You have ADHD? Me too.

I’m a writer, so my default is to write about it.

And so I have, right here at Psych Central, three times a week for nine years now.

And, I loved doing that.

It was important

I’m not just blowing my own trumpet here. I’ve had emails and comments and messages from people telling me they thought they were the only one until they read my posts.

That, is validating! And it isn’t just validating for my work or my writing ability.

The fact that there were others who felt what I felt and took the time to write to me in whatever way to tell me that, also did for me what I had done for them. I thought I was the only one for so many years.

When I was diagnosed …

I am not hiding from this. When I was first being assessed, the psychiatrist I was seeing was filling out a self reporting assessment form for me. He read off the item about finishing other peoples sentences and placed the pencil on the circle indicating the “All the time” selection and waited for me to confirm that.

I asked, “Have I been doing that?” and he replied, “Well, it is part of your disorder.”

Those words!

Those words, “your disorder” were the first official confirmation of my ADHD.

I immediately teared up. A fifty year old man, and I came close to sobbing. Seriously.

Since then, I imagine

This may be a bit pompous of me, but I’ve imagined others reading the words I write to describe what I live through, and upon recognizing their own lives in them, having a similar reaction.

I’m not living under the pretense that I’m some great writer or that I’m leading my people into the light.

I’ve honestly wished and hoped that these writings would help people. I’ve hoped they would find a starting place for their quest to figure out their lives.

But, all things that start

What goes up must come down, and all things that start must find their ending.

This post then, is the end of my ADHD Man Of DistrAction blog for 2020. It is quite likely the end of the blog for ever, there is no certainty and the new owners are not bothering to keep me informed as to any potential posting in the future.

So, should they reanimate this blog in 2021, I’ll see you all then. But if not, then this is goodbye.

I’ll still be around on social media, you could find me on twitter @writeofwaydotca or you can find me on Facebook and say hi if you like. You can even write to me at adhd_man@writeofway.ca and I’ll respond as soon as I check my mail. And I’d be happy to hear from you any time in any of those ways.

Why is ADHD called ADHD?

Consider this carefully.

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. What do you notice about this? What do you feel about this name if you have ADHD?

I’ll tell you what I feel about it these days.

It’s wrong!

Oh, don’t make any mistake. Someone with this disorder presents these symptoms exactly. But the word “presents” must be considered here.

Someone with ADHD appears to be unable to focus on what they should be paying attention to. A perfectly acceptable description of our one major symptom.

But should our disorder be described by symptoms?

How else?

We actually don’t have a problem focusing on things that we are interested in. That’s because focus actually is easy for us when it comes to things that attract us. So attention deficit is an untruth in this disorder.

The truth is much more primitive.

We lack dopamine!

Now, dopamine is a chemical that the we’re supposed to be able to produce. We don’t do well at that apparently. But, when something excites us, we do better at it.

The corollary to that is when nothing excites us we do poorly at dopamine production.

So when you ask us to fill out a form, read some statistics, clean up our room, sort the books on the shelf alphabetically by author’s middle name, one of two things is going to happen. We’re going to go to sleep, the less likely of the two, or we’re going to wander off in search of dopamine producing excitement.

That’s the ticket!

So, if we’re going to talk about ADHD, let’s start with talking about what it isn’t. It’s not a curse. And it’s sure as hell not a gift.

It’s not a “different way of thinking” or a “brain designed to be a hunter gatherer” although it is a brain more suited to that than the neuro-typical brain is.

What it is …

It is a difference that is denoted by a lack of dopamine in our systems. And that is not normal and it is not good if we are to fit in in this world.

But knowing this is a good thing. Because knowing this means we can help ourselves fit in better.

How?

Choose jobs that have structure but that also offer excitement. That means avoid jobs that suggest structure but in reality offer only routine.

When doing things that require concentration but that don’t offer excitement, take breaks to do physical things that produce dopamine. Get up and power walk around the room. Eat your lunch out on the sidewalk walking around the block. Set a timer for 30 minutes and when it goes off reset it, jump up and do pushups or sit ups as fast as you can for a minute of so.

And then get back to work.

And as to the name?

Maybe we really should be telling people we have Dopamine Deficit Disorder. DDD.

What do you think?

The way to get things done, is to just do them.

The Neuro-Typicals have been telling us that since our lives began.

And in one way, that’s true.

