This is a tiny snippet of a much longer presentation Dr. Barkley made for parents of kids with ADD/ADHD. It's incredibly comprehensive compared to what is normally available to the public.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in the early 2000's in my mid-twenties and randomly prescribed a new-ish drug called Strattera and shoved out the door after a couple of counseling sessions. The drug made substantial changes to my ability to function, but I had no frame of reference, so I thought that would be it.
Saw this video sometime in the last year and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Contacted Dr. Barkley directly via email and asked him for a recommendation in my area for treatment. Got hooked up with the NYU ADHD program and have been working with the program there for 6+ months and have been on new meds (Concerta) which is like emerging from underground for the last 16-17 years.
If you know someone with ADHD or family with ADHD, watch this whole thing. It's long, but phenomenal. A potential life changer for folks who haven't received help or may be getting the wrong help.
For folks who are poking fun and saying, "I guess have ADHD too!"
That would be like saying you have an eating disorder because you have trouble not eating a box of chips when someone with an actual eating disorder clears out the refrigerator. Or saying you have multiple personality disorder because you occasionally talk to yourself. Or saying you have epilepsy because you get shaky when you are hungry.
Everyone struggles from time to time to pay attention to things and focus on long term goals and lessons learned in the past. That's the human condition.
ADHD/ADD makes it literally impossible to integrate long term thinking into action, both in the future and remembering the successes and failures in your past. Trying to engage structure surrounding things that I am not directly threatened or rewarded by sends me wandering around the room, physically and mentally. Unless I am constantly getting rewarded or punished or don't have some massive impending reward or punishment on the horizon, I can't stay focused on the task at hand.
TLDR: The original video is almost three hours long and changed my life. Don't mock people who have ADHD or pretend to for attention. Attention deficit is crippling. My current treatment is helping a LOT and has changed my life for the better.
Can I ask you about how your current treatment is helping you? How does it overcome this neurological impediment?
It's almost painful for me to integrate long term thinking into action. Every time I study more than a few days or weeks out from an exam I have to induce myself into near panic to focus. I find adderall helps me somewhat, but only on more mundane tasks with a clear end point.
The drugs won't fix it. That's a common misperception.
They simply help you prioritize and focus your energy on building new habits.
Analogy: (because shitty analogies work best for me) You've grown up your whole life with a terrible tremor in your hand whenever you write and (among other things) have terrible, shaky handwriting as a result. It also made almost completely incapable of typing. No amount of effort or focus seems to fix that.
This was okay when you were in elementary school. Everyone struggled. But as you got older, everyone else got marginally better with their handwriting year after year. You resigned yourself to being unable to communicate textually at all. And people notice. You create a bunch of workarounds and cobble together as hoc solutions that allow you to get by.
Suddenly someone gives you a drug that steadies your hands.
Your handwriting improves greatly when you are on the drug, but it is still fucking terrible. You realize, however, that you have the ability to fix your handwriting. Your effort in writing and typing allows you get marginally better year after year and eventually catch up with your peers and become a better writer than many folks who don't have a tremor.
The drug can't fix your ADHD because the ADHD isn't just the lack of attention. It's also (for older kids and adults) the accumulated skill set you've defaulted to and habits you've built while you have been unmedicated.
After I got used to the exhilaration of fulfilling tasks, I started to use an app called "Habitica" to gamify my task list. I had to learn how to break tasks I wanted to do into discrete chunks. This didn't work for me before. I was able to take the newfound sense of purpose and context and focus it into learning how to function with the new energy and mental acuity.
This absolutely helps. Yoru analogy makes things very clear for me. Knowing the skills is one thing, but applying them is another.
Do you have any particular reason why you like concerta? Is it much different than adderall?
Also, one last question. What should I be looking for when I look for a new doctor who understands treatment at this level. I brought this up to my current doctor and he seemed flummoxed.
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u/supercali5 May 30 '17
This is a tiny snippet of a much longer presentation Dr. Barkley made for parents of kids with ADD/ADHD. It's incredibly comprehensive compared to what is normally available to the public.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in the early 2000's in my mid-twenties and randomly prescribed a new-ish drug called Strattera and shoved out the door after a couple of counseling sessions. The drug made substantial changes to my ability to function, but I had no frame of reference, so I thought that would be it.
Saw this video sometime in the last year and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Contacted Dr. Barkley directly via email and asked him for a recommendation in my area for treatment. Got hooked up with the NYU ADHD program and have been working with the program there for 6+ months and have been on new meds (Concerta) which is like emerging from underground for the last 16-17 years.
If you know someone with ADHD or family with ADHD, watch this whole thing. It's long, but phenomenal. A potential life changer for folks who haven't received help or may be getting the wrong help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc-rkIfo&t=2428s
For folks who are poking fun and saying, "I guess have ADHD too!"
That would be like saying you have an eating disorder because you have trouble not eating a box of chips when someone with an actual eating disorder clears out the refrigerator. Or saying you have multiple personality disorder because you occasionally talk to yourself. Or saying you have epilepsy because you get shaky when you are hungry.
Everyone struggles from time to time to pay attention to things and focus on long term goals and lessons learned in the past. That's the human condition.
ADHD/ADD makes it literally impossible to integrate long term thinking into action, both in the future and remembering the successes and failures in your past. Trying to engage structure surrounding things that I am not directly threatened or rewarded by sends me wandering around the room, physically and mentally. Unless I am constantly getting rewarded or punished or don't have some massive impending reward or punishment on the horizon, I can't stay focused on the task at hand.
TLDR: The original video is almost three hours long and changed my life. Don't mock people who have ADHD or pretend to for attention. Attention deficit is crippling. My current treatment is helping a LOT and has changed my life for the better.