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mcrmadness · 4 years

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I met with the new psychiatrist today and apparently here in Finland adhd is still a little boys’ disorder. I don’t understand why can’t they take it seriously when I talk about it? Why can’t they even run the tests on me???

Now I’m just having extremely bad conscience because I keep reblogging posts about adhd and the fact that I can relate to so many aspects of ADHD (inattentive), RSD and executive dysfunction makes me feel so fake now. I feel like I shouldn’t be reblogging, I should be tagging because I feel like I’m taking the platfrom from those who ACTUALLY have it diagnosed. This is my main reason for looking for a diagnosis - I feel like I cannot exist as who I am as long as it’s not “official”. I will keep asking myself why I feel like ADHD but why do I still have an Asperger’s diagnose I don’t even agree with? I don’t even have any of the “biggest” Asperger’s traits but I match fully to the inattenttive ADHD.

Apparently the core reason is: there was never any proof of ADHD when I was younger. No one ever questioned if what I have might be ADD. But it was the 90s! And early 2000s! No one was even talking about ADHD on girls (as I’m nonbinary afab)! Besides, I had social anxiety and selective mutism, my school problems were not because I would have failed, my school problems were me being very sensitive kid and having weird-ass mental blocks that prevented me from doing Things at school. And no one ever suspected Asperger’s either. So when one random doctor writes it as my diagnosis when I was 22, suddenly there’s no way to get rid of it???

I also feel like I was not in the best place when I was to those psychological tests back then. I had quit meds 6 months earlier and I had been eating them for 5 years - from the age of 17. In tha timet I had one SSRI medicine for the whole time (it made me numb and unable to create and focusing was even harder than what it’s now) and then two different neuroleptics, the first one made me eat nonstop and gain weight and caused hypersomnia; the second one replaced the previous and it made me so severely hyperactive (I felt like I saw what it really is like to have ADHD) even sleep was difficult and then I started to be dangerous behind the wheel because I didn’t remember to look at the mirrors and just laughed about it, and then I started having blackouts, even in the middle of driving. I stopped with these two when I wasn’t even 19 yet. And I feel like they did some permanent damage to my brains. That was the first time, 10 YEARS AGO, when I started to actually think about ADHD and I was googling a lot if one can have ADHD as a brain damage from neurolepts. Or if it could trigger a childhood ADD into adult ADHD.

I really would like to know what those test would say today, when I haven’t touched any kind of antidepressants or neurolepts in 7 years and now as my brain chemicals are actually back to normal. You just don’t recover from 5 years of antidepressants in just 6 months. I had a severe derealization going on still year or two after quitting the meds.

But yeah, I just feel so bad for reblogging adhd things here because apparently I can’t have adhd if you ask the psychiatrists. And the Asperger’s thing makes me so mad. I think they just look at me and think I look like someone with Asperger’s because I don’t look people in the eye - that’s just me being an introvert and highly sensitive person with lots of traumas. They literally just see how I’m on the outside and they think all that is because of something neurological. But they refuse to see what’s REALLY going on in my head and they refuse to understand anything I say is real. I don’t know if it’s because I have been researching and reading about adhd a lot, if that’s what immediately makes doctors go into this “you’re selfdiagnosing therefore you cannot be right I’m the doctor here!!!” mode. I have seen this before too - when I talk about these with actual medical terms, the doctors write down that I do so. Why? What is so bad about it? As a teenager I was never even told about the diagnosis, I just overheard them talking about “social anxiety“ and “selective mutism” and I had to go and google them myself because no one ever told me why I was there. I thought it was fun to go there and talk with adults and I was mindblown when I found the Wikipedia page about social anxiety and it was like reading about myself.

Now I’m seriously thinking about contatcing some sort of a neuropsychiatric specialist or so who would have actually updated information about neurodivergencies and who would ACTUALLY listen to me and take me seriously. Now all I get is suggestions for a medication and occupational therapy. And I still don’t even know what that occupational therapy is + if they think I need that, why don’t they look into the CAUSE of me needing that? They just think you don’t function like everyone else in this society so let’s try make you fit in :) Fuck you, why we always need to fit in? Why don’t neurotypicals ever try to adapt to us??? I still feel like the Asperger’s diagnose is there on me “just because you’re not like everyone else” as if it was the only way to call someone acceptably weird. (Also I’m not calling people with Asperger’s or autism weird - I’m only talking about myself here because it makes me feel like I can’t be weird in peace without a diagnosis but then I don’t get even tested for something I do think I might have. Anyway, my now adult sister has both Asperger’s and ADD and we are SO different what comes to the Asperger’s, I was always the one to look after her because her thinking process has always been very different, even way different from mine, but I relate to her ADD feels and symptoms a lot.)

#mcrmadness' random stuff #adhd #adhd inattentive #asperger syndrome #neurodivergence #neurodivergent

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idkwhoiamanymorebutwtf · 4 years

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Me: Why is literally all the angst in the fandom for The Amazing World Of Gumball focused around Rob when Gumball himself has a shit ton of angst?

Someone: Lol what reason would he ever have for angst tho? He’s never been mistreated in the show y’know :P

Me: What about things like like that time when his dad told him outright that Darwin was the favorite child or when his mom left him in the middle of a desert and made him walk more than ten miles to get home because she thought he was a loser. Or when she yelled at him while an old lady beat him with a cane because his mom wanted him to steal a fish from her and was mad that her twelve year old son was crying for her help instead of fighting for the fish so she kinda just called him a loser. Or maybe it has something to do with that time he got into karate and the whole school laughed at and mocked him relentlessly. Or when Bobert stole his identity and everyone- his friends, family, and girlfriend- not only didn't notice, but explicitly liked the fake him better. Or when his school counselor told him and Darwin that their mother hated them (he let them know it wasn't true after but that still crushed the kids) and then proceeded to yell at them to be silent every time they tried to talk for the rest of the day, scaring both kids so deeply that when an emergency happened later in the episode they refused to speak at all to anyone until they knew they wouldn't be screamed at. And apparently there's been years of insults to his intelligence since once he recalls how his teacher laughed in his face and called him dumb when he failed a test and when his principal just straight up taunted him by calling him a looser. There was once when Gumball was rude to Carmen and later tried to apologize, saying, "I don't know why I said all that stuff..." to which Darwin responded "Because you're a gutless coward who likes to ruin other people's lives because he's a chicken? :)" and honestly that kind of insult isn't even abnormal since his classmates, friends, teachers, and family are all consistently telling him that he's a stupid, heartless, nonathletic, pathetic, hideous loser to the point where he's so scared of failure that he refuses to even try to play the triangle in the school band because he doesn't want to fail despite his uncanny musical abilities, and when he confided in Darwin about this, Darwin literally just called him a chicken with no concern for the fact that his brother was so insecure. His 'abnormally large head' and 'tiny brain' are often subjects of discussion at family dinners too. In earlier seasons he was generally a pretty positive, happy kid, but i'm pretty sure that it just kinda got to him after a while, explaining his more cynical nature in later episodes. And that's not even touching on his clear mental health issues. I mean it's obvious he has anxiety- we've watched him have panic attacks multiple times on the show (usually resulting in someone screaming at him to calm down) to the point where it's just a normal occurrence- and he's even referred to them as panic attacks and anxiety attacks before, plus he's way too anxious about social interactions. Not to mention that i'm also absolutely certain that he has learning difficulties, probably stemming from adhd or a similar disorder (he never stays still, has trouble concentrating, is super hyperactive, etc, so I assume adhd tbh). And we know he's capable of being smart too! I mean, he supposedly bombs tests on the regular in a classroom environment, but when taken out of the classroom and put alone in a quiet room with no distractions he literally aced the test completely, which once again makes me wonder if his poor grades are just because the adults in his life are shitty and he clearly needs accommodations to succeed for the obvious mental health issues he has but everyone around him would rather just call him stupid and hopeless or just too lazy to try. To the point where he really thinks he's stupid and has legitimately stopped trying despite the fact that he really did want to succeed at multiple points throughout the show. But uh...I guess that’s not compelling enough.

#tawog #the amazing world of gumball #tawog gumball #gumball watterson

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launchiemcquack · 4 years

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get to know: Landon “Launchpad” McQuack

Landon McQuack comes from a complex familial dynamic. On one hand, his family is nothing like anyone else’s. His childhood is spent in the island heat, covered in oil and handing his parents tools and juice boxes (the juice boxes were Landon’s idea) as they fix and modify their airplanes. He learns the different components of a plane before he can even fully learn how to read at his grade level. On the other hand, his family is just like anyone else’s. The McQuack household is filled with laughter and love, warm memories and insurmountable amounts of unvoiced expectations.

Landon sits off in the audiences with his little sister Lola, and together they watch The Flying McQuacks perform daring aviation stunts for the entertainment of those around them. Listening to the crowd cheer for his family is one of the proudest experiences of Landon’s life. And when the show’s over, his father tells his kids that soon enough the crowd will be cheering for them too. The idea feels the young boy with a mixed sene of glee and dread.

It’s not that Landon didn’t want to fly with his family, being reckless and daring must have run in the family because Landon could be just as much of a daredevil as them. But Landon had always had a hard time focusing. Even as a child, Landon was overactive. Running from toy to toy, switching from swings to sandbox to the slide too quickly for his mother to really keep up. He was loud and often didn’t seem to realize that he needn’t shout everything he’s thinking over others, especially if someone else was already talking. At first, no one thought much of it. Just a child being a child.

By the time Landon started school, it became apparent that there was more to his hyperactivity than what his parents originally thought. Teachers complained that he talked almost entirely throughout lessons and had difficulty focusing on tasks at hand. His father believed reprimanding him through nearly constant time outs and yelling at him would be the only way to get through to him, but hardly anything ever worked. His mother noticed a pattern with his behaviors and sought help.

Landon has ADHD. This information didn’t rattle his mother all that much, understood that you just needed to be a little more patient with her little boy. His father had a little more difficulty navigating the waters of this. Landon’s father loves and adores him, he’s just a little more stern than his mother and that, coupled with his exceedingly high expectations for The Flying McQuacks’ often left Landon stressed.

Landon signs up for after school activities to keep himself busy while his parents work. He joins the woodchuck scouts, and while he’s decidedly pretty bad at completing a lot of his tasks without messing up his troop leaders are always in awe of his can-do attitude and inability to give up. He joins karate, and while he’s athletic enough to handle it, he fails at the quiet discipline part. Art doesn’t fare very well for him either solely because he’s just not good at it, his fruit bowls always just looked like blobs of bright colors. The only thing that sticks is football. He’s big and fast, loyal and dutiful, and that makes him the perfect linebacker. Protecting his friends from getting hit? Keeping the other team from getting too far with the ball? Yeah, it’s a match made in heaven

Landon gets the nickname Launchpad the same way his family earns their stage names. Ripcord for his father who’d made his name by jumping out of his plane at terrifying new heights. Birdie for his mother who’d always made sure she was dressed beautifully (and her personal plane painted just as pretty) as she gracefully flit through the sky. Loopey for his younger sister who had a love for swirling and twirling in the air. And Launchpad, who never had any trouble taking off the ground loudly and extravagantly.

