so does anyone think that this sounds like someone with ADD? 

My name is Olivia and I am a post-graduate Education and Neuroscience student at the University of Bristol.

I am conducting research on parents experiences of ADHD diagnosis and post-diagnostic support for their children. The study will collect and analyse quantitative date in the form of online surveys, which will be used to help understand how effective people believe the current process of diagnosis is in the UK.

Participants wanted for this project are parents aged 18+ of children with an ADHD diagnosis, in order to gain a more coherent understanding of the process of diagnosis and post-diagnostic support to aid and improve for the future for children and families with and ADHD diagnosis.

This research has received ethical approval from the University of Bristol ethics committee.

Participants are welcome to fill out this survey, taking approximately 20-25 minutes, following the link below which provides further information. Thank you for your time.

SURVEY LINK:https://bristolexppsych.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5gLTdbJj9kKXzhk

My name is Olivia and I am a post-graduate Education and Neuroscience student at the University of Bristol.

I am conducting research on parents experiences of ADHD diagnosis and post-diagnostic support for their children. The study will collect and analyse quantitative date in the form of online surveys, which will be used to help understand how effective people believe the current process of diagnosis is in the UK.

Participants wanted for this project are parents aged 18+ of children with an ADHD diagnosis, in order to gain a more coherent understanding of the process of diagnosis and post-diagnostic support to aid and improve for the future for children and families with and ADHD diagnosis.

This research has received ethical approval from the University of Bristol ethics committee.

Participants are welcome to fill out this survey, taking approximately 20-25 minutes, following the link below which provides further information. Thank you for your time.

SURVEY LINK: https://bristolexppsych.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5gLTdbJj9kKXzhk

I am a junior designer currently working on a project that aims in creating a more user-friendly and accessible method/guide to guide digital content and other designers on how to create products and services that adapt to adults who live with ADD and ADHD. I myself, have close relatives that live with these conditions and I would like to make the web a safe and more understanding environment in which everyone feels comfortable browsing and carrying out their daily task.
This project will be based on public opinion and not medical as I believe that medical data does not apply to everyone.
If you are interested in taking part in my research people feel free to private message me. 

Please find attach my project proposal. 

All information would confidential and will be kept anonymous.
I hope this does not break any forum guidelines!!!:):):)

proposal_document_ethics.pdf

Kindest Regards.

Richard,

XKLX

Soooo what I'm asking is, does anyone have any tips for managing ADHD without chemical assistance?

My son is in process of retesting and has had many observation sessions in different settings and a new ADOS and ability testing. I've not had results fed back as yet as psychologist wants everything together to get a full picture before she commits but totally agrees his current dx just doesn't cover him.

I am wondering if ADHD is one of the conditions she may be considering as although he no longer suffers regular night terrors he does still sleep very little and teachers find they have a great deal of trouble keeping him focused on a task unless there is constant supervision which they cannot provide in a mainstream classroom. He is performing well academically and is by no means the least able child in the class despite his language being "quirky" at best. He does talk pretty much constantly at giving a running commentary to the gerbils if there is no one else there to listen. Usually about minecraft lol - he will even prop the iPad up in front of the cage to let them see YouTube vids of minecraft. Yet theory of mine for other people still noticeably absent despite him being almost 7.

So before I go off on too much of a tangent back to my original question about ADHD and a lack if the very bad behaviour often associated with it.

In public I am very quiet, and my behaviour tends to be very rigid- which is not something I would have associated with ADHD. I even sit on my hands to stop any awkward movement. When I'm with people I'm very comfortable with, however, they see the full picture of my personality. The 'me' that these people see has wild mood swings, going from *very* hyper to extremely lethargic. I make rash impulsive decisions, and am incredibly disorganised. I tend to have difficulty looking after myself because I struggle to keep a tidy house, make food etc, although other people never see or believe this because I always appear well-dressed and groomed when I leave the house (and I never let people in my house). One of the reasons my ex-boyfriend broke up with me was because he felt like he was looking after me all the time, was always responsible for chores etc, and couldn't cope with my 'craziness'. I am also constantly late, and lose friends quickly because I'm so unreliable.

