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Yeah exactly in my psychology class they had to question if someone took a standardized test...did it accurately indicate how intelligent they were? They had to identify the different ways people learn to contribute to learning.

Those are incredibly unreliable tests. From my experience from teaching others individually as a PEER, everyone can learn no matter how they're taught. There just has to be a moral and social understanding between the student and the pupil.

I wish my ADHD symptoms lessened with time. Mine got worse over time.

I've been diagnosed ADD since I was a child (25 now), my sister was diagnosed ADHD and no longer has issues with it, my mother has ADD and it runs in the family on my mother's side. I've made it a point to not only study it in school (3rd year HBA in Psych! biggrin ) but I've also made it a side mission to explain it to my friends who don't understand it, and to get the word out that the meds are not the ONLY or even the BEST answer. But I digress... XD

>Do you believe in ADHD being a mental illness?
-- ADHD is not classified as a mental illness. It's a learning disorder, and I would not like to go about calling it an illness because, while it does cause difficulties, it is NOT detrimental to the functioning of one's life or disruptive enough to be classified as a mental illness. In point of fact, in some aspects of life and depending on what you do, it's considered an asset - I'll clarify that later.

>If so, do you have/know someone with ADHD?
-- As I said - me, my sister, my mom and members across my mother's side all have it, and yes, I know many people who have it now and who had it when they were younger.

>If so, how does it affect said person (above)?
-- The effects of ADHD/ADD differ, depending on the person and their personality. Aside from the attention deficits and easy distraction factor, there's also the secondary side effects, such as insatiability (some with ADD/ADHD are prone to developing self-control and eating disorders/issues).

>If not, how do you feel about the marketing of the illness?
-- I have a largely love/hate relationship with the way this disability is portrayed. It's sensationalized and too often used to describe any child who has trouble focusing, and is too often remedied with medication alone. Every person who has ADD has trouble focusing - not every child who has trouble focusing has ADD. Some my need more exercise at home. Some may be suffering some emotional discomfort. Some may simply be disinterested or may even be gifted. There are many reasons a child may not focus or have an abundance of energy, not every one of them actually has ADD.

>If you have it, did Strattera leave you feeling dizzy, weak, and ill?
-- I was placed on Ritalin for the majority of my elementary school years, before being upgraded to Dexadrin when I developed too high a tolerance for the Ritalin. The medication did not leave me feeling week - but it did produce massive 'snap-back' mood issues and temperamental issues, besides from the fact that it delayed my ability to develop proper emotional coping skills by years and impaired my ability to express and communicate emotion. I spent my entire high school career and a good deal of college having anger issues because during the years in which I was meant to develop the understanding and control of my emotions, I was instead on medication which effectively blocked them out entirely... Can you tell I have issues with the use of meds on kids? smile

>Could the symptoms of this (so called) mental disease lead to further complications?
-- ADD can complicate your life an a number of ways, but if correctly dealt with and understood, it can also enrich and add things to your life that others who don't have it have to strive to achieve. Yes, you are easily distracted. Yes, you are more susceptible to eating, control and emotional disorders - but you are also better able to multi-task, you're more creative, you're better able to make leaps in logic and understanding that others may not see or take longer to get to because they think in a linear fashion, you can have a greater understanding of emotional and behavioral connections, a greater sensitivity to color, shapes and patterns... But only if you learn the ways to control and access your potential.

The key with ADD is to learn the tools that work for you, and use them. For example, people with high ADHD need to have a varied assortment of active things to do. They need to play sports, go outside - do things that require a lot of energy - BEFORE they sit down to try and focus on something. People ADD often need to be doing multiple things at any given time. For example I am focusing on this task because I currently have the TV on and am also petting my dog with my foot. I have multiple sensory inputs being engaged at a specific time - this occupies the parts of my brain that are easily distracted and thus allows me to focus.

People with ADD have 'special brains'. We're wired differently. My mother once explained it in a way that really illustrates this well. Most people's brains are like your typical one track roller coaster. They loop, circle, twist, turn - but all on the same track. They have multiple cars and trains following (multiple ideas!) but each new leap is on a new rotation.

People with ADD have brains akin to a multi-story, multi-track, multi-car roller coaster. At any given time we can have tracks above and below the main one, cars beside and behind the main idea - we're like Time Lords, popping around the universe. Chaotic, messy - it's why we make messy piles and crazy lists, why we have odd, excitable, disjointed conversations that jump from topic to topic with no apparent connection. Two people with ADD, having an educated discussion, can sometimes seem like it's partly being held mind to mind instead of outloud - like half the information is missing. This is because we are making leaps in connections and logic that make no sense to a linear, one-track sort of mind. We're everywhere at once, and often the way we speak displays that. Ritalin, Dexadrin - all the medications we take for this are aimed to slow us down because our minds move too fast, process too much, to allow us to focus on any one thing at a time. Picture the above roller-coaster, from the spectator's view - there's too many trains moving, too many tracks, too much movement happening. You can't find your friend anymore, can't see which car they're on - that's what our brains are like.

In order to organize the mess, to make order in the chaos, we need to engage those excess tracks, to give them something to do - which is why we doodle, hum, tap. Why we map the mouth movements of the professor, or why we listen to music while we work - and watch TV, and read and... everything else we do. It's because, by engaging multiple different inputs to our senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, etc) we can allow the part of our brain that's fore front to have control, leaving those parts that are there but not the main focus to have something else to engage them.

With out doing that, we're prone to being dragged off course by whatever comes along.


>How would this affect the normal person's everyday life?
-- Lack of focus, in ability to get things done, low time management abilities... The list goes on. People who don't have ADD have mental filters - these allow you to unconsciously filter out background noises, distracting things you see or feel... All sorts of things. People with ADD do not have these filters. Those people chatting in the back row of the class are as loud and present to me as the professor orating at the front - and because I can't just filter it out, my attention skips in and out of both conversations, which is frustrating and irritating as hell. So I have to work twice as hard to focus on one thing as someone who doesn't have ADD.


*Now, how is it an asset? ADD, with all it's potential for multitasking and creative thinking, is understandably over present in artists and those who are more artistically inclined. I took a three year program in college for Graphic Design - almost every student in my year had ADD or ADHD, or another learning disability, to one degree or another. There's something about the chaos of a creative mind that links to ADD - probably because being overly creative requires the ability to multi-level think. You need to think outside of the box, consider many different potentials and possibilities and balance a great many ideas and tasks. ADD lends itself well to things like that. Interestingly enough, dyslexia was a close second for something shared amongst my classmates.

So, like I said - it's not an illness, it's not a disorder, and really, if it weren't for the fact that people rarely take children and teach them how to work WITH their ADD/ADHD to cope with it, it wouldn't even be a disability. It can be a wonderful asset, if you understand it and yourself.