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  • (at least as far as the ADHD parts...)

    The answer to the question of treatment is

    Yes.

    Nobody deserves to suffer like that without help.

    You don't have to let this shit ruin your life and steal opportunities from you. You CAN feel better than this, DO better than this, BECOME better than you thought yourself capable of being, with a competently administered treatment plan. And you aren't the only one who will benefit from it.

    Being able to casually remember commitments and promises and personal details of people you care about, and actually sense the passage and "distance" of time; being able to STOP doing something you don't even want to be doing right now and START doing something you WANT to get done; being able to more quickly and decisively make choices without becoming staggered by the multitude of options--all of these will make you a more helpful, more thoughtful, more beneficial, and overall better presence in the lives of every single person you care about.

    You don't have to languish in helpless, hapless, hopeless DESPAIR unable to trust yourself to follow up and follow through while gaslighting yourself about being a useless burden on the lives of everyone you care about like I did for DECADES. Please. PLEASE DON'T MAKE MY MISTAKE.

    This is NOT a thing in which the myth of bootstrappy rugged individualism will bear any fruit.

    I can tell you from personal experience that there is NOTHING to be gained from neglecting yourself.

    Seek treatment.

    • This! I was diagnosed as a child but only started getting treatment a month ago, it's incredible. I feel like I spent my whole life with the target lock on, bouncing from one focus to the next, and now I can choose when to lock on and when to free look.

      I will say that in the US treatment has been made more difficult due to fail first treatment policies enforced by insurance companies. They will only give you effective medicine after you first try a non-stimulant with low efficacy and lots of side effects.

      If I could do it again with what I know now I would have just thrown away the guanfacine and told them it gave me the side effects with none of the benefits. It's a norepinephrine agonist, it does the opposite of the highly effective ADHD medication, and it was mostly only tested on children who had negative reactions to stimulants. If you have low norepinephrine to begin with (which many people with ADHD do) the effects are agonizing.

      • I'm one of the lucky few for whom a non-stimulant works.

        Strattera paired with a low dose of Wellbutrin because my psychiatrist knows there's risk of interaction if I take too much Wellbutrin.

        It's incredible having agency again, agency that doesn't fade every few hours because ritalin would wear off and I forget to take the next dose because it wore off.

        Also stimulants can make the body form a tolerance that subverts their effects eventually x_x but honestly I'm grateful to see ANYTHING working for ANYONE.

        The reason I didn't seek treatment for most of my life was because I didn't want to believe that ADHD was real. I wanted to believe it was nothing more than an imaginary first-world-problem "affluenza" that only afflicted people who were too fortunate to have REAL worries challenging their survival. I wanted to believe that I could just LEARN to 'be better'.

        HAHA NOPE, that shit wrecked me for the prime years of my life.

  • I was diagnosed with ASD around when I was fifty. Five-Oh. I'm still wending the administrative labyrinth to get appropriate support.

    As for ADHD, I only really noticed my executive dysfunction when playing Subnautica and Satisfactory, both of which feature periods where there are big lists of tasks I can engage in right now towards large goals, and my brain would freeze up.

    Folks and teachers and peers noticed I was a bit odd since I was six.

  • oh boy thats me. especially now that i have someone in my social circle who im pretty sure has an unkind opinion about me, i have all my social behaviors under a microscope (my own that is)

  • i actually overcame my ED enough to talk to a psychologist, only to learn that the criteria for diagnosis here includes "is not able to lead a(n outwardly) mostly normal life despite the symptoms". which means i'd have to go to a private practice to get anywhere.

  • I like to refer to myself as "peer reviewed" AuDHD. Every neurodivergent person I've talked to is like "yeah dude, we can tell." I had autistic people accepting me as autistic before I accepted me as autistic. XD

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