Flying had never been the real issue for Landon. It was always landing. Easily distracted, Landon would find himself wrapped in a conversation so long that by the time he’d realized no one was paying attention to steering the plane it was too late. Landon does his best to prevent from absolutely catastrophic crashes. Either it’s luck or some strange talent of his, but no one ever gets hurt when he crashes anything.

He can fix anything! He just won’t fix it well. Landon is known to be able to get any vehicle up and running again after he crashes it, and for the most part it can carry him and his companions home without falling apart. He knows what parts are supposed to do what and where they need to be, he just doesn’t really remember the safety protocols involved in fixing it correctly. But it’s ok, as long as he gets the job done who really cares? Scrooge will have a real professional look at it and make sure it’s safe later.

Landon still finds himself desperate for his father’s approval, and he’s not sure how to achieve it but he wants for his dad to be proud of him.

Landon is a biiiiiig superhero fan. He sees the bravery of Superman, Captain America and his personal favorite, Darkwing Duck, and finds that he respects their fearlessness and desire to protect their loved ones. He relates to it. So, he will always be the first to sacrifice his wants and needs for the security of those around him. When there’s danger, it’s his instinct to grab those around him and shield them from harm.

Because his own relationship with his father isn’t the greatest he looks to his employer, Scrooge McDuck as a pseudo father figure. His opinion of the older billionaire is incredibly high, to the point where he overlooks some of Scrooge’s negative personality traits and chooses to only see the good in him. Scrooge is the only adult, aside from his mother, to ever tell Landon that he’s proud of him. And for that Landon will quite literally do anything for Scrooge.

Despite being a child at heart and the biggest dumb ass of all the land, Landon can be fiercely determined and serious when he needs to be. He cares deeply about people and is his most serious when it comes to protecting those he loves.

Bit of a himbo. Landon has dated his fair share of people, and he’s such a romantic it’s gross. Literally the most devoted and patient and caring partner ever. He never stops loving someone, even after they break up. His heart is big enough for everyone to live there.

WANTED CONNECTIONS

he’s the friendliest guy ever so FRIENDS

maybe he crashed a car into your business and now you hate him. he’s sorry! mr. mcdee paid for it though.

exes. he’s a himbo who loves all his former partners. come join in on the love

anything really, i’m down for whatever

#✈️ if you ask me real heroes don’t need cameras and make-up; real heroes just do their job. (about.)

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earlgreyandadderall-blog · 7 years

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What Does ADHD Look Like In Girls? - Things I Wish I Knew Ten Years Ago

Hello world!

I'm back, as promised, and today I'm going to talk about some stuff I wish I knew ten years ago- ADHD symptoms that are common in girls but often get overlooked. Why, you may ask? Because a teacher or parent normally won't notice that a child is struggling unless it's very apparent – if she is extremely hyperactive and disruptive, for example – or if the child admits that they are struggling. That girl in the corner who's always daydreaming, but still gets good grades? Or the one who has a hard time making friends or making relationships work, but otherwise seems "normal" (whatever that means)? She's going to be passed over while her teacher is busy worrying about the boy who can't stay in his seat for more than five minutes. Plus, girls with ADHD are more likely than boys to internalize their struggles, so if you or your child is anything like me, you might not realize something is off until high school or even later, and even when you do, you might be too embarrassed to ask for help.

If anyone besides my mom ever starts reading this blog, one thing that would make me really really happy and feel as if I've made a difference is if even one young woman out there doesn't have to go through the failed relationships, ruined friendships, and lost semesters that I had to go through before she realizes something deeper is going on than just laziness and being emotional. If you're a girl who often feels like she's getting in her own way and suspects there might be something up, but aren't really sure what it might be, here are some often-overlooked ADHD symptoms that you might relate to.

1. Daydreaming/Getting Bored in School

As long as I can remember, I've had a hard time paying attention in class. When I was very young, I would get called out for daydreaming all the time. I worked on my French homework in science class, flipped aimlessly through my agenda while the teacher was talking, and doodled all over ever single desk I've ever sat in. In grade five, I got in trouble for – get this – reading a book during a spelling test. Don't ask me how I thought I was gonna get away with that, but I was sooooooo booooooored and the teacher was taking soooooo loooooong to read these words that I knew how to spell in grade one. That's a big reason why inattentiveness in female students often gets overlooked- girls with ADHD don't usually perform poorly, especially in elementary school. Because I was gifted, my inattentiveness was treated as a quirk rather than a problem. I had a handful of teachers who tried to give me harder work to keep me motivated, but more often than not I was left to entertain myself. It always bothered me that kids who needed extra help got IEPs, the latest learning technologies, and one-on-one time with the teacher, but kids like me, who needed an extra challenge, were neglected

2. Impulsive Spending

The most important thing to keep in mind when analyzing the behaviour of people with ADHD is that our brains don't produce or transmit enough dopamine, which is the feel-good chemical that controls reward-motivated behaviour. Because of that, we seek out anything that will give us a dopamine rush... the only problem is that those behaviours are usually impulsive. You know the saying money can't buy happiness? Yeah, not necessarily true for ADHD brains. At least for a little while after buying something we've managed to convince ourselves we so totally need, we actually do feel really happy, because we're experiencing a dopamine high. My friend recently got me into doing my makeup properly, and I'm embarrassed to admit how much I've spent at Sephora in the last month. I know it's dumb, but I do it anyway. Why? Because ADHD brains have a hard time distinguishing what is urgent from what is important. Once I get it in my head that I need that contour kit right now (because what if a surprise event comes up in the next week?), I can't convince myself otherwise. That sense of urgency releases dopamine, which tells my brain that wasting $60 to look more like the MUAs on Instagram will make me happy. And for an hour or two it does!... Until I look at my bank account.

3. Relationship Problems

So, dopamine rush-producing behaviours are usually impulsive, right? What does that look like when it comes to romantic relationships? Dopamine-seeking brains love anything that's new and novel, and that includes the first phase of a relationship, when you're sooooo in love and can't get enough of each other. Of course, that phase ends, and neurotypical people settle into a more lowkey relationship just fine. ADHD brains? Not so much. If you don't recognize what you're experiencing as a dopamine withdrawal, you may interpret it is a lack of love from your partner, or as a sign that the relationship is getting boring. I tend to fall into the first category, and people like me can become really insecure thinking that our partner doesn't care about us. We become excessively demanding and need dramatic displays of affection all the time, which naturally alienates our partners. If you're somebody who just gets bored, that can result in two unhealthy behaviours: one, moving really quickly from one relationship to the next and never learning how to be alone, and two, cheating. If any or all of these three behaviours are a pattern in your life, you just might have a dopamine shortage, and are unknowingly looking to your partner(s) to fix it.

4. Word Vomit

It's really hard for me to explain my tendency to over-explain every little thing (ha, that's ironic), especially if I'm nervous about it. Have you ever taken seven sentences to say something that could have been said in one? Found yourself repeating the same thing in different words three times? I find I do this the most when I'm apologizing, or trying to explain why I did something that someone else didn't like or understand. You think you're being helpful, but really you're just annoying the other person. Then you realize how annoying you're being, and apologize for being annoying five times, and now they're annoyed with you for apologizing for being annoying... okay, that's when you know it's time to turn your phone off and cool down. On top of excessive explaining, ADHD brains can get a little word vomit-y when we're talking about something we're passionate about. Just ask my mom- get me on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, or, at the moment, information about ADHD, and you won't get me off it. Sometimes we don't really know when to shut up. If you have a tendency to keep talking even when you know nobody is listening anymore, then you might want to keep reading.

5. Road Rage

Everybody road rages once in a while (okay, I'm told that not everyone does, but I don't believe it. Come on, how can you NOT scream at the person in front of you going 5 km under the speed limit?) but I legitimately feel claustrophobic and panicky if I'm on a four-lane highway stuck behind a car in each lane going the same speed and I can't get out to pass them. If the person in front of me is doing something stupid, I could literally run them over I get so frustrated, and not just if I'm already cranky- I yell at someone on the road every single day. I'm told this is “apparently” because of our “inattentiveness” and “inability to sit still”, and not because everyone else on the road is a freaking idiot. I don't know if I believe it, but that's what I'm told, anyway. ADHD brains are also more likely to get into car accidents. I've never been in a major accident while driving, thank God, but I'm only 22, and I've had four minor fender benders that, embarrassingly, didn't involve other cars, but me driving into things in parking lots. Once, I just wasn't looking behind me and backed into a pole. Another time, I thought that texting in the Tim Hortons drive-thru was a good idea. You get the idea.

6. Forgetfulness

Again, everybody forgets things once in a while. But if you're forgetting or misplacing your homework, your car keys, your purse, your work pants (yes, I have actually lost a pair of pants before) every single day, then there might be a problem. Once, I parked my car near campus, spent the day studying in my friends' office, and then got a ride back to my car at the end of the day. My friend Dan was driving up and down the street I told him I had parked on asking me "is that your car? What about that one?" before I realized that I had parked on a different street on the other side of campus. I never thought being a bit scatterbrained was a problem, and if it only happens once in a while, it probably isn't. But all of these symptoms together paint a different picture.

7. Difficulties With Motivation

I never really enjoyed studying, and I guess I was lucky that throughout grade school and high school, I didn't have to do very much of it. It's not that I didn't like learning, it's just that studying for extended periods of time is so boring. Even in my first three years of university, my super strict immigrant parents watched me like a hawk, so I did what I needed to do, as difficult as it was at times. That all changed when my fourth year rolled around and I moved to Ottawa for an exchange. With no one to stand at the foot of my bed and scream at me until I dragged myself out of it, I just... didn't. It wasn't because I didn't want to, it was just that I couldn't bring myself to. Same went for going to class, doing my readings, handing in assignments, showing up for exams... it wasn't pretty. This can also be a symptom of depression, and many people with ADHD, myself included, meet the diagnostic criteria for depression. The difference is that people with depression can't get out of bed because they're depressed; people with ADHD get depressed because they won't get out of bed. We aren't lying in bed all day because our mood is low, but because we struggle with executive functioning - motivation, planning, organizing, and self-managing. Those things happen in the prefrontal cortex, and ours are underdeveloped. It can be hard to distinguish where the cycle begins for you, and before being diagnosed, I thought I had depression for sure, but as soon as my psychiatrist explained how ADHD works to me, it fit like a glove.

