Submitted by Old_Sport7920 t3_118ohfw in todayilearned
We talk about ADHD and Autism and such being "new". But then you hear about a guy who was so worried about needing six months to write 900 pages that he locked himself in his house.
And you realise these have been around for millennia.
I just got diagnosed at 36 and asked my parents if any teachers said anything or if they ever thought about it and my mom's response was essentially no and that "everyone had it back then" 🙄
I've yet to figure out the way to explain this to them. That just because we finally find a name and treatment plan for something, doesn't mean that it hasn't been there affecting people who have no idea... Or just that these things exist whether or not we have a name for them yet. The idea is on my head and makes sense, I just can't put it into the right words.
When ADHD first started being diagnosed, there was certainly a lot of noise in the US about overmedication of it, and how virtually any child who was underachieving in school was being prescribed ritalin. Even some parents chasing down doctors to demand access to it in order to calm down their child.
Whether this was a thing, I don't know. I was young and I live in a different country :D
It may simply have been that there was such a sharp increase in ADD/ADHD diagnoses that there was a typical moral panic/media freakout about it.
"Neurodivergent" and "Neurotypical" are the current ways we use to describe these conditions, and I think that helps people understand the nature of it better. With these words it's clear you're not saying that someone's brain is broken, or that they have a transient illness. They have a fundamental difference in wiring which has always existed, always will exist, and causes them to perceive the world in a different way to most others.
I don't know how old you are or anything, but when I was a kid, everyone did have it. In elementary school, only 4 of the boys in our class were unmedicated for an attention problem.
If you're diagnosing almost all of your population with a mental disorder, you need to reevaluate your diagnostic criteria.
Eh, there's literally no law of nature that says that an organism has to be ideally suited to a given environment. If 90% of the population was going on insane murder sprees, and putting a fairly-innocuous chemical in the water supply would stop that, would you want people reevaluating their diagnostic criteria, or just conceding that the species is fucked up and needs some chemical intervention?
Drugs have side effects and putting children on amphetamines is serious business. If it's necessary to get them the start they need in life, that's one thing. But you don't do it just to make the faculty's life easier.
I'm turning 40 this year so it was the 80s/90s. It wasn't really prevalent in my school or they just kept it more secret. I didn't know any peers that were on medication for it.
My mom's friend was a teacher and her son that I babysat has ADHD and took meds but that's really the extent. I worked at a daycare and didn't have to provide or monitor meds, no parents clued me in that their kid had anything other than allergies.
I just know that yes, the diagnostic criteria wasn't great. It's been documented that it presents differently in females so the rate of adult diagnosis is much higher bc it was missed so much when we were kids. It's not just hyperactivity and not everyone's "flavor" as I call it includes every symptom. I got decent grades bc my anxiety over consequences forced me to find coping skills to make sure I got it done. It didn't always work and I'd just completely forget about an assignment. I also only finished 1 book reading assignment ever. Studying for tests was just memorizing information to pass the test. The deadline motivation 👋✅, distractibility ✅, communication problems (interrupting, tangents on tangents, forgetting halfway through a thought) ✅, can't focus vs hyperfocus ✅... basically once I learned the typical symptoms it was very clear to me they'd been there all along and I feel cheated a bit that I had to go through so much and struggle when it wasn't necessary.
Fair enough. This was the early 2000s for me. I was referred because I got distracted and started talking to my classmates after being in class for ~2.5 hours or so.
Like, duh, I was 7.
Right? There's definitely kids being kids and then there's kids like me who grow up not knowing how to set boundaries, becoming a people pleaser to the extent that I have trouble making decisions without input from others, and I'm pretty sure I've been anxious since my first spanking. I am working on my conflict avoidance and being assertive.
I also started learning that most of my anxiety and depression triggers are directly linked to my ADHD behaviors/symptoms. So even the counselor I started seeing for those almost 10 yrs ago missed all the signs. It took going through a communications worksheet with our premarital counselor who specializes and has it himself to suggest I get evaluated. I always thought I maybe had a twinge just being so talkative and forgetful but the more I've learned... it's been right there front and center my whole life. And I was a child so I didn't have the words to explain how I felt or understand that what I was dealing with wasn't "just me". I'm not lazy like my mom said, I'm not broken or deficient... my husband has described it best, he said it's like being left handed in a right handed world. I just have to learn to do the differently in a way that works WITH my brain and not fight against it so much.
I'm sorry you went through that accusation as a child, it couldn't have been fun and if it had been me, I'd have taken it very personally even at 7. At least someone cared enough to at least suggest you get checked just in case though. Grass is always greener as they say.
Eh. When I was in elementary school, literally one kid was being medicated for. Dude was my best friend at the time.
I don't have kids myself. I think (and hope) that it isn't that bad anymore. They basically expected young children to sit attentively in class for several hours at a time, I really don't know what they were thinking.
Who says these things are new? It’s more like they were discovered more recently and being diagnosed more often.
There's a swath of people who want to believe that these things never happened before, and that the new influx of conditions is due to "modern society" brainwashing people to take drugs for (insert random conspiracy theory here).
...for money. No need to go there.
Nah. These conspiracies always go "there."
I've always thought that the mythological/folklore concept of changelings fit the onset of more intense expressions of autism.
Google Leonardo DaVinci's work habits! I saw a video about them and I was like, "that sounds like ADHD."
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