quirky.
I don’t know if you read it, the second paragraph goes with something like: if you’re having problems, then yes, if you’ve found ways to deal with things and be happy/productive then no need to labels things to be “normal”
If you do not have problems you will not be diagnosed. The diagnose criteria literally say that you must have problems.
There’s not medication for autism, and self-awareness is immensely helpful
Is it? Why does having a label for people treating you differently help with that? It mostly just turns into an excuse for others to use thank being a helpful label.
I think labels seem progressive and helpful but are mostly used to further divide people and make in and out groups.
If you know you struggle with people being told that it’s your fault cause you are genetically different somehow even though it seems ever so common and spectrum based does nothing to help you deal with people.
Here’s how a label can help: I did receive a social worker diagnosis (not medical) in elementary school, but my parents had a very similar outlook to you and didn’t do much for helping me learn how to handle it. I “knew”, but could never understand why I alienated everyone. I couldn’t manage my anger, because every time I met a new kid, it would get combative quickly. I felt I was in a position to have to earn massive respect from everyone to treat me decently, and therefore got controlling when working with others. This pressure also extremely heightened the natural tendency to procrastinate associated with autism (Note, all of this is afterthought analysis not what I thought as a kid).
College and then post grad, I had to confront these issues on my own with only poor coping mechanisms I had developed growing up. I had to educate myself about autism, and I had to spend a lot of time reflecting on myself and figuring out how to manage my worst impulses. If I had been educated and informed as a kid, I wouldn’t have needed to struggle like that for decades.
Do you know why humans are as advanced as we are? It’s because we can learn from each other and build on what people before us have done. A label helps you connect with people who have the same struggles and learn what strategies they used to cope and live a fulfilling life. It’s a way to avoid having to reinvent the wheel.
Everything is used to divide, someone autistic will behave in ways that “other” him regardless of labels, and people who want to hate are going to keep hating.
You don’t need them, don’t use them, but they absolutely are helpful for many people. We are nowhere near a society inclusive enough to make labels obsolete.
Beside, dealing with people’s attitude isn’t the only issue. Neurodivergent people will compare themselves to others on their own, and will struggle with their self image and self-esteem. A diagnosis will help with understanding themselves and finding better strategies much quicker.
Or…and just a thought…maybe people know their own truths better than you ever possibly could, and when they tell you that early diagnosis and therapy would have helped them immensely, you just believe them?
Also, I got diagnoses for Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Panic Attacks as well as Major Depressive Disorder, and having those diagnoses as a teen might have helped as well, ya know?
Dude, so fucking real. I just got denied meds because “If you can learn a big part in a play, then you must have very mild adhd.”
I’m convinced that most psychiatrists and psychologists have control issues that they satisfy through their practice. It makes them feel powerful to be able to gatekeep, judge and implicitly control their patient’s life and get paid for it.
I wish I could talk to someone who actually knows what adhd is like, and not just some boomer with a fancy piece of paper
Man if I was a doctor I’d probably get my control kick by giving people what they want and making them happy.
Extend that to anybody involved with patient care and medicine.
It’s weird how many people on here attribute good grades to being good at everything else in life. Or minimizing the probable and unnecessary struggle some individuals go through to get those good grades because of the system they were put in. I got good grades because i worked many times harder than my peers. I shouldn’t have to. No one does. I was privileged enough to have enough resources to do as well as i did. Most people with my condition don’t. I’ve also struggled a lot more at other tasks, and in the work place. But i got good grades, so fuck me right?
Back in school I literally helped other students cram 30 minutes before a test, using flash cards I made and used all week, only to have them breeze in and get a higher score than me.
Do you know how great it would be to only barely try, and succeed anyway? I can’t even imagine.
I don’t think it’s that great. I was able to coast through high school but I was hindered once I reached the edge of my natural talent shortly into college. I had never really learned how to buckle down and study so I ended up struggling a lot. I can still pick things up pretty easily but I often give up when it gets to a certain point. Nowadays I feel kinda inferior to others that learned how to keep trying.
