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In my experience, even with a diagnosis you don’t stop feeling broken.
True, but it helps.
I’ll probably never stop feeling irrationally guilty at times when my ADHD and/or my anxiety hinders me from getting stuff done, but being able to remind myself and explain to others makes it easier to carry it and not let myself descend into a guilt spiral that hinders me even further and for longer.
It helps once you have the emotional maturity and skills to contextualize your own dysfunctions and divergences as such. Even with a diagnosis on the early side, everything I do wrong or fail to execute on is inherently still, and always will be, my fault.
Sure, emotional maturity is a big part of it as well, but with no knowledge about the causes for your more vexing hurdles and limitations, you can be endlessly mature and STILL not know how to tell laziness or apathy from executive dysfunction 🤷🏻
Something that pisses me off to no end is the commonly accepted idea that confidence is a momentary emotion you can conjure in yourself like a joyful laugh at a memory. Sure, for people who have had a life that structurally empowered them and rewarded them for having the brain they did maybe it is…
For someone with ADHD who has been told they aren’t enough and are also too much their whole life and never had the diagnosis? You can’t just make that go away with telling them they have ADHD and giving them a hug. Lasting damage has been done to that child and they may never recover their confidence in adulthood the way other people do.
I wish we would stop treating confidence like it is child’s play, it isn’t. If you undermine a child’s confidence you have hurt that child at a more permanent level than almost any other way you can non-physically hurt them.
Especially for someone who is very sensitive about what other people think of them, which a lot of ADHD people tend to be (a lot of us rely on it to motivate us to get things done!), you can’t just think better about yourself. Your confidence is like an instinct that has been learned through the summation and culmination of your experiences. If those experiences are people shitting on you for things you can’t help, you won’t be a confident person, period. That is how that works and I wish people would stop pretending it is all just wishy washy perspective taking that can be undone by simply thinking harder. Maybe for a very narrow range of people in a much larger subset this is possible, but beyond that? No
I’ve known several kids in upper elementary school who have a diagnosis but their parents won’t tell them or get them school accommodations or services. It’s just setting them up for failure.
I was tested for something or things in 3rd grade. My mom never told me what the diagnosis was. I was diagnosed at age 41 and my mom was dead so I never got to ask her.
She was afraid of how it would make her look, I imagine, because her rep was all she was concerned with.
My rationale for not having my son diagnosed is that we live in the US. I am afraid by having that label he will be rounded up and put in a camp. He is already ADHD and Tourettes diagnosed so I figured that should be enough, no point in adding on Autism when it’s one of RFKs obsessions.
It’s one of the reasons I haven’t considered getting an autism diagnosis. I’m pretty sure I have it, but even talking with the doctor I get my ADHD medication from she agreed that while it can be helpful to “know”, there isn’t much else outside of that.
It’s not like my ADHD where I can get a prescription that helps me manage the symptoms. If I just work on the assumption I have it and use that to process things and know when I’m getting overwhelmed and how to deal with it, and also stop masking all the time, then I get the same benefit that I would from an official diagnosis without opening myself up to more discrimination or fascist targeting.
Between being queer and having ADHD I already have enough things they want to throw me into gas chambers for.
I was diagnosed with Autism at the ripe old age of 33. When I told my parents about it, my mum lost her mind because I was actually diagnosed at 7, she just never told me in hopes I will be “normal” and thought she got away with it.
😳 she lost her mind?!
Or in the sense of guilt?
I can only imagine the anger that would trigger in Me learning that like you did.My parents just don’t understand it… (while dealing themselves with it thinking it is how everyone is)
They learned to live with it in a healthy way, without knowing or acknowledging it…
And fork you if you don’t do it because you don’t wanna be the “parent with a kid who has x”.
“What are you talking about? You’re not different. Everyone feels that way, we just all learned how to deal with it ourselves.”
— Undiagnosed parents
What becomes epidemic can often be assumed as normal.
A Cautionary Tale: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome And The “enlarged” Thymus Gland
In the first half of the 19th century, physicians were becoming alarmed by sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Healthy infants would be put to bed and found dead in the morning. In 1830, pathologists noted that SIDS-affected infants had enlarged thymus glands compared with “normal” autopsy specimens. It seemed logical to conclude that these “enlarged” glands were in some way responsible for the deaths.
…
If an enlarged thymus was leading to sudden infant death, removal of the thymus might be of preventive value. Radiology had advanced to the point at which physicians began making the diagnosis of thymic enlargement from x-ray films. After radiographic diagnosis, thymectomy was initially recommended, but the mortality rate was unacceptably high. Thymus irradiation became the treatment of choice.
The first “successful” use of irradiation to shrink the thymus was reported by Friedländer in 1907. Thousands of children eventually received radiation to prevent status thymicolymphaticus. Some physicians advocated prophylactic irradiation for all neonates.
There was only one slight problem. It turned out to be deadly
The cadavers used by anatomists to determine the “normal” thymus size were from the poor, most having died of highly stressful chronic illnesses such as tuberculosis, infectious diarrhea, and malnutrition. What was not appreciated at the time was that chronic stress shrinks the thymus gland. The “normal” thymus glands of the poor were abnormally small. Here is where the fatal mistake occurred: because the autopsied thymus glands of the poor were regarded as normal in size, the SIDS-affected infants were erroneously believed to have thymic enlargement
In a household or community where large numbers of people express the same symptoms, it is very possible for people to assume this condition to be the normal one and good health to be the abnormality. They may even conclude healthy people are in need of treatment to bring them back to “normal” patterns of behavior.
You can see this error repeated historically, from abusive parents assuming “being beaten by my parents toughed me up so I should do the same” to anti-vaxxers who think measles and whooping cough build character.
