We just got an ADHD diagnosis for Mr. 7. It's nice to know that we weren't imagining that things are hard, or that we're not doing it all wrong. But we don't yet actually know what to do, with the possible exception of sticker-charting every single goddamn thing.

I thought (blithely and without personal knowledge) that getting a diagnosis meant starting on medication, and that medication for ADHD tended to work quite well. Are you not doing meds out of conviction, or has a doctor said it's not the right kind of ADHD, or are you thinking about it but not there yet?

We're still early in this, and just got the diagnosis a couple of weeks ago. Talking with the school in another week or so, and they've supposedly been doing a parallel diagnosis. Medication was mentioned in the report we got, but one oddity is that nobody medical seems to be in charge - the entity that did the diagnosis pretty much did that and said "good luck!" and now we're at square one in terms of finding therapy, psychiatrists, or whatever. Not opposed to medication.

2: many people still need psychosocial interventions.

I hear that all the time.

For some reason I thought for most of the post you were talking about yourself as the second family member.

Burn.

Also, Americans definitely have a patriotic duty to raise small screaming beasts that climb all over everything and shit on Russians.

If this is the family-issues thread, we (not Betty despite the appropriateness) now have secret day-drinking issues again. I suspect the amount drunk is less than I drank when I was at the bar all the time. That's why the key is to just own it.

Wait, Ford, is that the royal "we"? I imagine everyone contemplating the prospect of a dry 2020 is just overjoyed at it. Does it help to realize that it will be fucking impossible to quit if you wait until the presidential campaign really heats up?

The prospect of not having ADHD in 2020 does sound nice, though.

Not in the Oval, I hope. What with the nuclear launch buttons and all.

The prospect of not having ADHD in 2020 does sound nice, though.

Not me either. I had to completely quit because of stomach pain. I've barely had three drinks in a week now.

3: I strongly recommend finding a child psychiatrist. Our pediatrician first prescribed a medication for Pokey that sent him off the rails manic. The psychiatrist later said that something that made me infer that that medication (Vyvanse) is heavily marketed to pediatricians, when really it should be a 3rd or 4th stage medication for teenagers who have already gone through the first three stages and the effects aren't working anymore. No way should it be a gentle introduction to ADHD meds.

But on a positive note, meds have truly been amazing for Pokey. Pokey does not open up much about this stuff, but I asked him to explain to Rascal what it's been like this year versus previous years. Pokey said, "Before I was really crazy. I didn't care about anything and I was just angry all the time. Now I care about things and enjoy stuff." He has been so much happier this last year than the few leading up to it.

I thought (blithely and without personal knowledge) that getting a diagnosis meant starting on medication, and that medication for ADHD tended to work quite well.

I've had a therapist and a psychiatrist tell me that ADHD is the one thing where meds should be the first line of treatment. That therapy doesn't do anything on its own, according to the literature. And that in fact the meds are diagnostic of ADHD - there might be a wide presentation of symptoms, but the response to meds is the definitive thing.

16: what I've seen isn't so much therapy as coaching and help with planning and organizing, but, yes, the meds are hugely important.

I don't buy that the meds are diagnostic of ADHD. I had a psychiatrist discuss the possibility of a stimulant to help me with some concentration issues I was dealing with. He said, "That doesn't mean you have ADHD. Everyone concentrated better when they take a stimulant."

huh, I thought non-ADD people had an opposite reaction to ADD people. But that was not said explicitly in the conversations I referenced above.

Yeah. Sure. Of course they did.

I find stimulants highly unpleasant. I don't even take decongestants.

I love recreational drugs. Pretty much all of them. I've sampled a fairly wide variety. These days, I limit my intake to alcohol and the occasional joint, but I am pretty dependent on alcohol to make it through my life.

My son, about six months ago at age 16, was diagnosed with ADHD and social anxiety, and given prescriptions for each. I am, honestly, still a little puzzled by this. He's a lot like me at that age, but nowhere near as screwed up. He was doing fine in school, and to all appearances, doing fine socially. (I liked his girlfriend a lot, for instance.)

The psychiatrist gave me and my wife some very good advice on guiding him. (We were doing poorly in some important respects.) We took that advice to heart, put him on his two prescriptions, and the results have been great.