8. Starting Projects and Never Finishing Them

This kind of goes hand in hand with lack of motivation, and it's something I've struggled with all my life. It's also one of the very few ADHD symptoms that isn't also a hallmark of something else, like depression or anxiety, so it should be a huge red flag if it's accompanied by some of these other symptoms! Most people tend to procrastinate things they don't want to do, like studying or cleaning their room. A big indicator that you might be dealing with something more than just laziness is when you procrastinate or don't finish even things you actually really want to do. And it's not because you're lazy or don't want to do it, it's because as great as it sounds, you just... can't. If you've ever started a scrapbook and tossed it to the side three days later, tried to start a club on campus but let it fall to the wayside, or created a blog then never actually updated it (I meant to have this posted a solid five days ago, whooooops), then you know what I'm talking about.

9. Being Scatterbrained

You're in the middle of a sentence and you completely lose your train of thought. Alternatively, you'll be halfway through a sentence then think of something more important that you want to say and totally abandon the idea you're halfway through and start talking about the new one instead. You interrupt people a lot, because you feel like you HAVE to say the thought that just popped into your head right now, lest it no longer be relevant if you wait five minutes, or even worse, you forget it again in 30 seconds. You're in the middle of an important text conversation but you open Instagram while you're waiting for them to text back... then half an hour later you're creeping your crush's ex's brother's best friend when you realize you never answered that super important text. You zone out while people are speaking directly to you, which makes you look super rude because it seems like you aren't paying attention. Our inability to focus hard on things can affect our lives in ways you never would have guessed- for example, I am terrible at proofreading and finding typos, and the number of assignments I've handed in with words missing from the middle of sentences is embarrassing. If this sounds like you (and if course, if this happens all day every day rather than once in a blue moon, because everybody get scatterbrained when they're overwhelmed), then you've come to the right place.

10. Being SUPER Enthusiastic... Sometimes

We've already established that ADHD brains can have trouble with motivation and with staying committed to something long-term, but that doesn't capture the entire picture. If you think of depression as basically always being in a low state, ADHD is different in that you sort of swing from highs to lows and back again. Like I mentioned, ADHD brains don't have enough dopamine transmitters, and we kind of get addicted to anything that does produce a dopamine high. So if something does make us happy or excited, we're gonna be the happiest, most excited people on earth. My psychiatrist gave me a situation where an ADHD person might win $5 on a scratch off ticket, but the way they jump up and down all excited makes the people around them think they've won a million dollars. In my case, this often looks like getting really excited about a paper or assignment for a class I'm particularly interested in. I'll take out books from the library and hyper-focus on planning the assignment for about three days... then the whole "starting a project but never finishing it" kicks in, and that's a whole different story...

11. Verbal Aggression (As Opposed to Physical Aggression)

Although I don't mean to generalize or to imply that every single boy or girl is the same, this tends to be a notable difference between girls with ADHD and their male counterparts. Girls are much less likely to be physically violent, but when you piss us off, or trigger our Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (that's what my next post is going to be about, by the way!)… watch out. You might get a verbal beatdown like you've never experienced before. This is one of the ugliest and most frustrating things about having ADHD for me. I'll tell the people I love that I hate them, that they're ruining my life, that I wish they were never born; I'll pick on the things I know they're sensitive about and call them every curse word in the book... only to regret it five minutes and sheepishly try to convince this deeply wounded person that I didn't actually mean it. It sucks. Big time.

And finally, the one I really wish I knew all this time...

12. Being Diagnosed With Something Else

Throughout this post, I've given a dozen examples of the ways ADHD symptoms can appear like symptoms of depression and anxiety. ADHD in girls is notoriously misdiagnosed, and girls with ADHD are three times as likely as boys to be treated for depression before being properly diagnosed. Beyond that, ADHD can be comorbid with anxiety and depression. I've dealt with anxiety and panic attacks since I was eight, and was formally diagnosed with anxiety at 17. When I was diagnosed with ADHD, I was told that I meet all the diagnostic criteria for depression, but it was likely that treating my ADHD would make it go away. My depression went away within literally one week of starting ADHD medication. My anxiety did not go away, but it has been reduced by about 50%. I realized that about half of the somatic experiences I identified as panic attacks were not triggered by mental anxiety but by sensory overload because, as ADHD brains do, I was perceiving way too much of what was going on around me and getting overwhelmed to the point that I would experience panic attack symptoms- dizziness, shortness of breath, nausea, you know the drill. Another statistic that would have made a difference in my life is that girls with ADHD are 2.7 times more likely to suffer from anorexia nervosa than girls without ADHD. I struggled with anorexia from age 16 to 19, so this was quite a shock to discover three years later. There's definitely some cool brain science behind that why that is, so maybe it'll be the subject of a future post!

If you have any questions about this post, or think that you or a loved one might be dealing with ADHD, do not hesitate to reach out to me with any questions! I also want to stress that this might seem like a lot, and that anyone dealing with all of this crap would stand out from a mile away, but if that was the case, so many of us wouldn’t go undiagnosed until post-secondary. I experienced all twelve of these signs and symptoms, but the only ones that pushed me to see a psychiatrist were relationship problems, difficulty with motivation, and verbal aggression. Most of these things didn’t seem like they were impacting my day-to-day functioning- I get good grades, have a job, and have no trouble making friends. So please don’t get fall into the trap of telling yourself that what you’re going through “isn’t bad enough to be a real problem.” If something feels off, see a doctor, because you deserve to live the best life possible.

That’s all for now folks! Stay tuned for my next post about Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria.

#adhd in girls #adhd #attention deficit hyperactivity #mental health #adderall #earlgreyandadderall #adhd symptoms #girls with adhd #depression #anxiety #eating disorders #anorexia #anorexia nervosa #stress

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alliluyevas · 6 years

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Opinion on Vasily Stalin and also! Do you know much more about how Yakov treated Svetlana and how Vasily treated her?

Oh, man, anon, I’ve been thinking about this ask all day nowand marshalling my thoughts. I actually have a lot of really intense feelingsabout Vasili, and they’re all kind of tangled up together in a conflictingmess. I have a huge amount of sympathy for Vasili as a child, and quite a bitfor him in certain aspects of his adult life as well, but ultimately I alsohave huge issues with who he grew up to be and the choices he made with hislife.

This got EXTREMELY long so the rest is under the cut. CW discussion of abuse, suicide, and alcoholism

I’ll start with Vasili as a child, and what I do find verysympathetic and compelling about him. First of all, I think there’s substantialevidence that Vasili had ADHD—he was extremely hyperactive as a child, whichwas remarked on by various observers and apparently a matter of some concern tohis mother, who was concerned about his development. He also really struggledacademically, from the time he started school, having trouble focusing, completinghomework, and procrastinating on assignments. He consistently got failing tomediocre grades, and eventually transferred from a high school for children ofthe party elite that had a more typical curriculum to military school, and thento air force training when WWII broke out. I don’t think he ever technicallycompleted high school. Kids with ADHD or other learning issues still struggletoday, obviously (I should know, I was one of them, which also makes meidentify a little bit with Vasili’s experiences), but for someone like Vasiliwho was born in the 1920s, there was very little support or even knowledgeavailable.

I think this situation really ties into the other two thingsthat made Vasili’s childhood really difficult and traumatic—his mother’s lossand his father’s abuse of him—because it did affect his relationship with hisparents quite a bit.

Stalin clearly viewed Vasili as a disappointment—he oftencalled him lazy or stupid, both to his face and when complaining about him toothers, including to his teachers. (In a couple very sad instances, he reactedto teachers praising something Vasili had done or expressing concern about himbeing bullied by dismissing their view of Vasili and just putting him downagain). He was also physically violent with his son, including breaking hisnose when he was about fourteen. He also often unfavorably compared Vasili tohis younger sister, who was much more academically gifted and “better behaved”.He was very physically affectionate and cuddly with Svetlana when she waslittle, but almost never with Vasili, who was desperate for his father’sattention and approval and probably deeply hurt by this.

Vasili, on the other hand, seems to have been very close tohis mother. Nadya voiced some concerns to her friends about his academic strugglesand hyperactivity, but she was also very supportive and seems to have tried towork with him on his level rather than view him as deliberately misbehaving oruseless as his father did. She also framed it more as trying to make sure hewas able to succeed and be happy rather than viewing him as shameful ordefective. Nadya was also very affectionate with and protective of her son,often as a response to the way her husband treated him. She seems to haveviewed Vasili as being vulnerable and in need of special attention. I think herdeath was even harder and more traumatic for Vasili than it was for Svetlana,which is saying something. Because Svetlana was still very little, she stillneeded a lot of care on a day-to-day level, so her nanny was there to be asource of comfort and emotional support for her after the loss of her mother,and this continued throughout her childhood. Vasili, who at age eleven didn’tneed as much childcare, was still very vulnerable, but he didn’t have a supportsystem to the extent his sister did. In the first couple years after Nadya’sdeath, he went from a sweet, rambunctious little boy to an awkward, ganglyteenager who had panic attacks, frequently talked about suicide, and starteddrinking heavily at thirteen. A couple of Stalin’s bodyguards were concernedabout him, but it was more emotionally distant—they tried to distract him orwatch him to make sure he didn’t hurt himself, but he certainly wasn’t gettingcuddles or a chance to talk about his emotions. I think after Nadya died Vasilipretty much lost his only consistent source of nurturing, and the only persontreating him as a lovable little child—which at eleven he still very much was.After that, he was expected to start “acting like a man”, and he did clearly tryto emulate the behavior of the adult men in his life, and was very concernedabout their approval. This had disastrous consequences for both him and thepeople around him, because he was exposed to and adopted a lot of reallyharmful behaviors.

So, this leads me to mydiscussion of Vasili as an adult, who was frankly kind of a huge asshole. Thefirst and foremost thing, which I do think is absolutely inexcusable, is thathe was physically violent with several of the women he was in relationshipswith. I don’t think this is entirely surprising, given the environment he grewup in and the messages he was getting from his father about what adult menbehave like with women/people who are weaker than them—but that doesn’t makethat any better. And these are also choices that he made, because Yakov wasnever like that with women, and he was not doomed to be like that. He was also,according to his sister, prone to misogynistic comments in general, as well asanti-Semitism. Also he embezzled money from the Soviet Air Force and wasgenerally kind of an entitled brat who pulled rank and threatened to rat peopleout to his father—which I don’t think is quite as repugnant as the domesticabuse and bigotry but isn’t exactly appealing. Basically, I think the onlything he had going for him was that he was Stalin’s son, even if Stalin didn’tlike him much, and he was willing to take that for all it was worth in order tosucceed in the Stalinist system, even though his life was pretty much constantlyon the verge of falling apart because of his drinking and reckless behavior.And then his father died and it DID fall apart, because the new governmentdropped him like a hot potato and then his health completely shattered and inthe last couple years of his life he had multiple chronic health conditionsrelated to alcoholism and then finally died of liver cirrhosis at the age offorty.

