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No longer seeking a diagnosis under the current administration. Me and my children will do our best to stay out of concentration camps. In the meantime we’ll manage as we have been.
My thoughts exactly. I’m undiagnosed, and with rfk running shit, it’s staying that way.
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.
I considered getting it officially confirmed for both, then RFK made his concentration camp comment.
100% same!
And also after Trump just the other day decided to unban insane asylums.
If it wasn’t the fascists doing it I would have welcomed having more mental healthcare facilities. But these are probably gonna be 1920s style hell holes instead.
100 years later - “oops we found a mass grave in the basement”
“How could this have happened without anyone knowing about it?”
Narrator: “Literally everyone knew about it.”
definately. the idea is poor to homeless to prisons/asylums and for the prisons/asylums to be profitable so just enough to keep you alive to keep up the payments from the state but no more than that.
Yes, but I used the term “insane asylum” specifically due to its history in the US. Trump spent a lot of his campaign ranting about “Hannibal Lector” after all.
I look at it like alcoholism. I have been functional in my life so im fine where I am at (to some degree but that is more about US societal issues around a functioning society).
(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.
Totally. At least Strattera is a reuptake inhibitor, so it’s moving in the same direction as a stimulant with less of the negatives. I do not recommend taking an agonist, I don’t know what my psychiatrist was thinking.
I’ve been trying methylphenidate and it’s really nice, it doesn’t have as much dependency or falloff risks as something like Adderall.
Maybe guanfacine is just particularly unhelpful.
I am in this photo and do not like it
Came here looking for this. Was not disappointed
I’m unsure if I am, so what does that mean?
Why you gotta call me out like this
Let’s say I do book an appointment, get the test(s), and it’s positive. Now what? Do I show it to my boss the get easier tasks? How much can/will an official diagnosis affect my life? (In Australia if it helps)
I can only speak from my experience (USA based), but:
You can get access to drugs you may or may not wish to use.
Any new life insurance plan’s premiums will go up as soon as you get prescribed those meds.
You will probably go through a period of post diagnosis regression as you reevaluate unhealthy coping mechanisms you’ve developed. Even if you think you already accept your brain for its difficulties and quirks.
You might spend a couple months being really annoying about your diagnosis as you figure out how to incorporate it into your identity. This lines up with a lot of the post diagnosis regression.
On the far side, you might end up redeveloping new coping strategies that are slightly less shame driven. But the demands of the world around you probably won’t flex around your new diagnosis.
TBH if you’re old enough to be on here you probably already know how to manage your environment and needs to live in the world, it’s just a question of if you can actually acknowledge you have special needs and if you’re capable of being kind to yourself while addressing them. And a diagnosis does help with quelling the anxiety around “do I actually have special needs or is everybody like this”
I got autism diagnosis as an adult mostly because of my long struggle with depression and physical health problems. Having the official diagnosis helps when interacting with health care; it is a confirmation that my needs differ from a neurotypical and they have to act accordingly. Now I can point to the diagnosis whenever needed, so they don’t for example try to force stuff on me that just won’t work (like group therapy).
From my experience: Only an ADHD diagnosis is useful, and only because the medications really do help.
For autistic children it’s sometimes worth diagnosis to get additional help in education.
I arrived at “it’s just another weird C-PTSD quirk” and leave it at that
…Or…all three :D
Please don’t ಥ‿ಥ
:D
I’m certainly all 3, and more, it’s been quite the ride.
That’s been me for a bunch of years. Ever wondering what was wrong with me (parents were not really keen on seeking a diagnosis for me even if the signs were evident) until one day I decided to go to a therapist and ask what the hell was going on in my head. It was autism, and it explained
SO
MANY
THINGS.
I feel resentful towards my parents because they never cared and I probably could have got an easier life knowing what was going on instead of trying to figure things out without any help.
Hah jokes on you im like 95% sure i have adhd just it came out really late so everyone thinks im lazy but thats my master plan because if ww3 breaks out the usa wont put me in a concentration camp for neurodivergents.
I’ve been there. Today officially I have the proof of not having adhd, which is great so I can focus on autism.
Seeking a ‘treatment’ (strictly speaking autism isn’t treated) is an on and off thought but over decades the effort of high masking hits so hard it’s unbearable.
Off to waiting a VERY LONG TIME in a fucking so called first world country for a critical diagnosis just because I’m atypical.
Edit: btw it gets worse… Not even getting appointments. Guess I’ll just just suffer then.
Its not. Dont let anyone put that diagnosis on your permanent file. There is no benefit to it and lots of downsides.
That’s basically where I’m at, though I did get the ADHD diagnosis and medication has been life changing.
Ok, some benefit if its bad enough you need medicine. But most people in OPs mental loop probably are not bad enough to need medicine and a diagnosis would just adversely affect them via insurance and employment.
Glad the medicine is helping you!
What’s difficult here is that I’ve done the meds, and I feel so much more productive and generally “better” and less in my head. However, I already do well at work and thus it’s hard to justify (literally what I was told by a psychiatrist the one time I went to talk about it)
What does “doing well” mean for you? Because I was technically keeping up and completing my tasks at work (no complaints from management, standard raises, generally well liked, etc) but it was a constant struggle and I’d been burnt out for like a year while only being 2 years into the job.
I had 0 motivation or energy to maintain my life outside of work, I’d just go home and play video games until I went to bed, usually an hour or 2 later than I should have. My living space was a disaster (it’s still a mess but I’ve slowly been improving it since meds started last year, I donated 4 garbage bags full of old clothes this weekend!) and I simply couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it because I was stuck figuring out how to start and massively overwhelmed by it.
Now, about a year on meds, I’m able to be more proactive instead of mostly reactive at work. I’m slowly reorganizing both my living space at home and my office ar work (there’s a lot to go through!). I’m getting into more creative hobbies again like 3d printing using my almost 3 years neglected printer (and designing my own models to print!) and some small electronics projects!
Basically, if everything is a struggle to get through, even if you’re technically doing what you need to be, your psych should be receptive to trying meds. If they’re not, finding someone else who will take your struggles and concerns seriously is probably a good idea!
Why?
Hey, that’s me! At more than 30yo I finally emailed a psychologist specialized in ADHD and autism to get a diagnostic. Still waiting for an appointment though
Good for you. Fingers crossed you’ll get some answers and help :)
Or you have neither but the school teachers insist on you being diagnosed, because you are a “troublemaker”, with multiple doctors giving back negative results.
Subsequently you remain asking yourself “or am i?” the rest of your life, as the boredom of school becomes the boredom of working an office job. Meanwhile the people you actually get along with well seem to all be somewhere on the respective spectrum.
Sprinkle in some imposter syndrome salt-bae-style.
But what if I am not good enough to have imposter syndrome?
