Thoughts on ADHD PSY101 Has Me Pondering
My final project for PSY101 went through the normal ADHD process of production. It loomed over me for a couple of months. A whole month early, I actually reviewed it. (Please hold all applause until the end). And for the next month, I thought, and I thought because I had no fucking idea what I would do this on. I finally settled that two days ago… taking prompt from the assignment. I settled on the frontal lobe and ADHD functioning. If I know anything, it is ADHD. Easy peasy, right? If you answered yes, cheers, we were both wrong. Turns out, there is a lot of the brain involved in ADHD. For example, all of it. That's right. All of our brains are weird, not just the front. I learned a lot I did not know. Have you hugged your basal ganglia today? This is a very simple shot of those sexy lobes and their bartenders. 
There was an enormous amount of information on ADHD and the brain and comorbid disorders. Turns out, those comorbid disorders are partying together in the brain. Most people with ADHD have a comorbid disorder. An estimated 30% of us do not. And I suspect 25% of them are just trying to avoid therapy or parents. (logical plausibility) 
A new plan emerged. This had a working title of "Lesser-Known Traits of ADHD." Of which there are many, I asked my ADHD group for their input to prevent bias. A mere ten hours and 552 comments later....
There are multitudes of them. Some comments are about executive function. Others are about skin picking. I have directional dyslexia, a trait shared by few. And researched by less. There is some opposition that this is not dyslexia but a geographical disorder. Dyslexia is not a cut and dry diagnosis either. There are many types, and they involve hearing, vision, and phonics, to name a few, as well as reading and writing. Far more symptoms of both disorders overlap than do not.
https://www.dyslexia.com/about-dyslexia/signs-of-dyslexia/test-for-dyslexia-37-signs/ I did a triple take to make sure I was looking at ADHD signs.
Time blindness and the way we process time utterly different than the "average" person. We are focused on what our brains have set as a priority, engaging our mind. Time gets lost in the There is a lot to think about. Time for indeed, try as I might, I will never see it as most people understand it. Mastery of time is hard to master. I have tried and failed many times. Alarms, calendars, watches, and post-its eventually end up in the same abyss of not important NOW. Without fail, each of those things will lose object permanence. (Remembering an item is there even if you can not see it.) Objects or sounds have become predictable without a priority level. This again goes into the background of things less important.
Hyperfocus, that's the double-edged sword. People with ADHD are experts on everything from astrophysics, to thread count, to American History. Never knowing how long the intense focus will last. 1 day, or 15 years it all depends on how those neurons dance for a particular activity. During hyper-focus, nothing else matters. Nothing. During the Pokémon Go launch, I was walking to get my son down the street. He had been hurt. I stopped for a Wigglypuff. No lie. He will never let me forget that. Because his arm was broken. He now owns said Wigglypuff because as a trophy to our ADHD. Everything else is either a nuisance, does not exist, or does not matter. We can neglect responsibilities and cause our lives to fall apart around us. Fighting hyperfocus took me a lot of effort to overcome. By overcoming, I mean half of the time, I can escape.
Our last and until presently, the little-known trait of RSD, Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria. The inability to handle rejection to an appropriate degree. This is the hell part—the part where our inner critic becomes an inner judge, jury, and executioner. Rejection cuts deep, and it bleeds for a long time. This makes sense when people with ADHD, research suggests, are criticized 200,000 more than their peers by the sixth grade. Following that model, at 42 years old, that would be 1,200,000 more than our peers. The psychological ramifications of that can be nothing less than traumatic.
As I researched each one of these subjects, and found no pattern of predictability. ADHD seems to overlap with a multitude of other conditions, and those overlap with each other. We all have different symptoms of many different disorders. There are no universal criteria that apply to every person diagnosed. There doesn't seem to be an end to that coming anytime soon. I question if ADHD is not a disorder but a collection of symptoms attributable to many brain structures, these disorders seem to share. Do we have a disorder characterized by set criteria of different disorders? Or is it possible the lack of concrete symptoms in those disorders is what defines ADHD.
That leads me to my third project idea. How the different symptoms interplay together. Uncharacteristically, I told myself I was out of time. Perhaps my ADHD will let me hypothesize more. And return to the blog.