I was all ready to come back at with how I wish I had your problem, but I can honestly see how being unable to buckle down would be a huge impediment.
My results may not be as good as my peers and I may take longer, but I am able to get there eventually.
For instance, I am currently on day 4 of 25 of the Advent of Code competition, haha.
Good for you. Good luck!
Yeah. It’s so fucking shortsighted to be like, “Eh, you did fine, look at your grades. You can’t be that disabled.” Like, you putzes, are you kidding me? If I hadn’t been spending all my mental energy clearing all these pointless obstacles, I might have cured fucking pancreatic cancer by now. It’s not just about what’s convenient for caretakers, teachers, and a health team, it’s about being denied the opportunity that most other people are handed without asking to achieve everything they’re capable of doing.
being good at shit doesn’t mean I can have good grades either
My autism allows me to do it work, create servers, host websites and make my own Foss projects
This won’t however mean I’ll be getting 100 from my chemistry exam just because I can loop hello world a hundred times
Same with autism.
If you get low grades, off to special ed with you.
High grades? Oh you’re just a socially awkward dork or quirky nerd or something.
It’s like the Halo effect, but with grades.
Very true but you also learn to life with it med free, which is very valuable and healthy.
Some might, but many do not. Constantly burning out, knowing that you’re underachiving (even if other do not see it) and struggling with handling it all can and does make people end up depressed, extremely anxious and even suicidal. If one doesn’t get the help they need, many doors can close even permanently.
Some people really need the medicine to function.
I think some forgot the premise of the post, was specifically for people who are not underachievers yet have adhd. This what I am refering to.
I don’t think that’s the premise of this post. I think the post is talking about people struggling with adhd, who’s symptoms & struggling are being ignored just because they’ve somehow managed to keep up good grades.
They might also be “gifted” which helps with getting good grades up until some point when it all falls down, as it all just is too much. Also the responsibility and work on other areas of life start requiring the limited capacity to focus and execute necessary home upkeeping, studying & all the other things in life.
Getting the needed medication or even just the diagnosis and the understanding of oneself that comes with it can save a person from a lot of unnessecary suffering.
Yes, being stressed out about your own apparent inadequacies for your entire life sure sounds like a healthy way to live
Then don’t let others make you feel inadequate for being you.
Not being able to complete most simple tasks on time isn’t me. That’s the ADHD, and I hate it.
Ok then that’s something you want to work on and I hope you can get past it but that’s not a out other people.
Not true. Check some research, brain develops more healthy with meds.
I probably would have been better off maintaining Vyvanse into adulthood, but I quit taking it as soon as I had the ability to make the decision to. I felt dull, emotionless, my appetite sucked. Yes, ADD sucks and it has caused issues in my personal life, but I am who I am and I accept those parts of myself. Would my grades have been better in college? Would I have been better at maintaining social events? Sure. But sometimes you just have to build good habits to overcome whatever you can.
no.
Goddamn, this innocuous post brought me to tears. Been having a rough time, I guess
Hugs.
You can’t change the past but you can change the future.
Can you though? At least in most of the US if you aren’t already getting psychological help, you have to pay for it yourself, and will just have to figure out a self medication schedule that works for you.
I pay for both a psychiatrist and a psychologist and while my psychologist knows for sure I have ADHD neither of then can prescribe me stimulants so instead I’m on Lexapro so at least I don’t have to care.
As long as you’re not disruptive, they don’t give a shit.
And if you are disruptive, they diagnose you with odd and beat you to make you shut up. You can’t win
Turns out, the teachers just do their job. And most of the time just the bare minimum, just like almost everyone else.
And if you want to teach and a student is a pain and hindering/distracting everyone else, then you kinda have to intervene. If the student isn’t motivated/concentrated its easy for the teacher to just say that the student doesnt wanna learn so he gets just bad grades.
At least thats how I see it sometimes.
If you’re malleable enough, the machine will mash you into place.
