Quarter Up

why stop there

Have you ever wondered where cats come from?

ADHD diagnosis has five components: symptoms, age of onset, generalization, impact, and differentiation. Here’s how I’d suggest assessing all five components.

1. Symptoms

Do you have enough symptoms of ADHD often enough? Doctors use a questionnaire like this, but it can be complicated to score. An online quiz will ask similar questions but score it for you.

2. Age of Onset

Since ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder, it has to have been present as your brain developed—before age 12. (The only exception is if you have secondary ADHD from a traumatic brain injury—you definitely should not be self-diagnosing a traumatic brain injury. Go to the hospital! Now!)

Ask family member, friends, and old teachers what you were like before age 12. Did you get in trouble for talking out of turn or getting out of your seat in the middle of class? Was your room always a mess? Did you often injure yourself attempting daredevil stunts? Did you daydream when you should have been thinking about other things? Did you have a hard time memorizing times tables and spelling even though you didn’t generally have trouble with math and writing? All those things point to ADHD symptoms in childhood.

3. Generalization

Are most of the symptoms that you discovered in part 1 present in at least two parts of your life? For example, if you have trouble paying attention in classes but not paying attention to films, conversations, or cooking, you might just have boring classes. If you’re only hyper and impulsive with your friends but not in other situations, you might just have a high-energy friend group. In other words, if you think you have ADHD, do you always feel you have ADHD, or do you only feel like you have ADHD in one situation?

4. Impact

Is there “clear evidence that the symptoms interfere with, or reduce the quality of, social, school, or work functioning”? Are your grades worse than they should be? Have you lost friends because you’ve insulted them without thinking? Have you been reprimanded for inattention or forgetfulness at work? Have you caused multiple car accidents or gotten several traffic citations? Basically, are these ADHD symptoms causing you actual problems?

If your symptoms are not causing you actual problems, take a deep breath and step away from the Internet for a few hours. Everyone is different, and that is okay. You may identify with a shadow syndrome of ADHD, and that is okay too. You don’t have to have ADHD to read this blog. We will not hunt you down and block you because you don’t have ADHD.

5. Differentiation

This is the part that everyone skips over, and it is the most important. ADHD symptoms are not unique. Many physical and mental health problems can cause the exact same symptoms. You need to check out these too. For example, if you are getting less than eight hours of sleep a night, you’re basically giving yourself ADHD. Put your phone on blocking mode, place the phone far away from your bed, and go the f—— to sleep!

If you can, go to your doctor and get some blood tests: a Comprehensive Metabolic Panel, a Complete Blood Count, and a Thyroid Panel. Those tests should identify quite a few of the physical disorders that can cause ADHD symptoms. Have your vision (near, far, and astigmatism), hearing, and auditory processing checked. Sleep disorders are another thing you should look into if putting your f——ing phone down isn’t solving your sleep problems.

For mental health problems, I’d recommend taking a few screening quizzes; here are links to one for depression, one for anxiety, one for OCD, one for bipolar disorder, and one for sensory processing disorder. It is entirely possible to mistake one of these conditions for ADHD, and it is entirely possible to have one of these conditions and ADHD. If your score suggests a high probability that you have one of these conditions, check out mentalillnessmouse for information on what to do next.

Autism and learning disabilities can also be mistaken for ADHD, and they are both really complicated. Here are some steps for figuring out whether your symptoms are better explained by autism. There are so many learning disabilities that it is hard to link to a quiz—schools usually have the resources for learning disability diagnoses, and an educational psychologist is the person to see about learning disability diagnosis if you’re not in school.

Yes, this is a lot of work.

Diagnosis is complicated and takes time. Understanding yourself and your brain is worth it, though!

Once you know, it makes it easier to work out the best ways to take advantage of or learn to manage the evolutionary benefits your ADHD - being neurologically atypical doesn't have to be a bad thing necessarily.

Once I started to understand my own strengths and weaknesses better as someone with ADHD I began to find all of the tiny edges that being aware of ALL OF THE THINGS can give you and the patterns/heuristics that can be gleaned or adapted from beginning to be able to manage all of the incoming data streams.

Even if you’ve hurt other people in the past, or have been the kind of person that you really don’t respect, you can always make the decision to change. The tips below might be helpful for this.

1. Look for the good in the people that you meet, and try to empathise, and understand others’ viewpoints.

2. Remind yourself of this: “That it’s not all about you” … and the feelings and the wishes of others matter too.

3. Be polite; try saying “thank you”; and don’t take people for granted. What they did took thought and effort, and it’s nice to be acknowledged.

4. Think before you speak. This will save a lot of grief. For once those words are spoken, they cannot be taken back. They may never be forgotten, and can haunt you later on.

5. Check your tone of voice and the words you choose to use. These can cause misunderstandings, or create a bad impression.

6. Don’t gossip about others; look for things to praise instead.

7. Don’t take the bait and be pulled into arguments. Just let the comment go. You don’t need to rise to that.

I know phones are terrifying, but this is important. 

Stephen Bannon’s appointment to the Trump White House is a test of how far America will go in allowing the alt-right (which is code for white supremacist, antisemitic, homophobic woman-haters) control of the American government. You can help stop his appointment, but tweeting or reblogging or snarking on facebook will not accomplish this.

What will help accomplish this? A simple phone call.

This website will give you the contact information.

First, call your representative or senator. You have two senators and one representative. Call all three. It’s okay to take anxiety meds beforehand if you need them. 

When somebody answers the phone, here is what you say:

If your congresscritter is a Democrat or Independent: “Hi, I’m [Name], one of [Name’s] constituents. I am calling because I strongly believe that the [Senator/Representative] should follow the lead of their colleagues, such as Ed Markey and Nancy Pelosi, in condemning President-Elect Trump’s appointment of a white supremacist misogynist, Stephen Bannon, as his chief of strategy and chief counsel.”

If your congresscritter is a Republican: “Hello. Hi, I’m [Name], one of [Name’s] constituents. I’m calling to ask if you can confirm your candidate’s position on white supremacy and white nationalism for me.”

After they answer, then you say, “In that case, I would call on the [Congress(man/woman)/Senator] to condemn President-Elect Trump’s appointment of a white supremacist misogynist, Stephen Bannon, as his chief of strategy and chief counsel in no uncertain terms.“

They may ask your address, Give them the address from which you vote. It’s how they confirm you are for reals.