The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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If it helps, every non-alty I've ever met who has an autistic child has had that child misdiagnosed as ADHD. It's one of several reasons I continue to believe childhood ADHD diagnoses should be prohibited by law(you can just have a kid who gets bad grades and grows up to work in a warehouse. Sometimes thems the breaks.). Several of them had their eventual autism diagnoses made on the basis of 'duh. Did the doctor who made the diagnosis actually meet the kid?'
The Onion: American Psychiatric Association Adds ‘Obsessive Categorization Of Mental Conditions’ To ‘DSM-5’
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Uh.. Just because autism in children gets confused with childhood ADHD doesn't mean that the latter doesn't exist or isn't worth diagnosing.* There is still such a thing as hyperactivity or inattention beyond the "normal" range that responds well to medication, and waiting till adulthood for a diagnosis means that a lot of social/academic damage is unnecessarily allowed to happen. Being dumb is not the same as having ADHD, even if dumb people tend to be impulsive and lack focus. It is also possible to be smart and lack focus, I say, looking at no one in particular.
(This isn't the same kind of argument as for puberty blockers, in case someone leaps to pattern matching. Stimulants are rather safe drugs, the only minor downside might be slightly reduced growth rates.)
Most people diagnosed in adulthood have had the condition since childhood. It's not like schizophrenia where it can just "turn up" after you're 18. I know that's the case for me, and I'd have been way better off if someone had noticed when I was a child and put me before a shrink.
*ADHD and autism can coexist.
Be that as it may, doctors are not responsible enough to diagnose adhd in children, sorry. Maybe theres perfectly legible capitalist explanations that don’t apply in the nhs. Sure, willing to believe that. But in the USA, almost literally every child with some other developmental disorder was first diagnosed with adhd, and it just isn’t an emergency to have someone grow up to work in a warehouse instead of a hedge fund. We produce too many elites anyways. If your kid cant do school without accommodations maybe they just deserve bad grades?
While I do agree that ADHD in children is probably over diagnosed, it's worse in adults because of people motivated by the diagnosis.
This also applies to children to some extent - parents looking for an easy answer, medications, etc.
They can then shop around until they get the answer they want.
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I request citations.
An ADHD diagnosis is, in fact, significantly lower here, and much harder to get. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, that's because the NHS is operating far beyond capacity and it can take up to 10 years to even go from a referral to seeing a specialist for assessment. That's the worst case I've heard of, though 4-5 years is typical for schoolchildren. Not quite ideal either way.
I would rather my kids don't work in a warehouse instead of a better job, as would most people, and probably you. It's a false dichotomy anyway, there is no medication on Earth that would take someone from being only suitable for warehouse labor to being a quant, sadly.
That is more of an argument for cracking down on stupid and endless expansion of special accommodations.
Hell, I've never asked for special treatment because of my ADHD, even when it was specifically offered (they even suggested my own office, an impossible miracle in the NHS at my level). I expect that my medication makes me competitive with my peers, including in academics, and I don't want handholding in the process. My problems can be solved for <$100 a month, were I paying for the meds myself. I am all for exams being a level playing field and and a test of competence within certain constraints. If someone is genuinely worse at their job because of a disability, that sucks, but there's only so much society can do, or that I think it should do.
Besides, I disagree with this whole line of reasoning. Too much congestion on the highway? Clearly we have an over production of cars, and we should stop mechanics from using wrenches or people from changing their motor oil. There are far better ways of solving the problems of elite overproduction, should it need solving.
ADHD is real, in the sense that it is a useful term for a problem that exists in a spectra. So does blood pressure. Treating both does real good even if there's no firm line in the sand between 5th and 6th percentile levels of conscientiousness, or between 140/90 and 141/90 average BP readings.
Aren't the stimulants used to treat it at least moderately effective in non-diagnosed individuals at improving concentration and attentiveness? I have at least heard anecdotes of college kids using those off-label for performance reasons (studying). I assume the accomodations (extra time on tests) are moderately too.
Do you have any thoughts on where we draw the moral line for "you get to use these, you over here don't"? To use an analogy, if we had drugs that made kids grow taller, I don't see a problem with at least making them available to, say, ones predicted to end up under 5 feet, but there would be a huge moral hazard of 6'5" kids whose parents claim they're still "short" because they really want them to play in the NBA. I don't have an answer here, either.
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