I have trouble at uni in lectures because I can't listen to what the speaker is saying unless they're talking about something of very specific interest to me. In the past this has sometimes led to disruptive, rude behaviour, but I feel I have that in check now. Before I thought I couldn't listen because I had some sort of processing issue with speech- if something is written down I find it much easier to process than if it's said to me. But this doesn't account for the fact that it's not so bad if it's something I'm intensely interested in. And also the recent tests have shown that my attention span is very low across the board- not just with listening to speech but also in problem solving tasks etc too. They also showed that I'm very impulsive, confirming what I knew from past experience and the opinions of friends and family.

Despite this, I'm still very sceptical of the idea that I might have it (mainly because I'm not sure whether a lot of these traits could be explained by my dx of AS anyway), and would feel very uncomfortable about seeking an ADHD dx as I don't want to be wasting anybody's time if it turns out to be false. Being diagnosed might be helpful as it might allow me to address problems at uni and at home, but there is no guarantee of this. And frankly, if I ask about a dx but get told I obviously don't have it, I'm going to feel like a complete idiot and will spend ages being very hard on myself about it!!

So, would it be worth seeking a diagnosis? Is it even possible that I could have it, considering the lack of publicly obvious symptoms?

Any advice would be much appreciated thanks.

I'm struggling to keep up with managing keeping up with fast pace life of ADHD Leaves me feel totally drained! never seem to learn from my past ,old mistakes or advice? feel so wrong putting it due to the ADHD? cant wait to see how medication and coping skills from ADHD & AS team will help me move on forward hopefully so can be more productive like I am slowly doing with AS but still has taken years to do!

XKLX

XKLX

According to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control, a staggering 6.4 million American children between the ages of 4 and 17 have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), whose key symptoms are inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity—characteristics that most would consider typically childish behavior. High school boys, an age group particularly prone to childish antics and drifting attention spans, are particularly prone to being labeled as ADHD, with one out of every five high school boys diagnosed with the disorder.

“There’s a tremendous push where if the kid’s behavior is thought to be quote-unquote abnormal — if they’re not sitting quietly at their desk — that’s pathological, instead of just childhood.” — Dr. Jerome Groopman, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School

Presently, we’re at an all-time high of eleven percent of all school-aged children in America who have been classified as mentally ill. Why? Because they “suffer” from several of the following symptoms: they are distracted, fidget, lose things, daydream, talk nonstop, touch everything in sight, have trouble sitting still during dinner, are constantly in motion, are impatient, interrupt conversations, show their emotions without restraint, act without regard for consequences, and have difficulty waiting their turn.

The list reads like a description of me as a child. In fact, it sounds like just about every child I’ve ever known,

none of whom are mentally ill. Unfortunately, society today is far less tolerant of childish behavior—hence, the growing popularity of the ADHD label, which has become the “go-to diagnosis” for children that don’t fit the psycho-therapeutic public school mold of quiet, docile and conformist.

Mind you, there is no clinical test for ADHD. Rather, this so-called mental illness falls into the “I’ll know it if I see it” category, where doctors are left to make highly subjective determinations based on their own observation, as well as interviews and questionnaires with a child’s teachers and parents. Particular emphasis is reportedly given to what school officials have to say about the child’s behavior.

Yet while being branded mentally ill at a young age can lead to all manner of complications later in life, the larger problem is the routine drugging that goes hand in hand with these diagnoses. Of those currently diagnosed with ADHD, a 16 percent increase since 2007, and a 41 percent increase over the past decade, two-thirds are being treated with mind-altering, psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall.

Diagnoses of ADHD have been increasing at an alarming rate of 5.5 percent each year. Yet those numbers are bound to skyrocket once the American Psychiatric Association releases its more expansive definition of ADHD. Combined with the public schools’ growing intolerance (aka, zero tolerance) for childish behavior, the psychiatric community’s pathologizing of childhood, and the Obama administration’s new mental health initiative aimed at identifying and treating mental illness in young people, the outlook is decidedly grim for any young person in this country who dares to act like a child.

As part of his administration’s sweeping response to the Newtown school shootings, President Obama is calling on Congress to fund a number of programs aimed at detecting and responding to mental illness among young people. A multipronged effort, Obama’s proposal includes $50 million to train 5,000 mental health professionals to work with young people in communities and schools; $55 million for Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education), which would empower school districts, teachers and other adults to detect and respond to mental illness in 750,000 young people; and $25 million for state efforts to identify and treat adolescents and young adults.

One of the key components of Obama’s plan, mental health first-aid training for adults and students, is starting to gain traction across the country. Incredibly, after taking a mere 12-hour course comprised of PowerPoint presentations, videos, discussions, role playing and other interactive activities, for instance, a participant can be certified “to identify, understand and respond to the signs of mental illness, substance use and eating disorders.”

