the most accurate thing ever!!!!!
We Can’t Ignore the ADHD Girls in School Anymore
We Can’t Ignore the ADHD Girls in School Anymore
Every class had those boys—the ones who didn’t do their work and always climbed out of their seats. They never finished a worksheet, threw pencils, and talked too loud. They never raised their hand. Mostly, we didn’t like those boys, the ones who were always sent to the office, the ones always fighting. We didn’t have a name for those boys. Today, teachers and administrators call them ADHD. Today, they have IEPs, fidget toys, Ritalin. This generation of “those boys” has it much, much better.
But another group lurked in the classroom. We were mostly smart, but turned in worksheets littered with careless mistakes. A teacher might talk to us about it, or show her annoyance through some red pen. Nothing else. We sometimes shouted out answers without raising our hands, or spaced out and didn’t bother to raise our hands at all. At times we talked loudly. But most of all, we forgot things. We forgot dates, names, permission slips, homework assignments, and books. We didn’t remember. We were quieter than “those boys.” But in the eyes of the school, we suffered from no less of a moral failing: How could we be so smart and so damn stupid?
A moral failure—this is what inattentive ADHD meant to me as a child.
I’d love to add on to this if it’s ok.
I read a study for one of my classes that followed girls diagnosed with executive function disorders (whether or not they’d also been diagnose with ADHD) from about age 6 until age 20 – an incredibly long study that showed a huge link between EFDs, ADHD, and a whole host of negative outcomes. They included dropping out of school, poorer grades, more behavior problems and suspensions from school. But even more worrisome, the study also looked into rates of self-harm and suicidal behavior and found that THOSE rates were also higher in girls with EFDs.
The study is called “Childhood Executive Function Continues to Predict Outcomes in Young Adults Females with and Without Childhood-Diagnosed ADHD”. Here’s a link through the site that leaked a bunch of academic articles:
http://sci-hub.io/10.1007/s10802-011-9599-yI can also upload the research review I did since it’s a lot easier to read and sums up everything in the study, which is admittedly really hard to read.
Could you explain the whole “i don’t really have depression, i’m actually just a lazy piece of shit” = you’ve got depression, thing? It rang a bell for me and I’d like to know what you meant. Thanks :)
one of the most insidious things about depression is it doesn’t ‘feel’ like depression. even when you have it, you know you have it, you’ve been diagnosed—you still find yourself thinking, no, nope, this isn’t it, can’t be. it’s like the mental illness equivalent of that knight in monty python that keeps going ‘it’s a flesh wound! i’m fine, really! this is just a scratch, i’ll be up in a moment!’ even after all his limbs have been hacked off and he’s lying there helpless.
one of the most common narratives around it is that no one realizes they have depression until they start checking off what they consider to be normal aspects of their lives—and personal character flaws— against the checklist for depression symptoms. really key symptoms include:
- lack of motivation
- constant tiredness, even exhaustion
- finding no pleasure or satisfaction in activities they used to like, or that they know should feel good
- not seeing the point of doing anything
- increased and even unmanageable anxiety and fearfulness
any one of these symptoms drains away your ability to do work, cope with setbacks, overcome difficulties, or stop procrastinating. multiple symptoms create a pretty perfect storm of intertia and anxious self-loathing. you stop doing anything because it’s hard to get going, unpleasant while you’re at it, and afterwards there’s no reward. why bother, right? and when you’re always tired you get conservative of what little energy you can manage, and when you only feel emotions on the ‘empty to miserable’ spectrum you get really aversive to making mistakes. the whole mess very quickly and very insidiously loads every single thing in your life with toxic emotional baggage.
and then someone says to you— or you say to yourself, ‘stop being lazy’. and that haunts you forever. because you’re lazy! the work is so easy. everyone else does it. everyone but you, you lazy asshole, lying around all day not doing this totally easy thing that you should be able to but aren’t. you don’t have depression! of course not. mental illness is for victims, is for blameless innocent people who can’t be blamed for being so understandably sick. but you can be blamed. you have a character flaw, and it’s getting worse by the minute.
and that is how people who have been diagnosed, who have been medicated, who have been through therapy, can still spend all day hiding in bed and chewing themselves up over their failure to just somehow magically be a good, healthy, useful person, instead of treating themselves to a sick day and saying ‘yup! it’s depression. i need to be kind to myself.’
Fuck this is so important and relevant
Nope reblogging twice in a row because u want to scream this from the roof and plaster it over the walls and never shut up about it
Help Wanted: We Can’t Ignore the ADHD Girls in the Corner Any Longer
Help Wanted: We Can’t Ignore the ADHD Girls in the Corner Any Longer
Every class had those boys—the ones who didn’t do their work and always climbed out of their seats. They never finished a worksheet, threw pencils, and talked too loud. They never raised their hand. Mostly, we didn’t like those boys, the ones who were always sent to the office, the ones always fighting. We didn’t have a name for those boys. Today, teachers and administrators call them ADHD. Today, they have IEPs, fidget toys, Ritalin. This generation of “those boys” has it much, much better.
But another group lurked in the classroom. We were mostly smart, but turned in worksheets littered with careless mistakes. A teacher might talk to us about it, or show her annoyance through some red pen. Nothing else. We sometimes shouted out answers without raising our hands, or spaced out and didn’t bother to raise our hands at all. At times we talked loudly. But most of all, we forgot things. We forgot dates, names, permission slips, homework assignments, and books. We didn’t remember. We were quieter than “those boys.” But in the eyes of the school, we suffered from no less of a moral failing: How could we be so smart and so damn stupid?
