I’m shy, my brother who is many years older than me would tell his friends how I’d yap his head off. They couldn’t believe it cause I’d say almost nothing around them.
Yep “ADHD inattentive type” here. Chuck in Autism and dysgraphia and I was a quiet kid.
How does the dysgraphia affect you?
I have at least two concurrent trains of thought running simultaneously at all times; I don’t have the energy to be outwardly expressive.
I have a psychiatrist appointment coming up, and I am saving this to show him.
/raises hand
Literally me
What’s probably even more confusing is when the quiet turns loud suddenly because the topic has shifted to something interesting.
Women tend to exhibit inattentive ADHD more frequently than men. This is part of why boys are 16x more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD. It’s because women and girls don’t fit the traditional media representation of what ADHD looks like, and more parents become oblivious to the fact that their child needs help.
yes that sounds like inattentive type adhd, its the spacey daydreamy type, and fun fact, as its less disruptive its less likely to be diagnosed and funner fact its much more common in girls which contributes to the
Gotta say I really appreciate you getting distracted by something more interesting halfway through
yeah I couldn’t figure out how to name the thing at the end of the sentence so i just gave up and trusted yall would get it
has “in this essay I will” energy, 11/10
This was me during my youth - quiet, polite and serene on the outside, white noise on the inside. Teachers couldn’t work out why I excelled at some things and failed totally at others, they thought I was smart but not applying myself to my work. It took me til my 30s to get a diagnosis.
“a pleasure to have in class, but needs to apply herself”
“Has a lot of potential” got used a lot
I got that a lot, along with “has poor impulse control”… Bitches, if you only knew what impulses I was controlling…
“He easily deserves a B but he could get an A if he applied himself. I’ll just give him a C so he tries harder”
- gets a D *
“It’s no use, I push him as far as I could”
My parents were told I had it but they chose to ignore it fearing what others would think of them. May they rot.
My senior year I had 104 in computer science, a 99 in physics and a 100 in typing. In algebra I had a 75 and 72 in English. Somehow my parents blamed the teachers. It never occurred to them that the math for algebra and physics overlaps a lot. It didn’t occur to my algebra teacher either.
Replace her with him and one of my school reports literally had that word for word lmfao.
Thanks for the flashbacks.
My partner got that on hers.
I got a mix of that and “a pleasure to have in class, but needs to work on not distracting others”
How I went 31 years with no raised eyebrows is funny to me, so many red flags attributed to being “quirky” or “eccentric”.
When I was a kid, it was just called ADD, attention deficit disorder. Then at some point they slipped the hyperactive in there, and it made everyone think that it’s just energetic kids. Then you got pushback in the media saying it’s just excusing people not wanting to discipline their kids. And that’s why I never even considered that I might have it until after I flunked out of college.
I’m still in awe of the sheer naivety of the profession deciding that including hyperactive in the title would lead to increased understanding and inclusion.
Same, 31 now and I think I have a mild version of the inattentive type. My wife opened my mind to it, I won’t go for a diagnosis but having resources to help me improve and deal better with it are great.
Why not go in for diagnosis/screening?
Not judging, just curious.I’m not sure it would change my life. It’s a mild version so I don’t need meds, just some tools to manage it. It would cost time and money, with very little payoff.
same except i was diagnosed with ADHD (which was recognized as a separate disorder from ADD at the time) around age 6 and my parents decided to pretend it wasn’t real for… 30 years and counting.
How often do you have a feeling that there’s too much information to convey right now, and speech/mouth feels like a bottleneck not capable of delivering all that needs to be said in their really specific details?
All the time. My thoughts also run way faster than I can speak, so I very often speak too fast and mumble, which makes it hard for people to understand me.
I usually shake head and make the best impression of Duffy Duck fucking a deflating balloon in order to restart speech function.
Now combine that with impatient people who don’t give other people enough time to process information or enough time to properly explain something.
That’s my whole family dynamic right there. Pure anxiety fuel :D
ADHD Cross Type Communication
yes.
So much yes
I’m energetic and extremely talkative when talking about the things I’m currently into. All other times I’m exactly this.
This is why my parents dismissed my childhood diagnosis of ADHD. My older brother has the hyperactive type, but I am more of the inattentive type.
