I think I need to put the relevant section in the workshop to see how it rings there: And here it is.
I don't think it was ever PART of the spectrum, although it is somewhat similar and can relatively frequently occur alongside such similar conditions. I have some level of both ADHD and the Autism Spectrum for example. But they're not the same.
It's not. I know you meant absolutely no harm, and there's nothing wrong with having either, but please spend a minute on wikipedia before you say things like that. No. Again, wikipedia. This is how these things stay confused and stigmatized. See, this is actually something that happens. My cousin's kid has a similar diagnosis, identical, if I'm remembering correctly. It makes some sense to see overlap, because there's commonality. Lack of impulse control, for instance. People confusing these conditions doesn't help anyone though. How is it that thirty-plus years after Ritalin became a staple in school nurses' offices around the world, I still see constant misinformation about ADD? My seven-year-old nephew is as of yet undiagnosed, but it's unmistakable. It's already causing him problems, but his parents don't want it to be true, because they think that means there's something wrong with him. My kid shows a lot of signs at age four and has for a while, so I'm trying to raise him with coping mechanisms in place from the start. Either way, I fear they'll both face the same crap I did in the nineties because people still don't understand, and too many teachers don't want to accommodate it without legal intervention under ADA. It makes me very unhappy to think of the things my sweet, happy, brilliant son might go through. I was happy too when I was little.
I've read well beyond wikipedia, but it does appear that what I'm remembering is closer to a quote I just found on understood.org: "...some experts think there may be a similar underlying basis for autism and ADHD." And things like this" https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/shared-genetic-pathways-underlie-autism-attention-deficit/ Which I realize is not the same thing. I'm unclear on why either one would cause a child to be deprived of ADA accommodations. However, I'm sure that most people would be unclear on why cataloguing hoarding disorder under OCD (finally corrected) was not just incorrect but harmful, so I'm going to take your word for it.
They wouldn't. What I was saying there was that it's ridiculous that so many schools and teachers won't make simple, reasonable accommodations for a kid without being forced to by a law like ADA. A kid who learns easily, but has immense trouble staying on task for long periods of time when they're bored with material they understood from the first example, for instance, has to be declared disabled before he or she is treated in ways that are more conducive to their success. I don't like that. Yeah, you get it. There are still leftover mis-categorizations and misnomers all over the DSM, and worse out there in internet hearsay land. Borderline Personality Disorder was originally named for the misconception that it was borderline schizophrenia. They now understand the two have little in common, but it still hasn't been renamed. Things like that are counterproductive to understanding.
As someone diagnosed with ADD, here are a couple pennies for you. I was considered a clever and often time brilliant kid (I don't know how much of that description is objectively true, but I can say I was very retentive of information and could recall it on command & often verbatim but that doesn't equate with intelligence per se) but I was the sort of student who was either straight A's/Dean's List or failing spectacularly—all the way up through university. Often teachers were exasperated with me because I knew things and understood things but then instead of focusing in the direction I was supposed to, I'd get sidetracked by my own branches of inquiries and not complete the assignment or do something wrong or outside the bounds. I remember at uni when I was supposed to write a paper properly applying and expounding on the Greek vocabulary (it was a course on Homer, Plato, etc.) but started recognising some of the words I thought I recalled used in the New Testament which then made me read passages of the Judeo-Christian scriptures first (epistles I think?) in Greek and work out interpretations and then was interested to see what the Hebrew "equivalent" was in the OT and researched what those words and their etymologies actually meant for a comparison and then started looking into the definitions and etymologies of the English translations and Well, I forgot to write the paper. But boy did I post a whole bunch of weird extrapolations and ponderings on Facebook. (This sort of thing was the reason I was forced to take medication my senior year of high school—although no one liked me on medication so I stopped it immediately upon graduating.) Anyway, that's sort of how my mind kinda goes off in weird tangents and explorations, where my focus strays to other avenues that fascinate me. I also worked on my family's ranch for 13~15 years and in some ways you'd think the monotony would've broken someone like me, but actually I found I could have a lot more creative thought when I could mindlessly perform primarily physical tasks with a peripheral, drifting attention to the necessary particulars. The thing is I was free to LET my mind wander over every hill & dale and through every valley of ideas: replay films or television in my head, perform fictitious conversations or come up with better arguments for my positions in previous conversations, compose stories and how they play out in my head, wonder if my fascination with language will ever lead me to be fluent in anything more than one, et cetera. Anyway, I don't (and never actually did) think that my ADD is a problem or something to necessarily cope with. I'm sort of just me, and I'm well suited for certain things and ill suited for others. Like which classes I got A's in always had a different grading formula or work expectation than those that I flunked. Like if the bulk of the grade focussed on in-class inpromptu essays, participation, and tests, I was a rockstar. If it was outside homework and giant papers that required a lot of focus and time, I was prone to distraction and consequent failure. My current job seems to be leaning into these "strengths" as they put me in charge of Training & Education and are more and more assigning me research assignments. Because I love learning things and will often go off in many tangential avenues that can prove beneficial or at the very least thorough. But I'm actually okay with menial tasks & administrative work too—because I can have my mind elsewhere while I perform. But I wasn't hyperactive (I mean, I could be hyper but personalitiwise. I wasn't and am not restless.) My brother very quickly stopped working on the ranch cause he was the kid that read for didteen minutes then had to jump on the trampoline for fifteen, ten minutes of writing essay, play basketball for half an hour, et cetera. I don't think he could ever survive in a warehouse type job. Sorry for just ranting about myself, but I mostly only have personal experience to go on as ironically I don't know much about the disorder broadly. I remember reading up on it a few years ago me acting surprised that so many things were true about me. Partly because I subconsciously forget I was diagnosed and partly because I always privately held that I was somehow high functioning or some such nonsense.
