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
The best way I’ve heard it explained is “A chronic inability to maintain intention over time.”
When explaining it to people I tell them that I have no follow-through. Which is the worst problem to have because how do you fix that? Make a plan? Then what? It always gets a laugh when I say it, but the laugh belies the fact that I feel like I’m trapped inside my own life watching as it just *does* things (some good things, some bad things) with no real ability to do anything about it.
You ever watch Star Trek? And sometimes the computer would have an issue and Picard would say “Run a self-diagnostic”? When I was a kid I used to think, “But what if the part of the computer that runs the diagnostic is the part that’s broken?” That’s me. The part of my brain that I need to solve the problem is the part of my brain that HAS the problem. If I was capable of enacting a plan to solve the problem, I wouldn’t need the plan in the first place.
It’s like telling a paralyzed person that the solution to their problem is to walk more.
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