Truth. I remember being in school in the 90s when they were giving Ritalin to everyone who didn’t want to sit still in class. Shit was wild. And then you have me, with a healthy case of ADD but since I wasn’t a social butterfly, that just meant I wasn’t motivated.
Oh man, one of my people! My parents, my school, my teachers just watched me fail with an under 1.0 average, while I scored 95th percentile in every standardized test. I was lazy, undisciplined, and unmotivated, and it made me hate myself.
I feel like this would be a red flag now, but back then, even the school counselors were only worried about my impact on other students. Since it was minimal, they let me just stay there and fail… my best friend, who’s every bit at sharp as me, got Ritalined into fucking oblivion and put in remedial classes. Jokes on me tho, he got a diploma from HS.
GED is just another standardized test. If I knew how easy it was back in my junior year, I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble.
Dude, all the same here. I tested insanely high on that aptitude test in elementary school and was placed in their version of honors. But the teachers would get pissed because I wouldn’t do any homework, yet somehow aced all my tests and scored minimum 90th percentile on all standardized tests. I just paid attention to the lessons but had no interest in the busy work.
I ended up just doing the CA proficiency exam and got out of high school on my 17th birthday, and then got a diploma at 25 to make my mom happy.
Ritalin made me a zombie. Thankfully Adderall existed. I wish I could get some as an adult. That shit made me superhuman.
They had me and my brother on I think it was Concerta, and yeah there was something not right about that stuff. Adderall was great for getting shit done, but no way I’d want to take it everyday.
T breaks from amphetamines are (hopefully) encouraged.
T break?
Tolerance break. Even a one day weekly washout can be good enough.
Ah gotcha, thanks
And if you had ADD, ODD, and breaking the curve grades, they took every opportunity to lock you up in jail that they could.
At least that’s what happened to me.
Wait till you see what they let you do if you’re good at sports.
Wait till you see what they let you
doraw dog if you’re good at sports.Ftfy
Cheerleaders, teachers, whatever you want. The football players at my high school could do no wrong because they won state once.
Does anyone else have the incling ADHD and PTSD are the same thing? Human brain thinks it’s in danger and kicks into survival mode
Adhd kids get told negative things way more often that other kids, and that is traumatic. Undiagnosed Adhd leads to anxiety and depression because of it, which makes it very similar to ptsd. But since it’s chronic and over a long time period, it is separate from ptsd, as the cause is Adhd, and not the trauma itself.
ADHD can lead to C-PTSD if untreated
Especially when RSD is present.
Most of the symptoms commonly associated with ASD are shared with PTSD
Tbf same if you are ‘slower’
whole life
Even with ADHD you’re like, an full-ass adult, no? it’s weird how people never actually grow into their independance. I see many people come up in their 30-40s and discover they have ADHD - what were you doing this whole time?
what were you doing this whole time
Assuming it was this hard for everyone else and I was just really, really, inexplicably bad at this…so I’ll work harder to overcome my personal shortcomings!
Undiagnosed thought: “I’m always forgetting my important things, this is really difficult”
Society: “everyone forgets things”Undiagnosed thought: that fluorescent light is so incredibly loud and the way it flickers is creating this strange rainbow effect on my computer and it hurts my eyes and I’m really struggling here.
Society: working in an office sucks, the lights, the distractions, it’s normal to have unfocused moments.You repeat enough of these thoughts - I feel like I’m struggling with my emotional regulation, could it be ADHD? Well as a teen it was hormones, as a uni student it was “freshman anxiety”, then I was getting divorced so my emotional state was blamed on that, then I was always moving house so it made sense that my mood was always a hair trigger.
There were always just enough environmental factors to mask the underlying condition.
And it works! Until you burnout in your 30s because no one else is actually giving 150% all the time.
