Nictos wrote:http://higherperspective.com/2014/10/adhd-not-real-disease.html#rPzl9cBuFZIWl5Hg.01
I was scrolling through my facebook today and saw that a friend was claiming that ADD is fake because of this article. I decided to write an informative post against the claim.
Text wall! But it's okay, I used a TL;DR.
While I do believe that ADD and ADHD are a real disease, I also understand where this guy is coming from. ADD was a fad diagnosis when I was in High School, much like Asberger's became a fad diagnoses more recently, where some people actually have it, but most of the others are just assholes.
I was diagnosed with ADD around 9th grade and made to take Ritalin for it until just after I turned 18 when I was able to wean myself back off it much to my parents' protest. I don't think I ever had ADD though I fit many of the symptoms; taking the drugs did not improve my quality of life in any way, shape, or form. It improved my parents' quality of life because not only did I seem to get the 'drowsiness' side effect most days, but the Ritalin tended to wear off by the evening leaving me tired and docile after school so not at all as difficult to deal with as I had been becoming so this is great, right? Because when teenagers are being difficult, there's obviously something wrong. :/
I had two problems and was misdiagnosed. First, I have a real problem which is a sound processing problem that causes my brain to not filter out background noises very well and so I get distracted by sounds normal people don't even notice and which also causes me to have some difficulty processing spoken word so that I often have to ask people to repeat themselves.
The second problem wasn't really a problem, just that school was too easy for me. In Kindergarten, I ended up at the lost cause reading table because I already knew what they were teaching and couldn't be bothered to pay attention for more than 5 seconds. In first grade I got in big trouble for scraping all the varnish off my desk because I thought it was glue and even cleaning glue off a table was more interesting than the teacher. In third grade, my teacher sent me home with a very concerned note that I might have epilepsy because I did nothing but stare at the window all day. In forth grade my teacher kept me in at recess every single day of the entire year because I didn't pay rapt attention to her. But through all this my grades were fine. This was followed by a gang scare where my mother decided I should be home schooled for the next three years. I spent like 2 hours a day on schoolwork and got straight A's.
After I finally stopped taking the stuff, I had a bad time for a couple months but then I found myself improving markedly into what I felt was a more normal mental state. I also started thinking for myself a lot more instead of just doing what my parents wanted because I couldn't muster the energy to object. And I don't think I'm deluding myself either; my parents forced me to see a psychologist when they decided they didn't like my attitude and I was declared perfectly normal.
So, clearly my lack of attention in school and increasing independence from my very conservative parents should not have been diagnosed as an illness, and yet it was. Tons of kids were being diagnosed with this left and right and I'm sure many of them were like me.
I think the reason ADD continues to be one of those things Psychiatrists like to tell people they have is just because it's so easy to believe. The world is a lot more complex than it used to be and it's much more full of mental chores than it used to be, it's no wonder people, especially kids, have trouble concentrating. Up until the last few hundred years, being able to zip from subject to subject was great for survival. Walking through the forest? Think about tracking animals, think about edible plants, think about animals hunting you, think about your friend a few yards away and what he's doing, BE distracted by every little sound and change in the environment because it might mean there's a delicious red deer or dangerous cave lion behind that bush. And what about farming? For the last few thousand years, until less than 100 year ago, it was one of the most common professions in the world. Physically, very demanding, but when you're plowing a field your mind can wander all over the place as long as your furrow remains straight. Same with shepherding animals and a lot of other physical jobs that are a lot less common now than they used to be. The world has shifted into a format that most of us can deal with pretty well, but it's not entirely natural. It really shouldn't be surprising at all that some people have more trouble adapting their brains to the particular types and levels of concentration the world currently demands of us.
TL;DR: I think ADD and ADHD are real, but much more rare than diagnoses of them are. Doctors diagnose it for whatever reason because they themselves are misinformed, because it's easier to just let the patient have the medicine, because it's more lucrative, whatever. But these people aren't sick, they just have a little trouble adapting to a world that is much changed from what we have dealt with through most of our species' existence, or they are children whose parents don't want to deal with them in a natural state. So, you take a sample of people who supposedly have ADD, you're going to find a good number of them, maybe all of them, are really fine, which makes it seem safe to assume the disease doesn't exist at all.
You might know the state you want your mind to be in, but it takes a coder to get it there more easily.