So yeah, I have extremely complicated feelings about Vasili.I do sympathize a lot with his struggles—not just what he went through as achild, which is very sad in of itself, but also he was clearly really sufferingas an adult as a result of that. But I also really despise a lot of what he didand who he was as an adult. Ultimately, I think I feel anger towards him, and quitea bit of disappointment, I’d say? But ultimately primarily sadness. Especiallybecause I have so much respect and love for his mother, and SHE had so muchlove for him, and I think she would have been very, very unhappy to see whatbecame of her sweet little boy—both in terms of what he did to other people andwhat he did to himself.

I’ve exhausted myself and am now in my feelings so you all will get the second half of this post (about Svetlana and her brothers) later.

#my soviet history posts

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hawkeyedflame · 6 years

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Hey, I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing by asking this in question but would you say it's possible to have executive dysfunction while still being able to perform well in school? I don't have trouble with assignments but I've been wanting to read a book that sits in a cupboard 5 centimeters from me ever since October and haven't been able to force myself to open it. Could this be explained by EFD or should I look into something else? Or maybe I'm just lazy lol idk

It is absolutely possible. I excelled in high school while also committing myself to cross country and indoor/outdoor track sixs days a week for five years. I graduated with 15 varsity letters, over thirty medals at district and state meets, a 4.0 GPA, special or high honors every semester, 97th+ percentile on my SATs, 4s and 5s on all six AP exams, early acceptance to University with a merit scholarship, etc etc. I could go on but you get the point: you can have executive dysfunction and be successful in school.

[This got really long so I’m putting a readmore]

You might be wondering how I managed all those achievements if I have this disorder that I say I have. That’s normal. Most people hear “ADHD” and think “hyperactive child who can’t focus in school.” While that’s sometimes true, it’s far from an all-inclusive representation. The answer to my previous academic success, I’ve realized, is that I relied very heavily on externally-imposed structureLet me walk you through one of my days in high school, and you’ll see just how much of my routine was being enforced externally.

My alarm went off every day at 6:20am, and my dad made sure I was out of bed by 6:30 before he went to work. He usually made steel cut oats and left some for me. My mom always made sure there was enough food in the house so I could make my own lunch. I let the chickens out before leaving for school.I went to school for six hours of short (50 mins) classes of 18-25 students, where my teachers knew me (and my parents) and where phones and laptops were strictly forbidden. Notes were taken on paper only and homework assignments were due the next class, and everything was graded. Agendas were given out at the beginning of each year and we were expected to use them every day. Parents would be notified if behavioral or performance issues arose.After school I went to cross country or track practice where the captains led us through warm ups and then the coach told us what sort of training we were doing that day. They often timed us and recorded our progress over the season/years.After practice I went home, where my mom was starting dinner, and I did my homework that I had to do if I didn’t want to get a 0 and have a parent-teacher conference. I ate dinner, did the dishes because that was my chore, put the chickens away, worked on more homework, and then by 9:30pm my mom would be berating me to go to bed. I didn’t have a smartphone or a computer so it wasn’t possible for me to lay in bed staring at a screen all night. On weekends I cleaned the bathrooms and vacuumed the house because that was my job. Somewhere in there I also cleaned the chicken coop and attended to their food and water.Rinse and repeat.

If you look at that routine, you’ll see only two tasks that I truly did on my own: making my lunch and putting the chickens in/out. I didn’t want to go hungry at school, so I made myself food. And I frequently forgot to let the chickens out (and put them back in, but fortunately we had a solid run that kept predators out). Everything else that appears to be self-discipline was actually motivated by desire to avoid external punishment. And that punishment was very real to me because it was always immediate and harsh.Late for school? Detention. Phone in class? Confiscated, sometimes detention. Didn’t take notes/do the homework? 0s in class, parents notified, not allowed to participate in sports, absolutely grounded. Skipping practice? Not allowed to participate in meets, possibly kicked off the team, definitely in trouble with Mom and Dad. Don’t do chores? Time to get yelled at. Don’t take care of the chickens? They might die and then I’d be in huge trouble. Stay up too late? Yelled at.Everything I did was motivated not by desire to serve my own future, but desire to avoid immediate negative consequence. And I didn’t have hobbies for myself. I liked reading but I didn’t have much time for it. I didn’t play video games, surf social media, watch TV, go to the movies, or do anything purely for enjoyment’s sake.

When I went to college, all of that structure disappeared. I didn’t do a sport because I couldn’t compete at a Division I school (partially due to joint pain). My classes were large, long, and spaced out throughout the day, with weird breaks between them. Most professors didn’t care if we had phones or laptops, and often we actually needed them for class. Homeworks were due online, sometimes two weeks from when they were assigned. Grades were posted online. No warning for poor performance, no teacher giving me a talking to, no parent-teacher conference. Nobody told me when to do homework. Nobody told me when to eat (or to go grocery shopping). Nobody made sure I went to bed or got up in the morning. Nobody kept me from playing video games or scrolling social media all day.Nothing except my own desire to succeed held me accountable for managing my time and working hard in class, and like I said, I didn’t have that desire. People with ADHD don’t have that. Motivation and self-discipline stem primarily from aversion to negative long-term consequences, even more so than from desire to obtain positive outcomes. This is because negative emotion is felt more strongly and for a longer duration than positive emotion. It keeps neurotypical people on track. But people with ADHD lack the ability to “see” the long term consequences of not doing what we need to do, when it needs to be done. That’s why we are chronic procrastinators. We favor instant gratification over delayed gratification because we fail to integrate awareness of far-off consequences into our daily actions. In other words, people with ADHD struggle to orient their behavior towards their goals because it is difficult for our brains to recognize things in the future as real.

And so, because of all that stuff under the surface, I floundered and flailed. I didn’t know how to hold myself responsible and I didn’t know how to ask for help. And I was depressed. I was so depressed. And anxious. And losing weight because I wasn’t remembering to eat. And that made my body weak, it made my hands shake and it made my brain dull and foggy. I was being treated for depression and anxiety because nobody saw the other half of my history. The part where I crumbled the moment I had to hold myself up. It was missed entirely until I stumbled across information about rejection sensitive dysphoria, which is only experienced by people with ADHD, and I realized that rejection by my parents was what drove that fear of consequence that had been motivating me all my life. When I started looking at my history through the lens of inattentive ADHD, the picture became clear. It wasn’t laziness or depression that was stopping me, it was executive dysfunction.

So my point in all this is YES, it is 100% possible and is actually quite common for people with executive dysfunction to excel in structured academic environments. It’s especially normal for people whose ADHD is dominated by inattentive symptoms over hyperactive ones. One of the major reasons why many young women are not diagnosed until their late teens/early 20s is because they’re more often inattentive, not hyperactive, and so their executive dysfunction doesn’t become apparent until they enter an environment, such as university or a job, where they are expected to hold themselves entirely accountable for their own positive outcomes.

As for you personally, I can’t diagnose you. I can say that what you described is possibly a symptom of executive dysfunction, but I don’t know enough about you or your behavioral history to say whether or not you should consider seeking a professional opinion. If you are experiencing deficiencies in your self-discipline/motivation/memory/attention that are disrupting your quality of life, and if you can identify those as patterns throughout your life history, then you may have reason to see a psychologist. If your symptoms are confined to inconsequential/nonessential things like reading a book you’ve been wanting to read, I wouldn’t worry about it too much as I’m fairly certain that’s a normal experience for most neurotypical people.

Anyways thanks for coming to my TED talk, sorry for taking fifty million years to get to the point.

#adhd #anonymous #sorry that i can't be concise at all ever

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phenomenahh · 7 years

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Why my ADD was undiagnosed and what finally tipped me off

I’m going to be going over some things that prevented my diagnosis for so long, some symptoms I never knew were symptoms, and some of the impacts that came from my unchecked ADD. If you’re wondering if you have ADD/ADHD or just want a Hot Take™️ from someone who’s been rocking with it for nearly 15 years now, keep reading. TL;DRs for each paragraph if you don’t do well with long blocks of text.

When you think of someone with ADD/ADHD, you probably think of the little kid who won’t stop fidgeting and running around and acting up, or maybe the adult who went into art or something because academics were never their strong point. Either way, it’s usually a hyperactive, quirky, blissfully unfocused kid-at-heart. That view is why I didn’t get diagnosed until after my freshman year of high school. I’ve never been super energetic, I can get serious when I really need to, and I used to absolutely adore school! Because I didn’t fit the usual profile of the ADHD kid, no one ever expected that I would roll into adolescence showing major symptoms, and once those symptoms hit, everyone chalked it up to teen angst. Because of this profile, my parents refused to get me tested for ADD or even entertain the possibility that I needed any sort of treatment but good ol’ fashioned negative reinforcement for my falling grades, taking away privileges and taking me off the debate team (which I’m sure you can guess set me right the fuck off) and policing my grades to the point that I dreaded any conversation with them after missing an assignment. They also thought that ADD medication would make me “dependent on drugs” and “not myself anymore”. After doing about 5 minutes of Googling, I knew that neither of those are true at all, which has been confirmed after starting medication. It took me almost failing out of my school and having to drop an advanced course before they listened to my doctor and got me tested. To the surprise of absolutely everyone except me, I actually had ADD. Who would have ever guessed??? TL;DR The stereotypes and profiles of ADD/ADHD aren’t always right, and they prevented me from diagnosis and medication.

The other big reason I went undiagnosed was because I’m a Former Smart Kid (which sounds like a humblebrag but my intelligence is balanced out by my incompetence so let it slide). See, a smart kid is a young person with above-average intelligence, whereas a Former Smart Kid is the kind of person who did incredibly well in school for a while, and then it just all went downhill. Basically up through 4th grade, I was a special little sunflower who was excellent at academics because in those years you can sort of just slide by with very little actual effort. I was so special, in fact, that I skipped 5th grade and went straight to the very challenging one-year 6th grade Smart Children School, where I discovered that when you’re presented with things that require full attention, you can’t just not give them your full attention. I got my first D (the grade) there and cried a lot because I had thought I was smart but smart people just don’t get bad grades. But from there, bad grades and all, I went to my local Smart Adolescents Middle-High School, where my grades just got worse and worse. Only this time, it wasn’t just my grades in classes I didn’t like. I was slipping in my favorite classes, even the ones I was strongest in. Combine that with a bunch of assorted life problems and pubescent angst, and boom: Clearly it’s not ADD because I was so smart up until then. I’m just being lazy, I’m getting rebellious, I’m getting brain damage (seriously some people have found that more likely than ADD), it’s that damn smartphone, etc. TL;DR If you’re a good student when you’re little but your grades fall as you age, no one is gonna think you have ADD because clearly you didn’t have it as a kid.