But I honestly wonder if the worst of his problems weren't the result of his parents. We have learned a lot. I am a bit skeptical of the drugs, but the other advice we got was so good -- and the doctor recommended the drugs with such conviction -- that I'm not really conflicted about filling the prescriptions for him.

I am one of those people who is a skeptic about ADHD treatments -- in part, because I've seen them abused; in part because I have much in common with folks diagnosed with ADHD, and I did well enough in the era before Ritalin. But then again, I used to heavily self-medicate in those days, and still drink more than I ought to.

My son doesn't have the affinity that I had at his age for recreational drugs. (I can state this with confidence because I know him, but also because he voluntarily put himself in a position to be drug-tested for his current job.) Any skepticism I have about his drugs is necessarily overwhelmed by my own unhealthy reliance on chemicals. At least his drug use is well-supervised.

He has asked me a couple of times -- with genuine concern for my opinion -- what I think of his meds. I tell him the truth: That this is between two people I trust: him and his doctor. If they think this is the right approach, then it is by definition the right approach.

I can state this with confidence because I know him, but also because he voluntarily put himself in a position to be drug-tested for his current job.

You can borrow his urine, but that may result in a loss of parental authority.

but the other advice we got was so good

I am curious about the non-meds advice.

Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Don't stop, it'll soon be here.

I wonder about ADHD and the Calabat, but maybe it's just hard some days to be a six-year-old who doesn't get nearly enough recess.

You always need to have enough peanut butter cups.

I'm confused by 9 and 13. If it's not Gerald and it's not Betty, who the hell is doing the day drinking? Honor's Foxfire Liberty Hume?

When our son was first diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin, he was initially put on a short-term version that needed to be taken at lunch time as well as in the morning. This inadvertently gave us a test of the results. The rest of that year, whenever he got a behavioral demerit for the day, we checked with the office to see if they had remembered to give him his lunch time dose. Almost inevitably, it turned out that those were the days they had forgotten. It wasn't quite a double-blind randomized test against a placebo, but pretty close in retrospect.

Betty's tapeworm.

Tapeworm jokes never get old.

20: well, yeah and there are paradoxical reactions. My aunt fell asleep when she took someone else's Ritalin. Benadryl, on the other hand, leaves her wired and alert.

18: it's possible that this is different in children, but for adults, two things are true for everyone:

1) there is some dose of stimulants that will help you concentrate better
2) the dose response relationship isn't linear, and there is some dose of stimulants that will have a paradoxical effect (which I'm sure everyone can intuit from their experience with having too much coffee, even if they've never had prescribed stimulants or any other kind of upper)

I think (2) sometimes gets confused for (1). I suppose it's possible that there are some people running around with such a frontal norepinephrine/dopamine excess that no amount of stimulant can help them but I don't know who they are.

For adults, there's no particular dose the response to which is diagnostic of ADHD. ADHD is diagnosed by a combination of interviews and psychometric tests.

||

"This event is for the public, for all of us, in the name of the people who love Uncle, love the nation and the monarchy,"

Eldest nephew is going through some evaluations and diagnosis. Not sure where he'll end up. I think they may have a tentative ADHD, no meds, he's "very smart" (NB, I guess he's smart, but this is being made very much off when he is just smart, not, like, a child prodigy) and very angry. At the moment, he's an extremely unpleasant eight year old unless getting his way exactly. Getting his way looks like either reading books of his choosing (about Legos), watching TV, or beating all players at a game of his choosing. We were a little surprised when, starting to lose at Chinese checkers, he had a meltdown, threw the pieces at me, and subsequently tried to lock us out of the house. (We went outside to light luminaries.) He's in therapy but just served a ten day suspension for punching the principal. He has no friends (tested at 2nd percentile in social skills, his mom says), and his parents are announcing a divorce to the kids in 2 weeks. His mother basically quit a full time job and went to part time (a financial strain) to try to free up time to get him more help.

At any rate, I sure hope they get a handle on it pretty soon, because he's a pretty solid 8 year old, and I am worried he'll actually hurt someone, plus I imagine there will be more lasting effects psychologically and socially the longer this continues. His older cousin went through something similar, but shorter duration, and with medication and therapy, she's back to her normal self (diagnoses: ADHD, "on the spectrum.")