What they leave out, because they’re unaware that this is a thing, is that to “just do” those things, one has to be able to remember those things that are to be done.

And not just be able to remember them as in, “What are you supposed to do?” – “Oh, this, this, and this other thing.” … no, you have to have them in mind constantly.

On the Facebook today

In one of my groups on Facebook today, one member posted a meme that was titled “Recipe for Blackened Chicken.” I immediately took note because I have to cook chicken for supper tonight.

The image showed two charred chicken leg quarters. I mean, charred and hard and pretty unappealing. But the instructions looked simple, only three steps.

I read on

Step one said, “Clean the chicken.” Well, I’m here to tell you that isn’t necessary unless you’ve dropped it on the floor or you don’t trust the person you bought it from (in which case, why are you buying chicken from them?).

But whatever, sure, clean the chicken if that’s your jam. Studies have shown that you can actually make it more susceptible to bacterial growth on the surface by handling it and running water over it, also possibly contaminating it by contact with your sink or counter.

There,  my culinary public service announcement for the day. You want to kill that bacteria? You just need to cook the thing.

Moving forward

Step two was equally simple, but way more important. “Place chicken in oven.”

Now, this is a meme, so the omissions of the instruction to turn on the oven, and the detail of what temperature can be forgiven.

Let us assume a temperature of 375°F, 190°C for my fellow Canadians and the rest of the world. And let us further assume that the oven has been preheated to that temperature.

Step three!

Step three was the simplest of all. And yet it contained within itself the magic of the secret to blackening chicken.

Or rather, I should say it contained within itself the magic to the secret of blackening chicken if you have ADHD.

Concise, to the point, sublime in its simplicity, it read simply this:

Check Facebook.

As a writer penning a blog about what it’s like to have ADHD, you can count on me to tell you exactly what it is like for me.

You can be certain that I’ll tell you some of the more embarrassing things, not because I’m brave or dedicated to honesty and truth (though I like to think I am somewhat representative of those qualities), but because I find the telling of things like that to be too irresistible.

I mean, I really enjoy imagining you all laughing at how hopeless and helpless I can be at times, even as I am aware that you’re potentially crying because you know all to well what I’m going through.

But …

While you can count on me to be honest, to research aspects of ADHD that intrigue me and share that, and to illuminate exactly what it feels like for me to have ADHD, there is something you cannot count on me for.

No two of us have the same ADHD, so while what I go through may resonate with familiarity for you, you may have a few, or even many alternate experiences. We are not the same.

It is true, however

We empathize with our own even when we don’t get what they are doing or feeling, because the end result of ADHD, the anxiety and depression that we feel because of our symptoms, that hits in ways that we all feel.

We often know how we all feel, even if we don’t feel that way for the exact same reasons.

My ADHD

My particular flavor of ADHD may be solely developmental. Or it may be due to trauma. That’s a bit of a chicken and egg story, did I hit my head because I was being ADHD or am I ADHD because I hit my head. I can’t say.

Nor can I say with any certainty that my “serious concussion” suffered when I was four years old played no role in the development of my disorder.

It’s thought that some people grow out of ADHD. It’s a certainty that I did not. But is it because I was never going to develop executive functions well enough to leave the diagnosis behind? Or is it because of the trauma and subsequent insult to the integrity of my brain?

Some things will remain mysteries

What is certain is that I meet the criteria for a diagnosis of Adult ADHD. And what’s more, I am available to write about that.

So, while you can’t count on me to be exactly like you, you can count on me to be here wording all over the subject of ADHD and its insidious impact on our lives.

Because no matter what happens in my life, it seems I will always remain, the Man Of DistrAction.

Gotta go now.

We’ve discussed attention as it relates to ADHD before, but we never really dove into it in dull, dry boring detail, did we?

Likely that’s because it is difficult to maintain my attention long enough to explain the thing.

Attention is thought by many to be the ability to stay focused on something, and for most situations, we can assume that to be an adequate working construct.

But attention is, in reality, more fluid than this definition would lead us to believe.

Attentional flow

Attentional flow is the way in which our minds switch attention from the point that has been dealt with to the next logical step.

Let’s consider a simplistic example, coloring a picture. As a two yer old, one could expect a monochromatic choice of the favorite color and a scribbling across lines to indicate that they know what they are doing and they believe they are adding to the image.