Being smart as a kid was fun and all, but when ADD symptoms rolled up to the party, it really, really hurt. The thing is, if you spend your whole life being told you’re a fucking prodigy, and then suddenly you start failing, it makes you feel like you were never smart to begin with. I threw all evidence of my intelligence away and dwelled on every bad grade, convincing myself I was only pretending to be smart, that I’d tricked everyone into thinking I wasn’t an idiot. Understandably, that did a number on my self-esteem. It also really messed with my ability to succeed in the things I love. I mentioned debate earlier, but I’ll expand here in case you’ve never met me and heard about how it is literally the only thing I do ever. I do speech and debate at my school, and I love it more than anything. But debate, and even non-debate individual events, require a lot of attention and focus. Guess what ADD really fucks with? So I went through a couple years feeling like I was too dumb to succeed in my passions, and like I was dragging down my partners/teammates/coach/anyone who ever wanted to be proud of me. That wasn’t great for my mental health, as you can probably guess. TL;DR If you start out as a good student then turn into a worse student with apparently no reason, it’s not the best thing emotionally?

Here are some ADD symptoms a lot of people don’t know about: Trouble getting to sleep/waking up in the morning- Pretty self-explanatory, but these are pretty common symptoms that I never really thought about. No reference for the passage of time- You know when someone asks you about how long a length of time has been, and you just… can’t possibly guess? Or when you think 5 minutes have passed, and look up to see it’s been an hour? Or when an hour passes in 5 minutes? Interrupting people- I’ve always had this problem. I usually cross my fingers or put one finger up when I have something to say in the middle of someone’s sentence. Of course, I usually forget what I had to say wishing 5 words, so it sort of works sometimes? Aggression/irritability- Keep in mind, this one’s a symptom of LOTS OF THINGS. Don’t let this be the deciding factor. But it could be something to bring up with your doctor if you’re looking into a diagnosis. Not listening- Looking back, this seems really obvious, but my parents used to think I had hearing problems because I just wouldn’t listen. Rethink some issues you’ve had with this, they could be ADD.

Side note on self-diagnosis If you haven’t been certainly diagnosed by a legitimate doctor or just can’t access one, but you’re pretty sure you have ADD, or even just display a few symptoms, you should absolutely try non-medical methods of dealing with your symptoms, which you can find online pretty easily and can help almost anyone, ADD or not, to get through tough tasks. But don’t try to access accommodations, medications, or other things specifically intended for people with ADD. Doing this will perpetuate the very false stigma that ADD is just a way for neurotypical people to get away with putting in less effort.

#ADD #ADHD #attention deficit disorder #rambling

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actuallyadhd · 7 years

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(1/2) First, thank you so much for this blog. I was hoping you could help me understand something better. I have ADHD-PI. I'm still new to this, and I'd just like to know more about what it's like to have ADHD-PH. PI has less hyperactive symptoms than PH, right? Does that mean that PH has less inattentive symptoms than PI? Do ppl with PH tend to, or possibly, have less or no problems with memory and focus? Can you have ADHD and just have hyperactive symptoms without the other things?

(2/2) What would that be like? Does anyone here have experience with that, or know any resources that clearly contrast the types? I get a little confused because a lot of things just approach ADHD broadly, and listing symptoms doesn’t always clarify how they’d be expressed (but I know everyone’s different, too). I hope this isn’t a bad question. Thank you for any help. All of you are great, and I wish you the best in everything!

So apparently a lot of experts don’t believe that Hyperactive/Impulsive type really exists. They think that really it’s just Inattentive and Combined. I don’t know for sure, but I have seen that on TotallyADD and I trust Rick Green.

In order to be diagnosed with Inattentive ADHD, you need to have at least five or six of the symptoms listed in the diagnostic criteria (it depends on age; if you’re over 17, you need five and if you’re under 17 you need six).

In order to be diagnosed with Hyperactive/Impulsive ADHD, you need to have at least five or six of the symptoms listed in the diagnostic criteria.

In order to be diagnosed with Combined ADHD, you need to have at least five or six of the Inattentive symptoms AND at least five or six of the Hyperactive/Impulsive symptoms.

So if you have Inattentive ADHD, you may have up to four Hyperactive/Impulsive symptoms, and if you have Hyperactive/Impulsive ADHD, you may have up to four Inattentive symptoms.

So what I’ll do now is I’ll explain my Hyperactive/Impulsive symptoms, since I have Combined ADHD. I have eight of the Inattentive symptoms and five of the Hyperactive/Impulsive symptoms.

Here are the Hyperactive/Impulsive symptoms I display (in bold) and how they manifest in me:

Often fidgets with or taps hands or feet, or squirms in seat. I can’t sit still. I move all the time. I knit at the movies when I remember to bring in my project. I just am never sitting completely still. It’s not possible.

Often runs about or climbs in situations where it is not appropriate (adolescents or adults may be limited to feeling restless). I get restless a fair bit. Luckily we live in the country so I can get outside pretty regularly; that keeps me from having to deal with restlessness too often. But dude, when I was in school…

Is often “on the go” acting as if “driven by a motor”. I don’t know how much other people would notice it necessarily, but I often feel very much like I am spinning and pushing to get things done.

Often talks excessively. Once I get started, I don’t really stop very easily. Also, I will start talking randomly when I’m with friends, even if I really don’t need to say anything.

Often blurts out an answer before a question has been completed. Self-explanatory, yes? I feel like this is also pretty impulsive. My biggest impulsive behaviour is over-spending on things I don’t need.

Just for kicks, here are my Inattentive symptoms:

Often has trouble holding attention on tasks or play activities. I do get distracted pretty easily.

Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly. I have to stop looking at stuff and pay direct attention to really hear someone.

Often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores, or duties in the workplace (e.g., loses focus, side-tracked). I get distracted and start working on other stuff. I have so many unfinished projects!

Often has trouble organizing tasks and activities. I can do more than I used to, but I still get stuck a lot.

Often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to do tasks that require mental effort over a long period of time (such as schoolwork or homework). Yeah, I do actually avoid these kinds of things, even when they’re things I really like to do.

Often loses things necessary for tasks and activities (e.g. school materials, pencils, books, tools, wallets, keys, paperwork, eyeglasses, mobile telephones). I’m better now, but still lose things sometimes. I can’t remember where I put my three-hole punch right now, for example. And I do have more than one.

Is often easily distracted. By my own thoughts, by stuff going on around me, by the internet…

Is often forgetful in daily activities. OMG, just today I was going to check something in an app on my phone, and I closed out the one I was in and switched screens and then couldn’t remember which app I was going to look at.

I feel like the criteria still doesn’t really get to the heart of what ADHD is, but anyway. Does this help?

-J

#Anonymous #ADHD #Actually ADHD #asks #symptoms #ADHD types

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sailaway-frmthee-safeeharbor · 7 years

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My school experience with ADHD

I have always known that I had ADHD. From the time I was a little kid running around playing crazy detailed games of pretend and asking everyone I met questions about any subject a mile a minute. I always knew that there was something unique about the way my brain worked. The problem is, neither I, nor my parents, or my teachers were able to get an official diagnosis until I was 17 and in my Jr. year of high school. Being an only child, with several medical issues from the start and with parents who didn’t really know what to do with me made school, and life in general kind of difficult. Fortunately I was very lucky to have always loved learning no matter how hard the process had been. Math, (like many people) has always been my worst subject. I struggled with learning the concepts in the first place let alone trying to get them in my head enough to bring it to the test or move on to higher levels. And it sure as hell was not for lack of trying. The problem with school and especially teachers who do not understand that people have extremely varying was of learning, is that when it comes to kids with ADHD, we can put in a solid three hours, and only have half a page of work to show for it. It is extremely discouraging when you put all that effort in and you’re so proud of those solid three hours, and go into school the next day and have your teacher rip you apart for “being lazy”, and “not trying hard enough”, and asking the golden question of “why can’t you JUST do the work like everyone else!?”. Sometimes they even do it in front of the entire class. What kid is going to want to keep trying and is going to be motivated to keep learning about themselves and how they learn after a teacher, who is supposed to be your mentor, completely degrades you in front of everyone? The questions of “why cant you JUST…” are really hard to hear when you are young and you yourself would absolutely LOVE to know why the heck you can’t “just do the work like everyone else”. For me these disheartening questions started when I was in first grade.

My birthday falls in kind of a weird place in late June that made my parents really question if I was ready to go to kindergarten when I had just barely turned 5. I was already reading Junie B. Jones books and loving the work books my mom had given me so they figured it would be fine and it was. I started going to a private Methodist school and had a blast in kindergarten, just like many kids. But the next year really changed everything. I was younger than the majority of the kids in my class and it was my teacher’s first year of teaching. I don’t remember a ton of details from that year because I guess I spent a lot of my childhood desperately trying to forget it; but my parents still talk about how horrible it was to this day. I started to struggle with reading a little bit and the attention deficit was really starting to affect my learning process. It wasn’t that I was having behavioral issues in the class room or that I was being disruptive I just was having a little trouble with the work. I fall more under inattentive type rather than hyperactive type on the ADHD spectrum and what people don’t realize about that is it isn’t always about simple wandering thoughts, but it affects the way you gather, process, and categorize information in your head. At this point it was not a huge problem yet and had I had the little bit of support I needed I would have been fine. This of course was not the case. Instead of supporting me and giving me any kind of guidance let alone kindness, my teacher decided to make sure I knew just how stupid I was. Like I said I can’t remember a lot of detail but apparently I, a previously abnormally cheerful child, came home crying from school every single day for several months. Every day I grew more and more discouraged as any 6 year old would who had a teacher, a TEACHER constantly belittling them every single day. Needless to say after weeks of fighting the school my parents found a way to let me switch to a different class and a different school the next year. This helped me emotionally and helped me get back on track accedemically but the root problem was still there. My grades were ok enough for me to move to second grade but my parents had felt that I was so emotionally devastated by the constant daily humiliation and degradation, that it would be a good idea to repeat the first grade at the new public school. For the first two years the school change had really helped me get back to a productive mindset but again the signs were still there. I had a hard time sitting to study my spelling words and I was often asking to leave class to go to the nurse or the bathroom when I didn’t need to. I didn’t understand why I was doing those things or why certain simple tasks like cleaning my room took me so much longer than they should have. It was my normal. The rest of my schooling through 8th grade was pretty ok. There always seemed to be at least one teacher every year that didn’t really get me and I just had to kind of suffer in silence through it because honestly I didn’t really get me either. My grades were alright, mostly B’s and a few C’s with the acceptation of math. If I would have had any kind of additional support and a better understanding of the ADHD and how it manifested itself in my head then I am positive that I would have gotten straight A’s and would not have had so many emotional struggles in high school. The biggest thing at that point that got me through school was the fact that I really did enjoy learning and my love of reading. Being able to hyper focus on books has helped me keep up in school and has helped teach me how my brain categorizes information. Hyper focus is a great thing because when you’re in it, you can see how you think and feel in a productive setting. But you have to understand what is happening first. I was not able to make sense of why I could focus on some things and not others, and why I could learn something easily in one class and not the other, until my Jr. year in high school. And honestly it was a really tough process.

