No ADHD?

Via Vox Day:

A doctor with more than 50 years of medical practice asserts that ADHD is an umbrella of symptoms, not a disease in itself. And he also declares that the treatment can be considerably worse than many of the underlying causes.

They're on the right track here. It seems clear that something is wrong around the prevalence of ADD and ADHD. Arguments have been made that the diagnosis is medicalizing boy behavior in an increasingly femininized world. Day's source has an example in which the misbehavior was due to a nutritional deficit.

Day himself has this theory:

One boy with a supposed case of it was magically cured and never had any trouble controlling his behavior around me after I picked him up by the throat and told him that if he ever kicked me again, I'd rip his balls off and feed them to him.

All of these focus on acting-out behavior--kids who don't follow directions and are disruptive. That's certainly a sign of ADD but it doesn't mean that the child has ADD.

I'm a typical Internet ADD patient--self-diagnosed, so I don't offer myself as an expert or Certified Victim, but here's my perspective:

I think we'd all be better off thinking of ADD as an alternative cognitive strategy. That is, the minds of people with ADD work slightly differently than those without it. It's similar to how some people learn visually while others learn kinesthetically, etc.

Adam Dachis wrote a piece for Lifehacker in which he shares what he thinks are ADD-friendly tips for being a good listener. In fact, he's explaining ADD coping mechanisms.

When you can't pay attention like everyone else, you wind up getting bits and pieces of sentences. Fortunately, most people follow similar speech patterns and say a lot of the same things. The more you get to know someone, the more you can easily fill in the blanks and guess what they've said.

Most of the time I hear the beginning of a sentence, but things start to break up from there. For example: 

So did you want to ____ Mexican _____ _______ _______, or ___ ___ _____ __ ________ ___ __________ new for once? 

I blanked out most of that sentence, but kept in the parts that are easy to hear even if you can't pay attention for five seconds. Generally speaking, I'll hear the first part of the sentence, anything coming after a pause (e.g. or/and), and a few words at the end. There isn't much information, but I bet you can tell from tiny pieces what's happening in this example.

Dachis tells us to use context clues and our knowledge of the other person to figure out what is said. The thing is, most of us have been doing that our whole lives.

ADD isn't necessarily having a short attention span; in fact, "hyperfocus" is one of the symptoms. ADD is more a low tolerance for old information. Too many space-filler phrases in a conversation and one starts looking at the person's nostril hair or thinking about something that's actually interesting. ADD is about uncontrollable attention, not lack of it.

That's why I always say that ADD means that sometimes you have to take the long way. For example, I've tried to read the Monarch Mind Control book I'm outlining many times before. Each time, I've gotten bogged down in the long block paragraphs detailing brain chemicals and secret airstrip locations. But by breaking it down into chapters, skimming it then reading it to make notes then going over it again to write about it, I've been able to get a handle on the information. The issue hasn't been that I'm uninterested in the subject but that the format is at odds with my cognitive strategies. The block text in particular is a real obstacle; the sight of it puts my brain into first gear.

The reason why I have no compunction about announcing my self-diagnosis is that being certified by a doctor is irrelevant to me. Not because I'm so sure I'm right but because my life and productivity improved once I started thinking that I had it. I adopted ADD-centered approaches to what I wanted to accomplish, knowing that I had a tendency to get bored and find something else more immediately exciting. I learned how to manage distraction and how to break down tasks, among other things. It allowed me to think, "Oh, this is my problem and it will always be a problem. I'd better figure out a workaround." Thinking of myself as someone with ADD--and thus someone who has to make adjustments for the way my mind works--has improved my life greatly.

The lesser reason why I don't mind saying "self-diagnosed," like the proverbial basement-dweller is that I did attempt to see a doctor about it.

I called a local psychiatrist who specialized in ADD. I had no insurance and wanted to get an idea of how much I'd be spending to get the Official Stamp. The doctor asked me, "What makes you think you have ADD?"

I answered, "Well, I've had eight jobs in the past two years and it took me nine years to get my bachelor's degree."

"Yeah, maybe you'd better come in."

And, of course, I didn't go. I just never got around to it.