By the age of five a child has probably determined the purpose of the lines and has recognized the significance of color choice. But still, mistakes are made. Some might say that these should not be pointed out as that would inhibit artistic license. I say, let’s talk about that on your time, this is about attention and you can’t distract me that easily.

What’s happening in the coloring world?

In our example above, the two year old child has likely been handed a crayon, and had a piece of paper placed in front of them and been given an example of coloring either by an adult demonstrating or siblings and peers doing the same. They are going through the motions.

The five year old child has studied the process over time and is aware of what is expected. They have gotten to the point where they can see an area of the image that requires a color, they can see the color they assume is needed and they will select that color and fill the area in.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Pay attention now …

Once that area has been filled in to the artists satisfaction, their attention must shift.

It may shift to the activity of looking for other parts of the picture that require the same color, or it may shift to the next most interesting part of the picture thus causing a new color selection, but shift it must once they acknowledge the last task is complete.

But what has this to do with ADHD?

With ADHD the shift can be more extreme. The person with ADHD might look for other pictures in the same book where they can use the same color. They may look for another book.

They may look at the crayon colors and select a rainbow of them that they feel look good together and not bother coloring at all.

They may find a blank paper and try to draw a rainbow with all the crayons at once. They may set the crayons down near the place where they went looking for a blank page and start looking at a book, or a toy, or an empty unmarked cardboard box.

The problem is …

People with ADHD pay constant attention. People with ADHD can change the focus of their attention. People with ADHD can hyper focus (though usually this is not controlled).

But during attentional flow, at the point when focus must be changed, when attention must switch from one task to the next, there is a very good chance that the person with ADHD will not switch to what would be considered by others to be the next logical point of focus.

Welcome to my world.

One of the hallmarks of ADHD is a problem with impulse control. Impulsivity is so common that we are known for it.

And some of the subtle ways that it impacts our lives often go unrecognized because being impulsive is usually only seen in the more explosive and dramatic examples of its manifestation in our behavior.

It’s not unlike the discovery years later that a sibling has a milder form of ADHD that went undiagnosed because, in constant comparison to the more challenged member of the family, they appeared to not be one of us.

So too with impulse, the behaviors that did not result in something exploding are not recognized as impulsive in comparison to that time when I … well, let’s not dwell on the past shall we?

So sometimes behaviors that are at their root impulsive do not appear to be because they aren’t dramatic.

Jump!

Impulse control is, apparently, not something that can be turned on or used at will, it apparently is a thing that just is there in the neuro-typical human. For us, it is something that we have to fake.

And the trouble is that we do not see the difference between doing the right thing at the right time, doing the right thing at the wrong time, or doing the wrong thing at any time. When we do the right thing at the right time, we did it as an impulse. That’s just how we are.

To me there is no difference between my sudden decision to hit the brakes than my equally sudden decision to hit the gas. I see a way to avoid a collision and I just do it.

Did it work?

Often it does, and when it does I don’t think about impulsivity. I think I’m clever. I think I was thinking outside the box. I think I was problem solving.

But the other label for it is risk taking. As the saying goes, better to ask forgiveness than permission. And if my impulsiveness was successful, I don’t need to bother with either. But I did take a risk to get there.

If a tree falls in the forest …

If an impulsive action results in a success, was it in fact an impulse?

Yes, of course it was. But if you don’t acknowledge it how can you ever gauge the extent of your impulsivity?

How can you ever get control if you aren’t actually acknowledging the extent of the problem?

On the other hand …

If everything we do is an impulse, is there ever a chance that we might get control of our impulsive behavior? No.

So what could we possibly gain from acknowledging it?

In truth, the result of doing the right thing, impulsively or not, is that we feel good. And impulsivity is all about instant or near instant gratification. So the more often we do the right thing, the more likely we are to become impulsively prone to do the right thing.

And even if it just increases the chances of our doing the right thing at the right time, well, that’s better than nothing, right?

The phrase, “safe place” should stir up thoughts of comfort and, well … safety, right?

But when you have ADHD, the idea of a safe place, for some of us, has become a rather fearful concept.

How many things have we put in “a safe place,” never to be seen again?

And you might think this is trivial, but it is far reaching, and does not just exist in the physical world.

We the people …

… with ADHD have known for a long time that when we think, “I’ll just put this here where it will be safe so I don’t accidentally lose or break it.” that we should be cautious and concerned.