If it's not Gerald and it's not Betty, who the hell is doing the day drinking?

I was also confused and decided it was a relative (maybe a parent?) of Gerald or Betty.

Multiple elements of my comment in 32 don't quite make sense, which I attribute to being somewhat understimulated at the time I wrote it.

Tapeworm jokes never get old.

Just this morning I have seen a FB post warning that ALL STORE-BOUGHT SEAFOOD HAS WORMS. Which appears to be an exaggeration but not entirely false: there are apparently lots of nematodes.

My five year old was diagnosed in October, after a catastrophic first month of kindergarten. The combination of meds, occupational therapy, and accommodations from the school has been life changing and wonderful. And his therapist has been very very helpful with parenting suggestions beyond sticker charts.

Our family mental health issue is OCD not ADD. Bret Stephens would probably say it's because we're part Jewish.

There's nothing particularly trendy and of-the-moment about ADHD, right? This ubiquity of diagnoses and suspicions on Unfogged is surely because Unfogged selects for commenters with unusual presentations of things like focus, procrastination, and mental energy.

Hell, I guess I'll go presidential for this one. Since we're sharing and Vyvanse came up, our older son, now 16, was diagnosed as ADD (definitely no H involved), and when he took the first dose of Vyvanse immediately sat down and wrote a remarkable story/essay that was so beyond and different from anything he'd ever done that it was truly miraculous. Further results were not miraculous, but still his meds (which have changed several times) are key to his getting school work done.

The downsides have been first that he consistently, in the afternoon when "coming down" off the time release meds, has a really hard time - he's basically a zombie. I, being slow on the uptake, often get bothered by that and confront him on why he is being so negative and rude, when it was just the meds hangover. I didn't describe it well, but it's really unpleasant for him and we have tried switching doses and meds to alleviate that, but despite switches it's still there at some level, 3pm to 5 or 6pm, after which he may become his more normal, cheerful and communicative self again. The second downside is, he says, that when on the meds at school he does not interact with anybody socially. He has a tendency to withdraw socially at school anyway, and has no discernable social life there, but he basically goes full robot when on meds. This makes us super sad.

||

"The timing of when the difficulty bomb begins to kick-in is difficult to estimate. While planning Istanbul, it was first estimated that the bomb would not be noticeable until mid-2020. This implied that it could safely be delayed in the follow-up upgrade to Istanbul. However, those estimates were wrong."

ADHD has been trendy for like 20 years. So hyped they added an H.

I think ADHD has in some sense been trendy and of-the-moment for about 25 years. Also, IMHO, and I've probably said this here before, there is no "objective truth" to whether a person "has ADHD." There is only "this diagnostic label is helping this person in their current environment." The useful purposes of any mental health diagnosis are to:

1) give the person a self-compassionate narrative with which to understand themselves (depending on the diagnosis, this doesn't always work)
2) through naming the problem, access a supportive community of other people who have also had the problem
3) access services, accommodations, and treatment for the problem

It's a way of mediating your relationship with society. That's all. If a diagnosis does this for your kid it doesn't really matter for your personal decision making whether it's trendy. It might be useful to think about what it is about the world that makes ADHD trendy and ask larger critical questions about our education system, our diminished relationship to nature, or the countless BS admin tasks involved in "adulting" that don't have to exist, but every individual has to accommodate themselves to their environment as it is.

23: Advice was geared to our peculiarities as Tiger Mom and largely absentee Dad. (My wife is SAHM, I'm a 60-hour-a-week type worker.) To my wife, the doctor literally said, "Back off, Mom." And he urged me to get more involved -- something I hadn't done previously because my wife didn't like my laissez faire parenting style, and because I couldn't deny that the kids were thriving with her program. (My son's grades dropped precipitously for a quarter before the psychiatrist. They have stayed low in the quarter since -- now that he is on meds and I have taken over supervision of his grades. He likes the meds and he likes my supervision. My theory is that he's testing out his new freedom to do crappy work, and that it will all straighten out once he internalizes the fact that he is responsible for his own school performance, but we'll see ...)

Anyway, the kid -- who was always a good kid, and always got along reasonably well with his parents and sister -- is pretty clearly happier about being in this family these days. And since he's in his senior year in high school and we can't afford Harvard anyway, I think the falloff in his grades isn't going to have any serious repercussions. (I am a bit vexed that he has adopted my position on this, and have told him so without admitting that this is, in fact, my belief.)

