Is it normal that i have adhd?
I have ADHD(Attention Defisite Hyper Disorder)and I'm not sure if it's normal. Is it normal?
Voting Results
71% Normal
Based on 63 votes
(45 yes)
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Comments ( 33
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Darkoil
I'd guess that your American, In England you are only diagnosed with ADHD if you actually have it, in America every man and his dog is diagnosed with some form of mental disability.
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[Old Memory]
I personally believe that the vast majority of ADD related "diagnosis" are encouraged by drug companies. To the point where I actually wonder if they downright fabricated the "illness."
When I led a youth group several years ago, half of the boys in it were medicated. That experience led to my suspicion, and eventual cynicism, of Attention Deficit Disorders.
Many artistic, insightful, and intelligent children have trouble focusing on single, specific topics. I wonder how many creative minds have been smothered and quelched by Ritalin.Comment Hidden ( show )-
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NeuroNeptunian
I have studied this topic pretty well and yes, you are correct.
It was about in the '80s that marketing specialists in the Pharmaceutical industries decided that they wanted to "market medication to healthy people, make healthy people believe that they are sick" to boost sales.People don't realize just how many venues these companies have at their disposal to make people think that ADHD and said mental disorders are valid for many people. Media, advertising, psychiatrists, you name it, they have it at their disposal. What is considered socially normal is dictated by the sources they have at their disposal.
It's sad but true. Many modern Psychology experts are saying that in a decade or so, ADHD will be classified in the DSIM as a "trend illness", or an illness that was mass diagnosed in a fad-like manner.
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VioletTrees
How, though? In the US, at least, psychiatrists don't get rewards from pharmaceutical companies for prescribing medication (it's illegal). They don't get extra money from patients for writing prescriptions, either. There's no direct benefit to them. The psychiatrists don't work for the pharmaceutical companies.
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VioletTrees
ADHD medication allows me to actually express my creativity. Without it, I can't finish a project. As somebody with ADHD who also had childhood depression, I can confidently say that ritalin saved my life.
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[Old Memory]
As someone who battled depression for decades, I can relate. I can also attest to the fact that doctors are enslaved by pharmacutical companies' kickbacks and the ease and simplicity of "just giving a pill."
I became sceptical of meds when my doctor perscribed Zyban for quitting smoking even after I asked if I could have Welbutrin instead...insurance would pay for Welbutrin, the same drug. I paid $90 out of pocket for a perscription that he insisted was "tweaked a little bit...not exactly the same." It did nothing. Further research proved what the doctor denied...there is absolutely no difference between the two. I was in my 20s then. Young and naive.
My years as a Cub Scout leader put me in charge of about a dozen boys...seven of whom took Ritalin. My first reaction was wondering how the human race survived for the last 200,000 years without the drug. Statistically, there should be 3.5 billion people worldwide on it, just to cope. I watched their parents coddle and cater to their every whim, never holding them accountable and defending their every move, proving where the problem lied. It's so much easier to give a pill...than it is to parent.
The final straw, where my scepticizm turned to cynicizm, came when I suffered a bout of deadly depression. My doctor perscribed Cymbalta. It turned me Bi-polar and never addressed my problem. During one of the "lows," I filled my mouth with blood pressure pills...during another, I had a .357 in my mouth with the hammer cocked. Both times...I changed my mind at the last minute. Even after quitting, it took two years for me to stabilize. I sometimes still wonder when the Cymbalta will quit haunting me.
I'm 45 now. I've built a lifetime of experience that's tought me that we make our own problems. I'm now on a mission to fight pill pushing. I learned that the problems we face in life need to be addressed directly. Stop taking pills...stop looking for an easy way out. Face the world and conquer fears instead of looking for a way to avoid them. Whether you take a pill or not, the problem will always be there until you defeat your own demons. Most of the time, those demons are there only because you feed them. I stopped feeding them and they went away. Forever. They haven't returned and they won't.
This may not apply to you. Sometimes there really is a physiological problem that requires meds...but nine times out of 10...people need to quit feeding the wolf that eats at their soul.
Sorry about the novel. This subject really strikes home.
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VioletTrees
I'm very sorry you went through that. Of course there are some doctors who are irresponsible or misinformed about medications, and it sounds like you've had really bad luck with doctors. That said, your personal experiences don't tell you what needs to happen 9 times out of 10, they tell you what happened to you.
The human race has survived for a long time without ritalin, but that's not a valid argument for ritalin being unnecessary for most people. Penicillin wasn't discovered until 1928, which means, in terms of all of human existence, we haven't had it very long, either. That doesn't mean penicillin is unnecessary for most people who take it, of course, because the date of discovery of a medication is completely unrelated to how important that medication is.
