A very dear friend, who is a psychiatrist, says that the DSM is mostly to help GPs to identify symptoms, to be able to send people to the psychiatrist, not to actually diagnose.

For some reason I thought it was the inverse, stubby neck.

Five vs. One

Kind of lost at “luck” before starting, no?

Looks likitnshould be added to the crankcase, probably harder to reach that a fuel cap.

I don’t really believe it’s a spectrum. I believe that you either have a dopamine processing deficiency, or you don’t. I think the differences we see are the result of how well some of us learn to cope, or devise self protecting strategies.

I mean, there may be slight differences, but I wouldn’t call it a spectrum, at least in the way that autism is, where you have mildly socially incompetent people to nearly non functional people.

I was undiagnosed bipolar for over 40 years, masked by my success in employment and entrepreneurship, which lasted about 2-5 years every stage, when tedium became unbearable, and had to look for other challenges to fuel my dopamine. No one, even myself, connected the dots between my intense drive, and the following depressive stage, and the next jump. I finally crashed hard, and sought a psychiatryst. Once properly medicated, my mood swings normalized, the ADHD symptoms were unmasked.

Now we are working on dialing in meds for ADHD. Pretty hard to balance.

In my case I belive I don’t more or less ADHD than others, but that I was good at (extreme) damage control.

My opinion.

I was explaining to my sister about how my diagnosis, as an older adult, was going, and how it explained many things in my life. She immediately told me she suspects she has it, because she has a short attention span.

She is an elementary school principal, who leads a perfectly organized life, set on a path in her 20’s and has followed it to the letter, she has an insanely well set up financial structure, budgets to the cent, is learning a third language in her spare time, leads a regimented daily schedule, even on weekends and vacations.

Yeah.

Us nerds don’t buy laptops?

I don’t either, but there are many in my family and friends I will gladly support.