AIBU to wonder whether ADHD is normal and society is the issue

[LadyBeatriceBeaHiggins]

No offence intended

Discussing about Adhd with a friend who has Adhd and we wondered what if Adhd is naturally a part of being human and its the way society trys to make humans into machines that is the problem ?

so figured id open up our debate for fellow mumsnetters

That’s exactly my point though - it’s the same with autism - if everyone is completely honest I think we all know people who have been diagnosed (privately 99% of the time) as autistic and they got to 50 having had a very nice, successful life with friends, partners, kids etc and they’re autistic- yes they may have struggles in some areas through their lives but ultimately they’ve been completely fine and able to build a great life - compare that to people who are non verbal, can’t do any personal hygiene for themselves, are so violent they can’t live with siblings - it completely dilutes the struggles people face when the likes of Robbie Williams is diagnosed. It’s the exact same with ADHD, some people have had their lives ruined by it but most people are very mild and are just in line with everyone else

I think it depends on the sevetity of ADHD. You meet some people who have led miserable, extremely chaotic lives, living impulse to impulse and there's no way anyone would actively choose that life. It quite clearly is a significant disability at that point and way beyond the normal life difficulties other people experience
Absolutely, but severity doesn't matter any longer, only the label and then everything is associated to it.

I hear/read many behaviours out down to ADHD in teenagers and I think 'isnt this typical teenager behaviours'? Behaviours that as parents, you are responsible for kicking in the butt so that when they become adult, they understand why they are not acceptable and you make the extra effort to overcome.

People were less likely to live alone in the past, although it did happen.

Just because you dont see people's struggles it doesn't mean they don't exist. I was diagnosed as an adult (by the nhs!). You have no idea what's going on in someone else's life that you can't see.

But that is true for ND people too - everyone struggles with lots of things. I know my BIL very well since he’s a teenager, he has a degree, a masters, a great job, gets on well with everyone, has a wife and a baby, hes gone on lots of big trips to America in his own during his 20s that he organised and paid for himself etc, met a lot of different people on the different trips and has stayed in touch with them, has a completely normal life and is a completely normal man, outgoing, popular, friendly, first to suggest a night out and always wants big parties for his birthdays etc. Has never had any trouble with money or bad choices with women etc, and honestly he would definitely tell you if he did. His neighbour got diagnosed so off he went then, private diagnosis, was in for an hour or two and now he’s autistic and ADHD… I’ve every sympathy for people with autism but sorry I just do not see how his life has been impacted by it or how he has ever needed support for anything - yes I might sound ignorant but like I say I know him very well and I’ll get flamed for this but I just don’t buy it - there is an element of bandwagon and it’s imagine those who are genuinely struggling

Theres another thread running at the moment about a mum trying to get MH support for her daughter and of course shes at her wits end with it all

Everyone on that thread is persuading the mum that her daughter definitely has ASD and ADHD despite her saying there were no markers of it prior to Covid

Now the answer to that by many posters is that there being no signs of Audhd is likely indicator of there being ND, that she was doing so well at school and friends, and learning and articulation and eye contact and all the other things she was doing and thriving in, that this is evidence of likely ND as she was likely a perfectionist and masking all the time!!!

Yes and theres a big danger in seeing every behaviour through the lens of ASD or ADHD. Frequently on here the narrative is that if a child is ND then their behaviour is about that, its a meltdown, its masking, its burn out, its all down to the ND

But kids are kids first and they're growing and learning and challenging and testing. Thats normal, its whats happening all the time.

No, but if you've managed to get to 50, having successfully got through a degree, jobs, housing yourself, having a relationship, your children remaining in your care, then by definition whatever struggles you may feel you have, you are a success and you're thriving in this world and this society.

You might feel 'odd', 'different' and have things about you that frustrate you and mean you have to have some strategies for. But I would struggle to define and categorise that as being disabled. And guess what, we all feel odd and different at times, its part of the human condition. You dont need a diagnosis to 'find yourself' and validate why you feel odd.

Amen 🙌🙌🙌

Appearances can be deceiving though. Didn't they used to think that ADHD only affected little boys, largely because the vast majority of the little boys grew up to live lives that looked to be successful and problem free from the outside. There's now a theory that what actually happened was that the majority of these boys simply grew up and got married to women who became their executive function system by default and were forced to make up for all their deficits. If the husband wasn't managing to pull his weight, at a time when divorce was relatively rare and stigmatised, the wife was simply forced to pick up the slack and everything looked hunky dory to anyone who didn't know any better. If they could be volatile, unregulated and impulsive, causing problems by way of addictions etc, these things often remained hidden. Now that divorce is much more common, I certainly know a few divorced men who I very much suspect have ADHD (and it tallies with what the wives have said in the cases they've said anything!). Once separated they live in squalor and their lives fall to pieces whereas photos from ten years beforehand shown what looked like a happy well-functioning family unit. It's harder to be a good partner with ADHD and divorce rates are twice as high than for the general population. You don't tend to find out about what someone's marriage is actually like unless it ends though.

