Is everyone ADHD/ Similar now? Does everyone have 'something'

[pontipinemum]

My counsellor/ psychologist says she thinks I definitely have some sort of ND. When I see things about ADHD/ etc it all seems mostly very relatable.

But then I see people say that everyone struggles so it is normal, that I would just be looking for something to 'blame'. BTW I am not looking for anything to blame.

I think I mask exceptionally well - it's not on purpose. I can be look calm on the outside and be absolutely melting inside. But this does make me good in a crisis. I can 100% focus on that. My brain does not stop. I mean it does not stop.
DH gets frustrated with me because of the complete and utter tangents I go off on.

I am extremely vigilant, like too on alert. I see threat and danger everywhere. It doesn't rule my life but I will assess each situation, according to my counsellor I do this to a much greater degree than most people.

My family life growing up was dysfunctional, chaotic, alcohol misuse, I was abused and neglected. But on the surface we looked like a pretty ok family. Again people keep telling me that everyone struggles with their family. But it is only now in my 30s that maybe most people do not go through what I went through.

The more outward signs - I have my nail beds destroyed. I press my finger nails down into the finger bed until it starts to break. I love the feel of it. It hurt but it is nice. I have done this since I can remeber, because I used to get in trouble for it. I used to scrath my tooth and flick my ear too but they annoyed other people - I didn't know I did it until a colleague asked me to stop. I only do it now when I have to, like now since I've thougth about it!!

In my 20s I was hugely chaotic. In my 30s now I am far more organised. BUT that is not something that is coming naturally to me. I am working super hard to help myself and make things less overwhelming. But with 2 young kids things get stressful even if you wouldn't think I am stressed. I am exhausted, I mean waking up so tired. Even though the youngest is sleeping better now, I find I am sleeping worse thinking of all the things I need to do.

Other things I have noticed:

I can easily get distracted and flit from one task before finishing the one I was at

Time blind - I am way way better at being on time for things now, thank you DH, I was always stupid early for things like flights tho. But I still massively over estimate what I can get done in a certain time frame.

Before having DC I used to drink most nights, and too much each night. I thought it helped me to relax. It did slow me down! I haven't had a drink now since around last Christmas and in general I think it is much better for me. Bar the not slowing down part.

I feel in general I have managed to find ways to make things work for me. Which I guess is what everyone does? I do have dyslexia and have found many ways to work with that.

What I am trying to figure out is, does everyone not feel like this?

@HundredMilesAnHour it overlaps with a lot of narc traits, although it's not "true" narcisism in that they can feel bad for not caring about anyone else, unlike a true narc. https://www.adhdcentre.co.uk/adhd-and-narcissism-whats-the-connection/

@Pandasquishy I find your post quite misleading compared to the messaging given in the article you’ve linked.

Someone with ADHD having traits such as impulsivity and difficulty regulating emotions which narcs also have doesn’t make the ADHD person a narc (whether you class that as a “true” narc or not) or vice versa.

And I find your comment about ADHD people “can feel bad for not caring about anyone else” bizarre.

I’m not trying to pick a fight or argue (far from it, it’s Sunday and I just want to chill out on the sofa) but it sounds like you know/have had some really unpleasant people in your life??

I think we are discovering that ND isn’t some small minority of people. It’s a massive % of the population that has been poorly catered to from schools to work.

im hoping the current awareness will force change and there will be more variation in the ways we teach, assess and work

I have a diagnosis of ADHD and dyspraxia. I don't think everyone has ADHD but I think many, many people have ADHD traits to the point where I think there are few people who could really be considered to be what we imagine is neurotypical. Some of the characteristics people associate with being "neurotypical" are in many ways just different forms of being different and mask their own difficulties and issues.

There is also emerging research about things like chronic neuroinflammation which can cause many of the issues we see with ADHD and modern lifestyles greatly contribute to that though poor diet, tech, stress, lack of exercise, exposure to toxins and so on. For women add in the rollercoaster of hormones we experience week to week then it just compounds the issues many of us face and then when we hit menopause things get even worse for a significant majority.

A diagnosis may be useful but one thing I'd say is that most of the medication does nothing to address neuroinflammation and I think that does need to be dealt with through lifestyle and diet.

