Adhd Diagnosis Quotes

we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications. A major public health awareness campaign by governments—perhaps without influence from pharmaceutical lobbying groups—is needed on this issue.

You can't compare men or women with mental disorders to the normal expectations of men and women in without mental orders. Your dealing with symptoms and until you understand that you will always try to find sane explanations among insane behaviors. You will always have unreachable standards and disappointments. If you want to survive in a marriage to someone that has a disorder you have to judge their actions from a place of realistic expectations in regards to that person's upbringing and diagnosis.

Notice the things you do which give you energy and stimulate you in a positive way. Choose to spend time on these every day.

Like so many other high school discipline cases, he'd probably been given some hybrid cockamamie ADHD- bipolar diagnosis at a very young age and been medicated into submission for the benefit of his homeroom teacher. We've all read about them in the paper, the problem kids who get slapped with five disorders by the time they're twelve, and horse-pilled by a culture that has pathologized everything from PMS to teen angst.

The label neurodiverse includes everyone from people with ADHD, to Down Syndrome, to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, to Borderline Personality Disorder. It also includes people with brain injuries or strokes, people who have been labeled “low intelligence,” and people who lack any formal diagnosis, but have been pathologized as “crazy” or “incompetent” throughout their lives. As Singer rightly observed, neurodiversity isn’t actually about having a specific, catalogued “defect” that the psychiatric establishment has an explanation for. It’s about being different in a way others struggle to understand or refuse to accept.

A 2013 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that 15 percent of school-age boys had received an ADHD diagnosis (versus just 7 percent for girls), a diagnosis rate so over the top that some researchers believe simple immaturity is now being misdiagnosed as ADHD.

By far the most common comorbidities that co-exist with ADHD are anxiety and depression, which are probably caused by having the disorder. Given how the traits of restlessness, impulsivity, and distraction can impact on anyone’s life, it is understandable how these two disabilities will arise.

scientists to refer to the dopamine transporter gene associated with ADHD as the “explorer gene,

Many parents have experienced this with their kids. They get referred for testing, and the first psychologist says the child has ADD. But then another round of tests with the next shrink points to PDD-NOS. More tests and more doctors take us back to ADHD, then Asperger’s. They bounce from one diagnosis to another, never really knowing what to do or where they stand. In some cases, kids are given medications, and a medicine that’s good for one thing can be bad for another.

attention deficit disorder in his own son. “I had worked in an ADHD clinic during my residency, and had strong feelings that this was overdiagnosed,” he said. “That it was a ‘savior’ diagnosis for too many kids whose parents wanted a medical reason to drug their children, or to explain their kids’ bad behavior.

ADHD is spreading like wildfire. It used to be confined to a small percentage of kids who had clear-cut problems that started at a very early age and caused them unmistakable difficulties in many situations. Then all manner of classroom disruption was medicalized and ADHD was applied so promiscuously that an amazing 10 percent of kids now qualify.

What makes our contemporary neurobiological concepts different is the extent to which they have been promoted by pharmaceutical marketers. You are not shy; you have social anxiety disorder. You are not absentminded, dreamy, or fidgety; you have ADHD. You are not moody; you are bipolar. Each diagnosis comes with a prescription. Your need for medication becomes part of your identity.

ADHD Prescriptions: Diagnosis rates of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have skyrocketed 500 percent since 1991, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. An estimated 7 million schoolchildren are being treated with stimulants for ADHD, including ten percent of all ten-year-old American boys, according to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A 1998 study by researchers Adrian Angold and E. Jane Costello found that the majority of children and adolescents who receive stimulants for ADHD do not fully meet the criteria for ADHD. The efforts of neurologist Dr. Fred Baughman, ADHD diagnosis critic, led to admissions from the FDA, DEA, Novartis (manufacturers of Ritalin), and top ADHD researchers around the country that “no objective validation of the diagnosis of ADHD exists.” A Maryland Department of Education study found that white, suburban elementary school children are using medication for ADHD at more than twice the rate of African American students.