Yes, there are a lot of parents who spoil their kids, and sometimes their kids have ADHD. That has very little to do with whether or not those children needed their medication, which was none of your business as a Cub Scout leader. You weren't those childrens' doctors, and you weren't in any way qualified to evaluate their diagnoses or medication. Even if you were a doctor, which, based on the perspective of your post, I assume you're not, you didn't do a psychological evaluation of those kids. It's also worth noting that there are resources available for parents of children with ADHD, and they don't advise that you refuse to discipline your children. That was an issue with those parents, and there are many parents like them whose children have never been diagnosed with a disability.
Your approach to dealing with these things doesn't apply to ADHD. Like dyslexia, ADHD is not a mental illness, it's a learning disability. You can't fix it by facing your inner demons. It's not caused or triggered by trauma or stress, and it's not cyclical like depression. ADHD does not go into remission. Some people no longer have significant symptoms after adolescence, and therefore no longer require treatment, but you can't make it go away through therapy. There are coping tools to help people with ADHD, but they don't get rid of the disorder, and they generally work best in addition to medication, not instead of it. Of course, anybody who doesn't want to be on medication is perfectly free not to take it.
How would pharmaceutical companies be pressuring doctors to prescribe medication? Doctors don't get paid extra for writing prescriptions, and it's illegal for pharmaceutical companies to reward them for doing so. The doctors who prescribe medication don't work for the pharmaceutical companies. It sounds to me like you had a bad doctor, which is awful, but which I don't think is representative of most cases.
Again, I'm really sorry all of that happened to you. It sounds like it was really awful to go through, and I can see how it would really turn you against medication. There are a lot of people in the world like me, though, who can live happy lives because of our medication. Our stories don't get told as often, because they're much less interesting, but we're here. Every time somebody insists that taking pills is "the easy way", implying that we're weak for taking our medication, or questions our diagnoses based on how they perceive us, or tells us that our disabilities aren't real, it hurts us. Every time, it makes it a little bit harder for us to talk about our disabilities. Every time, it makes us a little more afraid to mention having them, because somebody's always there to talk over us or roll their eyes. Every time, it makes it a little more stressful to request accommodations that we need.
Do you have any idea how hard it was to get the help I needed in school when I had teachers who didn't believe that I had a legitimate disorder? Do you know what it feels like to have your classmates tell you that you're just faking for drugs when you're 13 years old? Have you ever tried to explain something that's shaped how your mind works for your entire life to somebody who wouldn't stop rolling their eyes? It fucking hurts. It's like getting punched in the stomach and having the wind knocked out of me every single time. Sure, sometimes there are false positives in the diagnosis process (something that happens with every disorder, disease, and disability, both psychological and physical), but you're not qualified to decide which is which. Is it really worth risking hurting people like that? Are your own opinions of this disability so important that you're ok with cutting people down? Do you really think you're more informed about ADHD than people who've lived with it for our entire lives?
I appreciate that you're trying to help people, and I think it's perfectly fine for you to talk to people who are considering the same medications you've been on. It is NOT perfectly fine to tell people with disorders that you don't have how to manage our disabilities. Telling us "Oh, I know YOU really have it, I'm just talking about other people" doesn't help any more than "I'm not racist, I have black friends" helps. We don't need you to speak for us. We can speak for ourselves.
I am one of those disabled people. If you look online at adults with learning disabilities, there are many others who are fighting exactly the kind of stigmatising "help" you're trying to provide. If you want to help, stop talking about us, and LISTEN TO US.
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[Old Memory]
Don't be sorry. Part of getting over it is owning it. I've overcome. I told my story to prove a point, not by any means to gain sympathy.
Penicillin is actually another drug that has been oveprescribed to the point of creating alergies and "superbugs." It saved many lives at one point, but taken others. Antibiotics kill bacteria..which is an entirely different topic.
Doctors most certainly are rewarded by drug companies. My brother-in-law is one. Just because they don't write a check, doesn't mean they aren't getting kickbacks.
As far as teachers...I'm surprised by your experience..or perception. The U.S. public school system proved the biggest pusher of Ritalin...if kids won't focus, teachers demand that gifted, creative students who can't focus on a single topic, however disinteresting the topic may be, be perscribed ADHD meds or transfer to special education...you want stigma? There it is. I also guarantee that Einstein would have faced such an ultimatum today. School absolutely couldn't hold his attention.
I'm not attacking you and what you believe that you suffer from, and there's certainly no reason to take offense. I'm just absolutely convinced that ADHD is fabricated...or at the very least overdiagnosed. I'm sorry...I don't mean that as an attack, and you may very well need Ritalin yourself, but I've watched too many creative minds turned to compliant zombies by it.