Regarding your point about the checklist for adult women - I agree that some might be self-diagnosing due to this but to get a formal diagnosis you have to demonstrate that you had symptoms and difficulties in childhood under the age of 12 and also in several different settings.

there are few people who could really be considered to be what we imagine is neurotypical

I don't think neurotypical is really a helpful descriptor if you're trying to describe a specific person. It's a bit like talking about the "average" man - they don't actually exist. There is not a person who is exactly average height, average eyesight, average weight, average intelligence etc etc average on EVERY single point. In fact, when you create faces which are averaged from a group of people, they look weird and inhuman. We are all a mixture of traits and most people have something which is on the extreme end somewhere.

For a particular example relating to physical norms - the average number of legs is something less than 2 but more than 1, because nobody has more than two legs. So it's literally impossible to have the average number of legs, because in reality, not counting partial amputation, you can have one, two, or none. And of course, the vast majority of people have two and so we would say the "norm" and the way the world is designed is largely for people with two legs. Somebody with one leg or no legs (whether they use a prosthetic leg, a stick, a wheelchair) is physically disabled and might have difficulty using the same facilities as somebody with two legs.

When we talk about neurotypical in discussions about neurodiversity, it's really more about norms like this. It's not about putting people in a bucket and saying "You're neurotypical, you're neurodivergent", especially based on one trait. If you go back to the leg example, you couldn't say that everybody with two legs is able-bodied because many people have physical disabilities which have nothing to do with their legs, and not every difficulty with legs involves losing one.

The term neurotypical is really intended to be a much broader term where you use it to describe social/cultural/behavioural norms and expectations rather than individuals. I know that it does get used like this, either as a shorthand or because sometimes people are under a misapprehension that there is a set way which "neurotypical people" all behave, but that's not how it originated.

I think that's very sensible @BertieBotts and how it should be used, but every second post here is "I'm ND" "I have two ND kids" "NT people don't know our struggles as ND people" etc

The other thing I would note is that "the world" is also full of diverse environments and this can be a major factor in whether something is a disability or not. Someone with one leg is going to have a much easier time trying to be a WFH software engineer than a bricklayer on a building site.

On that screener linked above I check essentially every box, down to the silly ones like "do you swivel on your chair a lot in office meetings".

I don't consider myself ND or disabled or even as someone who experiences difficulties though. I'm in a quite creative work environment where people see it as a positive sign of leadership and energy if you're constantly pacing the room and jumping up to scribble ideas on whiteboards. If I worked in a call centre I'd probably be in a lot more trouble!

Essentially I'm really bought in to the idea of "neurodiversity" in the sense of "there is a lot of variation in how our brains work" but I'm not so bought into "...and therefore standard practice should be to take drugs to make you more compliant with one type of life"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1529159415 - "How to Keep House While Drowning" by KC Davis - more about specific tips about cleaning, how to manage laundry piling up etc

https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADD-Friendly-Ways-Organize-Your-Life/dp/1583913580 - "ADD Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life" by Judith Kohlberg - older book which I read a few years ago but is more all-encompassing, more aimed at managing your whole life including household and work and projects etc

These are just two that I've happened to read though - I see a lot of books on the shelves on similar topics. I think they're helpful whether you have a diagnosis or not. A big theme is something like "observe what you are already doing, and create a routine that matches that" - e.g. if you always dump your keys on the side table by the sofa at the front door, make that be the "official keys spot" and put a little plate there to mark it, rather than saying that the keys actually should be hung on a hook in the kitchen.

@OneAmberFinch I know your last post wasn't towards me.

One thing that would put me off looking into this further would be the thoughts of medication. I don't want to change who I am. I just want to be a better version of me. I think working on myself can hopefully do that. So I will look up those books you mentioned.

I do take drugs for post natal depression. DS has just turned 1 and I am not sure if I should come off them (will speak to GP)

Yes but that's just a shorthand the way people use it like that. I agree it's unhelpful to make sweeping generalisations about what "NT people" do or don't understand etc but I really don't have any problems at all with people saying "Two ND kids" - it's much simpler than listing diagnoses, which often overlap anyway.

