Smash Notes
Everything I am
This episode is a description of my symptoms and how they affected my life and made me everything I am. I talk about everything from elementary school multiplication, to high-school late nights, college, relationships and work. They say to have ADHD you have to be able to demonstrate that symptoms have been there since childhood, check, and that it effects…
Notes
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Jeanette, host of Excuse My ADHD, says a Facebook post is what made her skip the textbook definition. Someone was annoyed that people compare ADHD with autism, because they did not think ADHD was impairing at all. Jeanette agrees that autism can be much more impairing, depending on where a person sits on the spectrum. Her objection is the picture of ADHD that comparison usually leaves behind: a boy in class who cannot sit still. She could sit still and read for hours. She says the DSM lists on the order of 90 ADHD symptoms, and hyperfocus was the one nobody had described to her.
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Jeanette, host of Excuse My ADHD, says she is taken aback by how little the public, and even professionals, seem to know about ADHD. She says the DSM lists something like 90 symptoms, but the image people carry is a little boy who cannot sit still or stop talking. That was her image too, until her husband said he thought she had it. She could sit in her room and read from morning to night, which she later understood as hyperfocus. Rather than recite a definition, she tells her own symptoms, including reading all eight Outlander books in two months and diving into sewing until the excitement wore off.