Comment by dijit
2 years ago
Well.
1. Self-diagnosis is not a diagnosis.
2. Things exist on a spectrum. The definition of it becoming a "disorder" is when it negatively affects your life enough.
During diagnosis a psychotherapist will be tasked with identifying traits of ADHD (IE; Markers), you will not have all markers. Everyone will have some.
Then those markers are investigated to discover how much they impact your quality of life. If it is above a certain threshold in aggregate then you are then diagnosed clinically as having "ADHD" and can be medicated.
What I mean is, for example: You can still have autism even if someone has significantly more severe autistic traits than you have.
> Self-diagnosis is not a diagnosis.
Nit: Self-diagnosis is the first step towards a formal diagnosis. You don't go to the doctor to get antibiotics before self-diagnosing that you're sick.
That said, as useful as a formal diagnosis is (getting proper help, and even meds), don't skip it if you can afford to do it.
Yes. Thank you for stating it so well. Self diagnosis is like a conjecture based on observation. It needs to be proved out formally to be a working theory. But that’s part of the process and there absolutely is value in self diagnosis. It’s up to professionals to sort the wear from the chaff, webmd be damned.
Similarly anecdotal evidence is just not strong evidence, but it is still evidence. Anecdotal evidence from a lot of people is a dataset and from a wide variety of people is a good dataset. It's all about confidence levels. Consider likelihoods (different from probabilities) and just update your priors but never forget the confidence intervals. They're the most important part!
Exactly. So so so many people do not understand this element of psychological disorders
The D in ADHD is “disorder”, which normally means you can’t function socially, at work, and/or take care of yourself. Normally I don’t consider scatterbrained knowledge workers in the top 5% of the income distribution to be in that category. It is kind of fun so do work on speed though!
There are lots of ways "can't function socially, at work, and/or take care of yourself" can manifest even if you're in the top 5% of the income distribution. For example, that person's house might be an absolute disaster zone, with overgrown lawns, tasks piling up and a million tiny piles of bills and papers to be done "later". They might need 4 separate alarm clocks in 3 different physical places in order to wake up on time every day. They might be constantly forgetting to follow up with family and friends all the time and isolated and alone when they're not in the office. They might be the co-worker that when everyone is talking about what they did over the holiday weekend responds with "not much" because they're otherwise too embarrassed to admit they spent the whole 3 days in a state of paralysis over what to even do. They might be putting all their energy into appearing normal and functional at work because the alternative is being homeless or starving and you might never know because you don't see them outside the office.
All that to basically say income and job descriptions do not inherently say anything about what disorders a person may or may not be suffering from.
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It's a good thing no one defines disorders the way you do. Going through life miserable but have set up your life in such a way and with a set of coping mechanisms that help you stay afloat is apparently fine and your life needs to be in shambles. Do you feel the same way about chronic pain? Is dragging yourself to work despite it prove you don't need help? Clearly you can handle the suffering. It's the exact same.
Surviving only because you've structured your life to revolve around the limitations of your disorder isn't a sign that everything is fine.
Adderall and its contemporaries aren't speed and I promise you it isn't fun. Stimulant medications are miserable to be on, it's just that not being on them is worse. That one time you took high-dose adderall in college is not at all reflective of what the experience is like.
What if you can function socially, at work, can mostly take care of yourself and generally look the part, but on the inside you are a miserable husk of a person exhausted from the neverending struggle to appear functional and normal?
Is that person just having fun on speed in your view?
Others have responded to you as if you weren’t being disingenuous, so I will respond as one should to people like you: go fuck yourself.
Anyone that dismisses this as being a scatterbrained person that likes to do speed is clearly not trying to help anyone and are only here to tear them down and make them hate themselves more than they already do. The world would be a better place if trash like you was collected and disposed of. Grow up, asshole.
I still thought "X is a spectrum" is essentially the same as saying that everyone have it, which I don't think is a useful assertion. There should still be a threshold somewhere, something that of course psychology won't try to draw.
The threshold for any disorder is usually “is it causing a significant and negative impact on your ability to live a normal life”. And while there are a lot of squishy terms in that statement, it’s about the best we have. We know even less about the workings of the brain than we do about the workings of your body and anyone with a chronic and rare health issue can tell you just how little we know about the workings of the body. So these sorts of “standard normal life” and “significant impact” fuzzy phrases are our best tool.
Everyone is late sometimes, are you so chronically late that you’re losing or at risk of losing your job despite doing things that normal people would do (e.g. getting up earlier, setting alarms etc), that could be (along with other symptoms) an indication of ADHD.
Everyone is sad sometimes, even deeply so. Are you so down that the very act of getting up and making yourself food seems too much? Are you so hopeless that even doing something you love makes you feel nothing? That (along with other symptoms) might indicate you have depression.
Everyone has things that they want to have “just right”, whether it’s a well organized tool box, a clean car or a spotless mirror. Do you find yourself needing to ensure that every dish in your cabinets are sorted properly by size and weight, every day, even if it means missing that important meeting with a friend you haven’t seen in years and even though you already did this yesterday and only used two plates since then? That might (along with other symptoms) indicate that you have OCD.
It could be, but that's why I think that the "self-diagnosis != diagnosis" statement is important