I don't think that you ticking all the boxes on a screener necessarily means that everyone or a majority of people would tick them, nor that you should seek any diagnosis you don't want to. Since you don't experience difficulties, sounds like there's no reason to anyway.

I am not sure which screener we are now talking about, since it sounds like you're talking about a specific one, and no screener has been linked on this thread. The ASRS (which has nothing about fidgeting in chairs) has been mentioned a few times, that is the most commonly used one, mainly because it has very good scores on all validity and reliability indicators, meaning it is right most of the time whether it indicates a positive or negative result. I don't have the figures to hand, I don't want to get the heavy book which would have the source I trust and I am not scrolling through all of the research studies about this, but it's something like 70-90% accurate when it says you do have ADHD (so some false positives there) and something like 91-99% accurate when it says you don't (so very few false negatives). That's not a bad rate especially for such a short screener - the 6 question version is more accurate than the longer one.

Weirdly the newer version is meant to be more accurate but I get a false negative on that one, even if I use my symptoms before diagnosis/medication.

If you mean the DSM criteria about fidgeting in a chair, the reason it is there even though it seems like a silly criteria to base a diagnosis on, is because the diagnostic criteria in the DSM are based on children, and for children it is much easier and more accurate to assess outwardly observable symptoms rather than ask them what they feel or experience. Because ADHD is a clinical diagnosis, that's all you really have. Even though, in fact, fidgeting in a chair in itself is a totally harmless thing which causes no problems apart from maybe being annoying to look at, it just happens to be something which children with ADHD do to a much more intense degree and more obvious amount compared to other children. It's very observable, and it has a high correlation with the symptoms of ADHD which cause actual problems, which helps differentiate it from other causes of similar problems.

I do think there probably are environments which are more/less suited to people with ADHD and I agree that it's important for everyone to seek out an environment which fits their own strengths rather than try to fit into some box that somebody else has decided is right, but I find it quite ignorant to suggest that medication is pushed as a way to fit people into a box and make them conform. It is just not like that and to suggest it is kind of like saying antidepressants are used to shut people up and stop them complaining - people who are depressed probably DO complain more, but that's not the reason that medication is offered. The hope is that it benefits the patient. ADHD medication is similar. Adults of course have full autonomy over whether they want to take it or not, nobody is going to force you, in fact you have to go through a fairly considerable amount of hassle to get hold of it, separate from diagnosis. And even for children, who may have less say in the matter, parents don't usually consider medication lightly. It's often turned to when a child is utterly miserable - nobody likes feeling out of control, like a failure, like they can't manage the things they want to do. You can frame it like the medication is making a child "more compliant towards an environment" (e.g. school) but I think most parents of ADHD children would say it's more about allowing a child to access things like school, clubs, friendships, hobbies, which they might struggle to otherwise.

FWIW, my own experience with medication is that it makes me feel exactly like me - the "better" part has come from changes in behaviour, but I found it much more difficult to stick to and maintain any behaviour changes without medication.

I have CPTSD from childhood trauma. I recognise some of what you say but not all.

Do you mind me asking which parts? Because CPTSD has been said to me as well. I don't know if it is one or the other or both! I am seeing my GP next week after getting blood done, I have been so tired and foggy the last few weeks.

Where I am really struggling with that I feel very numb about my childhood. My counsellor said I tell her with out any emotion in my voice. The one thing that nearly got me to cry was remember how watching Dumbo made me feel 😂It feel too raw watching baby dumbo hug his mum. When my mum kept leaving over and over again.
I often think it is ok for bad things to happen to me, because 'well it's only you ponti' but I can empathise and understand it is bad if it happens to someone else.

@BertieBotts I went and did the ASRS test you mentioned. I even did it twice and changed some of my answers from very often down to often or down to sometimes. This was my result 😳

I suppose in time we will collectively get used to ADHD being something that isn’t as rare as it used to be due to missed diagnosis. It will be normal that you know several people with an ND diagnosis.

I was diagnosed late, 5 years ago, and struggled with the label on one hand while feeling I’d been given the key to explaining myself/my actions/my life on the other. I don’t know why anyone thinks it’s a fun trend - it’s heartbreaking and life changing and wonderful and terrible but it’s not a fad for me (and all the others), it’s gritty reality. My life has been much harder because of it and it doesn’t get any easier as I get older! Apart from caring much less what other people think.