The transition to a private high school was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. The classes were so so much harder and the expectations were much greater and I struggled immensely. It was devastating for someone like me who genuinely loves learning, to fail so hard. I desperately wanted to do well and gain more respect from my teachers but I couldn’t even find a place to start. It was an entirely new environment and the teachers were so different from what I was used to. The atmosphere of that high school was built on academic success and athletic accomplishments so there was a lot of pressure to be exceptional. All of a sudden I was in the position again where the teachers did not have a clue how to connect and interact with me and I started to really fall into depression and anxiety. Those questions of “why aren’t you trying hard enough and why can’t you just…” started coming up again and I wanted to give up. I was so depressed because of my failures at school that I barely had a social life because I couldn’t bring myself to make the effort. I felt like because I was so bad at school that I didn’t deserve to go out with friends or even deserve to be happy. With my teachers and the administration making school a kind of hostile unsafe environment, and the constant frustration I felt toward them and especially myself, my depression and anxiety became very damaging. I was self-harming and my anxiety was so bad that I couldn’t ask for any kind of help, not for school work and noy for myself. I ended up failing math that freshman year and it was just an all-around bad situation. This stress and distrust of teachers continued into my sophomore year. Amazingly I was able to get into an honors level history class Jr year because history has always been my passion and for some reason I liked all of my teachers a lot more this year too. I took the fact that these teachers seemed to genuinely care about me more than past teachers had very seriously. I wanted more than ever to do well for myself and to make them proud. It took an extra toll on my anxiety but I was able to start asking more questions. Not just questions in class but I was able to ask my self questions too. My parents had also been asking questions and trying to somehow find out why I had been struggling for so long. Toward the end of that year we were able to get documented in writing that I had ADHD. Once I finally had the actual diagnosis and started to connect the dots I was finally able to understand myself and start to forgive myself for all those years of struggle. So for my senior year I was actually allowed to utilize the school’s intervention specialists and it was amazing. At that point I had a fairly more decent grasp of my brain and how it worked that I was finally able to do a lot of the work on my own. The school had hired new intervention teachers and the one I was assigned that first semester made a monumental difference in my life. She didn’t really help me very much with my actual assignments but just the sheer fact of knowing I had at least ONE person on my side who believed in me, was there for me, and understood where I was coming from made all the difference. I finished my senior year a decimal point away from being on the honor roll.

It was a healing experience to start to finally have answers, but it was also hard at first because I was very bitter about it. I held on to so much anger that all these years of frustration and self-hatred and desperately wondering why, when there was a pretty simple answer all along. It has taken me a while to come to terms with my journey and the impact all of this has had on my life, and I still today as a freshman in college have some days where I really struggle with it, but I can honestly say that I am grateful for the whole experience. All of it. I am at a place now where I know so so much about myself and how I learn and how my brain works in general that I cannot even put into word how amazing it feels. Of course I can still get depressed and I still battle the anxiety every day, and I still encounter huge setbacks but without this amazing and horrible experience I wouldn’t know how to bounce back from it and how to keep going. If nothing else these are the most crucial things I have learned:

NEVER. STOP. ASKING. QUEESTIONS. No matter how defeated you are, no matter how much you want to give up, no matter how much you think you don’t even deserve answers, never stop asking questions because it is how you grow.

Also, be able to understand the importance of being able to take those little steps to being more productive as victories. Even if you work all day on a paper and that doesn’t seem like enough, you have to be able to reflect on the good things you did that day and really look at the things that went right, so that way it might not take you as long tomorrow. It really does suck having to fail a bunch of times before you can get into the swing of things, but you can find peace in knowing that you will never be perfect. You just have to take those few strengths you may have and make them work for you. It will take a lot of time, and tears, and frustration but the peace that comes from progress and knowing you are doing the best you can is worth all of those tears.

`��

#adhd #school #highschool #college #mental illness #mental health #sensory processing disorder #therapy #failure #attention deficit disorder

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timclymer · 5 years

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ADHD Medications – Brain Damage, Heart Attacks, Hallucinations & Liver Damage

The medication Ritalin is prescribed to 6 million children with ADHD every year and like all pharmaceutical medications comes with a long list of side effects including nervousness, nausea, dizziness, drowsiness, insomnia, joint pains, headaches, increased blood pressure, fever, rapid heartbeat, abdominal pain, and psychosis.

Tom Sawyer may have been a layabout, a truant and self-indulgence. He may have picked fights with strangers for no apparent reason; but he was also resourceful, spirited and refreshingly clever.

Today children who have difficulty playing quietly or following instructions find themselves under the scrutiny of parents, teachers, guidance counsellors and child therapists, all of them looking for the slightest sign of a medical syndrome.

The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) only mandates a warning be printed on the package insert for the medication Ritalin which is now associated with 19 confirmed childhood deaths due to cardiovascular problems. Stimulants might be far more dangerous to the heart than Vioxx or Bextra, drugs that were withdrawn over the past two years because of their ill effects on the heart.

On March 21, 2000, a 14-year-old boy dropped dead of a heart attack while skateboarding. The ninth-grader had been on Ritalin since the first grade. The father of the youngster has testified that he and his wife were forced by Michigan Social Services to put their child on Ritalin or else be charged for neglecting their son’s educational and emotional needs. (WorldNetDaily.com January 3, 2003).

These agents substantially increase the heart rate and blood pressure.

In a placebo-controlled trial, mixed amphetamine salts (Adderall) administered to adults increased systolic blood pressure by about 5 mm Hg; similar effects were found with methylphenidate formulations. Blood-pressure changes of this magnitude, particularly during long-term therapy, are known to increase morbidity and mortality. (Steven E. Nissen. ADHD Drugs and Cardiovascular Risk. New England Journal of Medicine 2006; 354: 1445-1448).

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is advising health care professionals about a new warning for Strattera, a drug approved for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults and children.

The labelling warns that severe liver injury may progress to liver failure resulting in death or the need for a liver transplant in a small percentage of patients. The labelling also notes that the number of actual cases of severe liver injury is unknown because of under-reporting of post-marketing adverse events. (Medical News Today 18/12/2004).

Hallucinations

Medications like Ritalin lead a small number of children treated for ADHD to suffer hallucinations that usually feature insects, snakes or worms, according to federal drug officials, and a panel of experts said on Wednesday that physicians and parents needed to be warned of the risk. (The New York Times March 23, 2006).

Current labelling for the ADHD drugs – Adderall, Focalin, Concerta, Metadate, Methylin, Ritalin and Dexedrine – does not mention the possibility of hallucinations in patients who had no history of them and had taken the usual dose. “We read case upon case of these children who do experience these hallucinations,” Rosemary Johann-Liang of the FDA’s Office of Drug Safety told the committee. “That is something that really struck all the reviewers.” (USA Today March 23, 2006).

Dr. Kate Gelperin, an F.D.A. drug-safety specialist, told the committee that the agency had discovered a surprising number of cases in which young children given stimulants suffered hallucinations. Most said that they saw or felt insects, snakes or worms, Dr. Gelperin said. (The New York Times March 23, 2006).

Depression and Brain Damage

A new study conducted in rats by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School suggests that the misdiagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) combined with prescription drug use in children may lead to a higher risk of developing depressive symptoms in adulthood.

These findings are critical because they suggest that Ritalin can have long-term consequences on normal-functioning brains. The study is particularly relevant when considering the difficulty in correctly diagnosing children with ADHD. There is increasing evidence to suggest that correct diagnosis of ADHD is of the highest importance – children who are misidentified as having ADHD and subsequently placed on prescription drug therapy could face possible impaired brain performance as adults. (American College Of Neuropsychopharmacology 29 December 2004).

Dr Joan Baizer and colleagues from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York have found that relatively high doses of the drug methylphenidate, the generic form of Ritalin, changed the expression of a gene involved in brain function in laboratory rats. The same gene is known to be affected in humans by other psychoactive drugs, such as amphetamines and cocaine. According to Dr Baizer, the dose used was comparable to the high end of the dose used to treat children with ADD and ADHD, after taking into account differences in metabolism between rats and humans. (Anna Salleh, ABC Science Online 12/11/2001).

The ADHD drug manufacturers have been instructed to produce Patient Medication Guides that tell patients about possible risks of adverse cardiovascular and psychiatric symptoms and the precautions they should take. The adverse psychiatric events include hearing voices, becoming manic, or becoming suspicious for no reason. These events have even happened to people with no history of psychiatric conditions. (Catharine Paddock, Medical News Today 22 Feb 2007).

Dr Alasdair Vance of Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital said: “Yes, there are studies that show Ritalin is effective, but they only look at single doses, or what happens in the first three to six weeks. The vast majority of children are on it for months to years. The handful of longer-term studies of Ritalin use had only looked at symptoms, not brain physiology“, he cautioned. (Anna Salleh, ABC Science Online 12/11/2001).

The new instruction affects 15 products, including various forms of Adderall, Concerta, Daytrana, Dexedrine, Focalin, Metadate, Methylin, Ritalin, and Strattera. The FDA has been criticized for failing to notify the public sooner. (Medical News Today 22 Feb 2007).

After reading the above, would any parent be happy giving drugs to their child? The first thing to do is to look at the child’s nutritional status and other drug-free alternative therapies.

This article may be reproduced provided the link to my website is kept live.

Source by Kevin Flatt

from Home Solutions Forev https://homesolutionsforev.com/adhd-medications-brain-damage-heart-attacks-hallucinations-liver-damage/ via Home Solutions on WordPress from Home Solutions FOREV https://homesolutionsforev.tumblr.com/post/184868285715 via Tim Clymer on Wordpress

#Home Solutions FOREV

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homesolutionsforev · 5 years

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ADHD Medications – Brain Damage, Heart Attacks, Hallucinations & Liver Damage

Tom Sawyer may have been a layabout, a truant and self-indulgence. He may have picked fights with strangers for no apparent reason; but he was also resourceful, spirited and refreshingly clever.

These agents substantially increase the heart rate and blood pressure.

Hallucinations

Depression and Brain Damage

After reading the above, would any parent be happy giving drugs to their child? The first thing to do is to look at the child’s nutritional status and other drug-free alternative therapies.

This article may be reproduced provided the link to my website is kept live.

