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Something that pisses me off to no end is the commonly accepted idea that confidence is a momentary emotion you can conjure in yourself like a joyful laugh at a memory. Sure, for people who have had a life that structurally empowered them and rewarded them for having the brain they did maybe it is…
For someone with ADHD who has been told they aren’t enough and are also too much their whole life and never had the diagnosis? You can’t just make that go away with telling them they have ADHD and giving them a hug. Lasting damage has been done to that child and they may never recover their confidence in adulthood the way other people do.
I wish we would stop treating confidence like it is child’s play, it isn’t. If you undermine a child’s confidence you have hurt that child at a more permanent level than almost any other way you can non-physically hurt them.
Especially for someone who is very sensitive about what other people think of them, which a lot of ADHD people tend to be (a lot of us rely on it to motivate us to get things done!), you can’t just think better about yourself. Your confidence is like an instinct that has been learned through the summation and culmination of your experiences. If those experiences are people shitting on you for things you can’t help, you won’t be a confident person, period. That is how that works and I wish people would stop pretending it is all just wishy washy perspective taking that can be undone by simply thinking harder. Maybe for a very narrow range of people in a much larger subset this is possible, but beyond that? No
And it doesn’t just go away if the parents/guardians just decide to stop treating it entirely for arbitrary reasons.
I know i have ADHD, i know i was treated for ADHD until like 10 years old (and symptoms never went away) but because my parents “didn’t like how i was when i was on medication”, i had no treatment at all through middle school and high school, and they long since destroyed my childhood medical records so i have nothing to show for it. Frankly I feel like i should be more angry at them than I am. I probably shouldn’t have graduated high school.
Do all your countries still call it ADHD? I know it as ADHS (syndrome instead of disorder)
But to the topic, my son is 6 years old, and we won’t just ignore it 🫶🏻
My rationale for not having my son diagnosed is that we live in the US. I am afraid by having that label he will be rounded up and put in a camp. He is already ADHD and Tourettes diagnosed so I figured that should be enough, no point in adding on Autism when it’s one of RFKs obsessions.
It’s one of the reasons I haven’t considered getting an autism diagnosis. I’m pretty sure I have it, but even talking with the doctor I get my ADHD medication from she agreed that while it can be helpful to “know”, there isn’t much else outside of that.
It’s not like my ADHD where I can get a prescription that helps me manage the symptoms. If I just work on the assumption I have it and use that to process things and know when I’m getting overwhelmed and how to deal with it, and also stop masking all the time, then I get the same benefit that I would from an official diagnosis without opening myself up to more discrimination or fascist targeting.
Between being queer and having ADHD I already have enough things they want to throw me into gas chambers for.
Can your child not get diagnosed and just not tell others if it doesn’t want to? I mean only because the child has the diagnosis doesn’t mean that other children or teachers or whatever need to know, does it?
I understand your fears. I live in the US. My son is autistic. My youngest brother is autistic. Both I and my youngest sister have ADHD.
We were all diagnosed as children and my parents could only afford to help the worse off of us (my youngest brother) so that’s where their time, effort, and money went.
I struggled for years. My sister struggled for years. Because there was no support for us.
But I want you to understand that (as someone who suspects they also have Autism), the support for children with autism and ADHD far outweighs what is available for adults, and it might be more beneficial to him to give him support now than to allow him to suffer in some aspects without it.
The support he’s already getting likely won’t cover everything.
I would fight for your son and my son and all the others who could likely be affected by the current regime. Others will too. There’s so many more of us than people think and there’s power in that.
At the end of the day your child and his care is your business. I’m sure you’ve thought this through a million times.
I just wanted to express that there’s a downside to it.
Yeah 45+ years of that…
I’m feeling that.
i understand the frustration, but this post is just trying to upset people
How do you figure?
Hey, stop calling me out!
I always thought my problems as a child were due to a bad TBI when I was 7. And it certainly didn’t help, but my half century of archetypal ADD induced issues would have been nice to know about at some point in an official/helpful capacity.
I got diagnosed with ADHD when I was 6 and still concluded I am stupid, weak, annoying, and unlovable.
Yeah I didn’t get diagnosed until like 20, and I don’t think not knowing negatively impacted me. I knew I was different, but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. I still often thought “If they can do it, I can too.”