A moral failure—this is what inattentive ADHD meant to me as a child.
“Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern. Just the slow erosion of the self, as insidious as any cancer. And, like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience. A room in hell with only your name on the door.”
So my therapist said something awhile back and it’s really stuck with me.
I was talking about the stupid things I had done in high school. How the stories I wrote were stupid and how all I ever wanted to draw was anime shit (which was stupid) and how immature I could be, etc etc etc.
and she was like “Why are you so determined to beat up on Little Maggie?”
It took me off guard, I was like “what do you mean?”
“Why do you keep saying Little Maggie is stupid? You say she was stupid and immature but wasn’t she just a teenager? Do you not like who you were as a teenager?”
I shrugged and was like “I think teenage me was very creative and was probably just having fun and being a teenager…”
“So why beat up on her and call her stupid and embarrassing?”
“I dunno, because I guess now I’ve learned a lot.”
“But she was young. She didn’t know. I’m just telling you this because if you keep beating up on Little Maggie, you have to remember that she grows up to be you. When you put bruises and scars on Little Maggie, you’re leaving all the healing for Big Maggie. Your insecurity about who you were as a child is going to come through into your adulthood. Be nice to Little Maggie.”
And I’d never really thought of that before? It seems status quo to just… hate who you used to be for not knowing enough, but that’s totally illogical. Of course a younger version of you doesn’t know what you know and can’t act with the wisdom that you act.
And even if Little Maggie was writing silly stories about her friends while ripping off anime and drawing her own “manga” and being immature and goofy, she was having fun, she was being creative, she was enjoying the things she liked and she wasn’t hurting anyone.
She’s part of my past and hating her is hating the foundation of who I eventually became.
Just food for thought.
I love seeing those posts where people are like “if you have headmates or whatever you should be on meds because that’s not okay” posts. Like neurotypicals just think that there’s some magical pill out there that will ‘cure’ anything they don’t consider ‘normal.’ Meanwhile, in the land of reality, my shrink thinks it’s pretty healthy that I’m finally getting to know my headmates, and has no intention of putting me on magic pills, because as long as I’m not hurting myself or anyone else, who cares what neurotypicals think is ‘normal?’ Actually, let’s be real: who cares what neurotypicals think at all?
It is not a magic pill, it is called “Therapy” and you can even do it in groups!
i… literally mention my therapist… right there… in the original post…
did you not actually read this… do you honestly believe telling someone who has already admitted to being in therapy… to go to therapy… is a “gotcha” moment???
Okay, so there’s a relevant quote from Slatestar Codex here. (The link is to the source; attribution is a Thing.)
Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.
It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.
So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?
I, on the other hand, thought it was the best fricking story I had ever heard and the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back.
It is not a therapist’s job to make you normal. It is a therapist’s job to give you your life back, on whatever terms are acceptable to you. And if your therapist can’t do that, you need to find a new therapist.
For some people, having headmates and/or alters is a debilitating condition. They’re losing large amounts of time, having trouble going to work and/or school, or hurting themselves or other people. In that case, they probably do need help, but I think most people who are getting fucked up by their headmates that badly are willing to seek out help on their own anyway.
Other people who have headmates and/or alters find it to be a neutral thing, or even a positive thing.
Have you ever been in a roommate situation where different people do different chores, because, (say) Kate loves to do the dishes, but can’t stand to vaccuum, and Toby’s the exact opposite? If Kate and Toby are headmates, they can wind up doing the same kind of thing. Headmates can also comfort you when you’re sad, remind you that your depressive or intrusive thoughts are not true, or help you deal with difficult people.
So, if you’re in that kind of situation, where your headmates are helping you to be more functional than you’d otherwise be? A good therapist is going to treat it like the hair dryer on the front seat of your car.
Sure, it is a Weird Thing. It makes you look a bit eccentric, and it’s not normal. But if having headmates keeps you from having repeated nervous breakdowns, helps you hold down your job, or makes it so that you can deal with your abusers? Then it’s a win, and a good therapist won’t try to ‘fix’ that.
It is not a therapist’s job to make you normal. It is a therapist’s job to give you your life back, on whatever terms are acceptable to you.
While I was working in the local hospital a few months back, part of the training included a dementia awareness course, and one of the stories I thought was very telling regarded a woman who had kept stealing towels from others in her residential home and leaving them to soak in her sink. After talking to her and her family, they found out she used to make a living doing laundry when she was much younger, so the residential home invested in one of those old washboard-and-bucket setups for her, and would leave some clothes by it in her room for her. The stealing stopped, and she became much more lively and talkative now that she had something to do that felt familiar to her.
With disabilities and mental illnesses, the reality of it is that many of them won’t go away, not with medicine or therapy or wishful thinking. Treatments are there to manage the conditions. And if the condition is being managed in a way that doesn’t cause harm to the person with that condition or their friends and family, then why should anyone look down on that management?
This just tells me what I’ve known all my life; neurotypicals don’t often care about mentally ill/cognitively disabled people living to their fullest, they just want them out of the way. Out of sight and out of mind.
Sure, a person with headmates who deals with them healthily might be living to their fullest and without repression or discomfort, but then neurotypicals would have to suffer them. Stimming might help a dyspraxic or autistic person express themselves and soothe anxiety, but its annoying and embarassing! And we can’t have that can we?
fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:
“Treatment” isn’t a penalty cage you put crazy people in until they’re not crazy anymorewe dont have to be the same as neurotypical people to be healthy and have good lives.
I can’t reblog this enough.