We know that there have been many instances where we’ve uttered those words, or had those thoughts, and the result is that we never see the thing we’ve put away again, or at least not been able to find it when we’ve needed it.

Safe has become a code word for, “lost forever!” or “not finding that until it’s too late.”

Some safe, eh?

And then there are thoughts, info that we think we’ll never forget. It’s too important for us to ever mentally misplace that name, number, address, appointment time, password, user name, lock combination, locker number, gym bag, new shorts, amazon shopping, mail box, birthday card, aunt Della, family reunion … what was I talking about?

Yes, sometimes just thinking something is important lulls us into believing we’ll retain it, actually makes us feel good about having done the right thing in recognizing its importance.

It’s a matter of duration

That feeling of security and happiness usually long outlasts the retention of the important bit of information.

That’s actually not too far removed from the loss of memory of where we put the important form we’ll need later. Or where we put the keys to the neighbor’s house that we promised to look in on with the fish we promised to feed for the next three weeks that they were going away for.

Thank heaven for the pandemic

None of my neighbors are going away. Or at least if they are, none of them are counting on me to watch things for them. Hmmmm.

But on another note, I’ve recently become more aware of that Safe Place phenomenon and it has made me more aware of the problem. I have had two positive results from it.

The first is that I have started realizing that my safe places might not be so safe and I’ve started a new “tell a friend” program that involves burdening my partner way more than she deserves to be burdened.

The second thing is that I’ve become aware of just how resourceful I am in situations where I’ve misplaced things or info.

Seriously, if it wasn’t for the brilliance of my deductions, this problem would be way more obvious to everyone than it is.

ADHD caution? What could that mean? What kind of ineffective caution could ADHD caution be?

It’s not so much ineffective as maybe unreliable in its consistency.

I’ve lived with ADHD All my life, and I’ve known for eleven years. I’m aware of the problems, pitfalls and troubles I must endure. Fifty years of being unaware compared to this eleven of growing awareness have been an education.

I’m slowly catching on

I’m aware I make mistakes from being inattentive. It doesn’t help that I am actually combined type, my hyperness pushes me forward so I often miss more things.

This week I had an incident that illustrates this well.

On Tuesday, while I was supposed to be working on a radio show script, I decided to format a memory card that had been giving me some trouble.

Maybe don’t try this at home …

I popped the card into my laptop, selected it and tried to read it one last time. Error messages, so I selected properties and made my way to format. And format it I did, a quick format. Hey, it might have worked.

Might have, but it didn’t. I popped it out, stuck it into a camera and got errors again. I popped it back into my laptop and again chose format, this time disabling quick format.

And then I clicked go.

After a little while I started to wonder just how long it was going to take.

That’s when my day went wrong

I discovered I was actually formatting my data drive on my system. ADHD impulsivity made me click that button when ADHD inattention had allowed me to select the wrong device. And ADHD distraction led me away from what I was doing when it was doing something that I thought I could only watch with boredom.

I interrupted the formatting as soon as I realized it was the wrong drive, and then I realized that too was likely a mistake. Had I let it finish I might have been able to reverse the process.

Then I stopped

In the last ten or so years I’ve learned that when things have gone wrong, they don’t go right when I abandon sense and caution. I spent a little time researching what had happened and did make several efforts to recover the data, but the truth is I may have formatted the drive more than just that bit of full formatting.

This isn’t supposed to be a technical blog.

What I did next was to set my laptop aside and make a cup of coffee.

And as in uffish thought he sat

I sat and took stock of what I had done, and what I needed to do. I also took inventory of my stress level, off the chart would be the most accurate measurement.

I then got out my list of what I needed to do for the day, and checked what things were going to be made more difficult by all the missing data.

And then?

Then I made a subsequent list of how to get around that.

And I then proceeded with ADHD caution, aware that I was on the edge, and determined to stay on the edge and not fall off into the pit of incompetence and non-productivity.

It’s been two days, I’m behind on some things but not so far behind that I’m in trouble. I’m slowly coming to terms with lost weeks of edits on a book, and lost copies of lyrics that will need to be written out again, but those terms will be arrived at.

And my ADHD caution, a caution that is as much informed by my knowledge of ADHD as it is made less useful by my ADHD, is still helping me through.

Of all the things I might be able to easily forget, the fact that I have ADHD is not one of them, especially at times like this.

