I dont think people with ADHD have a disease. They are just people with a certain personality type. What are your thoughts on this?
You're paranoid.Call me paranoid!
Seems like a perfect plan for pharmaceutical drug companies to make big bucks. Doctors prescribing meds to children at such a young age to mask their personality is f*cked up to me. Call me paranoid! I dont even trust my dentist...
ADHD is a real chemical disorder. How they treat it is completely up to the patient/guardian and the doctor.
I think Telsa was using sarcasm there.
I forgot to take that quote out of my post
It's not bullshit, it's just over-diagnosed.
This is a classic "treat the symptom" error. The causes of the symptom are what matters, and a chemical root is true ADHD. As in, there is a hard diagnostic test. But it's cheaper and easier to just write a 'scrip for the symptoms.
It's a bit like people who call themselves OCD simply because they like to organise their music collection in an alphabetical fashion. Trust me, if you're OCD, you'll know it.
I know one or two individuals who are ADHD diagnosed, and validly so. One of my friends, a woman named Mary Beth, would regularly walk off in the middle of a conversation, and come back five minutes later, completely oblivious to the previous conversation and the fact that she left in the middle of it.
That's genuine ADHD.
Some kid who looks at the wall in class because his maths teacher is utterly boring? Not so much. But it doesn't seem to stop the doctors from analysing them so.
As I have said in the past, and most ADHD authorities point out, ADD involves an unusually high level of distractibility on a chronic (on-going) basis, not just getting distracted sometimes by distracting things.
[...]
Put another way, ADDers get distracted by boring stuff just as often as they do by exciting stuff.
If you have ever brought home a brand-new DVD release that you have been dying to watch and ended up cleaning the dust bunnies you noticed under your TV stand instead, you know what I’m talking about. I needed to be reminded a half-dozen times not to use up all of the already minimal time we had for "date night" because I was trying to get a laptop to play the DVD onto the TV so that I could show her some of the new features in Windows Media Center. Instead of eating popcorn, laying on the couch, and watching the movie I desperately wanted to see (and which she has no interest in, but agreed to watch for me) I was trying to find the online manual for my laptop. Instead of fun, I was troubleshooting keys, software, and S-video cables.
In other words, I got distracted by something boring. That, my friends, is what it is like to have ADD.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder – Distracted By Boring Stuff
From a teaching perspective I have found that engagement and linear vs abstract thinking in the way that students are taught can make the difference in attention being maintained. I have a friend who is ISTJ and had often wondered what relationship functions had on distractability. When the friend refused to come to see The Matrix because he found the abstraction too boring and difficult to follow I realised that Linear concepts are boring to Abstract thinkers who learn in leaps of association driven by relative imperatives, and Abstract concepts with no deliberately scheduled purpose are boring to Linear thinkers. Each scenario increases distractability.
When we eliminate the distractability caused by poor nutrient intake, and situational distractability, we are left with a much smaller portion of the population with true difficulties. One of the problems with medicating these distractable people is that many have unique creative capacity and, like many who suffer from bipolar disorder, there is a tradeoff in reducing the distractability with meds.
Some feel that a lot of their creativity is sacrificed to achieve "normalcy" by reducing that distractability. What is the answer?? I don't know - but I do know that many adults who have bipolar disorder perefer to live with the disorder rather than blunt their creativity. Children really don't get that choice.
That's why I was hesitant to meds first.. But now I am thinking of trying. I'll generate ideas in my "chaos mode" and actually be able to make something out of them in "focused mode" (on meds). I haven't tried any medicin yet though.
Just check the safety of going on and off meds too frequently or suddenly. There is no real answer at the moment but I have a couple of questions for you:
Was your distractability a problem for you before you were told it was? What I mean is - did it put you in any danger? Are you able to hyperfocus when you have a strong interest in something? If so does time disappear for you while you are engaged in that hyperfocussed task?