I remain a bit puzzled by the need for meds. My son (who has always had a normal social life and regularly plays four-hour games of chess in tournament settings) has thought for a long time that he needed help with ADHD and social anxiety. He's been undeniably happier since he got the help. So I'm not inclined to interfere with something that works, but I'm keeping an eye on it.

This may be a crass observation, but where did all these conditions come from? ADHD -- not just the diagnosis, but the behaviour -- didn't figure at all in my childhood, nor that of my son, who is now 40. I knew one child at prep school who was, in retrospect, clearly on the spectrum and we normies bullied him quite mercilessly, something of which I am still ashamed. But he was one boy out of 400. I don't remember any from my secondary schools.

What has changed in the environment of middle class [British usage] children that so many of them now grow up with this disorder?

I don't think ADHD is a medicalisation of previously normal behaviours. It sounds like something new. But why? If it's not caused by an infectious agent, it can only be a change of environment. IF so, what?

I see that Tia offers one answer, which is essentially that this is a medicalisation of pre-existing behaviours which were not seen as problematic; perhaps they even weren't, in a different kind of society.

41.2: This is more or what my stepdaughter was like when she took Concerta (sustained release Ritalin). She took it all through school, and I guess it made it possible for her to sit in class and not be a constant disruption. After she graduated from high school we gradually took her off Concerta, and she's much more social and seems happier, but is also so goofy and silly that it's hard to take for long, and has impulse control issues.

This is all oversimplified because she's also always been on other meds. Sometimes I wonder what she would be like if we took her off all her drugs.

44 is all very reasonable.

46 is also something I wonder. It is really easy to feel like there must be something environmental to blame, but I honestly don't think our kids' schools or home are requiring a higher degree of self-control and less exercise than was present in the 70s or 80s. But my parents do validate our experience and say that (unmedicated) Pokey and Rascal are both far more difficult than anything they had to contend with.

My secret fear is that I'm just a terribly low patience adult and that I have the problem, not my kids. Thank god they get in trouble so much at school.

I like 44 a lot. I'm wondering how many girls are struggling in various less disruptive ways that don't give them access to fairly mature support systems and treatment options. Unfogged can't in any way be representative, but . . . no daughters with ADHD?

To 45, I run into a moderate number of adults who appear pretty together and well-adjusted, who tell stories about how hard they worked as children/teenagers/college students to hold it together despite various internal struggles, and it's really nice your son won't have that kind of story.

I've wondered if Hawaii would benefit from ADHD meds but her presentation is so far off the typical that I don't know how to proceed. She certainly has some significant challenges.

46: my theory is that the kids need a lot more recess than they're getting. Calabat is a different child in the summer when he rides his bike all day.

27, 35: A "family" isn't just a nuclear family. Instead of trying to whip inflation, I should have explained that when I was president.

46: I'm your son's age. There were definitely kids with things similar to ADHD or ADD at my school. The class clown who just could not keep his mouth shut and fidgeted constantly? The girl who was in my class for a grade or two who broke an aide's toe throwing a chair? The kid whose parents signed him up for a bajillion sports to wear him out because he just couldn't keep still? Maybe you didn't have the kid who just could not manage a clean desk and getting forms signed, even for cool field trips because the school systems were different? I have several friends who have told me they are pretty sure they'd have been diagnosable if they had been tested. One told me he was diagnosed but he and his parents decided against meds or accommodations since he was mostly performing OK, and he's been lucky to find a field that suits his personality quite well.

I'm pretty interested in both ADHD and autism spectrum stuff just out of general curiosity. I think it's a really interesting area, quite different from a lot of medicine where you have (eg) HIV, and it's quantifiable, and there isn't much of a judgment call or societal component.

46: My college professor father (born in 1927) used to say that he would have been diagnosed with ADHD when he was a kid. This was his way of being dismissive of the diagnosis. He obviously succeeded despite his issues. Others could do the same.

Mind you, this is a man who died and left his estate with 12 years of tax returns to file. He was much more of a fuckup than he was inclined to admit. (He was always going to get to those returns someday.)

