There's no such thing as ADD.

[Phentex]

Why do people say this? I even read it here on DU!

Do they believe it's simply a catch-all diagnosis?

[Nitram]

1. Not "simply" a catch-all diagnosis.

But probably an amalgam of various different syndromes. I suspect we need to learn more about the brain before we can distinguish the various types and causes of ADD behavior. And I don't doubt that some kids are just plain bored by school because they are too intelligent for the slow and dull pace of the average curriculum, and they act out as a result.

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. Or "act IN". School makes some kids crazy. Really. n/t

>>>they are too intelligent for the slow and dull pace of the average curriculum, and they act out>>>>

[LWolf]

5. It's amazing

how often I've heard this excuse for students with poor self-management skills and poor study habits, ADD or not.

Some kids are bored because they've been conditioned by adults in their lives to think they're supposed to be bored.

As a teacher, my response is:

"Your attitude is a choice. "Bored" is an attitude that you can choose and hide behind. Or you can choose to find something of interest in what you are learning, and thus engage your brain. It's up to you, but if you choose to be bored, you have no one to blame but yourself."

I know there are legitimately tedious tasks in any student's day. That's just life. Personally, I find many routine chores around the house to be tedious. That doesn't mean that I don't take out the trash or clean the cat litter because I find it "boring." When something is tedious, I find a way to get it done and move on. I share ways to do those things with my students, as well. Of course, just because I find taking out the trash to be tedious, doesn't mean that many ADD/ADHD people won't grab the trash bags or bins with relief, because it gets them up, out, and moving. "Boring" or "tedious" is subjective.

I currently have a very bright adhd student. I've banned the word "boring" from his vocabulary in my classroom. Why? Because he uses it for every task that he can't finish in under 2 minutes. It's "boring" to him when a task requires multiple steps and an extended focus to complete. He prefers math; even with a page of complex problems, each problem only takes a couple of minutes, giving him the relief of closure as he finishes each one.

Writing, though...requires thinking, organizing those thoughts, drafting, proof-reading, editing, re-writing...it's "boring," not because his skills are low, or he has nothing to say, but because it's really hard work for him to stick to longer tasks. He communicates quite openly about it. If he has to focus his thinking, he doesn't like it, so it's "boring." If nothing else, he's expanding his vocabulary, lol. Since he can't use the word "boring" to complain, he's finding a rapidly expanding list of creative synonyms. He's actually spending time LOOKING for, and planning for, ways to say something is "boring" without the "b" word, because that's part of what he does to excuse himself from anything that taxes his attention span. All without realizing how much attention he's paying to finding new ways to say something.

Much of his assigned written work is in content areas. But...when I have to assign a prompt to assess his writing skills, I'm going to set "boring" free and let him write about everything that's boring, and all the ways to complain about it. I'll bet he'll stay focused all the way through the process.

[Nitram]

7. I was bored out of my mind in 5th grade and would probably be diagnosed with ADD today. Fortunately,

my family moved to Caracas, Venezuela and the change in environment and a more interesting and challenging curriculum "cured" me.

[Blue_true]

9. Did you explain to your student how focused he had to be

to find synonyms for "boring"? For a child, that effort requires remarkable intellectual gymnastics, some adults can't execute such an effort.

One of my brother's granddaughters is getting tested for ADD. She is in kindergarten and acts out in class. I really have not spent a lot of time around the child because I have my own life interests, but the times that I have, I have found her to be of remarkable inate intelligence, she only has to see or be shown something once to pick it up. She asks rapid-fire well thought-out questions for her age. I am not sure why she acts out in K-school, in my estimate, it isn't because she doesn't understand. I mentioned diet to my brother with the idea that she is missing some nutrients, I still may suggest to him that she get a blood analysis. But after reading your post and thinking about my own observations of her, maybe the issue is when her teacher explains stuff, she picks it up really fast and gets bored when the teacher explains to other kids. I know that I have always been a slow reader, I got smoked by kids in speed reading exercises in grade school, but I successfully became an engineer and it was only a few years ago that I realized that eventhough I read slow, the absorption level of what I read is almost total, I can give a pretty vivid synopsis of anything that I read, and an added bonus is that slow reading for an engineer is not a drawback because of the complexity of my work demands slow reading to get through the dense research reports that I read. So intelligent people arrive in different ways.

It is good to see creative teachers like you in the classroom, teachers that see each kid as a unique canvass and not a pressed out duplicate of some ideal student. You can craft teaching to each individual kid, I only wish that administrators have enough foresight to give you smaller classes, or assistants.

[mikahawkins]

15. A little disagreement

I don't think boredom should be related to ADD as much as it has been. Boredom is a felling you have, its a state of mind just like happiness, sadness and ecstasy. You can be bored and still be in the moment. And still be able to do a particular task. Surely when you are feeling good you work better as well.

[gopiscrap]

16. welcome to DU

[I_UndergroundPanther]

18. I got bored in school

Because I was held back by the other students pace of learning. I would flip ahead in my school books to find something interesting to read because I had already learned what the class was now learning because I would get bored and seek out new stuff to learn.

My 4th grade teacher was the first one to get why I was bored. She got seperate learning modules for me and I burned through those like wildfire.
Then the next year another teacher that didnt know why I was bored again.

Then I got sent to a special class where some kids were behind and others were advanced. This time I got the modules again and burned through them. I was in the class for 4 years and they figured out I was gifted. I will always have a special spot in my heart for every teacher that cared to investigate why I was bored.

All the years when my education kept up with me I wasen't bored.

However my math skills were awful.
I still struggle with basic math. I'm 56 years old and simple math like multiplication confounds me.