This fits in very well with how I see my MC. Since he was never diagnosed, I'm taking the word "ADD" out of the text and just leaving in some hints, but I'm glad to see that the whole "menial labor while the mind roams free" is something that works for someone else as well (I worked in a plastics factory for a while, doing a job that repeated every 32 seconds. I could do it in 27 seconds, which meant that I got almost ten seconds of break time every minute.)
Yep. I worked in the engineering library for work study in school, and I fairly quickly got to the point where I could shelve books with absolutely no conscious attention whatsoever, and then I was fine. The nightmare is tasks that are (1) boring and (2) require conscious attention. So I may be wrong with the idea that this character wouldn't keep a boring job that long.
If you are thinking about ADD, ADHD, OCD, AS, HFA... you must step out of your normal understanding. We have a tendency to something. And we have some kind of environment. And we have interaction between tendency and environment. I'm active & odd type Aspie with some level of ADHD -traits. And... - If I'm in shallow environment that stresses superficial dimensions it is very difficult and I can't cope well. ("Identities over essence".) If I find opposite environment I'm like a fish in a pond. - If you put me in the middle of noisy place with lots of stimulus, I get an overload of everything very soon. But if you put me next to the wall it's much easier. It's not "stimulus everywhere" but "stimulus there but not there". - It is very hard to me to talk with you if you snap a pen at the same time. Every snap cuts my thinking and I have to think it again. It is frustrating. Put the pen away and all is good. - Strong cosmetic smells... no way! Same environment and same people but no overuse of perfume... fine. - Put me somewhere where people mean what they say and say what they mean. I'm fine. But where ever people speak something and mean something else... We'll get a bloody war quite soon. (So: don't ask me how I am doing if you don't want to get 15 minutes long report. And don't insult me by praising me if you don't really, really mean it and have a good reason for it.) These are Aspie examples but I suppose you get my point. We neuro-atypicals are not the same in different environments and circumstances. Nothing is about some trait. Everything is about interaction between traits and environment. And stress level is very important part of it. (I'm in the middle of extreme stress. I can manage 4% of the workload I can manage in high stress situation. And the quality is lower. It looks like this will go on 2-3 months. If this extreme stress does not kill me, I'll probably get soon to 10-30% and in February - April to the range of 80 - 200% of usual.) There are techniques we can use - if we know them. (Very few do.) Some main categories: - We can regulate our lives and via that stimulus and our skills. - We can regulate a bit how we react to stimulus. - We can help others to avoid misinterpreting us by giving information. - We can learn knowledge and skills that help us. Main fields where such techniques are helpful: - Managing ordinary every day life. - Managing social interaction. - Managing identity work. (Often not easy for autistic persons.) "How to avoid things, persons and social or other environments that put you to underperforming mode" is very important part of our life. If we get out of that mode, we might forward fast, really fast.
Did you just assume my spectrums smoothness? Some of us are smooth. All of us are smooth sometimes. Smoothness does not rule us out. But this does. Almous all of us are pathologically honest compared to NT:s. Google: Autism honesty or Asperger honesty.
You are right. But... 1. Food might matter. Natrium glutamate, convenience food... Those might skyrocket your traits. 2. Stress level might matter. A lot. 3. You learn to organise you mundane life. 4. You learn what kind of social environment is good for you - or not. 5. You lear about yourself - and how to use that information. 6. You learn to avoid things and targets that you can't cope. 7. Your hormonal balance changes. It changes you. 8. Character growth of your personality. Even very simple rules might help you a lot. "Don't eat cheap salami! Ever! At all!" "Situate yourself so that all the noice and people are on the same direction and not around you." "Take care about sleeping enough." "Learn to do only one thing at a time and not to think about next before you have finished the previous one." We can change things that matter and some of us do - even a lot.
No it is not. But about 70% of Aspies are also ADD or ADHD. Often it is not important to get "smaller" diagnoses like ADHD even if we have them.
This is true of ADD too. Environment plays a role. Oddly though, a lot of us have an easier time concentrating in a chaotic environment, e.g. a loud factory, a messy office, etc. I used to go to this noisy bar/arcade to write. There was music and video games and skiball and slot machine alarms. It would have driven so many people crazy, but it was wonderful for me. I'm kind of an extreme case in that respect, but for many of us, the worst possible work environment would be a clean desk in a quiet room with no windows or decor. I need my attention split to really concentrate. Some of us, and this might make for a fun character trait for a con artist, learn to fidgit in small ways that won't distract or annoy the people we're talking to, like flipping a guitar pick or something similar over and over between two fingers and a thumb. Smaller distractions seem to occupy the part of the mind that might otherwise high jack the whole brain and take it on some wild internal adventure while we're supposed to be listening. I'm constantly moving, but in ways people won't necessarily notice. Even I don't realize I'm doing it half the time. A grifter, on the other hand, might actually want them to notice the guitar pick so as to add to the misdirection a bit. Another big similarity here, the sleep and stress factors. When sleep deprived or emotionally stressed, I have trouble finishing a [SQUIRREL!] sentence without losing my train of... uh... See, I've learned that this one doesn't work for me personally. I'm sure it does for a lot of people with ADD. It must, because it's always the first advice I get from anyone who thinks they're somehow going to teach me something no one else thought to mention in almost four decades.
I guess I need to start watching this show. It keeps coming up. She was spot on too. Most of us develop these coping mechanisms after pissing people off or hurting their feelings. It turns out, people think you're not listening if you start mouthing the words to a Beck song in the middle of their sentence. I heard you, but I was also thinking about two turn tables and a microphone.
