A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with adhd and I’m having a hard time understanding how it works, being a child of the 80s/90s it was always just explained in a very simplified manner and as just kind of an auxiliary problem. Thank you in advance.
In: Biology
(ADHD sufferer here. Diagnosed at 35 at the urging of friends. Medication changed my life).
ADHD is at its core a brain chemical deficiency.
ADHD brains do not produce enough of the usual “happy juice” – the chemicals that, in short, make you happy. There’s a lot of them.
Human brains need this happy juice to encourage us towards normal human behaviors. Everything you want – food, fun, self-improvement, social activity, even sex, is driven by happy juice. Additionally, human brains make a low level of happy juice (which you get used to) to mitigate the sudden spikes when it makes a bunch of happy juice at once to encourage you to do something.
ADHD sufferers don’t make enough of this low-level happy juice. Just imagine the passive contentment that you feel every day plain *gone*, replaced by a nonstop feeling of boredom and pointlessness. This has the side effect of a very high incidence of depression (the comorbidity of ADHD and depression is ridiculous). But it also means that ADHD sufferers get *strongly* encouraged by anything that creates this happy juice.
One of the things that generates this happy juice is thinking about interesting things. Boring things don’t make much. But boring things are sometimes important. The bad news for ADHD people is that their brains will start rigging their behavior to ignore the boring but important thing to hyper-focus on the interesting but less important thing.
There is also a certain continuity to this interest. It’s a misconception that ADHD people are easily distracted – they’re the opposite. Instead they are hyper-focused on a single train of thought and all the stuff other people think is important is what is trying to “distract” them, to no avail. The happy juice is too strong. This means a lot of impulsiveness.
Imagine a starving man who only gets to eat every few days, while you get your regular meals. When food does arrive, the starving man is going to chase that food much harder than you. You’re wondering why this fool is so obsessed with a few slices of toast, not realizing he doesn’t get to eat the toast you have for breakfast literally every morning.
Now we talk medication. Stimulants (we’re not sure why entirely) suddenly make the ADHD brain produce happy juice. Stimulants have hours-long durations, so while they are in effect, ADHD sufferers suddenly have their happy juice deficiency eased. For a long-time sufferer, the effect can be quite dramatic. This is not perfect or universal – different people react differently to different drugs. The big two are methylphenidate (Ritalin) and amphetamine (Adderall). About 70% of sufferers will have a major positive reaction to one or the other.
Look up there – does amphetamine ring a bell? If you watched Breaking Bad, you will know that this is (same name, different salt) part of the name of a street drug called meth. Meth also eases the deficiency on ADHD sufferers, though abusers tend not to be properly regulating their doses and can go overboard from the (mental) addiction to the happy juice. ADHD sufferers have a VERY high rate of addiction to meth, and this is progressively viewed as a desperate attempt at self-medication.
If you’re wondering if this might extend to addiction to other things, you’re absolutely right. Lots of ADHD sufferers end up addicted to specific things of varying healthiness (sports is generally good, video games not so good, drugs pretty bad). The thing these addictions have in common is a proven source of happy juice that they’ve gotten used to.
ADHD is not a condition I would wish on anyone. Even in the best case scenario it makes your life needlessly more difficult. At the worst it can compound with other disadvantages (poverty for example), making the combination impossible to solve without intervention. Keep in mind that no matter how difficult a life situation is, there’s probably someone who has that *and* ADHD. Every time I look back at the difficulties I overcame, I wonder where I would be if I didn’t have to deal with ADHD at the same time.
A diagnosis and proper prescribed medication can be a literal lifesaver for us. For many of us it’s the first time we feel like a normal person – and I mean this in the most primal, fundamental sense. It annoys me to no end that ADHD constantly gets maligned in news and media. There was a very important paper published about how lots of child ADHD diagnoses are wrong – this has had the effect of people suspecting adult ADHD is not real.
I happen to be a straight-A student because I was obsessed with science, math and reading. But my professional life was basically so much hell keeping afloat that I tried to kill myself in my late 20s. Am on Ritalin now and things are finally livable.
Latest Answers