That isn't to say that I don't think sometimes people are wrongly diagnosed but that can happen with more or less every condition, including things like cancer. Improving the rigorousness of the diagnostic system can be done without casting doubt on what is a very well researched and evidenced condition.

Indeed. I'd have probs been burnt at the stake. 🤣

I think what people often mean by that is that you couldn't be 'abnormal' if there was no accepted 'normal' state of being. Similarly, you couldn't be overweight or poor if there wasn't a normal range. It can be applied to almost anything that is considered different by not adhering to an accepted standard.

That's true but a lot of blokes put up with pretty neurotic behaviour from their partners too. Some of that is likely to have been things like BPD. There are loads of common phrases like "happy wife, happy life" which allude to peacekeeping with 'difficult' partners.

Well yes, but I'm thinking about the original cohorts of boys who were identified as having ADHD in childhood but who were later thought to have grown out of it.

A lot of people seem to ignore the 'significant difficulty in at least two areas of your life' as necessitated by the NHS for it to qualify as a disorder.

I remember a poster claiming to have undiagnosed ADHD as a high flying executive with a six figure salary. She managed a team of 250 people and had three young kids.

I was waiting for the reveal that she was constantly masking and her personal life was hugely impacted by the burnout of having to pour everything into her job (pretty much me when I was a bid manager - I spent so many nights working into the small hours to keep on track).

Instead she said she disagreed with the stereotype of everybody with ADHD struggling. She was happy and had never experienced depression or anxiety in her life. Was regarded as 'a pioneer' in her industry etc. She just really struggled to do the housework on the weekend and would lie in bed with 'ADHD procrastination' finding excuses to watch another episode before doing the washing.

Defo couldn't have been the three kids and high pressure job making her feel burned out. 🙄

They just developed coping strategies in all likelihood. I'm 30ish and earned around £60k last year, yet I was excluded from mainstream education prior to secondary school for my emotional dysregulation which often manifested as violence when wound up by other kids - pretty serious stuff like stabbing a metal pencil all the way through a classmate's hand and breaking another's tooth with a metal ruler.

I had to adapt and accept that I'd never have the patience to be a writer despite having a reading age of 16+ at 9yo, getting straight A/A* results in English, and getting 99% for my key stage 3 exam - all post medication with Ritalin. Did I not have ADHD I'd likely have managed it as I was offered an internship at a newspaper and spent years writing bids and business stuff in my 20s (during which time I was smoking weed daily to deal with my frustration and felt completely unable to date despite getting asked out a lot).

Instead I embraced my hobby of offroading/pickup trucks and sacked off my graduate job to get my HGV licence and work in heavy plant. The chaotic lifestyle suits me well. I'll spend a few months getting paid just shy of £400 a shift for four hours night work on HS2 then I'll spend a few weeks off just sleeping into the afternoon and not keeping a schedule.

Currently working self employed for a small business eight minutes from my house and only earning half of what I did on HS2 but it's easy work, steady, and normal-ish hours. But once I've recharged my batteries I'll probs do some more contract work in the city centre and do all the weird shifts again - I get work offers all the time and just this week turned down a job with Aggregate Industries as I've just finished an 18 month stint with Tarmac where I was often starting at 04:30am and regularly working 13 hour days (with a fair bit of waiting around onsite and power napping in between) so I didn't really fancy it.

I've had to be really adaptable and I can't imagine any of my former bid management colleagues jumping into the drum of a mixer truck with a kango. It's the only way in which I've ever kind of regarded my ADHD as a possible benefit as I think a lot of people would struggle with my chaotic schedule.

It's probs cost me the opportunity to have a family though as I just can't imagine that with my current lifestyle and really hate feeling bound by routine. Love my three nieces and my goddaughter but can't imagine dealing with that myself. It'd be a nightmare! Thankfully my partner can't have kids so I'm under no pressure in that dept.

I very much doubt they all learnt to cope although some of them may have done. I've certainly never learnt to cope with many of my inattentive symptoms despite endless strategising and reading several libraries worth of books - the only thing that made any difference at all were meds and I can't even take them long term due to other health issues (thankfully I get lots of help to do the things I can't do). Good for you for making it work in your own case though!

If you read the threads on here about useless husbands, many sound like they have some pretty strong ADHD traits - I do tend to believe that a huge number of people remain undiagnosed. Often people tell themselves they can change and adapt because the problems they have are things that others find relatively easy and if you're someone who has achieved things that others find hard in other areas of your life it can be baffling why you can't do these basic things. Often it can take the shock of a divorce or losing a career before someone really takes a serious look at why they're not coping with things that other people don't have any major struggles with at all.

Very true. It's mostly academic, one of the reasons I don't fully subscribe to it.

I mean, you could ultimately say there's nothing wrong with a middle aged man having the intellect of a current day 12yo, because at some point in human history it was undoubtedly true.

ADHD is completely normal, it makes us prime hunters not farmers.

Society, largely since the Industrial Revolution has become an increasingly inhospitable place for people with ADHD.Boring, repetitive, processed tasks really are not our forte.