I will give you that my experiences, and the points that I made, however valid, were anecdotal, but that doesn't make me wrong. I could give you a mile of links proving my point, but that would be a waste of both our time...since 1)anything can be found on the internet and 2)neither of us will be convinced of the other's point.
My lifetime's experiences are going to influence my opinion...as yours will. I've just witnessed too many creative and critical minds numbed by ADHD meds, antidepressants, and other neurological inhibitors, stimulants, and depressants.
My opinion will not change, and neither will yours...but I will say that I did listen to you...I didn't talk about you. I just disagree.
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VioletTrees
Actually, Einstein was a reasonably successful student. He wasn't stellar, but he was ok.
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VioletTrees
Ok. There's more I could say, but I'll take your word for it that I'm not going to change your opinion about ADHD itself. That said, I'd like to talk about discussions of ADHD for a bit, and to explain why I've reacted the way that I have.
I understand that it can be very difficult to discuss the nature of something and its surrounding issues when each party has a different opinion on its existence (or at least its prevalence, in this case). That's said, let's establish a couple points that I hope we can both agree on:
• Some people actually have ADHD.
You admitted yourself that there really are some people who have a physiological problem. You said "This may not apply to you. Sometimes there really is a physiological problem that requires meds." We disagree on the probable number of such people, but we agree that they do exist.• I am one of those people.
This one takes a little more explanation. When I was getting ready for college, I went through a process to get disability services. Among other things, this required rigorous testing to see if my diagnosis was correct and determine the exact nature of my symptoms (sometimes symptoms can manifest differently or disappear after adolescence). This was not the first time I'd been thoroughly tested, but these sessions were more involved. The testing took three days. They did ask questions about my symptoms to both my mother and me and reviewed my past doctors' reports, but the rest of the testing was objective. They tested math and verbal skills, short term memory, reaction time, spatial reasoning skills, pattern recognition, and attentiveness, among other things. When I say they were objective, I mean that they didn't rely on the opinions or observations of the research team. The tests were timed, scored, and compared to scores of the general population as obtained through large previous studies using the same tests. There was no doubt as to the diagnosis. I scored abnormally low on sections affected by ADHD, such as tests involving attentiveness and reaction time, much lower than is even required for a diagnosis. I'm telling you this not because I need you to validate my disorder, but because I think it's necessary to establish this if I'm to explain my perspective properly. I do not, for the record, think that only people with symptoms as extreme as mine should be diagnosed. I'm not playing the "I have REAL ADHD, but everybody else is pretending" game. You probably disagree, and I'm not trying to start an argument over that. I just want to be clear, particularly in case somebody else with ADHD reads this.Now, if we can agree on those two things, I'd like to explain myself.
You experience the world as a person who doesn't have ADHD. As such, maybe it's difficult for you to see why anybody would be offended or hurt by your posts. Maybe it seems to you that you've done nothing but express an opinion on an interesting topic. Maybe this topic seems somewhat abstract to you, however passionate you are, like a political discussion which, after the debate is over, everybody can agree to disagree about and still be friends. (continued…)
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[Old Memory]
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[Old Memory]
It's not as healthy as not having it, but it isn't abnormal, many people have it.
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zchristian
A lot of people have it and i also belive that many people have it without them knowing it.
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cheerdp
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[Old Memory]
Everyone apparently has ADHD these days...I'm sorry if you actually do but yes I guess it's normal x
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ThatChick28
In America u always have SOMETHING, so yes, it's normal that a doctor put a name to something u may or may not have =P
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Who_Fan4Life
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(s)aint
Be glad that you know what's wrong with you! I've had the diagnosis since i was around five years old (I'm turning 22)
I've refused medication even though it would probably soothen my mind simply because this is how i am and others just have to learn how to deal with it.
You aren't "normal" per se, but nothing is "wrong" with you either and hopefully you get the assistance that you need.
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Honey_Badger
If you had to endure the socialist American schools systems fill with #@$^ head teachers... You would get diagnosed too. Truth is I wanted to shove a pen into my neck and end the painful indoctrination process of these liberal retards.
They teach you about culture and arts when we need real world skills. Then after using a bell curve to pass their class they sit down to write a book on how to fix the economy. Dicks. Give me some drugs and I'll soak up all of their bad information like a sponge.
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Skitzo1
Not extraordinarily common, so its not normal (the word normal associates things with mainstream and commoness) but its not bad that you have it.
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Did they rule out things such as ODD (oppositional defianant disorder)? That's a common misdiagnosis.
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