This got a laugh out of me when I spotted the title, and then a nod of recognition once I started reading the article. Apparently, ADHD can make you miss 20 days of work per year. Well, kinda.
When “Fidgety Philip” grows up, the problems of attention deficit disorder can multiply into loss of nearly a month’s work per year.
Long seen as a problem for children, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was first described in 1845 by Dr. Heinrich Hoffman, who wrote “The Story of Fidgety Philip.”
More recently, it has been recognized as continuing into adulthood for some people, and new research seeks to estimate the effect of ADHD on workers.
This lack of ability to concentrate costs the average adult sufferer 22.1 days of “role performance,” per year, including 8.7 extra days absent, according to researchers led by Dr. Ron de Graaf of the Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction.
It’s almost funny that, for folks with ADHD, those “missed days” occurred when they were actually at work. Almost.
I worked from home yesterday, because the hubby was dropping the kids off early yesterday, before going off to a night job he has every other week. Just before the rest of the family left, my cable internet connection went dead. I called tech support and was told there was a service outage in our area, related to the previous night’s storm.
Thanks to an anonymous manager at CNN, I have a new favorite word: “neurotypical.” Or maybe it’s “neuro-atypical.” I’m not sure, but I know which one I am. So, I knew I’d find something to identify with when I (finally) sat down to read her account of how diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome in adulthood left her feeling like an “earthbound alien.”
Recently, at 48 years of age, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. For most of my life, I knew that I was “other,” not quite like everyone else. I searched for years for answers and found none, until an assignment at work required me to research autism. During that research, I found in the lives of other people with Asperger’s threads of similarity that led to the diagnosis. Although having the diagnosis has been cathartic, it does not change the “otherness.” It only confirms it.
When I talk to people about this aspect of myself, they always want to know what it means to be an “Aspie,” as opposed to a “Neurotypical” (NT). Oh, dear, where to start . …
Neurotypical? Now there’s a new one. I suppose though, it’s better than “normal,” which has obvious implications.
Dwight asked a question on a post two weeks ago, that I’m only just now getting around to answering.
I never really thought of ADD being something that lasted over a life, beyond childhood and yet I’ve had the experience of lacking direction, getting burried in life. Some of this time was marked by depression (I imagine poverty, not moving ahead, etc.) added to this
But I never thought of ADD as being very relevant until your posts. And as someone who spent many years in the foster care system, I admit I get almost Tom Cruise -ish when I think of things like medication, being part of the mental health system.
So my question was..how does ADD plug into your experience and what sort of actions did you take to change direction?
How does ADD plug into my experience? I think it’s colored my experience from day one, long before I knew anything about it.
How does it does it plug into my experience? Well, let me put it this way. For more than a week now, I’ve had four pieces of writing I wanted to do, including this one. So far, I’ve had time to write exactly none of them. That is, except for this one. And this one may yet take me more than a day or two before I’m done writing it.
Writing is an activity that I find immensely rewarding and enjoyable, but it isn’t my job and it doesn’t have to do with taking care of my family, so there is always something else that takes priority. That includes sleep, since I often find myself nodding off at the computer at night, when I finally do have the opportunity to write something
That’s partly because of ADD-related problems with time management, but it’s also partly because I’ve arrived at two entirely different places in my life all at once, and at a time in my life when there doesn’t seem to be room for both.
Ed. Note: This started out as a response to Marissa’s thoughtful comment on a previous post, related to the one before it I decided to let it stand on it’s own, as a post.
A late bloomer is a person who does not discover their talents and abilities until later than normally expected. In certain cases, the individual may be as old as 60, and retirement may lead to this discovery.
Maybe it’s due to my 30-plus years of untreated ADD. Maybe it’s just because I have a late blooming brain.
Indeed, until quite recently most researchers believed the human brain followed a fairly predictable developmental arc. It started out protean, gained shape and intellectual muscle as it matured, and reached its peak of power and nimbleness by age 40. After that, the brain began a slow decline, clouding up little by little until, by age 60 or 70, it had lost much of its ability to retain new information and was fumbling with what it had. But that was all right because late-life crankiness had by then made us largely resistant to new ideas anyway.