While commendable in its stated goals, there’s a whiff of something not quite right about a program whose supporting data claims that “26.2 percent of people in the U.S. — roughly one in four — have a mental health disorder in any given year.” This is especially so at a time when government agencies seem to be increasingly inclined to view outspoken critics of government policies as mentally ill and in need of psychiatric help and possible civil commitment. But I digress. That’s a whole other topic.

Getting back to young people, Dr. Thomas Friedan, director of the CDC, has characterized the nation’s current fixation on ADHD as an over diagnosis and a “misuse [of ADHD medications that] appears to be growing at an alarming rate.”

Indeed, not that long ago, the very qualities we now identify as a mental illness and target for drugging were hallmarks of the creative soul. Many of the artists, musicians, poets, politicians and revolutionaries whom we have come to revere in our society were unable to sit still, pay attention, concentrate on their work, and stay within the confines which had been set out for them in the classroom.

Visionaries as varied as Mahatma Gandhi, Richard Feynman, John Lennon, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Thomas Edison, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Einstein, and Winston Churchill would have all been labeled ADHD had they been students in the public schools today. Legendary filmmaker Woody Allen claims to have “paid attention to everything but the teachers” while in school. Despite being put in an accelerated learning program due to his high IQ, he felt constrained, so he often played hooky and failed to complete his assignments. Of his school days, Gandhi said, “They were the most miserable of his life” and “that he had no aptitude for lessons and rarely appreciated his teachers.” In fact, Gandhi opined that it “might have been better if he had never been to school.”

One can only imagine what the world would have been like had these visionaries of Western civilization instead been diagnosed with ADHD and drugged accordingly. Writing for the New York Times, Bronwen Hruska documents what it was like as a parent being pressured by school officials to medicate her child who, at age 8, seemed to have “normal 8-year-old boy energy.”

As Hruska relates in painful detail, each time the overall effects of the drugs seemed to stop working, their doctor increased the dosage. Finally, towards the middle of fifth grade, Hruska’s son refused to take anymore pills. From then on, things began to change for the better. Will is now a sophomore in high school, 6 feet 3 inches tall, and is on the honor roll.

Will was in third grade, and his school wanted him to settle down in order to focus on math worksheets and geography lessons and social studies. The children were expected to line up quietly and “transition” between classes without goofing around… And so it began. Like the teachers, we didn’t want Will to “fall through the cracks.” But what I’ve found is that once you start looking for a problem, someone’s going to find one, and attention deficit has become the go-to diagnosis… A few weeks later we heard back. Will had been given a diagnosis of inattentive-type A.D.H.D….The doctor prescribed methylphenidate, a generic form of Ritalin. It was not to be taken at home, or on weekends, or vacations. He didn’t need to be medicated for regular life. It struck us as strange, wrong, to dose our son for school. All the literature insisted that Ritalin and drugs like it had been proved “safe.” Later, I learned that the formidable list of possible side effects included difficulty sleeping, dizziness, vomiting, loss of appetite, diarrhea, headache, numbness, irregular heartbeat, difficulty breathing, fever, hives, seizures, agitation, motor or verbal tics and depression. It can slow a child’s growth or weight gain. Most disturbing, it can cause sudden death, especially in children with heart defects or serious heart problems.

The drugs prescribed for Ritalin and Adderall and their generic counterparts are keystones in a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry that profits richly from America’s growing ADHD fixation. For example, between 2007 and 2012 alone, sales for ADHD drugs went from $4 billion to $9 billion.

If America could free itself of the stranglehold the pharmaceutical industry has on our medical community, our government and our schools, we may find that our so-called “problems” aren’t quite as bad as we’ve been led to believe. As Hruska concludes:

___________________________________________________________________________________

We’re also ensuring that down the road, when faced with other challenges that high school, college and adult life are sure to bring, our children will use the coping skills we’ve taught them. They’ll reach for a pill.

If “accelerated” has become the new normal, there’s no choice but to diagnose the kids developing at a normal rate with a disorder. Instead of leveling the playing field for kids who really do suffer from a deficit, we’re ratcheting up the level of competition with performance-enhancing drugs. We’re juicing our kids for school.

