I have as of the Spring of 2015, been diagnosed as suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), a physical and neurological disorder, after a lifetime of mistreatments and misdiagnoses and a fair amount of apparent bullying and two-facedness from people (including several colleagues and at least one relative) who I would have expected to be kinder to me. I have many of the symptoms of dyspraxia (e.g. clumsiness, low muscle tome, reduced sensory perceptions, reading difficulties, and lack of spatial awareness). I also have a tendency to tangentialise and to blurt out haphazard remarks during conversation. I think very much in my subconscious, which tends to get wired with a beehive of competing thoughts. My specialist thinks that the increased activity in my subconscious which is caused by my ADD is responsible for the peaks of my mathematical ability, my broad-ranging lateral thinking, and my late emerging literary abilities. My highs and lows are explainable by my ADD and not by any of the crass disorders or biochemical imbalances which have been dreamt up by the shrinks.
At age 67 I am consequently beginning to understand how my brain works for the first time in my life. As my perceptions can be a bit more varied and colourful than for most people, I need to take time modifying, refining and clarifying them. I can then rely on my perceptions just as much as anybody else. I find periods of relaxation and meditation to be very useful in this regard.
While I re-established my long-term memory and productivity following a long period of medication-induced ill health (2000-2011) I now find myself renewing and re-interpreting all my important memories as they flash through my consciousness, I now much better understand people's reactions to me; they of course never understood what was going on inside my head either.
The US and UK medical professions stand indicted for not diagnosing me properly until January 2015 despite being made aware of many of the relevant symptoms, Maybe this was not totally due to their lack of medical competence, I have of course declined to take any of the dangerous medications, such as ritalin, which are so frequently used to 'punish' children and adults who suffer from ADD or ADHD
See also MENTAL HEALTH DISCUSSIONS EDINBURGH
The only issue I ever took with labels such as ADD. Depression, Bipolar, etc. was the prescribing (pushing) of psychoactive drugs to treat these illnesses.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that people can be forced to take these drugs against their will due to a label (used to define a mental illness) is a grotesque perversion.
My diagnosis did not involve a DSM scale but was rather performed both subjectively and professionally by my consultant. I regard ADD as a name or identity given to people on a Spectrum who have particular groupings of real symptoms. Maybe ADD should not be regarded as a disorder, but rather an extreme point on a scale of normality. All of the enzyme poisoning psych drugs should of course be avoided like the plague
ReplyDeleteMedications do not "punish people." I was not diagnosed until I was 46, and did not take medication for ADHD until several years later. However...I wish I had taken it sooner. Since you have never tried it, you should not make claims that it is used to "punish" children. Plenty of people, including me, wish we had been given it as children. After taking medication for several years, I cannot imagine life without it. I work with children as well, and some of them will look back and wonder why their parents waited so long to give it to them. The damage that NOT taking medication can have on children far exceeds any potential side effects it may have. And, if they do not seem to help a child, they can simply stop taking it; so why not give it a try?
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