I think a case could be made for me as an ADHD sufferer. Like my father, I'm doing basically okay, though, so I don't fret about it. Like NW (but in a much smaller school) I knew a guy who was mercilessly bullied -- even by teachers -- for what was clearly, in retrospect, a developmental issue probably like ADHD or autism. (And like NW, I retain my guilt for my participation in this.)

I'm pretty sympathetic to Tia's 44, but I think it could be read two ways: As a critique of the ADHD diagnosis, or as support for the efficacy of ADHD treatment. I take the latter view.

Also, well-off white people can get away with shit that other people can't.

To 55.1 and .2.

The class clown who just could not keep his mouth shut and fidgeted constantly?

oh hai.

That was me also. Kids used to tell at me because I was bouncing my leg hard enough during a test to shake the whole room.

Everyone is obviously different, but for us more recess wouldn't be enough (though the frequent class movement breaks certainly help). These last two months are the first time we've been able to be at playgrounds with other kids without me standing by to intervene before he hit someone for taking "his" turn. The meds restrain the impulsivity enough that he can find other solutions. And so the neighborhood kids will play with him now. I think maybe a lot of the severe cases in decades past weren't allowed in schools or were put in special classrooms.

Similar with us. Pokey has the option to play an hour or two of basketball or baseball or football any day at the afterschool program - the problem was being able to actually play without losing his shit and having giant meltdowns. He was definitely in the stage of having social consequences and isolation for his lack of impulse control.

I have sort of self-diagnosed as ADHD as an adult, in an "I'm not planning to do anything about this, and I'm managing okay, but I'm clearly weirder than most people along the lines people describe as ADHD." Procrastination, untidiness, losing things -- ordinary stuff, but when I tell people specific stories I surprise them with how very weird I am. (And when I have occasion to interact with other people's organizational habits, I'm often super impressed by them.)

On the question of what's changed that this is all so much more common than it was a generation or two ago -- the only obvious thing I can come up with is outdoor time and exercise decreasing and car time increasing, but of course I would think that because that's my cane-shaking-get-off-my-lawn hobbyhorse about all social ills. But personally, I get miserable if I don't get a steady amount of time outdoors walking around, and I think it's easy for a busy kid to get almost none of that, depending on their living situation.

And I'm not sure that organized sports fills the same need. Sports are terrific, but regimented. There's something about being able to move around freely outdoors not bound by anything in particular that I don't think kids get enough of.

63 is probably not to the line about Pokey in 61, but just for the record, the afterschool program is very loosey-goosey and the sports are all casual pick-up games. So it's in the unstructured-time category.

Chasing geese is great exercise.

Unstructured time is where my son had the most difficulty. He'd melt down every time people didn't follow what he thought were the rules. Or miss the hidden exceptions (ie not when the teacher is looking!).

He certainly needs lots and lots of outdoor unstructured time. But that's not enough.

I don't mean to suggest that more unstructured outdoor time would fix everything, more that I think it might move population averages a little -- some kids would move from having a genuinely hard time functioning back in to the ordinarily fidgety and disorganized category. It's just the biggest obvious population-wide change in experiences that makes sense to me as affecting these issues.

But medication for ADHD seems to be a wildly positive experience for most people I've heard who've tried it -- I wouldn't mean to suggest that it was unnecessary or a bad idea.

I like 44 a lot. I'm wondering how many girls are struggling in various less disruptive ways that don't give them access to fairly mature support systems and treatment options. Unfogged can't in any way be representative, but . . . no daughters with ADHD?

Adult women go to the doctor way more than adult men so they'll catch up.

One thing that's changed in the past 30 years is parents' ability to be like, "You're now going outside and you're not allowed back in for a few hours. Go."

I do think this all needs to be placed in a "Two Americas" type context. The changes and pressures on UMC America are vastly different from the changes and pressures on LMC or poverty America.

Two things that are very tough: 1. Apartment life in a suburban setting, I think, in terms of getting free time.
2. Kids with trauma getting misdiagnosed as ADD, and not getting help for the environmental problem.

But what if they never get around to making appointments?