“Is often forgetful in daily activities (e.g., doing chores, running errands; for older adolescents and adults, returning calls, paying bills, keeping appointments).” ~ the last symptom listed in the inattentive symptoms for ADHD in the DSM5

How is your memory these days? Are you feeling like it could be better? Is it worse than it used to be? Or do you feel it does not compare favorably to the memory of those around you?

All fair questions, and yet, with the exception of the quote above, ADHD does not require a bad memory.

So why can I not remember shizzle?

Seriously!!!

And I’m not talking about that which is listed in the quote above. I can get to the end of my day and have my partner ask how it went doing the thing and suddenly realize that I didn’t do the thing, I did a bunch of things, many of them were things that I intended to do and many of them were things I spontaneously did that were unintended but still good but I still forgot THE thing.

But along with that is the knowledge that when THE thing is mentioned by my partner, I know it, I remember that it was a thing that was to be done.

But then there’s the other thing

I’ve arrived late for appointments and even believed I was on time. I’ve gone to my doctor’s office for a three o’clock appointment only to be told that my appointment was actually for 1:30. I don’t suddenly say, “Oh yeah, it was 1:30, wasn’t it?” Nope. I can’t say that it was 1:30 despite the evidence in front of me.

And there are times when I am told about something I’ve done, or said, and the person telling me is not someone I distrust. And even if they were, there’s no percentage in it, there is no advantage to them to tell me these things. And I can even track down proof that they are telling the truth …

But I don’t remember!

I know of others with ADHD who have memory problems of this type. And the oddest thing is that I have an amazing memory when it comes to things that I do remember.

What’s more, it isn’t selective. I don’t forget things that are unimportant any more than I forget things that are important. They can be long past or last week. They can be significant for their seeming grandeur or they can be obscure.

They all collectively have only one thing in common, I forgot them.

And even when I’m told of them, even when they are proven to be, I still have no memory of them.

I wonder if I’ve written about this before?

“It is a chronic, life long condition, and it’s about time that we started treating it as such. You know, people with ADHD are more susceptible to problematic drug use and more likely to take their own lives, but it is one of the more treatable conditions so why aren’t we doing it more effectively?” ~ Beverly Nolker, Founder of ADHD Sheppey

In the UK they have ADHD, just as we do here. And in the UK they have requirements that must be met for diagnosis. But those requirements are different. While North America uses the DSM or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the UK uses the alternate publication from the World Health Organization that is published under the name International Classification of Diseases, or the ICD.

Differences between these publications include distinct variations in the criteria for diagnosis of Adult ADHD. And those differences apparently mean that fewer people get a diagnosis of ADHD when the diagnostic professional is using the ICD.

Perhaps because there is a more narrow criteria for diagnosis, or perhaps because of the fewer diagnoses documented, in the UK, there is a wait list for people seeking confirmation of their disorder through diagnosis.

That is not the case in North America

No, it isn’t. And thankfully so. In Bev Nolker’s quote above we see some frustration with the system.

And yet, we know frustration here in our countries as well. While we do not have years long wait times for diagnosis, we also do not have any consistent system in place to channel those who are suffering from adult ADHD into the resources that could offer a diagnosis and consequent help.

In fact, we are still struggling with the idea that ADHD persists well past childhood.

I have seen no statistics on suicide and ADHD, but I have no trouble believing that there is likely a correlation. I know the mental and emotional struggles that this disorder offers us, and I feel quite certain that undiagnosed and untreated ADHD could at the very least exacerbate the issues that lead to suicidal thoughts and potential actions.

In our time …

Many notable specialists have acknowledged the fact that ADHD is one of the most treatable disorders we know of, Drs. Barkley and Hallowell among those who have said as much. And Bev notes that in her statement above.

And whether we are making people wait for appointments or whether we are just not bothering to create the channels needed to get people the help that could change, or even save their lives, the fact remains that ADHD is one of the most mismanaged disorders in any diagnostic publication.

People with ADHD …

People with ADHD who are untreated will treat themselves, whether they have a diagnosis or not, whether they have an awareness of the disorder or not. And their treatments will involve self medication with whatever they have to medicate with.

And when those medications and actions fail to produce long term results that are consistent and not flawed, there is likely to be a reckoning.

As someone with ADHD I can say with certainty that this world would be a lot better off with more treatment for those in need and fewer cases of drug use and suicide.

Thank you, Beverly Nolker, for putting the fine point on this issue that it needed to have.