Source by Kevin Flatt

from Home Solutions Forev https://homesolutionsforev.com/adhd-medications-brain-damage-heart-attacks-hallucinations-liver-damage/ via Home Solutions on WordPress

#Home Solutions Forev

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hustlemalarkey · 6 years

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Peter Parker has ADHD

I had this school project where we had to “diagnose” a fictional character using the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and I chose to use mine to prove that Peter Parker has ADHD... enjoy!

inattentive

Fails to give close attention to detail; makes careless mistakes:

-he webbed a guy's face and bashed his head into his own car because he didn't realize it was his own car he was breaking into

-he fell face-first onto the roof of a building without being pushed or anything; he just didn’t think fast enough

-he thought he was in the vault thing for a lot longer than 37 minutes

Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly:

-stark told him he wasn't an avenger but the second Ned asks him if he's an avenger he says "yeah, basically"

-he literally listens to nothing Tony says ever

Often does not follow through on instructions/fails to finish schoolwork/chores/workplace duties:

-he is told to report it if he finds any more alien rock but he just does not do that

-tony fires him but nope he back

Difficulty organizing tasks/activities:

-he obviously thinks on his feet and never comes up with elaborate plans before they're absolutely necessary

-need I go on??

Dislikes/avoids tasks that require sustained mental effort:

-he is in some sort of math-related class (physics??) and as the teacher is speaking he is watching a video on his laptop

-literally says "school is boring; I got better things to do"

Loses stuff:

-he lost his bag and according to Aunt May, it was the fifth one

Distracted by extraneous stimuli:

-as he is "taking a shortcut" through people's yards he is talking to every person he passes

-he just found a piece of the alien purple stuff and is about to pick it up when he gets a call from his best friend, and the picks up the call instead of ignoring it

-when the little drone-like think comes out of his suit he goes "woah! Has that been there the whole time! That's awesome!" While his friends are literally about to fall to their deaths

-when he is being nervous about Liz's dad being the bad guy he forgets to talk to her and act cool, calm, and collected and looks like he’s very nervous

Forgetful

-he forgot his phone's sound was all the way up when he was trying to eavesdrop on the bad guys

-he forgot Happy had a tracker on him

hyperactive

Fidgets/squirms in seat:

-*insert all the classroom scenes*

Leaves seat when staying seated is expected:

-he is in detention for like a minute before he just leaves. The detention guy even calls after him but he gone.

Runs about or climbs excessively in situations where it is inappropriate/feelings of restlessness:

-there is a scene where he gets trapped in the vault warehouse thingy idk and he's all over the place doing stuff and he eventually stops and asks Karen (Suit Lady) how long he's been in there and she say "37 minutes" to which he replies "what?! 37 minutes; that's insane! I cannot take this anymore; I gotta get outta here."

-the entire rest of the movie

Has difficulty playing/engaging in leisure activities quietly:

-according the Aunt May he snuck out of the house every night (to go be spider-man) so apparently he just avoids quiet leisure activities completely

Often "on the go"/acts as if driven by motor:

-in class he constantly checks the clock and looks impatient to start the next class

-leaves as the bell rings, gets out faster than anyone else

-he's literally leaving everything early all the time

Often talks excessively:

-at the beginning of the movie he texts Happy like a bajillion times at once

-he talks excessively and quickly almost all the time

-when he's prepping to go up to Liz's door May asks him what his gameplan is and he includes in it to not tell her she's pretty too much because that's creepy (because he probably would tell her that otherwise)

impulsivity

Difficulty waiting turn:

-literally the entire plot of the movie is stark being like "aight dude keep being you and someday you'll be an avenger" but then peter's always like "nah dude I wanna fight cRIME BY MYSELF RIGHT NOW"

Interrupts or intrudes on others:

-seamlessly stops a bad guy stealing a bike without hesitation

-interrupts his crush girl on the bus to ask if he can take a call

-he interrupts Tony Stark multiple times while he's chewing spideyboi™ out

other notes based on my observations not included in the DSM:

-he is very impulsive

-like literally the whole movie is him just like "I THINK I'LL DO THIS" a millisecond before he does it

-works best when there is a set/immediate deadline (or in an emergency situation)

-can't see long-term: "I am so far beyond high school right now"

-I think it's interesting how when Liz asks about what happened with the stark internship he says, "it got boring" because that's like,, the #1 reason ADHD people quit jobs?? So that reason would make sense and be believable coming from him and I just think it’s funny he chose THAT reason

-ADHD people are more likely to die from wrecks and dumb stuff due to inattention to detail and um that's the whole movie

-he hyper-focuses on his job as spideyboi™

#actually adhd #adhd #spider man: homecoming #spiderman #spider man #peter parker #dsm #fun fact i actually never wrote the actual paper these notes were written for because i lost interest :))))

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idkwhoiamanymorebutwtf · 4 years

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Ok,rewind time. What do you think Gumball's IQ is? Have you changed your mind on anything there?

Ooh, that’s a tricky question, and as hard to answer this time and last time. When I last answered this question, I estimated that he has an above average IQ, at least over 120 but very likely around 140 or 150. When I first answered the question, though, I strictly asserted “We know he isn’t an actual genius (smart, yes, but not genius level, which is about 160).” and I have no clue why. Yes, we know he’s not a certified genius, but it was a bit presumptuous of me to state he’s not a genius as a fact without any followup or reasoning behind it. Maybe I was under the impression that his academic abilities said something about his IQ? I’m not sure, but thinking back on it, I see no reason he couldn’t have genius level IQ. In fact, I definitely see reasons he could have a much higher IQ than I previously predicted. Before deciding weather he likely just has a high IQ (120-150) or a genius one (160 or more), I gotta go over why exactly I consider him to be very intelligent at all. Yeah, it’s an important distinction to make on just how much he’s above the average IQ, but it’s also important to discuss why I think he’s above average in the first place.

First off, why is it that Gumball doesn’t appear consistently smart? One of the biggest episodes I use to prove to people that Gumball is smart is The Grades. He took about five minutes to completely ace a test with every single question correct. That’s incredible. Yeah, some students are quick with test taking and it doesn’t always prove they’re some sort of genius, but honestly I don’t know many people who can take a test in five minutes without making any mistakes. In fact, the speed and accuracy in which he took the test reminds me of his sister. And speaking of Anais, did you know that high intelligence levels can often be hereditary? Meaning if you have one genius kid, you’re more likely to have a second. And I know that typically, within the fandom and the show, Anais is considered strictly to be more intelligent than her brother, which could be why I previously stated that he was probably below genius lever, to put Gumball below his sister IQ wise. However the difference between the two may not be one of IQ or inherent intellectual abilities, but rather it may very well come down to the fact that Gumball has learning difficulties and Anais doesn’t. He clearly has ADHD, and he clearly needs in school accommodations for it. In general this is why I tend to ignore his school work when it comes to analyzing his intelligence. Because he’s set up to fail just by merit of him not having the proper accommodations. Not to mention that most people have given up on Gumball ever being an intelligent person. Mrs. Simian outright said “I knew it was a good idea to give up on him early” and it seems like from day one he was seen as an idiot by the people around him and morphed to fit that view when he was convinced that trying to be better isn’t worth it. And I mean, it is, multiple times throughout the series, implied that his stupidity is manufactured. As early as season one in The Goons we see him purposefully act dumb. As if he’s self aware that he’s acting like a moron and is capable of higher thought but chooses not to use his full capabilities. Now the thing about fools, about people who are actually, genuinely stupid? They don’t know it. A fool thinks themselves to be wise, and applying a level of self awareness to stupidity and treating it as if there’s any level of choice there implies that it’s not actually stupidity. Later on in The Triangle it’s shown that Gumball doesn’t try to achieve things because he has a fear of failure and doesn’t trust himself to succeed. Of course, in the context of the episode it was applied only to his choice not to sign up for the solo in their school band, but he speaks as if it’s his general philosophy, and if that’s the case, this could be another big reason he doesn’t appear smart. And remember in The Fraud when Principal Brown offers to bump his grades but he says no because he just doesn’t feel like maintaining that level of success (not that he can’t, but it seems like a bit too much effort). So basically, the reason Gumball doesn’t look intelligent upon first glance is a mixture between his ADHD and the adult’s failure to compensate him, and the fact that he chooses not to try. And I could go on forever about why he chooses not to try but it boils down to the fact that most people around him don’t believe in him and that makes him afraid to try because he doesn’t want to fail and face the possibility that everyone was right about him.

We do see a lot of intelligence in him, though. Let’s completely ignore moments where he can’t understand basic sentence structure or can’t spell the simplest of words, since those moments are obviously not signs of his full capabilities. In fact, since we’ve established that he purposefully portrays himself as less capable than he is, these moments can just be completely thrown out as indications of his intelligence. Now, we see indications of how smart he is very early on in his life. Typically it takes a child around four years from their first words (at around a year old) to being able to speak full sentences and have adult like conversations (at around five years old). However we see Gumball, at four years old, speaking in sentences with six or more words and using conjunctions to lengthen them. He also uses words that seem a bit above his age level- hyperactive, for example- and he asks a lot of ‘why’ questions. Now it’s not unusual for toddlers to ask why questions (although five seems to be the most common age for kids obsessively asking ‘why?’ it’s not abnormal for children to start younger). The thing that strikes me about these things, though, is that it apparently took Gumball until he was four years old to start using full sentences at all. This seems worrying since normally sentences start at two years old and those skills develop over three years until they’re talking in developed sentence structure, however Gumball didn’t seem to miss anything. In fact, If anything, he seemed slightly before schedule in The Origins. This implies that he somehow, within less than a year (He supposedly only started talking in sentences at four years old but he was also four in The Origins), managed to develop a skill that takes most people three years- and was ahead of schedule despite starting late. It’s actually common for highly intelligent children to be late talkers and to skip over stages of development, though, which is clearly what Gumball did. At this age he also clearly had a pretty complex knowledge of what death was and the implications behind it. Yeah, he didn’t really realize that his original fish died when they did, but later on he seemed to understand and even saw through a fabricated version of it Nicole gave him. Children that age are capable of knowing what death is, however most don’t have a real sense of permanence associated with it and don’t know the implications, often seeing it as temporary, reversible, or something that only applies to other people and not to ones self or their loved ones. But, like I said, Gumball clearly understands most (if not all) of the implications behind death such as the permanence of it. This kind of understanding isn’t typically developed until later in childhood- around six to nine years old- or even later, honestly. It may seem odd to harp on his development as a young child, but this quick development shows that he is, in fact, very advanced.