The prevalence of memes, Insta videos, Tik Toks etc make it seem funny and relatable but I actually can’t watch those type of things any more.

I think what's c-PTSD and what's ADHD is really just something for a doctor to tease out - it's not that uncommon to have multiple things feeding in.

Yeah I agree - thinking back to classes of 25 at school most had one noticeably awkward geeky person with special interests and one/two 'rowdy boys' who couldn't sit still, then if you add in the occasional person with dyslexia or who was extremely clumsy and another person per class who was quietly zoning out or chronically absent you are easily approaching 20%.

And what about all the ones that just didn’t do well at school and just labelled ‘nit very academic’. How many of them may have had undiagnosed NDs

@BestZebbie I was the one with dyslexia - picked up in yr 8. Also hugely clumsy friends would laugh that I fell up the stairs. But I got good results, did well in GCSE/ A level so not much was said about it. I was always in trouble for staring out the window 'ponti I am sure I am more interesting than what ever it is you are staring at out of the window' 'ponti could do so much better if she just applied herself' ' enthusiastic and tries hard'

Friend once said 'ponti you are so intelligent, but my god are you stupid' another friend said 'you really are a fountain of random, useless information'

Kept back from a fun day out to do course work alone. But I usually had my homework other than that in on time.

@bumbaloo I do suspect dsylexia/ similar with DH but I asked him to do the ADHD test as well, he doesn't have it. He is not very book smart and did not do well at school. But he can look at things and just know how to fix them. Or how to make something to make it work. He really just is not academic

Being a mine of useless information is quite common with the ADHD + intelligent combination I think - ADHD often manifests as rampant curiosity and if you're book-smart, then the curiosity tends to result in reading everything you can get your hands on (e.g. I used to read all my grandad's Readers Digests and other adult magazines on random topics like this), possibly also watching documentaries about things you find interesting and later, spending a huge amount of time on the internet trying to find things out or just falling down rabbitholes of stories or information. Two things I love about the internet are forums, where you can access an incredible amount of people's anecdotal lived and shared experience, albeit some of it is made up, I think the conversations are usually the most interesting anyway, and the incredibly detailed websites people set up on utterly niche topics - I always assume that a lot of these website authors are autistic, that level of detail and passion into a special interest is totally mesmerising. For example, did you know there's a website detailing all the different types of lamppost in Britain? And of course there are several cataloguing every single lego brick and which sets they appear in, their second hand value, all sorts. Not to mention all the fan wikis for every conceivable TV series, movie, book and computer game. I can get lost for hours in those kinds of places.

Also, if I find something interesting or can make a solid link to something else, it seems that I tend to remember it in a ridiculous amount of detail. Sometimes I feel extremely confident about things but have no idea where I learned it and when I look it up, my memory is right about 90% of the time, and the 10% it's not it's usually somewhere close - it is rare that I totally misremember something like this. Luckily for me, I found most of school interesting, though I got exactly the same comments from teachers and on my reports. But finding it interesting let me do well on exams without really doing much in the way of revision until I got to A Level and I had to start learning how to study.

This is me @BertieBotts, I am almost certainly a 'ADHD plus intelligent' person and my brain never stops thinking 'I wonder about this' or if I read some seemingly innocuous news story, I get a compulsion to go down random rabbit holes to find out more, especially when I'm supposed to be doing something else.

For example, not so long ago I read about how the Shetland Isles were considering building undersea tunnels, inspired by the Faeroe Islands where they've already done this.

And before I knew it, I'd spent ages reading about the Faeroes, toured most of the islands on google maps (I have a bit of a fascination for small remote islands, probably because there's not a lot of people there ), looked up flights on how to get there (direct flight from Edinburgh, not too expensive), looked into accommodation, planned an itinerary for a short break, discovered that most Faeroese speak fluent English, found out tips to visit while not breaking the bank and added all the details to my multipage spreadsheet of trips I want to take one day. Such that if I ever do decide that my next holiday will be there, I could book it all in about 5 minutes.