There I was, in black and white. My entire being of weirdness, easily explained with bullet points listed under both “Signs of Adult AD(H)D” and “Signs of Adult Giftedness.” Double trouble. Twice fucked, as I like to say. Getting diagnosed was definitely a mixed blessing for me. On one hand there was a nicely packaged reason for all of the things I felt were wrong with me. On the other hand, it was comparable to a mental-health death sentence. I used to say to my mom, “It shouldn’t be this hard…it isn’t this hard for other people…this isn’t normal.” I used to think I could just fix myself away with my little self-improvement plans. I still do, actually—a different one every week, but getting that diagnosis meant I could do all of the self-improvement plans available in the universe, and I would still come out as messed up as I went in. No improvements for me. Sorry, Charlie. Shit out of luck, my friend. I’ve always felt misunderstood. Though I was never at a loss for friends, I was always told I was weird, which I was totally OK with. Weird

In 2005, Dr. Ronald Kessler and colleagues reported the results of the US National Comorbidity Survey Replication, a household survey that included a diagnostic interview of more than nine thousand representative people across the United States.16 Overall, 26 percent of people surveyed met criteria for a mental disorder in the last twelve months—that’s one in four Americans! Of those disorders, 22 percent were serious, 37 percent were moderate, and 40 percent were mild. Anxiety disorders were most common, followed by mood disorders, then impulse control disorders, which include diagnoses like ADHD. Of note, 55 percent of people had only one diagnosis, 22 percent had two diagnoses, and the rest had three or more psychiatric diagnoses. That means almost half the people met criteria for more than one disorder.

The way we define their problems, our diagnosis, will determine how we approach their care. Such patients typically receive five or six different unrelated diagnoses in the course of their psychiatric treatment. If their doctors focus on their mood swings, they will be defined as bipolar and prescribed lithium or valproate. If the professionals are most impressed with their despair, they will be told they are suffering from major depression and given antidepressants. If the doctors focus on their restlessness and lack of attention, they may be categorized as ADHD and treated with Ritalin or other stimulants. And if the clinic staff happens to take a trauma history, and the patient actually volunteers the relevant information, he or she might receive the diagnosis of PTSD. None of the diagnoses will be completely off the mark, and none of them will begin to meaningfully describe who these patients are and what they suffer from.

20 years, we have experienced three unanticipated fads partly precipitated by DSM-IV: a 20-fold increase in Autism Spectrum Disorder,7 a tripling of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),8 and a doubling of Bipolar Disorders.9 The most dangerous fad is a 40-fold increase in childhood Bipolar Disorders,10 stimulated, not by DSM-IV, but instead by reckless and misleading drug company marketing. Twenty percent of the U.S. population11 is taking a psychotropic drug; 7% is addicted to one; and overdoses with legal drugs now cause more emergency room visits than overdoses with illegal drugs.

There is no known blood test or brain scan that provides definitive diagnosis at the time of this writing.

People who suffer from IS may feel as though they just lucked their way into success. They may not be able to celebrate victories, instead looking to the next thing they need to complete. You may be only able to focus on the one thing that went wrong, instead of ALL the things that went right. You may be dismissive of compliments and praise, feeling you do not deserve them. And you may constantly compare yourself to others.

If someone is sad, or angry, or needs help, then I am your girl. But if someone is hurt and sad and angry about something that has nothing to do with me, but they’re rude or mean to me as a result, then my trust is broken.

The saying “What you see is what you get” is something I seek out in people, and it’s what I offer in return.

They have a super-fast processor in their brains so they can see through the fluff, and they know when someone is genuinely on their side.