That, as it turns out, is hooey. More and more, neurologists and psychologists are coming to the conclusion that the brain at midlife–a period increasingly defined as the years from 35 to 65 and even beyond–is a much more elastic, much more supple thing than anyone ever realized.
Far from slowly powering down, the brain as it ages begins bringing new cognitive systems on line and cross-indexing existing ones in ways it never did before. You may not pack so much raw data into memory as you could when you were cramming for college finals, and your short-term memory may not be what it was, but you manage information and parse meanings that were entirely beyond you when you were younger. What’s more, your temperament changes to suit those new skills, growing more comfortable with ambiguity and less susceptible to frustration or irritation.
Well, if my own life serves as any indication, the answer to the above question for some kids with ADD/ADHD is no. Some kids won’t outgrow ADHD.
New findings that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder may stem from a developmental delay that children could outgrow, rather than a cognitive deficit, have raised questions for parents of the 4.4 million children diagnosed with the disorder.
The findings from a National Institute of Mental Health study, published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared brain scans of 446 children with and without the disorder. The brains of children with ADHD appeared to develop normally but more slowly, lagging on average about three years behind other children.
We spoke with several experts about what the findings might mean for parents.
It means that a certain percentage of their kids will grow up with ADD and that the condition (I so hate the word “disorder” applied here) will persist into adulthood.
1. Know basic nutritional needs & how to plan balanced meals 2. Hone your sense of direction & navigation so you don’t need step-by-step turns to find a location
3. Understand types of health insurance & terminology such as OOP max & co-insurance percentage 4. Maintenance of a personal computer
5. In-depth knowledge of your employment benefits 6. Change a flat tire 7. Wash & iron clothes
8. Balance a checkbook & manage your finances 9. Patch holes in walls
10. Fix a clogged toilet 11. Jump start a car 12. Use public transportation to get around 13. Write an effective resume cover letter 14. Professional oral & written communication 15. Basic math 16. Stay calm in emergencies
17. Know when to ask for help 18. Personal hygiene 19. Do your own taxes 20. Use internet search engines strategically (if you know how to do good searches, you can find any information you need on the web)
Not bad. Better than I did on the Popular Mechanics list.
To borrow a line from Martha Reeves, “Come and get ‘em, come and get ‘em. And take them away.
Seriously though, don’t you have some memories you could do without? C’mon. Something you wish had never happened? Something you’d like to forget? Maybe something you’d erase if you could? What would you erase if you could?
I’ve asked these questions before, back when I reviewedEternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and I’m still asking them. I guess that’s because of my own ADD-related memory problems, which can be pretty disruptive in terms of working, living my everyday life, etc. Without treatment that is. On the one hand, there are days when I’d give almost anything for something that would improve my memory to the some level of normalcy. (I don’t know what a normal level of functioning is, memory-wise. The treatment I’m using now helps some, but there’s no “curing” ADD. Thus, speaking of memory-related movies, I felt a special affinity with the main character in Memento
.
Ironically, on the other hand, there are some pre-treatment ADD-related memories I wouldn’t mind getting shed of. Humiliations. Dismal failures. Lost jobs. Lost relationships. Depression. That why Spotless Mind appealed to me. And, despite the possibility that losing those memories might mean losing part of myself, the idea of a drug that wipes out bad memories sounds pretty tempting.
I knew it. I posted about it a few months ago, when a Canadian psychologist suggesting that "letting your mind wander" (or a mind that wanders of its own accord) can be beneficial. Now a Dartmouth study says that daydreaming is beneficial because your mind may be working out issues that aren't immediately relevant, but that aren't entirely unimportant either. So there. Next time you see someone sitting at their staring out of a window, they're working on something. It just may not look like it.
There are at least three political posts I want to write at the moment, but right now the personal is what’s on my mind. So, if folks will indulge me for a bit, I need to get this out. It’s been one of those months, so far, where I’ve swung between the extremes of the exhilaration of getting to combine my interests and talents in a meaningful way and the shame and embarrassment of letting down people who rely on me and whose respect I’d like to earn.
