Sunday, 16 October 2011

On lapses of focus and the ADHD/ADD controversy



  2. scratchy888
    October 16, 2011 at 10:22 pm | #27
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    October 16, 2011 at 10:13 pm | #26
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    Scratchy888: I’ll begin by saying that before school-age, I was considered to have an active imagination and preferred not to play with other children. By first grade, I was socially isolated, refused to talk to or make eye contact with the teacher, and spent most of my time playing games and hiding. By second grade I wouldn’t speak to or willingly interact with my classmates, actively ignored my teacher and spent all of my time playing games or hogging the world maps.
    I spent most of the fall of second grade going in and out of tests to see how my brain worked. I have a fancy bit of paperwork from a doctor saying that I have it. I took psychology tests every few years to see whether I was managing to stay on task with or without meds. I spent most of my school years in classes with lots of kids who were in the same situation I was, some of them with other associated learning disabilities like dyslexia. In college, I had a note-taker- who was paid by the college- for each class just in case I missed something important.
    So, either it’s a real thing or hundreds of people suffer from a delusion. Occam’s razor suggests it’s real. Unless you believe Big Pharma has somehow hypnotized most of the US’s population
    .
    I remember first grade in colonial Rhodesia. We had to sit quietly at the end of class at our teacher’s feet, to be read a story. Suddenly, I became obsessed with the idea that my underpants were on inside out. Next, I became preoccupied with the idea that I ought to put them on the right way, which I eventually did, sitting there in front of the teacher. This teacher spoke to my mother about my “difficulty in concentrating”.
    I seemed to daydream quite a bit in class, especially when it was most important for me to focus. In one case, we had to illustrate the word, “jump”. I drew a picture to illustrate this word and my first grade teacher was unsatisfied with it. She said it didn’t clearly illustrate the word as I would have to draw something for my stick man to jump over. So I went back to my table and drew a log underneath the stick man. Whilst I was queuing up again, I noticed that somehow I had two pictures, adjacent to each other, of stick men jumping over logs. I didn’t know how the second picture came to be, but I hurriedly tore out the replica, hoping my teacher wouldn’t notice and I presented my image to her once I reached the top of the queue.
    She asked me what had happened to my book and and why there was a page torn out. I lied and said I didn’t know, so she threw my book against the wall at the other end of the classroom and told me not to deface my book.
    Despite my failure to focus in all sorts of contexts, as a child as well as an adult, I find that I can engage very effectively with all sorts of abstract ideas.
  3. scratchy888
    October 16, 2011 at 10:36 pm | #28
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    I suppose I should attach an note by way of a moral of the story. There isn’t really one except that I am very, very happy with my life right now in every possible way. I’m very much in control of my life and I only do whatever makes me happy. I also have a great relationship, of more than ten years’ standing, with someone who was brought up with approximately the same environmental and social experiences as I.
  4. scratchy888
    October 16, 2011 at 10:50 pm | #29
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    I also tried to join the military once, but failed due to my inability to pay attention to detail. In a fatigued state, I have almost no visual memory. I can’t remember where things are or the precise order of events. I had enormous difficulty, for instance, ordering my wardrobe. I would make a mental note of where the collection of different items were placed on the shelf and then, in the five meter walk back to organize my locker in that way, I had lost the visual image.
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Cultural barriers to objectivity