Now I know there’s something wrong with me I do often wonder what’s the point of trying. I feel like I’m fighting an uphill battle, but I guess I also think that my successes are even more of an accomplishment?
Now I know there’s something wrong with me
There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re being forced to live in an extremely unnatural situation.
Yeah, I feel this so hard. I only got diagnosed with ADHD in my mid 20s and now just starting the process of getting assessed for Autism.
It’s been a rough childhood with my family taking the route of learning through negative reinforcement, which did not feel consistent and sometimes the punishment was sometimes spaced far enough in time from when I did a bad thing that I didn’t know what I was being punished for sometimes. It also didn’t help that I got bullied a lot in school if I’m just not left alone, sometimes even initiated by staff too (not the teachers).
I’ve only found my childhood psychologist report recently that I was recommended to get tested for a condition that has long since been rolled into the autism spectrum.
The funny thing is my family didn’t want me to “catch” autism so I never got assessed.
Now I get to maybe be diagnosed AND work on the issues I have from what I used to think was all my fault, that I was lazy, etc etc.
Good fun! /s
Wait, I’m supposed to think I’m not those things if I know about my condition?
You’re supposed to think your condition is those things and that you aren’t your condition, rather you are you (whomever that may be), affected by a condition.
For me there was a difference between “I’m all the shitty things I know myself to be” and then finding out about my definite ADHD / possible autism. My mindset changed from “I am the unmanageable problem” to "I have some problems that can be addressed ". Helped me quite a bit to have a little shift in paradigm.
Yeah, found out I’m Autistic this year. I’m mid 30s and it’s been fucking rough.
Mom never took me to get tested because she didn’t want me to grow up with “that label” or whatever. Jokes on her cuz I basically had that label for everyone except me and her my entire child and teenage life.
In my experience, even with a diagnosis you don’t stop feeling broken.
That really sucks dude. Nobody should feel like that.
It’s not helped me that much either, but it has at least given me a level of understanding, and a route to direct self compassion down. It’s a really slow process, and it’s not linear or steady, but it is something.
Rafiki whacks you on the head with his staff.
Go talk to a therapist!
I do that too!
True, but it helps.
I’ll probably never stop feeling irrationally guilty at times when my ADHD and/or my anxiety hinders me from getting stuff done, but being able to remind myself and explain to others makes it easier to carry it and not let myself descend into a guilt spiral that hinders me even further and for longer.
It helps once you have the emotional maturity and skills to contextualize your own dysfunctions and divergences as such. Even with a diagnosis on the early side, everything I do wrong or fail to execute on is inherently still, and always will be, my fault.
Sure, emotional maturity is a big part of it as well, but with no knowledge about the causes for your more vexing hurdles and limitations, you can be endlessly mature and STILL not know how to tell laziness or apathy from executive dysfunction 🤷🏻
A diagnosis is just a generalization of the “symptoms”. And the “cures” for the symptoms are almost always drugs and almost never address the actual problems - family, society, etc.
The idea that society is the problem could be true from the point of view of an ND person, but I don’t feel it’s the whole picture. I think there is a more helpful way to frame it.
ND naturally think and act in ways that are different from NT people, and may need different things, just as NT have needs and ways of thinking and acting that are natural to them.
So a better way to understanding the problem might be as miscommunication and lack of understanding. Sometimes the problem is ignorance and lack of empathy. This can happen on both sides.
A diagnosis gave me language and understanding to identify ways I’m different from other people, and helped me understand and communicate these differences.
personal mitigation is a lot easier than changing family/society/&c. i get why people medicate.
audhd. still dealing with those “I’m stupid, a failure” every day because of that.
existing really messes you up
I was diagnosed with Autism at the ripe old age of 33. When I told my parents about it, my mum lost her mind because I was actually diagnosed at 7, she just never told me in hopes I will be “normal” and thought she got away with it.
Fuck!
😳 she lost her mind?!
Or in the sense of guilt?
I can only imagine the anger that would trigger in Me learning that like you did.My parents just don’t understand it… (while dealing themselves with it thinking it is how everyone is)
They learned to live with it in a healthy way, without knowing or acknowledging it…
I only found out when getting my own son diagnosed and realizing I ticked every single one of his boxes as well. Explained a lot about my youth. And yeah, feeling like you’re some sort of alien who will never belong is unfortunately part of it.
