how can someone be an adhd
If parents are declaring one child as diagnosed but not another it’s because they went to health professionals and respected their diagnoses. Your attitude is gross, toxic, and harmful.
When I was 8, my 4 year old brother, 40 year old father, and 35 year old uncle whom I lived with all went to get screened for autism after my brother’s pre-school recommended it.
3/4 of us walked out with autism diagnoses.
I was given the official psychiatric assessment that I had “learned and developed autistic traits and mannerisms due to growing up in a household with no neurotypical influence” and the advice was that I would grow out of it once I made enough “normal” friends at school.
My brother started occupational therapy and other programs, and at each one, the practitioner would recommend to my dad that I join too to “help her brother feel safe and comfortable” and I would litteraly participate in the Autism therapy programs with my autistic brother.
Over my years at school, I picked up official diagnoses for dyscalculia and dyspraxia and that explained a few of the struggles I was having. The autism OT I was already doing covered support for my learning disabilities so nothing except the paperwork changed.
And sure enough, I made neurotypical friends at school, and a lot of the autistic-like traits I exhibited as a kid were no longer apparent in my behaviour.
I had a lot of mental health issues as a teenager and young adult. But what millennial isn’t depressed and anxious? I was growing up with 3 autistic men as a teenage girl, I rationalised that my dysfunctional emotional state was justified by my life circumstances. I was a dramatic teen.
Hearing and visual impairment, and other physical health issues with muscle tone, and struggles to heal due to poor proprioception that got worse in my 30s somehow lead to a re-assesment for autism as an adult.
Big fucking suprise. I’m autistic. Always have been.
Sometimes health professionals don’t get the full picture. They’re human.
My presentation is drastically different from my male family members, and I was parentified by my fathers autism from a young age - I remember being as young as 10 and my dad saw my ability to blend and socialise, he’d send me into stores or get me to make phone calls for him if he was having anxiety over it. This was not something that was discussed at the time of my first assessment.
My special interest was, and still is, anthropology. I maintain that loving the study of humanity and human culture means I’ve been able to intellectualise my way through social situations that neurotypicals feel their way through on instinct. I suspect I’ve done this from a young age, and that this further muddied the waters for that psychiatrist who assessed me when I was 12.
If I’d gotten reassessed in my later teens, or early 20s, I’m certain the result of the assessment would have been different then to, even with the same psychiatrist. You get 4 hours with a perfect stranger,just on some random day, and they’re supposed to make an assessment on your entire life?
We trusted their assessment, which is why I fumbled through life for 20+ years under the assumption I could learn my way out of feeling autistic.
Trust your healthcare professionals, but remember that they’re human, and second opinions are important, especially if you’re struggling with the treatment plan, or lack thereof, from the first doctor.
Not to mention that neurodivergence in girls and women is severely underdiagnosed due to differences In manifestation combined with hegemonic standardizations and diagnostic norms.
Female-bodied people show different symptoms and may be more commonly dismissed as “quirky behavior”.
So your assumptions that one is tested and the other wasn’t may, in fact, be just as “gross and harmful” as this user accuses someone else to be.
That’s my point. Assuming a diagnosis of mental conditions based on casual social observations is a super fucked up thing to do.
I don’t think the person in the OP is necessarily assuming diagnoses. I agree with you that arm-chair diagnosing based on little information is generally a bad thing to be doing. However, there is a disproportionate number of girls and women with undiagnosed/late diagnosed ADHD. People (understandably) put a lot of weight on official diagnoses, but also, institutional bias exists (though has been improving on this front, in recent years)
This isn’t about trusting or distrusting the assessment of doctors. If the daughter in the tweet had been assessed for ADHD and was deemed ineligible for a diagnosis, then I might be more in agreement with your comment. However, the crucial step before being sent for an assessment for ADHD is often an informal one: teachers, family or friends commenting on a child’s behaviours and saying “you should get him/her assessed for ADHD”. Institutional bias is one thing, but sociocultural bias is insidious and hard to challenge. That’s why in my opinion, the person in the OP is doing a positive thing, because the daughter might not have been assessed for ADHD, and if no-one says “have you considered she might have ADHD?”, it’ll stay that way for many years.