On the quantifiable piece, I have a child in inpatient psych yet again right now and I'm going to ask yet again that they do the fucking genetic test so we can at least know a little more about how to medicate her. In fact, it would be awesome to get that done today since it's her last day on the insurance I hate because they are terrible about covering inpatient stays, so it would be nice to stick them with something. We'll see. The same hospital did the testing as a matter of course for her sister this summer but the unit she was on this fall didn't bother with it. She's in a new one now and so fingers crossed I guess. (I do think the behaviors and diagnoses they show are probably the sort of thing NW's agemates might have seen because abuse has always been with us and its tentacles go far.) Both girls are now in a support program with caseworkers who will help me coordinate with the school and their medical care and in the more extreme case state disability workers if we ever get off that waiting list plus social/community support. It's really tough and exhausting but so it goes I guess.

Also a lot of people used to wash out of school at the youngest legally-permitted age. Maybe also more children were literlly bludgeoned into manageability. The free and outdoor time explanation makes some sense for the Roclings.

Oh man, Thorn, that's tough. I'm sorry.

And yeah-- there are probably lots of kids where more unstructured outdoor time would make a huge difference. And both school and general life have gotten harder for a lot of people in a lot of ways. But I also wonder if a lot of the rest is just less hidden than it used to be.

Whee, this thread took off while I was fixing the swing, but to 46 and 56, I think I would clearly have been diagnosed ADD if I had been born in 2002 instead of 1962. Pretty much every single report card I ever got said "isn't performing up to his potential." In later schooling, I could write papers by only maxing out external stimulation in odd ways: classical music (which I never listened to otherwise), blasting, constant changes of body position, other things I forget. But as a well-off white person (and, also, frankly, bright enough to roll over most academic obstacles), I got to be in a private prep school for some of those years, and I was able to eventually get some degrees and have a career. I see the same things in my ADD kid.

71: Sorry to hear that. It's not a good way to spend a holiday.

I got masses of "isn't performing up to his potential" but this was understood by all parties, including me, as a moral defect, to be overcome by a programme of concentration and self-discipline*. It is also true, and possibly relevant, that disruptive children were simply beaten if they disrupted a class. I learned to fidget in my head.

*which I hope to start any day now.

[I am feeling very like an ancient fascist this afternoon, after apparently wounding the feelings of a young man in his twenties at the Christmas lunch when I told him to "put that fucking phone away".]

Apparently the use of that intensifier was considered ruder than simply studying his phone in a social situation.

Sometimes there's a rare Pokemon and you need to catch it.

If I catch one in my garden I will beat it to death with a baseball bat.

I refuse to believe there is an actually existing living person named Jolyon Maugham.

This browser doesn't even recognize Jolyon as a word. As well it shouldn't.

80: My kids discovered Pokemon Go on a family car trip. I am the sort of person who felt compelled to point out whenever I saw a dead Pokemon in the road. Nowadays, I bet they have a medication for that.

It's a spray that revives the Pokemon. They don't die, just pass out.

I might have been diagnosed with ADHD as a child had I been younger, had there been higher awareness of what inattentive symptoms look like in girls, had my mom been less punitive and moralizing in her narratives about my problems, and had I not moved to an impoverished school in middle childhood where I was the most academically prepared student by such a wide margin that my problems could scarcely be visible. I'm quite arguably still "not living up to my potential" -- it's overdetermined, but I do have a pattern of wandering off the paths I start on.

As to the trendiness of ADHD and medicalization, it's just one portion of the largest trend in medicalization and the expansion of the umbrella of who might be said to have a mental illness. It has its pluses and minuses.

Pluses: Less moralizing, is a means of arguing that we should put communal resources into treatment, that people have the right to access care

Minuses: Can be disempowering, can promote ideas about the fixity of traits and behavior, can obscure the social determinants of distress

"largest" should be "larger".

I don't mean to suggest that more unstructured outdoor time would fix everything, more that I think it might move population averages a little -- some kids would move from having a genuinely hard time functioning back in to the ordinarily fidgety and disorganized category. It's just the biggest obvious population-wide change in experiences that makes sense to me as affecting these issues.

Same here. I'm not dismissing ADHD at all, nor the benefits of medication, but if one's asking after the explosion in diagnoses, it does seem to march in lockstep with trends in medicalization (as Tia says, some good, some bad) and an increased in structured time. We have a pretty unstructured schedule compared to most of our friends and the Calabat melts down sometimes just because he doesn't feel like he has enough time to play.