On to present day, though, Gumball still continues to show his intelligence. He’s excellent at quick innovation, planning, organization, and execution of complex plans. And the imagination of a genius really does surpass their intellect. Gumball has more than enough imagination and creativity. He’s always coming up with plans and schemes that are admittedly often failures, but show his ability for quick and deep thought and for innovation nonetheless. Not to mention that often times intelligent people are known for their creativity, often being artists or musicians as well. And we know that Gumball has a penchant for art in a lot of it’s forms. We also know that he’s a very curious person. He often questions the world around him and seems to want to learn more about it. And of course, signs of his intellect aren’t all in his early childhood development or in his creative spirit. Gumball also has very overt signs of his intellect. He’s a very cynical person a lot of the time, and as such has a penchant for sarcasm at times. And he’s been known to exhibit the intelligence he doesn’t usually allow himself to express when just trying to be snarky at people, weather it be correcting spelling or lecturing people about common sense, it shows that he has thinking abilities. Gumball has also managed to figure out secrets of the universe through thought. For example when he figured out The Void existed? And yeah, so did Mr. Small, but the thing is that Mr. Small is always looking out for a conspiracy and had the benefit of remembering people who disappeared due to his weird tinfoil hat thing. Gumball, however, had no memory of anyone or anything that disappeared and is just as weirded out by the type of conspiracies Mr. Small comes up with as anyone else. Yet he still managed to think his way into realizing the truth that they universe had been trying so hard to hide.

I think that Gumball’s childhood development, his ability to score high on tests if given the proper accommodations, and his tendency to correct people on things like spelling and common sense mistakes are signs of his high intelligence, however it’s very likely he could be an actual genius judging by his curiosity, creativity, and his self awareness that he doesn’t know everything.

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katherine-rambles · 7 years

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lately i’ve been learning a lotta things that.... make me wonder if i have low-key add/adhd?

evidence in the “probably” pile:

i learned recently that becoming angry at interruptions can be a symptom of focus issues, and that many add/adhd folks HATE interruptions.

guess who has literally scheduled her entire life around avoiding interruptions, since as long as i can remember???

like No Joke i would do homework in the early afternoon so my parents wouldn’t bother me whenever to do chores (because to them homework was Above interruptions, but nothing else was???) and then after they went to sleep i would read/play videogames/art/etc. all of which, had i done during the day, they would have felt ABSOLUTELY FREE to interrupt me and then get mad when i got mad at them for interrupting me and didn’t immediately drop it because i’m a stubborn asshat

from research of the above, i’ve learned about (and immediately converted to) the school of thought that “attention deficit disorder” might be inaccurate, and “attention regulation disorder” might be a better way of phrasing it. see this link for more info

from that link: “But with people with ADD, who have impaired executive functioning, the inability to self-regulate appears as laziness or lack of willpower. It clearly is not.”

i’ve always had IMMENSE trouble self-regulating. without places to be, work structures and schedules to support me? i 100% fall apart. i’m still having trouble, as a 23 yr old adult, at setting up bedtime and wakeup routines!!!

from a list of ADD symptoms, inattention: “Be easily distracted by things like trivial noises or events that are usually ignored by others.”

i can’t often stand music or tv or whatever while i work. either i just Stop Doing What I’m Doing and pay attention to the music or tv show (and thus waste a couple hours on tv shows i don’t even like) or i turn it off.

relatedly: i cannot go to bed with the tv or music on, despite it being a regular occurance for many of my friends. (guess who stays wired up on sleepovers while other ppl fall asleep to media.... :^) )

from a list of ADD symptoms, inattention: “Be forgetful about daily activities (for example, missing appointments, forgetting to bring lunch)”

i circumvent this now by writing a bajillion lists all the time, but when i was younger... i almost failed sixth grade because i wouldn’t bring my homework to turn in.

which is to say: i would take it home, i would DO all of the work, but i literally forgot to bring my homework to turn in, on a regular basis, for the better part of a year.

my teachers were confused at my great grades but lack of homework, so they talked to my parents about it, and that got drilled the fuck outta me, but... yeah

also? i can’t sit anywhere but at the front of classes. if i am not at the front i cannot pay attention, due to all the shit that people get up to. i’d love to join u at the back of class my delinquent friends playing games on your phones, but i cannot or I Will Fail.

from a list of ADD symptoms, inattention: “Have a hard time paying attention to details and a tendency to make careless mistakes. Their work might be messy and seem careless.”

there’s a job in libraries that i cannot do. it is called Shelfreading, and basically, the idea is that you read the collection numbers on the shelf (that bit on the end of the spine libraries use to keep things in order) and make sure that the books are, indeed, in order.

i begin falling asleep maybe four feet into shelfreading. i literally cannot do it when i am Any degree of tired in the first place, but even when i am at my Tippity Toppity Best i’m the absolute worst at that job. it is my least favorite part of libraries-- even including the time I had to be a part of moving a library, and i wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.

from a list of ADD symptoms, hyperactivity: Fidget and squirm when seated.Get up frequently to walk or run around.

me.

i can’t sit/stand still.

from a list of ADD symptoms, hyperactivity: Always be "on the go"

when i’m not depressed, i ALWAYS need something to do. i have ‘patience’, but only if i’m doing something else in the meanwhile.

for most of my childhood, i had drawing as a “something else”.

from a list of ADD symptoms, hyperactivity: Talk excessively

hhahhaaaahahhaha i’m so insecure about this but basically i can and often will babble on until you tell me to stop. case in point: look at how long this post is getting. i do that in speech, too

from a list of ADD symptoms, impulsivity: Impatience

fufufuuuuuuuck it me. i literally cannot play some games because of how slowly the characters walk. i will never be able to replay the older pokemon games because of this. rip me

from a list of ADD symptoms, impulsivity: Having a hard time waiting to talk or react

!!! i’ve channeled this into “interrupting folks to help them find words”!!!!!!

from a list of ADD symptoms, impulsivity: Have a hard time waiting for their turn.

hhhhahmmmmm this might be a reason why i strongly prefer single-player sports.

in tabletop, “waiting for my turn” doubles as “watch other people make fun things happen”. and any other time i need to wait i can usually do something else while i do so.

from a list of ADD symptoms, impulsivity: Blurt out answers before someone finishes asking them a question.

yes. but it’s kinda rare, i wonder if this is one of those semi-gendered symptoms.

but also, did you mean, “raising my hand before the professor is done with their thought”?

from a list of ADD symptoms, impulsivity: Start conversations at inappropriate times.

hhhhaaaa i’m sure becca can attest to my inability to wait five seconds before beginnning a conversation that’s awkward while the person who reminded me of something is still around.

something that seems like impulsivity might have a hand in:

right now, i really don’t want to be spending money. and yet??? i have like ten purchases in the past three days or so around 10 bucks a piece. for random videogames, toys, books, a tiara, a hat i found at a storage store, a couple of things i thought would make great gifts for specific folks in the future.... why tf can i not wait until i get my goddamn paycheck at the end of the week????

something else that seems like impulsivity might have a hand in:

i am a Serial Procrastinator. the only way i get things done is by procrastinating on one thing by doing something else. very few of my tasks are both Proactive and Not A Part Of Putting Off Something Else.

from a different list of add symptoms in adults: Restlessness, Trouble Relaxing

i’ve said that i literally cannot relax. that is: actual relaxation occurs so rarely for me that i treat it more or less like a myth.

from a different list of add symptoms in adults: Trouble Starting a Task

hey, did you know that this (in addition to being super tired) was literally what kickstarted my depression? now ya know

welp

more generally, i am a ninety-per-center. which is to say: i got a’s in school, but it wasn’t because i studied and memorized every last detail. getting 100% on anything was extremely rare for me, even though you’d think i’d have a higher chance at it with my average so high.

i hate straight-up memorizing. i’m terrible at it. if learning only happened like that, i would be a highschool dropout.

what i AM good at is being a magpie of knowledge. learning is legitimately a hobby for me.

so learning MORE for me is often about contextualizing something new in terms of what i already know.

one of my other hobbies? READING FUCKING EVERYTHIGN as a child. i read so much that my average reading-words-per-minute is 700 (w/ 100% retention-- that’s an easy reading pace for me), but i can jack it up to 1k with 80% retention. theoretically, if i could keep that up, the internet tells me i could read the entire bible in 24 hours at that rate.

my good grades also gave me a positive feedback loop: having good grades meant that teachers didn’t care if you doodled during class, and doodling during class is apparently a huge coping mechanism for ADHD/ADD.

uh.

so.

in researching and writing all this out.... i’ve basically convinced myself that i probably have some degree of add/adhd, but i had really good coping mechanisms that developed early.

when some of the things i’d relied upon began falling apart, i spiralled into Depression because executive functioning is hard

oh my god now i’m taking a test and.... SHIT IT ME http://totallyadd.com/adhd-quiz-start/

ESPECIALLY

My home or workspace is cluttered, piles everywhere. Things have to be out where I can see them, otherwise I worry that I’ll forget about them.

When I am alone I talk out loud to myself to stay on track. I have sticky-notes everywhere. I’ve bought things and then realized I already owned one.

You probably don’t bounce around like a hyperactive child, but perhaps you often feel restless. Driven. Like there’s a dynamo inside you. Maybe you’re impatient. On the go. Thoughts race, sometimes tumbling, ricocheting as you pour out one idea after another.

I walk faster than others and have to wait for them. I like to be in action, on the move.

this only applies in crowds; in other situations i’m small and can’t keep up the same with folks. But in crowds if I’m not moving forward i want to tear my hair out

I find myself stirring things up. Teasing.

auuugh i’ve been trying so hard to stop this one because it’s often really rude and invasive but I HAVE SO MUCH TROUBLE STOPPING MYSELF

I’m drawn to one hobby or obsession after another.

did you mean “project”? did you mean “life consuming goal projects that take ~80 hours during a month when i’m also in school full time and work part time??”

I have more stamina and enthusiasm than anyone else if it’s something I find interesting. I dive in whole hog, like a whirling dervish, with tons of energy. But then suddenly crash.

I always have lots to say, but I’m not so great at listening. I can be an enthusiastic chatterbox who just can’t stop. If someone else tries to speak I get louder because I feel pressure to get it out.

I am full of ideas – my mind jumps and races ahead. I don’t sit quietly and consider, but immediately offer one idea or opinion after another.

I may seem impatient or dominating, always adding my two cents, having to contribute my ideas… and I have lots of them.

I’m instantly enthusiastic and interested in new challenges. I say yes to everything, then end up overwhelmed with commitments.

HOLY FUCK

HOLY FUCKITY FUCK

I SCORED AN 18/18 ON A SCALE THAT’S MEANT TO BE 10/18 “YOU SHOULD MAYBE CHECK WITH YOUR DOCTOR”

you mean to say, i have been dealing with this all on my own, for TWENTY GODDAMNED YEARS, AND PEOPLE DIDN”T NOTICE OR CARE JUST BECAUSE I GOT A’S IN CLASS

i may be, more than a little pissed at this. hguhgugh

#text #present #curiosity #happy #gentle mental #is this adhd

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