The outside is calm, but the inside is a tornado of thoughts that doesn’t cease.
That definition always bothered me a lot… The hyperactivity is always there, but it’s either internalised, externalised and sometimes it’s both. It’s the intensity of it that can vary a lot from person to person.
That’s why they don’t use “types” anymore, they call them presentations. Any person with ADHD may present as more inattentive or more hyperactive depending on circumstances, and, like you said, some elements of both are always there.
“I have all this energy inside and I can’t use it how I want!!”
“I have all this energy outside and it’s using me how it wants!!”
Pretty much!
I’m the inattentive type. My youngest kid is the hyper type.
We clash soooo much. His body does what my mind does.
Pretty sure I have undiagnosed ADHD. I tried to get an evaluation on the recommendation of my therapist once and all they did was offer me meds directly.
I can totally relate to the quiet variant, I’m very nonverbal and always lost in thought. But when it comes time to speak I usually only have a couple words to say. I’m only ever talkative through text when I have time to organize thoughts.
Are you in the US? And if so did your therapist offer to give you a screener? It’s a self-evaluation that you can do, then you try meds and if the meds are effective you probably have ADHD. I wasn’t given any kind of initial evaluation beyond that. And also there are three main presentations of ADHD - inattentive (lost in thought), hyperactive-impulsive (what the media focused on), and combined. Each individual’s presentation will be unique though.
I am in the US and my therapist didn’t offer any screening but gave a referral, which basically amounted to a doctor coming in and asking why I thought I had ADHD (to which I answered several reasons including scattered thoughts) to which the response was: “you think you have ADHD because you’re forgetful?” And that tbh made me feel pretty defeated. They offered a prescription and I said no and that was that :/
I have actually had medication once without any medical guidance when I was a kid in middle school (maybe 7 or 8 years prior to therapy when I found a loose concerta pill) and I did all my homework that day. I remember being blown away by how I was able to focus, and the problems seemed so much more satisfying to do. Medication probably would help me a lot but I was raised by psychiatrist parents who distrust psychiatric medication and kind of brainwashed us to not get any diagnoses or medication so it’s kind of hard to get over the fear that they’ve instilled in us even though I’ve already tried it and nothing bad happened. I definitely resent them for that
https://add.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/adhd-questionnaire-ASRS111.pdf ask if a LCSW (most licensed therapists) or really any mental health provider will proctor this for you. Don’t read it before they give it to you or it will skew your answers. This is what I was given before being offered medicine. Then when I responded well to the medication my psychiatrist was like “yeah you probably have ADHD. lets see how you do on the meds”. Good luck.
Your parents sound like shitty psychiatrists.
Yeah they are. My dad is more of a “everyone else can use the medicine I prescribe but our kids have to stay pure because we don’t have those kinds of problems and if we did taking medicine is a cop out” kinda person and my mom is only a neurologist but would talk to patients about herbal medicine, acupuncture, and how they shouldn’t get vaccines. Thank god they’re both retired and I don’t have to hear their whining about hospital policy and the continuing education requirements they should have taken more seriously.
Something to understand about ADHD is that it’s very much a “physical” issue. It’s a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts the signal pathways between your pre-frontal cortex (the brain’s filter) and the amygdala (fight, flight, freeze). Some people’s brains can sort of re-wire over time and you’ll develop coping mechanisms, but I’m 39 and mine sure didn’t. The stimulant medications stimulate various neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine which helps those malformed neural pathways function more effectively. It also tends to help with anxiety which often goes hand in hand with ADHD. Do yourself a little favor and read this article from Cleveland Clinic, they’ve been recommended to me by several health providers as a reputable source. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/4784-attention-deficithyperactivity-disorder-adhd
I spent 2k on a test for my daughter and they just simply said “nope, she’s fine. But she might need some counseling on how to get work done more efficiently.” I’m old school ADD diagnosed and I can absolutely tell she has it.
Damn, that sucks. Yeah it was called ADD when I was diagnosed as well. It’s all just ADHD now, but there are different presentations as I mentioned above. Also you can have ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder together now, which wasn’t in the DSM prior to like 2014.