jackofallgeeks | Attention what?

Attention what?

I don't think I believe that ADHD exists. I don't know anything, mind, I'm hardly a qualified professional and I've only done the barest amount of reading on the subject. But what I have found makes me think it's another case of self-overmedication that our society is so fond of. The 'symptoms' don't seem to be anything more than a lack of self-control or discipline, which most kids have naturally and will retain unless self-control and discipline are instilled in them by adults. That being the case, it wouldn't surprise me if more kids lacked necessary self-control because many parents can not or will not discipline their children, and 'finding' a new disease lets us medicate our children into a docile, managable state.

That's the theory i'm working on at the moment? any of you out there want to help do some of the foot work and point me toward articles et cetera that might support or contradict such a theory?

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I completely agree. I was diagnosed with ADD, and I fully believe the entire disease is a load of crap.

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this book if you ever want to borrow it, and have had this book on my amazon wish list for about a year now.

I'd get into more of this with you, but I really hate talking about heated subjects in livejournal comments, I have too much to say and don't really want to type all that.

*raises hand* Being both a qualified professional and someone who suffers from ADD, I can honestly say that yes, it exists. I've seen huge amounts of research on the subject and can link you to some of the better ones if you would like, but honestly the reasearch aside, it's what I feel and the experiences that I go through that make me believe. I am not hyperactive, and therefore do no have ADHD, but many of the signs are the same. I did not get diagnosed until I was 20 years old. Not because I only developed it then, but because I was intelligent enough and at a slow enough school that I was capable of breezing by without having to concentrate. I developed a multitude of coping skills to help me in dealing with it since I was unmedicated, but in all honesty, they were incapable of doing what a simple medication was able to do after only a month of taking it. Help me concentrate. I could go on a longer schpiel about it, but I'd rather do that talking than anything else. Over the internet, I'd rather just say this.

Try telling someone with major depression or bipolar disoder that it doesn't exist. Look in their eyes when you say that their mental illness is made up and is just an excuse for them not being able to deal with things without a pill to make htem better. Then try and say that ADHD doesn't exist again. I've been coping with this problem for 26 and a half years. Please don't tell me that it's made up.

On the other hand, I will happily and emphatically agree with you that it is overdiagnosed. But then, so are depression and bipolar disorder.

I will happily and emphatically agree with you that it is overdiagnosed. But then, so are depression and bipolar disorder.

This is largely my feeling as well. I feel that I am one of those people that got misdiagnosed with it, lo these many years ago.

I do believe that as a condition it does exist, however I also believe that the reason that until recently this disorder didn't exist is because of the huge amounts of fast-paced, overwhelming sensory input we subject our children to from the moment they are born, hell even before that, while they are still in the womb.

I don't believe that we as human beings are wired to be able handle the excess amounts of sensory input that are thrown in our faces in todays day and age, or rather we can be, but like all of our senses it has to be developed slowly rather then flooding our poor senses with dozens of sights & sounds (& smells & touches) while we are still trying to learn how to use them.

Like you, I don't have any professional background to back this theory up, but I strongly believe that with some research, I could provide some serious correlary data.

I don't believe that we as human beings are wired to be able handle the excess amounts of sensory input that are thrown in our faces in todays day and age, or rather we can be, but like all of our senses it has to be developed slowly rather then flooding our poor senses with dozens of sights & sounds (& smells & touches) while we are still trying to learn how to use them.

This is very, very true. I see so many therapy patients come through my office who are being treated "for ADHD" but who have completely different issues that are 100% based on poor sensory development. The trouble is that the symptoms manifest in such a way that they present like ADHD or ADD and our society is os stinking focused on band-aids that they want a quick fix for the symptoms and don't want to have to worry about the actual problem.

Oh, I am positive it DOES exist. I am also equally positive that it is often used as an excuse for poor parenting, (when we're talking about children) or poor self-disipline (when we're talking about adults) and sometimes it is overmedicated.

I know a lady who steals her son's ADD meds when she has a big project due, otherwise she'll put it off and miss her deadline. She says she's ADD, but her Doc disagrees and refuses to medicate her. So, she just takes her son's meds! (I didn't say she's a friend, just that I know her...)

Um, the problem I have with this is your methodology. You have to ask an awful lot of questions about your terminology and premises. before you can make a judgement like this with any confidence.

For example, when you say something like, "the symptoms don't seem to be anything more than a lack of self-control and discipline," you are making a whole horde of philosophical commitments about what things like "self-control" and "discipline" are and where they come from. You have to be on guard against leaping to conclusions based on your own worldview, and making assumptions based on things it's not occurred to you to question.

(BTW, I'm not trying to say you haven't thought of this already, or that you're doing a bad job. I think those blind spots are inevitable, and everybody from the man on the street to the most educated expert has them. No amount of mere knowledge will protect from them, because this is about how one connects the things one knows.)

Anyhow, the first and foremost objection that I'd raise is that by saying "ADHD doesn't exist, it's just a lack of self-control and discipline," you're already drawing a conclusion without even having looked at any medical facts. You're assuming that there is a meaningful distinction between a neurochemical status and a character defect. There might be a good case to be made for that, but my advice is you've gotta start from proving that and work your way forwards.