I’ve been here before. More times than I can count. I wrote back in November about my time/task management issues and my latest attempt at putting things in some semblance of order. I was wary then, about trying yet another organizing scheme.
There have been times throughout my life when this deficiency has been cast in very stark and unflattering light; usually those times when circumstances overwhelm my ability to compensate for it. And there are, in all those periods, events that send me scurrying for some sort of time management information (TMI, for short), the way a man aboard a sinking ship looks for something, anything, with which to bail out the water that’s rushing in. (A bucket would be great, but a teaspoon will do if that’s all I can find. When my first job in D.C. was going down faster than the Titanic, and happened to be riding down in the elevator with the Executive Director, she asked me how I was it was going. I said “Like I’m bailing water on the Titanic with a teaspoon.”) Never mind looking for a lifejacket. That’s somewhere under all the water.
Now — when I’m facing the intersection of work and (a growing) family and blogging and any number of other activities that I might want to engage in — is one of those times. So I find myself reaching for another bucket to bail with, and some trepidation given my track record with this sort of thing (more below). But at this point might worship as a demigod the person who can show me how to get organized and stay organized — to find time to do all the stuff I have to do, and maybe a fair amount of the stuff I want to do — if it will loosen or even completely banish the knot of tension that tightly winds itself between my shoulder blades on a daily basis now.
Six months later, I’m back in pretty much the same place; a little better in terms of the positive side of the scale but losing ground fast, and I’m not sure what to do.
Do you have one? I don’t. Or at least not one that I thought about until I read this Lifehack post (one of several similar blogs I’ve been reading since I starting trying to implement a GTD system) about how the author’s seven-year-old started his own life list.
About two months ago, on a rainy Saturday, my seven year-old son (who is enjoying his budding ability to write) came to me with a small, yellow pad of paper and said, “Daddy, I want to write a list. What should I make a list of?” Suddenly, I recalled reading about John Goddard and the life list he wrote at age 15. His list consisted of 127 things he would like to do or see during his lifetime (for example: Climb Mt. Everest, run a mile in under five minutes, land on and take off from an aircraft carrier, and circumnavigate the globe). Goddard is now 75 years old and, at last count, has accomplished 109 of the goals he wrote as a teenager.
I hadn’t heard of John Goddard or his life list, at least that I can recall, but I was impressed with the idea that he even started one at age 15, let alone knew what he wanted to do. I can’t imagine doing that at 15 or at seven.
I probably shouldn't say this, but I work on K Street. I've even bumped into Robert Novak once, when we were both pedestrians, crossing the street in opposite directions. Now, I'll have remember to keep an eye out, and look both ways before I cross the street, lest Robert Novak run into me.
I don't really care about the Madonna/Alex Rodriguez affair story, because I'm not married to either of them. But in this day and age why would anyone (who's not "in the business" and getting paid for it) intentionally record their sexcapades on video? Why, when there are a thousand different ways for someone to get and distribute that video? How dumb do you have to be to make a 'sex tape' nowadays?
Maybe I'm taking this the wrong way, and I know these aren't Warren Buffett’s actual words of widsom, but nothing irritates me more than hearing things like "Happiness comes from within," and "Find happiness in simple pleasures." From a billionaire? Easy for him to say...
Gimmick or no gimmick, I would sodance with Lance. Hey, I took ballroom dancing in college, and was pretty good at it. Later, I learned to two-step in a gay C&W bar, and was pretty popular because I was a good follower. Not like dragging around a sack of potatoes. So, Lance, you can lead if you want to...
I knew there was a reason I'm not buying an iPhone today. (Besides the fact that I don't "need" one, and the reality that I don't need to spend that much on a tech purchase. It looks like Apple's having a pretty bad day, along with people who did buy iPhones that currently don't work due to server problems.
My friends and I used to joke that in D.C. it's a law that in DC, you're never more than a block from Starbucks. When tourists stop me and ask where's nearest Starbucks, I usually end up pointing in three different directions. But that may change.
I'm getting tired of wanting to write, and needing to write, but not writing because writing is not my job. Anybody know anyone looking to hire a writer?
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