Actually, girls can have ADHD too (I should know--I am one, and I've been diagnosed.) Also, as someone who's been diagnosed with ADHD, saying "boys being boys" is not only untrue, but also dismissive of what IS actually a medical problem for some of us.
I wrote a blog post about ADHD called "Why I Feel Like A Failure, Even Though On the Outside, I'm A Success..." I think it might resonate with many here:
(http://www.erica.biz/2012/failure-success/)
I would ask that you please not be dismissive or stereotypical of what is a real medical issue that some of us have had to deal with our entire lives.
The point about boys isn't that girls cannot have ADHD, but that boys specifically are over-diagnosed (and medicated with powerful substances) for behavior which is merely typical of their age or gender or both. Children are supposed to explore and get excited. They are not supposed to be putting in 60 hour weeks in the coal mines just yet. They're kids. Their brains are immature. Growing up makes them more suitable for the coal mines, you don't need to medicate them into an artificially premature maturity. That's the argument, anyway.
And here's a different, more controversial point. We used to have psychiatric disorders called hysteria and homosexuality. Now those have been reclassified out of existence. No one knows which of the current disorders will meet with the same fate. It's not impossible that while the help you get from your treatment is real (and the problems you face are real), ADHD is a poorly defined disorder.
>And here's a different, more controversial point. We used to have psychiatric disorders called hysteria and homosexuality. Now those have been reclassified out of existence.
I don't think that homosexuality is a good example to illustrate your point that ADHD might not be a "real" disorder. There's no question that there are people who are homosexual, but we no longer refer to homosexuality as a disorder because we no longer believe that it requires treatment. If ADHD were to parallel homosexuality in this regard, then there would be people who actually have ADHD, but we would stop viewing this as an abnormal variation in behavior.
Your example of hysteria is a better one to illustrate your point though. We no longer believe that hysteria is a disorder because we no longer recognize it as an actual state of being.
"If ADHD were to parallel homosexuality in this regard, then there would be people who actually have ADHD, but we would stop viewing this as an abnormal variation in behavior."
Some people believe this will one day be the case. (Personally, I don't have strong opinions on the matter one way or the other. It's not something I've researched.)
I don't think jasonjei was being dismissive of real ADHD. He was just pointing out that it is often over and mis-diagnosed. Many kids are considered misbehaving or diagnosed with a medical problem because they can't sit still for hours at a time, but that really is just kids being kids.
I think jasonjei and you are on the same side of this issue. He was a normal kid that didn't want to be mis-labeled, and you have a real condition that deserves consideration. You should both be opposed to the lazy parents/teachers/doctors who extend ADHD diagnoses far beyond its real scope to medicate normal kids into compliance.
I have met several people with ADHD one of which was extreamly hyper and clearly had major issues the rest where fairly close to the norm. IMO, the real issue is spectrum disorders like ADHD tend to get over used and really need a sliding scale vs a simple tag. Aka this person has level 2 ADHD and has trouble sitting for more than 30 min, this person has ADHD lvl 10 and has trouble focusing for more than 20 seconds.
Why do you automatically assume that not being able to complete the tasks you assign for yourself is a medical issue? Maybe "boys being boys" (and sometimes girls) just means they are not well suited for the kind of tasks that they are supposed to do. They might still be perfectly suited for other tasks.
So if Ritalin helps people to achieve their goals, great, but I don't think it implies that they had a medical issue when they were unable to complete those tasks.
Thanks for that post. Now almost a year later, is your medication/dosage/enthusiasm the same?
(Looking to see if you'd written a followup, I instead found your 2006 post about Adderall. Of course that's a different drug, but the older post is interesting for both the contrasts and similarities to your later Ritalin assessment.)
Wow, I didn't realize it had been almost a year until you said that!
Yes, I'm still on Ritalin--in addition, I found out that the night panics I'd been having (which I mentioned in that post as well) are actually sleep apnea. Turns out, when you can't breathe at night, you often wake up in a panic. Who'da thought? :)
I normally take 1 Ritalin per day now, instead of the 2 I've been prescribed. Days without it are still less productive than days with it. The biggest change, though, has been understanding how my ADHD ties in to just about everything I do...it was why I couldn't connect with people, why I had trouble getting things done, and why my productivity never seemed to be where I felt like it should be. (The whole "should" thing is a trap in and of itself, but that's a different post for another time.)
I vastly prefer Ritalin to Adderall since the Ritalin doesn't give me the "narrow focus" issue I complained about with Adderall in my 2006 post. Ritalin is generally considered to have more mild effects than Adderall, and different people react differently to them.
I wrote a blog post about ADHD called "Why I Feel Like A Failure, Even Though On the Outside, I'm A Success..." I think it might resonate with many here: (http://www.erica.biz/2012/failure-success/)
I would ask that you please not be dismissive or stereotypical of what is a real medical issue that some of us have had to deal with our entire lives.