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My 95 year old grandmother realized she was neurodivergent last month while I was talking about mine and my siblings’ audhd symptoms.
Can I bring up, on the other hand, too many people now take their diagnosis as a reason to be assholes and not improve themselves. You gotta live in the world that exists, not the one you wish for. Shit is hard. I have a middle aged cousin with severe, untreated autism and he had to learn to live alone, get a job, pay rent, etc. Many parents now get their child’s diagnosis and stop trying to make the kids succeed
This is largely what I see as well. People who under any definition would largely fit under the umbrella of “normal” but got a diagnosis of autism, adhd, bipolar, etc. and use it as an excuse to shirk basic responsibilities. And I think this further stigmatizes the problem for people further down the tails of the spectrum who really do need assistance. In some of these mild cases its even been a parent who pushed for the diagnosis when the child was young simply to get them medicated and become less of a hassle. I often think especially with fuzzy definitions like an arbitrary point on a spectrum of behavior of normal on one side and pathological on the other ends up being interpreted universally wrongly for whatever purpose best suits the patient. Largely the same vibe as conversations about xenogender and stuff, labels can have negative utility. It also starts to set some really horrific logic in place for normalizing the use of mood stabilizers/adderall which is an implicit acceptance that the world is immutable and we must change to meet its needs rather than pushing against the ever encroaching walls the rich are erecting around us. I actually do expect people to suffer alongside me striving for a better future… and if you medicate yourself into a complacent coma, whether it be through weed/alcohol/adderall, I will hold it against you. But I also acknowledge that the root cause is a system we’ve created that is so hostile to humanity it requires medication to simply exist.
I agree with what you’re saying, though It can be difficult to tell from the outside how much help a person needs. I ‘act’ normal and feel like I have to pretend to be someone else, most people would probably assume I’m ‘normal’, this can make things complicated for friends and family that don’t see the level of internal struggle. Especially when my brain tells me I must not be seen as abnormal, I must do everything I can to maintain the image of being normal.
That’s part of what I was trying to get at with the second half of my comment. Forcing yourself to appear normal masks reality, pushes the definition of normal further towards homogeneity, reinforces the need for everyone to be medicated to accept reality. But I also think there is a problem with your definition of normal: literally everyone, even the genuinely happiest person alive, is filled to the brim with fear/uncertainty/doubt–that is literally life and its a choice to be happy and make positive connection with people in spite of the nihilism underneath existence. That isn’t something to medicate away, in some philosophical interpretations its the entire point of life. It’s a lifelong project to learn how to deal with these feelings, they tell us when there’s a problem that we need to spend energy to fix, they should be embraced. But I also recognize that the way things “ought” to be is not the same as what’s required to achieve that end result. If you need to medicate in order to help bring about a better future where you wouldn’t need medication… so be it.
Some people are always going to need medication though. That’s what having an executive function disorder means. Would you refuse a person with a broken arm to have medical treatment and pain killers because it’s natural to die from sepsis?
We didn’t used to have left handed people either — we just had right handed people with really shitty handwriting…
I’m right handed and still have really shitty handwriting.
I’m 52 now… Probably about 10 or 15 so, I meet my kindergarten teacher (relatively small community) and she told me that she was among the first teachers that allowed children to be left handed.
Definitely have shitty left handed writing and ADHD!
Woah, I’ve never thought of this and want to see this. Anyone who’s left handed but forced to write with their right, who want to write the same sentence twice with either hand and attach a pic?
So I was supposed to be all lefty but my hand got fucked up as a baby with an infection so in the formative months I had to do stuff right handed.
So everything that’s foot based I do left, or goofy foot where appropriate, and hand stuff is all right handed.
My left hand is fine now and I can throw better with my left hand than most right handed people can tho so that’s nice.
Left hand writing is still shit tho
That’s so interesting! Thanks for sharing
They had all of it, they just lumped it all in with Down Syndrome and colloquially referred to any neurodivergent people as retards.
And they beat the shit out of these “retards”, and at the suggestion of doctors/principals the parents sent them to military school/boarding school/catholic school/mental institutions where they got the shit beat out of them. All they learned was how to hide their condition and suffer in silence.
I’m not adhd nor a woman, but any time this comes up I mention this:
https://slowrevealgraphs.com/2021/11/08/rate-of-left-handedness-in-the-us-stigma-society/
But they had lots of alcoholics. Entirely coincidentally, of course.
They’re dead Janice. You killed them.
That’s true to an extent, but maybe there’s more to it than that. The older people I know seem to have more, well, I’m not sure how to put it… Willpower? My psychologist is an elderly woman and she says that if she decides she ought to do something, she just does it. What she feels doesn’t matter. My older relatives act like that too. Their ability to endure emotional (and physical) pain and keep going is remarkable.
That sounds an awful lot like emotional repression, and it’s not healthy. Those generations are not known for their impeccable mental health.
I also hope you realize your comment implies that people with ADHD and autism just need some willpower to feel better.
To some extent, the coping mechanisms we (the old people) had to figure out ourselves did work. Stuff got done. The cost? Depression, anxiety, all that good stuff.
Yes, most of us survived - but life would have been so much better (and more productive) if we could have gotten the right help at the right time.
So, yes: We made it, it SUCKED, let’s not make people go through this needlessly.
With ADHD it’s kind of technically true lmao, part of ADHD is a difficulty building the “willpower” to do basic daily tasks, at least in my experience. However what helps to build that is medication and/or therapy
My belief is that willpower isn’t something a person “just” needs - it’s one of most precious and hard to acquire things a person can have. It also doesn’t fix mental health problems, but it helps cope with them. I say that as someone who has just barely enough willpower to keep my own life from falling apart, even with medication and the help of my family. I don’t know how to get more of it so I’m not going to be dismissive of other people who also don’t have as much as they might want.
Let’s not forget the survivorship bias at play here. I don’t want to take this somewhere morbid, but the older people you know survived to make it to be old. There were people from their generation with undiagnosed issues that did not.
People are downvoting you, but I think you are on to something.
My parents and grandparents are/were quite similar to me, but never diagnosed. It wouldn’t surprise me if a few of them also have/had ADHD.
That said, without therapy or medication I noticed that they learned to just plough through. That was their coping strategy. It isn’t 100% successful, but it was what they had.
I also think the distractions of modern life don’t help. With smartphones, the internet, games and streaming services - there are just so many distractions that make life harder.
Perhaps “ploughing through” would work better without all the distractions.
They just drank and smoked instead, those are just different coping mechanisms after all.
My parents and grandparents neither smoked nor drunk. Only one grandparent was a light pipe smoker.
If that were true a lot of people weren’t struggling as much as they do.
I think you are right to an extent, but the philosophy isn’t healthy, though I don’t think you are wrong in pointing it out, you are just pointing to the cracks in the sidewalk. I think it’s more in line with the idea of being born without a finger or a hand. As you progress in life you adjust and learn to live with your disability. It’s the same for mental health, except that you can’t just point to your missing attention span and say, “it’s a disability.” People want proof, otherwise they think you are trying to take advantage (a problem that arose in the late 50s as a response to the Beat generation, and propagated by the government through Vietnam and onwards). The older generations have the same problems as us, but if they are old enough to be around to talk about it then they have learned to adapt. This is a dangerous way of thinking in the same way that it’s dangerous for a parent to tell a teen that life isn’t that difficult in high school. Sure, with more life experience it may be easier to cope, but that experience doesn’t mean fuck all to the teen dealing with bullying. Problems are problems, and ignoring your fellow human isn’t the cure, it’s just another disease. Be kind.