Who are we, the people who have ADHD? We are the problem kid who drives his parents crazy by being totally disorganized, unable to follow through on anything, incapable of cleaning up a room, or washing dishes, or performing just about any assigned task; the one who is forever interrupting, making excuses for work not done, and generally functioning far below potential in most areas. We are the kid who gets daily lectures on how we’re squandering our talent, wasting the golden opportunity that our innate ability gives us to do well, and failing to make good use of all that our parents have provided. We are also sometimes the talented executive who keeps falling short due to missed deadlines, forgotten obligations, social faux pas, and blown opportunities. Too often we are the addicts, the misfits, the unemployed, and the criminals who are just one diagnosis and treatment plan away from turning it all around. We are the people Marlon Brando spoke for in the classic 1954 film On the Waterfront when he said, “I coulda been a contender.” So many of us coulda been contenders, and shoulda been for sure. But then, we can also make good. Can we ever! We are the seemingly tuned-out meeting participant who comes out of nowhere to provide the fresh idea that saves the day. Frequently, we are the “underachieving” child whose talent blooms with the right kind of help and finds incredible success after a checkered educational record. We are the contenders and the winners. We are also imaginative and dynamic teachers, preachers, circus clowns, and stand-up comics, Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, inventors, tinkerers, and trend setters. Among us there are self-made millionaires and billionaires; Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners; Academy, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy award winners; topflight trial attorneys, brain surgeons, traders on the commodities exchange, and investment bankers. And we are often entrepreneurs. We are entrepreneurs ourselves, and the great majority of the adult patients we see for ADHD are or aspire to be entrepreneurs too. The owner and operator of an entrepreneurial support company called Strategic Coach, a man named Dan Sullivan (who also has ADHD!), estimates that at least 50 percent of his clients have ADHD as well.

[Dr Sami Timimi] told me that when people hear a child has been diagnosed with ADHD, they often imagine this is like a diagnosis of, say, pneumonia - that a doctor has identified an underlying pathogen or illness, and is now going to prescribe something that can deal with that physical problem. But with ADHD, there are no physical tests a doctor can carry out. All she can do is talk to the child, and people who know the child, and see if the kid's behaviour matches a checklist drawn up by psychiatrists. That's it. He says: 'ADHD is not a diagnosis. It's not a diagnosis. It's just a description of certain behaviours that sometimes occur together. That's all it is.

Studies even suggest that the social misperceptions surrounding psychological and neurological conditions can contribute to their exacerbation, perhaps even prompting a transition in severity to full-scale psychiatric disorders (Corrigan, 2007). The extent to which this impacts individuals diagnosed specifically with ADHD is highly under-investigated, but trends seem to point towards significant repercussions in their social lives. In addition to peer rejections due to perceived “weirdness,” anecdotal evidence appears to suggest that an official diagnosis of ADHD can lead to resentment from the undiagnosed. Furthermore, the effects of courtesy stigma mean that even individuals associated with the person bearing the brunt of a stigma can be negatively impacted, for no other reason than their closeness to the stigmatized person (Mueller et al., 2012).

An adulthood diagnosis of ADHD can be, among other things, physically dizzying, and that I once feared 'never beginning to live’ now feels completely legitimate. However, I am learning that my fear was borne of the assumption that ‘truly living’ is something ‘other’ than what I experience, and it isn’t.’ - Katy Fraser, Talking in Diamonds

Your five-year-old son wanders around his kindergarten classroom distracting other kids. The teacher complains: he can’t sit through her scintillating lessons on the two sounds made by the letter e. When the teacher invites all the kids to sit with her on the rug for a song, he stares out the window, watching a squirrel dance along a branch. She’d like you to take him to be evaluated. And so you do. It’s a good school, and you want the teacher and the administration to like you. You take him to a pediatrician, who tells you it sounds like ADHD. You feel relief. At least you finally know what’s wrong. Commence the interventions, which will transform your son into the attentive student the teacher wants him to be. But obtaining a diagnosis for your kid is not a neutral act. It’s not nothing for a kid to grow up believing there’s something wrong with his brain. Even mental health professionals are more likely to interpret ordinary patient behavior as pathological if they are briefed on the patient’s diagnosis.[15] “A diagnosis is saying that a person does not only have a problem, but is sick,” Dr. Linden said. “One of the side effects that we see is that people learn how difficult their situation is. They didn’t think that before. It’s demoralization.” Nor does our noble societal quest to destigmatize mental illness inoculate an adolescent against the determinism that befalls him—the awareness of a limitation—once the diagnosis is made. Even if Mom has dressed it in happy talk, he gets the gist. He’s been pronounced learning disabled by an occupational therapist and neurodivergent by a neuropsychologist. He no longer has the option to stop being lazy. His sense of efficacy, diminished. A doctor’s official pronouncement means he cannot improve his circumstances on his own. Only science can fix him.[16] Identifying a significant problem is often the right thing to do. Friends who suffered with dyslexia for years have told me that discovering the name for their problem (and the corollary: that no, they weren’t stupid) delivered cascading relief. But I’ve also talked to parents who went diagnosis shopping—in one case, for a perfectly normal preschooler who wouldn’t listen to his mother. Sometimes, the boy would lash out or hit her. It took him forever to put on his shoes. Several neuropsychologists conducted evaluations and decided he was “within normal range.” But the parents kept searching, believing there must be some name for the child’s recalcitrance. They never suspected that, by purchasing a diagnosis, they might also be saddling their son with a new, negative understanding of himself. Bad

