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A large number of people claiming to have ADHD are just using it as an excuse for lacking any self-discipline (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world
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This is no way disregards the difficulty of living with an actually severe case of ADHD but is not what most of these people are dealing with.

EDIT: many seem to have misunderstood what I mean by this. I'm not saying these people are only claiming to have ADHD to use it as an excuse. What I mean, is that they may very well do have, and they're using it as an excuse. Mostly to themselves.

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[–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

I suppose I'm arguing that ADHD is an extreme of something that most people experience to a lesser degree all the time. Many will relate to these memes and assume that they have ADHD, not recognizing that these can also be normal behaviors. Kind of like how you can be sad without being clinically depressed. I think I'm an asshole for suggesting that there are people who will blame ADHD for behaviors that they are more in control of than they realize - for suggesting that ADHD is a medical condition and not merely a club that one can invite themselves into because they relate to a meme. Any sort of gatekeeping is assholish I suppose, but respectfully, that's how it looks to me.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I agree... to a certain degree. I don't think every sort of gatekeeping makes you an asshole, but this... does apply, unfortunately.

    The specific reason for my take here is that people dismiss things they don't understand all the damn time, especially if it's an "invisible" affliction. Implicitly and sometimes without even realizing it has happened.

    It is impossible for people to understand major depression, "significant" ADHD, etc if they haven't experienced it themselves, and most people just haven't, and therefore can't. While that is true, the brain is only too eager to pattern match, which is where you get into "major depression is like when I felt slightly sad once and could just focus on something else" and "ADHD is just like when I didn't particularly feel like doing that one thing, but then it took almost no additional effort to do it anyway and it made me feel better afterwards". If you try to map those experiences onto people with, bluntly speaking, any kind of actual problem at all, you will think the problem is much simpler than it realistically is to anyone actually affected - and not even realize it is happening.

    Some people can get closer to actual understanding through (near) connections who both suffer obviously enough and are talkative enough about it - but this is rare and it fucking shows.

    In short, it is intellectual laziness proper, in a form that you very definitely can do something about. As opposed to just saying "you and you with your definitive respective neurodevelopmental differences from the average, you should be able to tackle any consequence arising from it with straight up aplomb". Which, in case it wasn't obvious, I'm not a huge fan of.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I feel like we're saying the same thing. Your argument (and mine) is that it's hard for people to understand ADHD unless they have it. For this reason, people like me should keep their mouth shut about it, and if this weren't an "unpopular opinion" thread I normally would. But for the same reason, I feel that people who haven't had a proper diagnosis should be cautious about assuming that they do have ADHD, because maybe they don't understand it either. If I didn't follow my own advice, I might join the self-diagnosed crowd and start sharing personal coping strategies, and if it turns out I don't have ADHD, those comments could be ignorant, offensive, or even harmful.

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