adhd-informative:

adhdgeek:

ierohero:

being a naturally smart kid with adhd was honestly so damaging tbh because throughout grade school i just immediately understood every concept explained to me and i did well in school on intelligence alone, which was fine at first, but it meant that i never learned how to cope with things i didn’t understand immediately, and also nobody ever noticed my adhd since i wasn’t having trouble in school, which meant i would blame myself when i couldn’t focus and get incredibly frustrated with myself for procrastinating so much. so like, when school started to catch up with me, and my methods of just throwing my brain at things started to not work anymore, i literally didn’t know how to do school work. i would procrastinate or straight up avoid work i didn’t know how to deal with and i developed crippling anxiety over school and eventually major depression. like it eventually got so bad i had to leave school for a couple weeks. and like, i finally got diagnosed, and now I’m taking meds for adhd, but to this day, i still don’t really know how to learn or work efficiently and i kinda wish id been forced to learn this stuff in grade school instead of eleventh fucking grade when i really need to be doing good in school for college

I did terribly in school starting in 6th grade (middle school), but this post brings up something important: if left undiagnosed and/or untreated, we don’t learn how to do what we’re supposed to do. We don’t learn the habits that make for a successful student (or employee). When (if) we are finally diagnosed and treated, we still struggle because we have to learn this stuff much later than we should have. It’s so much harder. It’s so easy to fall into bad habits of procrastination and avoidance when it’s all you ever knew.

So, when I see parents talking about how they don’t want to medicate their child, I understand why, but I also get very angry. And sad.

ADHD is the only mental health disorder that is best treated by medication and doesn’t improve much by therapy alone. Therapy can be useful to help cope with the side effects of having ADHD (not to mention the co-morbid disorders that most of us have), but is not going to give us what we need: a brain capable of focus. A healthy diet and taking supplements/vitamins is important but should not be considered ‘treatment’ itself. Alternative therapies can also be helpful but I strongly believe that for most of us, medication is what we need.

And because knowing the basics of getting by is something typically learned in childhood it confuses teachers, professors, coworkers, bosses etc when you don’t have those basic skills as a teenager, young adult, or adult. Especially when you’re clearly intelligent. And effective help can be hard to find. Not all mental health professionals specialize in ADHD, and many that do specialize in children.

I don’t think the problem for me was that I didn’t know how to learn as a child. It’s that I didn’t know how to deal with executive dysfunction, with burnout, with anxiety, with depression, with intense emotions, with impulse management, that kind of thing.