What Is ADHD?

ADD or ADHD are terms that people tend to casually throw around.  Most of the time, they are thrown around as jokes or insults, but in reality it is a difference in how a brain works.  To someone who has it, it is certainly not a joke, and it is very hurtful when it is used as an insult.

I am not a doctor, and my psychology training only goes as far as a BA degree, but I do have a son with this diagnosis, and from there I do have some expertise.

ADHD and ADD used to be two separate diagnoses, but ADD is no longer “official.”  It is now called ADHD-Inattentive Type, and that is what my son is diagnosed with and treated for (along with dyspraxia, dyslexia, and sensory processing issues, things that often go hand in hand with the ADHD disorder).  This is what I can talk about.

Most people define ADHD as “hyperactive.”  It is so much more than that.  In fact, ADHD-Inattentive type literally means ADHD without the hyperactive component.  People diagnosed with this disorder may still have some impulsivity, but if you were to observe them in a classroom, they would not be jumping up and disrupting the class, rather they would probably not be noticed at all because they would be sitting in the back, just quietly staring out the window.

So what is living with ADHD like?

While there are a lot of things that make day to day living hard, there are also some benefits.  Many children with ADHD are above average intelligence, have particular obsessions that they actually are hyperfocused on, and as adults become tremendously successful in life by capitalizing on those GIFTS.  My child’s hyperfocus is baseball, both playing and knowledge about it, nothing can make him pay more attention than baseball, and he would easily be able to turn those skills into something great when he becomes an adult – statistician, coach, etc.

Day to day struggles can include?

My child is unorganized.  He can’t find a shirt in the closet that is directly in front of his face.  He forgets to turn in homework that he did.  His room is never clean.  And it’s always a bit of a scary task to see what has been left in the bottom of his baseball equipment bag.

He makes careless mistakes.  He does things too quickly and doesn’t always put all the thought required for a task.  I have had to help him remove, because it’s difficult with the dyspraxia, quite a few Legos put in the wrong place this evening in building his latest creation because he hasn’t thought something through. (But at least he is DOING the Legos, a new skill he has acquired!)

He loses things daily.  Or maybe even hourly.

One evening we were packing for a weekend getaway and I told him “Go to my room and get a pair of shorts from the basket on my bed.”  He went to my room.  He came back.  “What was I supposed to get?”  I informed him, he went back, but 30 seconds later, “Where am I supposed to get the shorts from?”  Yes, instructions can get overwhelming!

His friends all tend to be several year younger than him, as his interests and emotional maturity level are also “behind.”

And the baseball thing, even though he is obsessed, he can still sometimes forget.  Yesterday, while playing, he forgot what signs used at every game meant, he had what he called “sign overload.”  There was just too much going on in his brain.

He can get so overwhelmed with frustration at all these things that sometimes he has meltdowns.  A meltdown is like a temper tantrum on steroids, one of the main differences being that a child can control a tantrum, but a meltdown actually turns into something that controls the child.  Luckily as he has gotten older, and started taking medication which helps diminish the other symptoms, these are few and far between and he hasn’t had one in over a year, but when he was younger the meltdowns (and trying to avoid them) consumed our lives.

Basically, ADHD is a processing disorder.  We all take information from our environment in, process it, and then spit it back out with an appropriate response.  With ADHD, sometimes not all the information makes it in.  Sometimes, what does get dropped off in the processing portion because there was just too much.  The end result is that it the response then becomes skewed, and thus not always appropriate or the correct action.

ADHD is not a lack of intelligence.  It’s not bad parenting. It’s frustrating, and that frustration can just sometimes compound the response.

My child takes medication.  He does not take it because he has bad behavior or because I can’t control him, it is because he gets extremely unhappy and frustrated when he can’t process things correctly.  He does not do well in school.  He loses all his confidence.  He struggles each and every day.  The medication makes that processing accessible, and thus helps him to be successful and happy and confident.  This may not be the solution for everyone, but it certainly helps with my child and I think to withhold it would be equivalent to abuse.

In my personal life, ADHD is a brilliant, funny, quirky, amazing kid.

…Who can sometimes frustrate the heck out of me!  But that’s why they have wine.