2002-03-08 - 9:54 p.m.
Lancing old wounds ... again

I learned a lot today about AD/HD. I found a webpage that was a Godsend -- almost literally. It was a 123-page PDF transcription of a scholarly lecture from sometime in the last year or so. Gimme a few minutes to retrace my Google search, and I'll find the link again ... it doesn't say where it came from once you save the PDF off. =)

Ah, here it is. Given by a guy named Russell Barkley, reputedly one of the most respectged researchers in this area Fascinating stuff.

Ya, ya, "you think you're AD/HD, so how come you read all the way through that novella?" Ah, back off. Like I said, I've never had much problem with reading. High IQ, plus constant motivation/reinforcement from my parents about the reading thing when I was youger, plus being highly interested in the material anyway... and those last two are proven to be enormous helps for getting the attention of AD/HD individuals.

Anyway. It goes really heavily into the causes of AD/HD, and the fact that what it really does is disrupt the "executive functions" of the individual, not prevent them from paying attention. It's not a failure of knowledge, not "oh, this kid just never really learned how to manage time, so let's teach him," it's a failure of performance, which is completely and entirely different. The stuff goes in, it fails to come out, like a schizo computer.

(Does anyone else remember that Christian kids' tape from about fifteen years ago? Stupid song, it always sticks in my head when I remember it. "Input, output, what goes in must come out, input, output, that is what it's all about ..." all chirpy and singsong).

I won't go into all the details, read it yourself if you're really interested. But there are a few points I'll pick out. For example, it talks about emotional/developmental maturity of AD/HD persons. It says they're pretty consistently 30% behind their peers. To translate that into concrete terms, giving an AD/HD 16-year-old a driver's license is like putting an 11-year-old behind the wheel. Sending an AD/HD 18-year-old to college is like putting a 12-year-old in the dorms.

A statistic related to this ... only 5% of AD/HD people graduate college, as opposed to thirty-something percent of normal people. Which means my little cohort of college friends was pretty damn special, even with as many problems as they had. Every last one graduated, even if some had poor grades or had to take one last class in May term to make up enough credits to qualify.

This stuff is all complicated by the IQ thing. I'll use my 160-IQ, hyperactive-AD/HD friend as an example. Totally brilliant individual, and according to IQ computations, that means his mental age is 160% of his mental age. Ergo, this 24-year-old has a mental age of 38 1/3. That's quite a jump! But according to the AD/HD computations, his emotional age is 16 2/3.

It's pretty similar with my other AD/HD friends. No wonder their lives (and, IMHO, mine) can get so fucked up so quickly, if they're not careful. That's an enormous gap between what you think you're ready for (IQ), what other people think you're ready for (age), and what you're really ready for (AD/HD). So when good things happen and big decisions go well, huger than usual kudos are warranted.

I mean, goodness. Even if you discount me, which is anybody's prerogative until I see a doctor, my engagement was a pretty risky thing. He had AD/HD, and he was 24 at the time; as we just saw, that's not even 17 in emotional/developmental terms. But me? 19. That would have put me at 13 1/3. Eeeeek! No wonder I did such a bad job of assessment in that relationship, and it's a good thing I haven't developed any new serious relationships since then. I daresay I'm still not ready, and I'm facing my 24th birthday this weekend..

Anyway. Deep in the lecture, it starts talking about how parents can both help and hurt AD/HD children. It talks about how they need consistent, persistent rewards, not just at the completion of tasks, but at the beginning of them and during them. It talks about the need for chores being broken into smaller pieces, and putting up all kinds of physical reminder systems (notes, etc) and setting up time management (timers, etc) since AD/HD kids' working memories and time management functions are shot to hell.

Importantly, these rewards systems can never be stopped. Without management and motivation systems imposed on them, AD/HD children are pretty unable to generate their own. It's no use complaining that they should have internalized the system by now, or that they should be able to remember what chores they had to do without lists or nagging, etc. It's not a failure of knowledge. They KNOW. They just can't DO on their own.

When I read this, I flashed on that huge argument I had with my mother not so very long ago. She was yelling at me at length on this very issue, in fact. "But I asked you to do chores while you were here. I asked you to vacuum twice a week. And you haven't since last Tuesday, and you never look around to see if anything needs doing, and ..." so on and so forth. And I would say, "But Mom, it's not that I'm trying to be lazy! It just doesn't occur to me, or something gets in the way, or ... Look, it would really help me if you'd remind me now and again BEFORE you get angry."

And here's the part where all this AD/HD stuff really rings a bell ... Mom then began to yell how she had to do that all the time when we were kids, but I'm not five anymore, and she doesn't have the energy to do it anymore, and I should be old enough to know better and motivate myself by now!

That's just it. I DO know better. I had earlier screaming matches with her back during early college summers, five or six years ago, about how I wished she'd just stop telling me how I'd messed up yet again because I KNEW I'd messed up, every time I did a stupid thing or forgot something important I kicked myself a thousand times, and I really didn't need her treating me as if I didn't know better, when the fact was, the knowledge wasn't the problem.

Anyway. The whole bit about her doing that all the time when my brother and I were younger? Actually, she did. Yet another reason why AD/HD stuff wouldn't have surfaced when I was younger. Mom and Dad were actually being pretty perfect, parenting-wise! I had few problems with them until after high school. And they'd have had no idea anything wasn't normal, because their childhoods, especially Mom's, weren't normal either. It's just that they expected my brother and I to no longer NEED that parenting after a certain age, and guess where the system started failing, and my problems started? After that age, when they started cutting off support in the name of adulthood.

Stuff like this makes me want to cry tears of relief, that my frustration is real, and has a scientific basis ... then sigh in resignation because my parents will never, ever, ever listen to a single word of any of this. They will never understand.

Mom has problems enough of her own that any "I have symptoms of..." plea of mine will be written down as hypochondria or making excuses, on ANY issue, including my legitimately diagnosed and extremely painful allergy, cold urticaria, which she minimizes to the point that she tells me not to make such a big deal when I'm curled up wincing in pain because I was outside without gloves too long and my knuckles feel like they're being impaled with knives. This is probably why I'm paranoid about not being taken seriously on this AD/HD issue. Plus she is derisive enough about my friends' AD/HD that it's the last topic I want to ask her about, regarding whether she could agree that it might apply to me.

Well, that's enough to wrap my mind around for tonight ... and probably too much of one for the rest of y'all. (I should probably stop saying things like that, though; this is MY diary, and it is my DIARY, right? Justification enough to mention any issue that raises so many red flags for me).