I've been pondering the premise of the channel 4 documentary again, and the use of the term "social construct". I just wondered if anyone could come up with any other social constructs that are shown to respond positively and and so significantly to medication in placebo controlled clinical trials? Bit of a thought experiment. I can't come up with anything unless you consider things like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depressive disorder a social construct which they don't seem to. And as far as I'm aware, none of them respond so significantly to medication.

'Coping' in life doesn't necessarily mean entirely eradicating your issues IMO. It's more about finding a situation where they don't matter so much. Extreme example but I believe that most people with ADHD would manage just fine if they won the Euromillions because they'd just outsource the shit stuff and wouldn't need to dance to anyone else's tune.

I was really good at my corporate job in terms of final output but it felt like it took my entire life focus to accomplish it. I now earn more or less the same amount and don't really have to do anything strategic or keep pulling my attention back to a 150 page bid I've been writing/formatting for weeks.

I just turn up, jump in my truck/machine, and check the tablet to see where I'm loading from and where I'm going. Then I drive there, load, and head to site. I'm always either waiting to load, on my way to site, or pouring concrete/delivering aggregates to site.

There's a lot of different skills I need depending on what I'm doing - like controlling the flow while pouring into a 80 foot deep foundation or into a truck mounted pump with a boom for pumping it up to a slab on the 30th floor, or slowly driving along with two chutes attached keeping the chutes aligned with a pipeline I'm filling in). But it's still always waiting, driving, or pouring.

The biggest factor for me is not feeling mentally tied down for want of a better phrase. Like when I have to keep focusing on something I'd rather not. When I'm waiting I'm on my phone. When I'm driving I'm listening to podcasts or music. When I'm onsite I enjoy doing the work because it sort of feels like playing a video game in a weird way. You're sitting in a cockpit controlling something with lots of levers/switches and revving the fuck out of things.

I love jumping in the shovel and moving boulders around or driving up an aggregates pile so the back's almost scraping on the ground and you're looking at the sky. Even when the novelty wears off it's never soul destroying like sitting in a chair all day was for me. But I usually try something new when I get bored. I've driven tippers, concrete mixers, flatbeds, 32t dustcarts (bigger version of the council type bin lorries used for collecting cardboard bales and bulk recycling from factories etc), loading shovels, 100t articulated dumpers, refrigerated box trucks, mini mixers, FELs (waste trucks with big spikes/arms on the front to lift industrial skips and tip them overhead), ROROs (roll on skip trucks that drag the big industrial skips onto the back with chains and pulleys), booze deliveries where you're roping barrels down into cellars. Probs some I've forgotten.

Am also learning to operate the plant and batch concrete which is really interesting. I'm able to jump on the shovel to load the aggs into the hopper or conveyor. Then add all the admixtures and ratios on the system. Then mix and pour it into a mixer truck (which I could in theory then drive to site and offload).

I don't feel my ADHD is in any way an obstacle to any of the above. If anything it keeps me zipping around doing stuff like a duracell bunny and constantly checking all my mirrors/cameras rather than being complacent - I have slightly less bumps than most of the operators and have never told an employer I have ADHD. I only struggle with motivation when I need to do something boring like write a long document about safe systems of work and compliance stuff etc or sit through a CPC course, but I only need to do 35 hours CPC every five years.

It defo affects me in other ways but I think if you can get your job locked down then everything else is much easier. IME motivation usually struggles the most when you're already stressed from other factors. When I worked the evening shift for Tarmac I was stood down on full pay every Friday as the builders travelled home for the weekend. My weekend would start at around midnight on Thursday and I wouldn't need to be back at work till about 7pm Monday. I'd get all my housework and shopping done on the Friday morning/afternoon and then have all weekend free and lie in as long as I wanted on Monday. It was so much better than my office job.

EDIT: I sound like a right know it all. 🤣 That's not the case at all. I know most of my mates would hate my job in reality. I usually just find it easier to be direct and say what I mean. My point is that I've managed to find something that works for me and it's kind of made my ADHD a non-issue. But I was pulling my hair out when I was a bid manager!

I don’t think any of those could ever be considered a social construct- my neighbour has schizophrenia, I’ve lived beside him for 10 years and 3 months ago he did take his meds when his wife was away and he was running around the green naked shouting to god, none of us had any idea he was unwell. Depression is something that is absolutely undeniable if you know someone who suffers genuine, life ruining, need to be admitted to a psych ward in case they kill themselves level - even though there is no reason for them to be depressed ie great life, happy marriage, no money troubles etc. I don’t think those illnesses can be compared to people who can’t leave the house when they should and find it hard to pay bills on time and, as one poster said above, was a chatty child. There is a WORLD of difference and i absolutely guarantee that anyone with ADHD would never switch to have schizophrenia or terrible terrible depression

I didn't get a diagnosis to validate myself but thanks for being so incredibly offensive

I'm not sure. Possibly anger issues (I used to know a guy who was a nurse and a genuinely nice chap but was prescribed Valium for his volatile and uncontrollable temper). He was a 6'4 ex rugby player and regional powerlifting champion and would've probs been just fine marching onto the battlefield with a mace a few hundred years ago as he was never aggressive to people he knew.