My take on it is that the distinction isn't all that strong. "Willpower" and "discipline" are just primitive, societally constructed forms of cognitive therapy. When you are "disciplined," you are conditioning your brain to act in certain ways. Why would this necessarily disprove that there is an underlying neurochemical condition that produces hyperactive behavior in the first place? Or is that not what you mean by "the disorder doesn't really exist?"

I think every question you're asking is legitimate. All I can say is you've opened up one hell of an interesting can of worms here. I hope my response makes some sense, tentative and incomplete as it is, and I'd love to talk this out with you a lot more. I could go on for pages and pages about this. :)

Some further questions:

* We know that certain chemicals can alter attention levels in the brain. If that's true, is it not entirely plausible that an organic condition could raise or lower the production of, or ability to process, those chemicals? If this is the case, would that then qualify as a "disorder?"

* Say for the sake of argument we accept that attention is chemically modulated. What if it proved that an individual could entirely reverse the effects of an imbalance of those chemicals, by a simple conscious decision. Would that, by your definition, mean ADHD "did not exist?"

* How about if an individual could restore the balance and consciously decide to "act normally," but it was proved to be markedly more difficult for some than others? Would that difficult "be" ADHD, or not?

* What if it were possible for everybody, but was more uncomfortable for someone with a natural tendency to that chemical imbalance? Would it be a "lack of discipline or self-control," even if the starting conditions for them to exert discipline or self-control were made harder for them because of their own neurochemistry?

* What about if it turned out that what some call ADHD could be controlled, but it required a certain learnable skill?

* What if it turned out that the difference in "attention neurochemicals" was caused by genetic? How about environmental variables? What if it turned out that it only developed in kids who were raised a certain way? Or only in kids who did not learn a certain cognitive "skill" of self-control?

* What makes a disorder "real" or "not real," besides a doctor saying so? Is it a sliding scale where you might have 20% or 40% or 200% more difficulty concentrating and keeping still... or a binary yes/no condition that you either "really have" or "don't really have?"

These are the sort of questions that keep me awake at night, almost every night. :)

My own opinion, FWIW:

1. ADHD the neurochemical condition does exist, but on a sliding scale
2. ADHD the diagnostic condition is just a handy rule-of-thumb invented by medical science, usually based more on how dysfunctional a kid is than any objective neurological standards
3. thus ADHD "exists" in much the same way that rain exists, as a phenomenon and not a thing; in a sense, there's no such thing as rain, there is only water that is raining at whatever intensity (this gets into crazy Buddhist metaphysical stuff that'll take me all week to write about :) )
4. ADHD can be treated either by pharmacology or cognitive therapy; the latter is essentially indisguishable from "discipline" but is more scientific; CT is preferable to drugs
5. ADHD is not anybody's "fault" nor is it a "character flaw," but willful failure to acknowledge and adapt to it IS a character flaw

6. I'm pretty biased here, because I've had a very short attention span and bouts of poor memory and concentration all my life, and they got a lot worse when I started having chronic fatigue symptoms. The symptoms come and go, and they almost feel like brain weather; the distinction is so obvious, that I can't help believing something physical is causing it, not just some crazy self-defeating "desire not to concentrate" which doesn't make any sense to me.

7. I know plenty of adults who complain of ADHD-like symptoms, some of whom are in demanding careers. They've developed complicated routines to deal with their limitations, like writing things down; things that themselves require a lot of discipline. So it really doesn't seem plausible to me that lack of discipline is what's behind it.

I noted Seven in my new post, I think, but I didn't really get into it. I think adult ADHD as such is mostly (though not entirely) a side effect of child-ADHD becoming popularized. "Hey, I think I'm ADHD too!" Not to say it's all in people's heads (heh heh), but that it isn't what it's made out to be, and that it doesn't need the sort of medication it's being given. In fact, here more than anywhere I think Jason's theory of information glut is the most likely; I'm sure these demanding careers have lots of data to analyze, likely in constant streams through email and blackberries. I think there are other ways to cope with this sort of mental overload other than medication, and I guess it's my feeling that labeling it as a "disorder" legitimizes the medication. Or something. See my new post for other (disjointed) thoughts.

Oh, I think we're definitely on the same page, if that's what you mean by "it doesn't exist." ADHD as this diagnostic category of "you have this; take this to fix it" is kind of faddish, yeah. I thought Jason had a good thought on that, myself.

I suspect that it's one of those "culturally linked syndromes" like anorexia or, um, koro (aka "that delusional Micronesian testicle-shrinking disease"). I suspect what those are is basically the "operating system" of a culture not working so well with the "hardware" of a given set of human brains. Some people have the structure to organize huge amounts of sensory overstimulus without going bonkers mentally and physically, and some of us just don't.

(I wonder how much success people would have with ADHD kids if they tried to teach them in ways that weren't prone to trigger that kind of overload? But I don't know if I'd trust our social instutitions to be that bright. They'd probably end up doing something really DUMB with it, like using it as an excuse to indulge the kids and let 'em learn nothing at all...)

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