I did the same with a physical illness! I was born with a hip deformity so my whole life any pain or issues around my hips was just totally brushed off until I got aggressively assertive in my 20s because with the physical symptoms I was able to feel more confident in my perception of my reality and advocate to my doctor (where as with mental health, it’s harder, sure I think I feel this symptom but it’s in my head it’s fleeting what if I’m remembering experiencing my own thoughts wrong? Years of describing how I feel to therapists, being told it’s nothing out of the ordinary, so I’ve convinced myself it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing)
Turns out I had nerve damage in my spine the whole time, but we all just assumed I was being overly dramatic and sensitive about the known hip issue.
Same with my ADHD. We all (myself included) thought it was just really bad anxiety in addition to me being bad at sticking to the homework for therapy so it made sense I wasn’t getting better.
But we know more about how it presents, so if I was a kid going through the process again I’d be less likely to be misdiagnosed in the first place.
You know when enough of society agrees on the whole light things, or forgetting things, or about noises…
Maybe, just maybe… Being a hyper focused machine used for mass productivity in a country designed around stripping as much value from your existence as possible…
That it maybe is a common position and the drugs to “equal” yourself to others is just a lie to make you think that is the normal way for people to live?
Most people aren’t giving 150% because they don’t think about anything they do and just hope for the best and rely on connections and luck to get through.
Pretty sure we as a society should be trying to accommodate other people and help them as they need to be needed instead of demanding conformity to a position we are just pretending is the normal. But hey when the drugs are this good…
Maybe trying to get out from an overprotective parent or unburying yourself from decades of gaslighting? Are you a psychologist? You seem to hold a very high opinion of your ability to judge people.
yeah but that’s not the context of the post.
Thats not important here.
You can’t just add random context to suit your claim lmao
And I didnt. You nibbled at a detail of the op and I did the same with you. Its always okay as long as nobody does it to oneself.
It’s a fair question, if you haven’t gone through it. I agree: it seems ridiculous!
I grew up surrounded by authority figures who didn’t have a nuanced understanding of mental health. I internalized being called “lazy” and “a procrastinator,” because everyone told me that I was choosing to be bad at managing my time and focus!
I believed this right into the upper management of a tech company in my 30s. And I’d get down on myself constantly for zoning out during meetings and being overwhelmed at long-term complex tasks. “Wow I’m so lazy and unmotivated,” I’d think to myself in between client meetings. For years.
A friend showed me the ADHD symptoms (probably after I zoned out for the thousandth time), and it was a shock and how closely they described my childhood, schooling, and professional and social life.
Some people do just fine with their coping mechanisms - I discovered that I had quite a few! But I made the choice to seek medication. Taking it was like breathing air for the first time.
So that’s what I was doing.
Trying to fucking survive the last fucking 40 years of this life i didn’t ask for
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The equivalence of what you’re saying is that if everything contained lactose and just because Phil, with his lactose-intolerance, is always able to make it to the toilet in time, he shouldn’t need lactase supplements or a special diet.
Lactose intolerance is actually a very good example. The level of lactase production varies significantly among the population. Different people will find different amounts of lactose as interfering with their ADLs. There’s generally a point where too much milk or cheese will cause you to have gas and visit the bathroom within an hour. This is called clinical significance. If they don’t have enough clinical significance, it’s pointless to diagnose them with lactose intolerance.
Although I agree with the facts, binary „diagnosing“ isnt the only way to go about your life. You, your parents and your doctor can make decisions without a piece of paper. The problem here to me seems to be that „you‘re not diagnosed so you dont have it“ has been a valid strategy for too long and needs to go already. Seeing that your child (eg) shows signs of autism doesnt mean you need to put them in special everything but people are rightly pissed that they have suffered irreperable damage to their bodies for self medicating an issue that could have been mitigated if not soved, were our society able to accept imperfection and not reinforce stereotypes at every turn.
You can and should use nonmedicalized strategies for something that’s subclinical. That was my point. A disorder is a medical diagnosis.
A disorder is a medical diagnosis.
As is the absence of one.
