High school teacher (grade 9) one of my best students got diagnosed with "muh ADHD" this week. Here's what he told me.
The doctor (a GP) gave him a list of ten questions. It went something like this:
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Do you sometimes struggle to finish tasks?
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Do you sometimes have problems paying attention in class?
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Do you sometimes get bored?
Who the F is going to say no to any of this? Anyway, he got diagnosed with muh ADHD and now he's on pills, probably for life. The pills he gets are amphetamines by the way. Yes, really.
I'm a fucking teacher and I get bored by my class sometimes. Guess I need speed too.
This is 90%+ student by the way. Imagine diagnosing a complex mental condition (if it even exists) in five minutes, tops, and then being put on pills for life.
Absolutely disgusting.
I agree that the diagnostic methods are completely worthless hogwash. Which isn't exactly uncommon across the board in the medical and psychiatric fields.
The condition itself isn't entirely bullshit though. Poorly defined, named, and explained though, but I can attest to it being an actual problem that can exist. And the kinds of medication you're likely referring to are nowhere near as potent as actual amphetamines, but I can understand some degree of caution and concern, especially when the diagnosis sounds a bit dubious.
Oh, and I generally wouldn't trust a GP when it comes to this kind of shit at all. Most of what they understand about psychiatric conditions practically comes straight from a handbook with almost no formal training or education in neurochemistry or psychiatry. They're bound to over or under-diagnose, over or under medicate because they're pretty clueless.
And there's a lot of terrible psychologists and psychiatrists out there in general. Patients have to do 90% of the work in these and medical fields themselves to figure out what's going on and to investigate effective treatments.
What's the difference between a "condition" that needs to be treated and a "personality" which is just who you are?
I know people that did terribly in school who can build a car from scratch or a whole house from blueprints or write songs in real time. Do they need to be treated for something?
Or are these poorly defined "conditions" just an excuse to not succeed?
Yeah, I'm huge on that. Some people are just not fit for the "school" life, yet they are really given the choice between that and criminality and nothing much in between. They are actually really good at something useful, just it was either something they figured out later in life or were never even presented it as an option, because you know you can't feed the college system and the pharma industry like that.
Depends on the person I'd wager. For some patients the symptoms or effects aren't so bothersome, for other patients it might cause a lot of impactful issues when they go without any treatment.
Having a difficult time being able to relax at all, no matter the situation, isn't always fun. Nor is it fun to live with mental overload every hour of every day because there's no filter on the information flow, usually in a chaotic and disorganized mess.
Some people are perfectly capable of managing though. Some people thrive on the chaos. Doesn't mean it works for everyone. Also doesn't mean everyone needs treatment either to get by.
It's a case by case scenario, which is something I think professionals need to factor in a lot more. Diagnosis and treatment should be handled with more of an optional opt-in approach rather than something that's marketed as a necessity.
I believe they're called "hyperfixations" in psychology parlance. People with ADHD have one thing they focus on at the expense of everything else. You see this with the speedrunning community, and they're not exactly sane there.
THANK YOU! So many people here jump straight from "doctors are not properly diagnosing people which leads to more people being diagnosed with a mental illness than there actually are and are over prescribing drugs to people who don't need it" to "all forms of mental illness are complete bullshit, don't exist at all, and are just a side effect of trauma or drugs". Mental illnesses absolutely exist and ADHD is one of them. Yes, far less people actually have it than are diagnosed with it but that doesn't change the fact that it is a real thing.
Unfortunately people have a tendency to jump to very "absolute", wide blanket conclusions.
One solution fits all kinds of assumptions, assumptions that just because a tool/treatment might not work for some then it must mean it's totally tainted and completely unsafe or unusable. And assuming that just because a lot of apples (doctors) are rotten that not only is the whole barrel bad, it "must" mean that the entire apple industry is totally wrong about every possible thing and is "surely" just rotten to the core.