#adhd article

Excerpt:

Now that he had the facts, now that we had interviewed so many experts, now that he and Janis had done a great deal of reading, Patrick said that he was looking forward to trying medication.

He said he was looking forward to experiencing that calm that other people talk about, but that he had never known.  I smiled and nodded.  Been there done that.  ‘Good answer,’ I thought.

But for Ava [who doesn’t have ADHD], Patrick’s answer was a bolt of lightning.  A revelation.

I just found this amazing site (ADDitude) while doing some research for a class and I had to share this article:

https://www.additude.com/adhd-brain-prefrontal-cortex-attention-emotions/

Quotes from the article:

“If you have ADHD, the stronger message isn’t that you were late for work last time, but the desire to play a video game for a couple of minutes or phone a friend about going out on the weekend right now. And you are late for work — again. You keep doing the same things over and over because past experiences are being cut off by what is in your focus at the moment.”

“As I’ve said, people with ADHD often forget things that aren’t in their focus, so these anxious thoughts are an attempt to keep these items (cars) in the intersection, so that the person doesn’t forget about them. Holding many things in your mind creates a lot of tension, a traffic jam of sorts. Whenever too many things — thoughts or emotions — try to pass through the intersection at the same time, you’re apt to feel anxiously overwhelmed and shut down. For instance, when trying to clean a cluttered room, with many items demanding your attention and none of them sticking out as more important than the other, you don’t know what to do first, so you don’t do anything.”

ADHD does not look the same in boys and girls. Women with the disorder tend to be less hyperactive and impulsive, more disorganized, scattered, forgetful, and introverted. “They’ve alternately been anxious or depressed for years,” Littman says. “It’s this sense of not being able to hold everything together.”

Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) disrupts how the central nervous system takes in, organizes, and uses the messages that we get through our body’s receptors for everyday functioning. We take in sensory information through our eyes, ears, muscles, joints, skin and inner ears, and we use those sensations – we integrate them, modulate them, analyze them and interpret them for immediate and appropriate everyday functioning.

For example, you hear a truck rumbling down the road as you’re standing poised to cross the street, and that rumbling of the truck tells you, “Jump back.” You don’t think about it, you just react instinctively, if all is going well. But sometimes with SPD, that processing falters. For people with SPD, sensory stimuli from our own bodies and from our environment can cause signals to misfire — and problems in movement, emotions, relationships, tension and adaptations to the signals that we’re constantly receiving.

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Temple Grandin says that all people on the autism spectrum have SPD and sensory challenges.

ADHD and SPD have fidgetiness and inattention in common. The big difference: If you take away the sensory overload of an itchy tag or a humming florescent bulb, the behavior changes for a person with SPD. For a person with ADHD, it does not.

Excerpt:

Rejection sensitivity is part of ADHD. It’s neurologic and genetic. Early childhood trauma makes anything worse, but it does not cause RSD. Often, patients are comforted just to know there is a name for this feeling. It makes a difference knowing what it is, that they are not alone, and that almost 100% of people with ADHD experience rejection sensitivity. After hearing this diagnosis, they know it’s not their fault, that they are not damaged.

Psychotherapy does not particularly help patients with RSD because the emotions hit suddenly and completely overwhelm the mind and senses. It takes a while for someone with RSD to get back on his feet after an episode.

There are two possible medication solutions for RSD.

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Excerpt:

Dr Ashok Roy, head of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ intellectual disability faculty, says the core symptoms are the same in men and women, but that “female patients’ inattention problems often are combined with daydreaming, whereas men have more hyperactivity and behavioural problems, which are more noticeable during childhood”. Roy has also observed that women with ADHD also tend to suffer from other disorders that can affect their mood and behaviour.

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