I have adhd was diagnosed in the 70's in 2nd grade. When I was taken off ritalin because it was assumed one grew out of it. For years my adhd symptoms made me even more miserable on top of having a mental illness and trauma. I thought it was all my mental illness and I no longer had adhd.. But it wasen't just mental illness .

I am on Adderall now and can function,still have mental illness and trauma,but not having bad adhd symptoms on top of all the other shit I deal with is better than not being on adderall and still having adhd symptoms kicking me in the ass daily.

[mapol]

6. ADD is not simply a catch-all diagnosis.

It really is a biologically-based, neurological developmental disorder, and no two people afflicted with ADD or ADHD are the same. Nobody knows what causes this kind of thing, but it just happens.

[Nitram]

8. "no two people afflicted with ADD or ADHD are the same. Nobody knows what causes this kind of thing"

is just another way of saying it is a catch all diagnosis for what is probably a combination of neurological and other factors that cause a developmental disability with some similar symptoms. I wasn't saying it isn't real. I'm saying it isn't just one simple neurological syndrome.

[jorgevlorgan]

11. ADHD is generally defined is a lower than everage level of dopamine in the frontal cortex.

Studies have shown that this lack of dopamine level is associated with an unconscious reversed cost/benefit/analysis your brain does when executing tasks (instead of prioritizing the reward, we focus on the work as something far more daunting than might be likely). Because of this, it becomes a bit of a mental block that increases the burden of tasks for people with ADD/ADHD. So far, anyways, that seems to be the most specific description of ADHD that I could find, and something that I relate to immensely.

The reality is, ritalin has likely saved my life in more ways than one, regardless of what the other reasons behind ADHD are.

[Nitram]

12. Thanks, jorge, for the informative post. I'm glad to hear you've benefitted from ritalin.

I'm looking forward to learning more about the effects of ritalin and the causes of ADD/ADHD as scientific research advances. I suspect we are in the pretty early days of understanding in this area.

[jorgevlorgan]

13. Thanks! I've only had it for a few months and I am still in disbelief of how much it has helped me.

Here is one article that I think cites the study I read about a while back when I first was prescibed ritalin. I definitely agree with you about understanding it and am really looking forward to what is learned in the long term about it.

https://www.brown.edu/news/2020-03-19/ritalin

[meow2u3]

3. Yeah, right. There's also no such thing as....

diabetes, paralysis, blindness, or other handicapping condition. It's all a government conspiracy to make money for Big Pharma.

[trublu992]

4. Drives me crazy when people say Add doesn't exsist really then whats made

my life so difficult.

[Blue_true]

10. Have you come to understand more about your ADD?

Do you do self-analysis to try to figure out what concentration aids work best for you?

I am not trying to be an ass, but people have overcome disabilities to rise to the very top of their fields. The great super-lawyer David Bois is dyslectic. He has to struggle with things that most people take for granted. But he used his disability as an advantage, not to gain sympathy, but to make himself the best lawyer that he could possibly be. I would guess that he faces daily challenges, but he also seems to have developed his personalized system for surmounting those challenges. As I pointed out to another poster, I have been a lifelong slow reader, the scrowling text at the start of a Star Wars movie is absolutely freaking torture for my, especially if I am with someone else who may ask, "did you read that?", but I am also a pretty accomplished engineer.

[True Blue American]

22. Wes Clark was diagnosed

At age 7. He later won a war without losing a man.

[WSSlover]

17. Sorry that people have given you such a hard time about it, trublu992.

The trouble is that ADD/ADHD, like Autism Spectrum Disorder, and other neurological disorders, is very poorly understood, and that's why there's so much insensitivity to it. There's no question that ADD/ADHD, like the other above-mentioned neurological disorders, has bred a lot of ignorance on the part of many people. Sorry that's happened to you.

[ClaudiaBradley]

14. not know

not know

[quakerboy]

19. Because if it exists, it complicates their judgement of bad, lazy kids.

If a kid has a broken femur, it's a lot harder to feel good about calling them lazy, crazy, bad for not winning foot races.

And there probably was an abundance of diagnosis for a while. And as we all know.. if one person is unnecessarily given some benefit due to systems built to help others who need them, it invalidates the whole thing.

[Blappy]

20. Better late than never

Most people simply cannot understand or relate to the challenges of the non-neurotypical, including the highly variable ADHD.

I had a challenging childhood and was thought by many to be a bad kid. I was precocious and acted out, because I was bored with school. Eventually got a PhD in my 30's, but was NEVER a good student, at least beyond age 11 or so. I always thought it was laziness or something was wrong with me morally / spiritually, but realized there was a lot of boredom and 'potential' for success when my intellect was applied appropriately. This whole time it was ADD, inattentive type.

In retrospect, I sure wish I would have known about this 30 years ago (I am in my 60s now). But knowing the why helps me understand my history and who I have become, even if others don't get it. Nowadays there is enough known about the condition that more are able to get the early assistance needed for ultimate success, but ADHD was not 'a thing' when I was a kid....

Those who are challenged by ADHD understand one another more so than the neurotypicals, we have the realization that we are wired a bit differently.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

21. Adhd is fucking real

I get the hyperfocus so bad I have had my blood sugar levels drop dangerously low. To almost passing out. The tunnel vision got really bad and I had trouble seeing my artwork. Thats what made me stop.I could not physically see what I was doing . When I got out of hyperfocus I realized my sugar was dangerously low it was 40 that time. I have forgotten to pee for hours. I forget to eat and drink.
When in hyperfocus everything but what you are focusing on literally does not exist.

This is only 1 symptom of adhd I have. I have more.
.
My adhd can actually endanger my life because I am diabetic.

I would probably be dead without adderall helping with some of my symptoms.