I apologise for the wall of text. My intention isn’t to just talk at you, I am genuinely interested to hear your opinions on what I have said, especially if you find some parts of my comment more disagreeable than others.
It’s not “super fucked up”. Suspecting it based on behaviors is the first step to diagnosis, what are you smoking
I hate it when people say “[person] is ADHD”. A person is not a disease. If someone has cancer, do you say “my aunt is cancer”? Weird and insulting.
“I’m so OCD”. You ARE obsessive compulsive disorder?
Yeah, you don’t say “I am diabetes/cancer/leprosy”.
No but you do say “I’m diabetic” which uses diabetes as sort of identity within the sentence structure.
Similarly “I’m a cancer survivor” and “I’m a cancer patient” are ways someone with cancer could structure a sentence to give weight to the way cancer and the experiences of cancer fundamentally change this person’s personality and identity.
While “I am ADHD” isn’t perfect, it’s a very new use of language to try and create an identity form, and it will continue to evolve and sound more natural.
Personally I still find myself saying “I’m autistic and I have ADHD” in most situations, but if I know I won’t have to explain the term too much, I do prefer “I’m AuDHD”, because it’s an identity first phrase, and it feels as natural as “I’m autistic” or “I’m diabetic”.
But the difference grammatically between “I’m autistic” and “I’m ADHD” is minimal, yet I agree one sounds fine and the other just sounds stupid. And other than exposure, I can’t place my finger on why.
From the autistic side of things, a lot of us dislike “has autism” or “person with autism” because it implies there’s a hidden, non-autistic person underneath the autism. Not everyone feels this way of course, but for people that do they may transfer that way of speaking onto other things like ADHD as well.
The whole “person with autism is better because it puts the person first” sounds exactly like the kind of BS that autism can lower patience for, anyways.
I think that there are some groups of people who prefer person-first language. For example, “person with epilepsy” is generally preferred to “epilectic person” (n.b. I do not have epilepsy). I also just looked into the history of person-first language and apparently it first arose in the context of people with AIDS, who were sick of being referred to as “AIDS victims” or similar.
In that light, I can understand why some people prefer person-first language. Myself, I am in accord with the general autistic community in calling myself autistic (as an adjective). Occasionally, amongst friends and kin, I may even call myself “an autistic”.
There are others on this wider thread that capture some of my reasons why: I remember, shortly after I was diagnosed, I pondered whether I would take a cure for autism, if one existed. I concluded that I wouldn’t — not because being autistic was a strictly positive thing for me (it certainly made my life harder in many respects), but because I didn’t think that it would be possible to extricate the autism from what is intrinsically me — in short, any “cure” might as well be death.
it’s just a linguistic quirk, english just so happens to put adjectives first (i.e. “autistic person” instead of “person autistic”)
Interesting, thanks for sharing a different view on this. I can understand that. For ADHD it’s the same of course, you can’t separate your personality from it. A question like “Would you like to have not had ADHD/autism?” makes no sense, because then we would have been entirely different people.
I’ve never heard someone say “I am autism” or “[person] is autism” though, like people seem to do with ADHD. In the case of autism, what would you use instead of people-first language?
For autism you’d just say someone is autistic/I’m autistic, I think people just say he’s ADHD/I’m ADHD because I’m not sure there’s a comparable way to adjective-ify ADHD like there is with autism/autistic.
I completely agree. I don’t have autism, it’s not a disease, it’s part of who I am like my ethnicity. I am so fucking tired of having to conform to what neurotypicals think I should be.
“Mrs Jones, I’m afraid your son has Black. Luckily, we caught it early, so with speech therapy, skin-bleaching treatments, and facial reconstruction surgery, he can lead a normal life.”
Funny how this works but yet I got diagnosed as an adult THEN my brother got diagnosed haha. We do everything backwards.