You can pretend that clinical significance is the gold standard measure of disability if you like, but you should recognize that you leave a MASSIVE gap in your effectiveness both as a diagnostician and a practitioner if you neglect all the masking your client has been doing to deal with everybody’s demands their whole life. Seeing that bias in someone pretending to treat me would be enough reason for me to walk out of the appointment and schedule with someone more capable and knowledgeable.
I’m neither a diagnostician nor a provider and I don’t pretend to be one. I’m just a nurse. That’s one of many things people seem to ascribe to me. I will say however, something needs to be disabling for it to be a disability.
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Yeah, my guess is that this post is implying the typical case - it wasn’t disrupting grades specifically, so it wasn’t diagnosed. You may have gotten those grades by staying up until 3am as a child, lying to get out of forgotten homework, had more injuries, pushed through work by building up a healthy reserve of depression and anxiety, struggled socially because you couldn’t prioritize both school and socials or because you couldn’t connect with most other people because of your way of talking, been horribly forgetful, etc. but because grades number stays high, nothing is wrong. It’s easy for people to see grades as the metric for mental wellness which is wild
Yeah nobody else is mentally well either and we all have our coping mechanisms for this world.
This is basically keeping up with the Jones’s but using “happiness” as a grading curve for your life.
People are not superheroes or magical beings above all the downs we share. Hell most of the upper class are busy abusing drugs just as much from their burnout and depression. But someone might have been more social and smart and thus you are somehow less than them? Meh. And Nah.
Can you please define “interfere” Dr. Roguetrick?
Difficulty or inability. I’m not claiming to be a doctor and I’m not making an outlandish statement. People are acting like I’m making a value judgement on them or their lived experiences when I’m not. They sure are making wild assumptions about what I mean though.
“Difficulty or inability”
So some degree of difficulty and/or some degree of inability. Assessed by someone. Subjectively. Which means that there is absolutely no point in trying to infer that somehow those who say they feel they have some degree of difficulty or inability may not, in your opinion as not a medical professional, over the internet, actually have the disorder they and/or their doctor feel they have.
tl;dr your statement is completely meaningless
What a long winded way to rephrase what I just said I wasn’t doing. I was making the point that if you don’t have clinically significant symptoms you don’t have a disorder. That’s it. Every other point you’ve made us a wild supposition.
Nice gaslight Herr Doktor.
Your statement is meaningless. It’s just as meaningless as saying you didn’t diagnose the absence of a disorder.
I honestly don’t even know what you’re trying argue with me about at this point. Do you hold the position that a subclinical set of symptoms is a disorder? Because that’s what I disagree with. If not, then what exactly is at issue beyond your imagination of my position?
You are trying to claim that you are making a simple factual statement when in fact the subtext - which is probably obvious to all - is that in your opinion you don’t think people’s claims of impairment or dysfunction are valid unless they have a specific medical diagnosis that YOU feel is valid. And the proof of this is that your statement can be as true reversed. IOW, you have NO idea if they’ve been medically diagnosed or if any diagnosis or absence thereof is valid or not. It really negates your point.
And why does this all matter to me, personally? Because my own personal experience with the medical establishment is that they pretty much throw shit out there that may be valid or may not and relies heavily on both the doctor’s and the patient’s own subjective assessment. A sibling was for decades diagnosed as intellectually disabled when in fact he has ASD because they were unable to communicate effectively. I was diagnosed with a common mental disorder by one doctor and told there was no way I could have that by another. It goes on… And so I tend to be pretty sympathetic when someone says “I feel impaired by <condition X>” and I don’t feel a need to question whether or not they have <condition X> or if there was a formal diagnosis or not. Again, because many of those diagnoses are about as valid one way or the other has throwing darts. Could be good, could have missed something completely, could have misinterpreted what the patient said because they weren’t able to communicate it in that moment.
What is important is what the person says about themselves. If they want to say they have ADHD or ASD or whatever, it’s not my place to gate keep or question that. Nor yours.
Edit: To put it another way… your statement is about as useful as, when someone says “I just love this blue dress I’m wearing” pointing out that “well akshually that’s turquoise”. The point is THEY like the color.