Dr. Alice Parnes of the University of Michigan, one of the founding figures in ADHD diagnosis and treatment, says, “ADHD is a disorder in which the attentional process is seriously disrupted.” She explains, “the ADHD child really can’t pay attention. They are not bad at listening and following directions; they can’t concentrate.” (Reed, 2019)

Schedule a comprehensive evaluation to not only provide a formal diagnosis, but to also delineate a clear picture of your strengths and weaknesses. You will then be ready to participate in designing a total treatment plan that meets your unique needs. Get Treatment An effective, total treatment program is essential to future success. Such programs usually include a combination of medication, psychotherapy, coaching, alternative treatments, and necessary related services (support groups, counseling, family therapy, etc.). ADHD can have serious consequences, but it is treatable with safe and effective medications that can change people’s lives. (See Question 35 for a more in-depth discussion of medications used to treat ADHD.)

appreciating the progress made by your child or student.

A few years ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve always felt like I’ve been doing a million things at once, and I felt like I had to give all of those things all of my attention.” I thought about the way being diagnosed had changed things for me. All of the sudden, I could explain why I did things the way I did. It was a revelation for me. It had made things different, but not in the way I expected. I’d hoped the diagnosis would be a fix-all, that I would no longer feel so desperate to be in complete control all the time, and that I would stop making impulsive decisions based on the fact that it made me feel like I was in charge of my own life for a minute. That didn’t happen. Instead, I would kind of know why I was doing something, but I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from doing it. I kept on doing too many things and fixating on the things that made me feel like I had power.

ADHD people often feel the need to wear a meta-physical mask. This means we dilute ourselves so that we are more “acceptable” to neurotypical people.

The label neurodiverse includes everyone from people with ADHD, to Down Syndrome, to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, to Borderline Personality Disorder. It also includes people with brain injuries or strokes, people who have been labeled “low intelligence,” and people who lack any formal diagnosis, but have been pathologized as “crazy” or “incompetent” throughout their lives.

you are not ‘ungrateful’ for not feeling overcome with joy when receiving your diagnosis.

According to DSM-5-TR, children 4 to 16 must show at least 6 out of 9 symptoms listed in the DSM-5-TR with apparent severity to be officially diagnosed. Who and where: A psychiatrist, a neurologist, a psychologist, a certified mental health professional, or a pediatrician must be the ones to make the diagnosis.

sleep deficiency and the epidemic of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Children with this diagnosis are irritable, moodier, more distractible and unfocused in learning during the day, and have a significantly increased prevalence of depression and suicidal ideation.

Much of the increased prevalence of ADHD results from the “false positive” misidentification of kids who would be better off never receiving a diagnosis. Drug company marketing pressure often leads to unnecessary treatment with medications that can cause the harmful side effects of insomnia, loss of appetite, irritability, heart rhythm problems, and a variety of psychiatric symptoms.

Others argue that an increasingly demanding society is exposing previously subclinical ADHD symptoms. As performance standards are ratcheted up and external stimulation becomes nonstop and blaring, previously well-adapted individuals with mild ADHD may now be reaching a clinically significant level of impairment that qualifies as a mental disorder and requires treatment. My point back is that the difficulties people have in meeting society's expectations should not all be labeled as mental disorders. [...] If we, as a society, choose to help people enhance their performance to meet (perhaps excessive) demands, this should be an open policy decision - not one cloaked under medical auspices, done by medical prescription, and enhanced by drug company marketing.