Which brings me to the idea of “normal.” The Merriam-Webster definition, which reads in part “of, relating to, or characterized by average intelligence or development,” includes a newly dirty word in educational circles. If normal means “average,” then schools want no part of it. Exceptional and extraordinary, which are actually antonyms of normal, are what many schools expect from a typical student.

For [Will], it was a matter of growing up, settling down and learning how to get organized. Kids learn to speak, lose baby teeth and hit puberty at a variety of ages. We might remind ourselves that the ability to settle into being a focused student is simply a developmental milestone; there’s no magical age at which this happens.

Article published here: The Rutherford Institute.
URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2013/04/12/the-psycho-therapeutic-school-system

However I do have some other concerns about things which I am not sure are PDA/ ASD related or if its something else as well (ADHD?) .I have listed a number of things about him below (would say they are centered around organisation, think some points may also fall under "executive functioning") and I wonder if any others have noticed similar traits in their PDA children/ themselves?

1)I have to prompt him to get dressed, and remind him to wash/ brush teeth each morning or evening.

2) He often rushes out of the door in a morning forgetting his lunch/ bag/ coat/ pe kit and myself to walk him there - he is focused on going to school but forgets all the things he will need in the day

3)If you speak to him it often appears he is not listening.

4) He does not sit still even when on pc or watching tv he constantly fidgets. He is same in school and the teacher overlooks a lot of it if it is not disrupting the others too much (I think if she pulled him up every time he would have been banned from the classroom. I have seen this for myself as I go in to help the children in the class once a week)

5) He takes off his coat/ shoes/ any other clothing he does not want to wear as soon as he walks in to the door and drops it on the floor and goes off to do whatever. This is same whatever he is doing, as soon as he loses interest it is abandoned.

6) He loses money, and other things that you would think are important to him

7) His bedroom is very untidy

If you ask him to look for something he can never find it even when its under his nose, and he appears to have no idea on how to make a logical plan to start searching for it.

9) After much effort on both our parts homework that he does finish often does not get handed in (and I have to stand over him and help him to make sense of it and keep him focused on finishing - I know the reluctance to do it is part of PDA)

10) He often leaves items at school such as PE bag, homework, shoes.

11) His mind is often focused on his obsessions (at the minute army, lego, bionicles and Bakuman) rather than what he needs to do

12) He is just starting to get the hang of telling the time

13) If he wants your attention he will be really obvious in your face no matter what you are doing and he often puts his hand up or shout out when he does not know the answer to a question

Part of his objectives on his statement are to work on these skills at home and school, but I do not have any bright ideas as to how (other than telling him each time, and to be honest I am getting fed up of hearing my own voice ). I have stuck up visual charts for weekday morning and evening routines - one of each in his bedroom and also the morning one in the kitchen, so he sees it before he runs out on me for school. Can anyone help with other ideas that do not involve so much verbal prompting/ reminding from me or the teacher?? Do you think more visual aids will help or will he just learn to ignore them?? Any books you can recommend?

Is it worth pursuing an assessment for ADHD? Would medication help with these things or are the other strategies enough in themselves to work therefore meaning a formal diagnosis not necessary to help him... Am worried about how he will cope in secondary school, and if he cant his behaviour will deteriorate again...

Went to a Bristol ADHD support group because i know a number of ADHDers. i can highly recommend the group but was wondering if anyone had any in their area and were they supportive?

Alexis

Thanks very much for creating this forum, i have been wondering if it was okay to post adhd related things in asperger forum. My son had a diagnosis for aspergers in 2008, he was only 5 then, we have been reading about it and trying as best we can to let our child lead a normal childhood. When he was 7 we decided to tell him about the aspergers syndrome, our starting point was looking at the number of people who have got autism and to look at the cool things of having aspergers. I really dont believe much in labels, I have found it terribly difficult to come to terms with this diagnosis.like every mother out there i just want my child is happy, so it really hurts when my son wakes up in the morning and he constantly looks sad and has a constant frown, he can ask you to get something and yet when you bring him he does not animate his face as you would expect. when my son started primary school he did not want to hold hands or give me a cuddle( clearly i appeared to the refridgerator mum) at the beginning of may we went back to cahms as the head felt there was something else, he said he thought he was depressed, we were told that he has adhd, i was so gutted to find this. I am not disrespecting his opinion but i dont think he has adhd, he can sit and read a book and he is not that wired to the moon. if both the dx came at the same time that would have easier to deal with. i am interested to know what experience other parents have had. thanks for reading jax