One thing we ran into about recess in elementary school was that they would take away the kid's recess time for misbehavior. So kid acts out in morning - no recess - even more acting out later.

I remember in the 90s all the talk about how treating ADHD with ritalin was a zombification, and normal boys were being overmedicated just because they were more likely to be disruptive in school than girls. Now I guess it's more accepted that disruptive kids have something wrong with them, so people are saying "How many girls are failing to get treatment for ADHD just because they aren't disruptive?"

The new Star Wars movie should be seen on enough drugs that you can't realize how stupid the plot is. Other than making no fucking sense at all and being transparent about mashing on a keyboard made of Gen X emotional triggers, it was great.

90: so you liked it?

I wouldn't go that far.

A possibly-serious answer to 46 is assortive mating. ADHD appears to be strongly heritable, and (painting an extremely broad brush) we've increased the fraction of nerds getting together with other nerds instead of with their secretaries.

93 probably explains 90.

I hadn't heard 93 in the context of adhd, though it was a frequent explanation for autism spectrum disorders about five years ago, and may make some sense.

50: I like 44 a lot. I'm wondering how many girls are struggling in various less disruptive ways that don't give them access to fairly mature support systems and treatment options. Unfogged can't in any way be representative, but . . . no daughters with ADHD?

This matches my experience, though even in college when I was diagnosed with ADHD my psychiatrist didn't think we could treat both depression and ADHD at the same time, so I didn't start Dexedrine until halfway through grad school (Ritalin and Adderal had literally no effect on me whatsoever). I still struggle with a lot of low executive function stuff, and mostly manage to hide it from most (or just look like an airhead).

You can get away with so much low-executive functioning if you're a middle-aged white guy with a good serious-face and basic verbal competence.

Figuring it was a quiet day, and in fact I literally did not step foot outside the house all day, I tried one of the old Focalins lying around from an old rx. It definitely made me feel more peaceful and calm on the inside. I didn't experience any extra focus or motivation, but I was less vaguely agitated and cranky. It was pleasant.

Analyze me!

You fought a war in Vietnam because of castration anxiety.

I'm Ladybird, you sexist reprobate.

We fought a war in Vietnam because you wouldn't castrate your husband because of castration-anxiety anxiety.

I didn't want him outside the tent, peeing in.

I have tent without a floor so I can pee inside it.

I don't even have any expired medication to take.

103 is the first line of one of the great protest folk songs that just wasn't written yet.

Well actually, I have two floorless tents and one tarp.

Is it the floorless tent of justice? Is it the tarp of freedom?

I can't look at the label now. I'm in Nebraska and the tent isn't.

And yet, if you pee on the Nebraska ground, you're peeing on the very same ground that forms the floor of your floorless tent of justice. This land was made for you to pee.

I think I'm too close to a Mexican restaurant and a bar to pee in the ground. That reminds me, Mexican food in Lincoln is pretty good but the Chinese food is mostly bad and the Italian dressing usually sucks.

Probably ruins the Chinese food, too.

97: Really. Being a middle-aged white guy is the best. I don't understand why more people don't do it.

Because of the high blood pressure.

Hey, I've been diagnosed with ADHD, I guess. If I were 10 years younger I can imagine that I would have been diagnosed as a teen, but I think I was just a bit too old for the explosion in medicalization. Either that or my parents were involved in my education enough to keep me on track with scolding and guilt trips.

That old thread is very interesting. I'm wondering if it would be nice to have an rx for my hardest days, at least.

Updates on how the meds have been for you, since those links?

114. I wouldn't bet on being diagnosed earlier these days. A friend IRL was diagnosed ADHD in his mid 40s and on the autism spectrum in his mid 50s. They missed both for most of his life. He's also the principal carer for his father and was for his mother until they got her into a care home after years of trying. Nobody showed the slightest interest in his own well being.

Care from cradle to grave my arse. I won't say that the concentration of melanin in his skin has anything to do with the situation- yes I would in fact; it's established, I believe that both those conditions are well under-recognised in high melanin people.

Mrs Y managed him for awhile and says that if she was hiringg for the kind of job that needs high skills in stuff like spreadsheets and mapping systems she'd grab him in a heartbeat. As it is he's been unemployed for about four years. You guess