They will find an interest, play it out as far as it can possibly go and then move on. It’s

No sooner did I feel relief than grief set in. What would my life have been like if I’d been diagnosed in childhood? What might I have accomplished? Would I have the family I’d always wanted? Would I have a home, a garden—all the normal things others had, but which had eluded me for years? I realized that I’d tried to convince myself I didn’t want these things as a defense against the fear that I was never going to have them. Knowing the truth, I was able to admit that I still had some of these dreams. Unfortunately, it was too late for many of them. I was too old to have my own children or to catch up on my retirement savings. Before my diagnosis, my recurring nightmare was that I’d end up living under a bridge. Given that there’s no cure for ADHD, after my diagnosis I wondered, Will this be as good as it gets?

ADHD medications is skyrocketing—in 2003, 7.8 percent of kids had the diagnosis, and as of CDC’s 2014 numbers, that is now 11 percent for youth ages four to seventeen. The market for these drugs is also surging—a report from IBISWorld puts the ADHD drug market at $17.5 billion by 2020.

patients, inasmuch as it is easily excited by every impression. The barking of dogs, an ill-tuned organ, or the scolding of women, are sufficient to distract patients of this description to such a degree, as almost approaches to the nature of delirium. It gives them vertigo, and headache, and often excites such a degree of anger as borders on insanity. When people are affected in this manner, which they very frequently are, they have a particular name for the state of their nerves, which is expressive enough of their feelings. They say they have the fidgets.

To my amazement, staff discussions on the unit rarely mentioned the horrific real-life experiences of the children and the impact of those traumas on their feelings, thinking, and self-regulation. Instead, their medical records were filled with diagnostic labels: “conduct disorder” or “oppositional defiant disorder” for the angry and rebellious kids; or “bipolar disorder.” ADHD was a “comorbid” diagnosis for almost all. Was the underlying trauma being obscured by this blizzard of diagnoses?

beans, cheese, eggs, meat, and nuts,

A Columbia University study identified fifteen hundred children who had been assessed and diagnosed with ADHD. Within two years, over 50 percent of the children had lost their diagnosis. In other words, the severity of their symptoms no longer met the criteria for this disorder.

Autism and ADHD and all the other neuropsychiatric functional impairments are not handicaps per se. In many cases, they can be a superpower, that out-of-the-box thinking you so often hear performers, artists and celebrities talk about. Performers like me, for instance. But the complications that can arise because of a diagnosis can definitely be compared to a handicap; a handicap that is created by ignorance, incorrect treatment, discrimination or an inability to provide much-needed societal adaptation.

Those children who are fortunate to have the sleep disorder recognized, and who have their tonsils removed, more often than not prove that they do not have ADHD. In the weeks after the operation, a child’s sleep recovers, and with it, normative psychological and mental functioning in the months ahead. Based on recent surveys and clinical evaluations, we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications.

An added reason for making sleep a top priority in the education and lives of our children concerns the link between sleep deficiency and the epidemic of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Children with this diagnosis are irritable, moodier, more distractible and unfocused in learning during the day, and have a significantly increased prevalence of depression and suicidal ideation.

Have you ever noticed that autistic adults who apply on their own for disability benefits from the government –no matter where they live- are almost always turned down on the first try? Yet it seems that for kids, when funding is applied for by schools on their behalf, the dollars fly into school coffers. Have you ever stopped to wonder why that is? How does that happen? Children get funded because schools fill out the necessary application forms in a way that demonstrates a child is grossly developmentally challenged, and has special needs that are so expensive as to be unaffordable by the school district. An ADHD diagnosis used to get schools much of the funding they needed for a child. Now it’s an autism diagnosis. But

Although we recognize that poor parenting practices and deliberately defiant children do exist in our culture, most oppositional behaviors in 2e children—stubbornness, impatience, low frustration levels, and tantrums—are caused by underlying deficits in emotional regulation and in social cognition (mind-blindness) or by characteristics of giftedness. For a large portion of the 2e population, oppositionality is not simply a learned behavior. The diagnosis of ODD is a very real danger to 2e children because it opens the door to their being seriously misunderstood, misjudged, and medicated. Unfortunately, the notion that ODD is a learned behavior arising from poor parenting echoes a long-held assumption that parents somehow “cause” their children's disorders.