Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, and . . .

Stop the testing accommodations for kids newly diagnosed with ADHD in high school (if they really have ADHD, how did they previously qualify for those advanced classes and get top grades?) and encourage kids to acknowledge anxiety in novel situations and help them learn appropriate life skills to meet those new challenges.

Anonymous wrote:Oh you can't concentrate or focus? Here you go, take some amphetamines.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC was diagnosed with ADHD in college and received accommodation. Not surprising, since it runs in the family. Prior to diagnosis, National Merit Finalist and 1,580 SAT, obviously without accommodation. Full merit tuition ride at a T-20. All A in HS and still all A in college. I understand OP's skepticism, but perhaps should keep an open mind since every kid is different.

DC got that far without it: why is the accommodation necessary now?

Some of my favorite alternate version of this include:
Your child had cancer but hadn’t died before the cancer was diagnosed, why treat it now?

Or

Your kid failed the driving vision test? They’ve never needed glasses before, why get them now? They could just ride the bus everywhere instead.

That is a really dumb analogy. ADHD is not like cancer or low vision. If it exists, you cannot get through a demanding high school with all As, top scores, and admission to an elite university.

This is not true. Plenty of now adults, including my husband (TJ and HYP grad) did this without realizing they had ADHD because it was not well understood when they were kids.

It's a common misconception though. I have the exact same academic background and am considered relatively sucessful in my field, but had a (bad) psychiatrist question the diagnosis because of exactly. (This 20 years ago, so slightly less terrible than it would be now).

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC was diagnosed with ADHD in college and received accommodation. Not surprising, since it runs in the family. Prior to diagnosis, National Merit Finalist and 1,580 SAT, obviously without accommodation. Full merit tuition ride at a T-20. All A in HS and still all A in college. I understand OP's skepticism, but perhaps should keep an open mind since every kid is different.

Sorry, but this isn’t ADHD. You didn’t provide any behavior or outcome basis to suggest a problem, so maybe it’s anxiety. A kid who feels he must be perfect and fears that the slightest imperfection might wreck the whole card deck is going to be anxious.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC was diagnosed with ADHD in college and received accommodation. Not surprising, since it runs in the family. Prior to diagnosis, National Merit Finalist and 1,580 SAT, obviously without accommodation. Full merit tuition ride at a T-20. All A in HS and still all A in college. I understand OP's skepticism, but perhaps should keep an open mind since every kid is different.

DC got that far without it: why is the accommodation necessary now?

Some of my favorite alternate version of this include:
Your child had cancer but hadn’t died before the cancer was diagnosed, why treat it now?

Or

Your kid failed the driving vision test? They’ve never needed glasses before, why get them now? They could just ride the bus everywhere instead.

That is a really dumb analogy. ADHD is not like cancer or low vision. If it exists, you cannot get through a demanding high school with all As, top scores, and admission to an elite university.

This is not true. Plenty of now adults, including my husband (TJ and HYP grad) did this without realizing they had ADHD because it was not well understood when they were kids.

+1 A highly intelligent person not diagnosed until adulthood can tell PP that you will never fully appreciate the relief the diagnosis brings, especially if medication helps. The level of extra mental work, work arounds, self reminders, lack of sleep to keep up with your own brain, stuggle to turn off your brain, extra energy used to keep focused or break hyperfocus, fighting the anxiety of not remembering people's names and being late, etc. that ADHD causes even in (maybe expecially in) extremly intelligent people is exhausting and can cause huge levels of anxiety. They are always working twice as hard as everyone else because of the effort to keep ADHD in check.

PP, the error you are making here is in thinking accommodations are causing the achievement -- no, the kid's intelligence is what it is.

A person with ADHD is trying to do what everyone else is doing with the intelligence they have, but also has a disability unrleated to their intelligence. While they are sitting in class or the board room or a court room with everyone else, they are simultaneously using a part of the brain and mental energy to:
- lift a heavy curtain that keeps unexpectedly dropping in front of their eyes,
- to try to adjust the volume in invisible earphones operated by invisible gremlins who really don't care,
- to constantly look at and focus on external clocks because the internal one sometimes runs fast and sometimes runs slow but never is the same as the external one,
- shoo away crowds of gnats flying around their brains shouting interesting but irrelevant factiods at them,
- tell the professor at the core of their brain that, while fascinating, now really isn't the time to solve the major world problem they work at endlesslly, while hoping and praying it isn't true that if they don't do it right now, it will be lost forever;
- and resist the impossible urge to daydrem about whatever floats into their conscience at any given moment unbeckoned.

It is a constant noise, like tinitius of the brain. People are able to stem this tide at varying degrees at at varying costs to their energy and metal well being. Some of us manage to achieve in spite of this, but at a price - an unnecessary price, we now know.

Accommodations and medication is about that huge added burden on the brain and avoiding that extra price on the head; it's about making up for or stopping all the stuff happening in the brain that other people either don't have at all or can turn off and on at will.

Medication can calm a lot of it and give you extra control. It can ease the anxiety it all causes too. This is what people diagnosed as adults discover.

Extra time for kids who are still trying to develop the copes and work arounds allows them to finish a test even though they involuntarily spent 20 or 30 minutes of the allotted time lifting the curtian, swatting the gnats or puzzling about Schroedinger's cat when they were supposed to be reading a poassage of poetry on the SAT test. It alleviates the anxiety of knowing they are about to be put on an external clock, when they have yet to devolp the skills to work around their broken internal clock. The net result is simply the ability to show what they know without the added suffering and unneeded extra mental strain caused by a disability.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC was diagnosed with ADHD in college and received accommodation. Not surprising, since it runs in the family. Prior to diagnosis, National Merit Finalist and 1,580 SAT, obviously without accommodation. Full merit tuition ride at a T-20. All A in HS and still all A in college. I understand OP's skepticism, but perhaps should keep an open mind since every kid is different.

DC got that far without it: why is the accommodation necessary now?

Some of my favorite alternate version of this include:
Your child had cancer but hadn’t died before the cancer was diagnosed, why treat it now?

Or

Your kid failed the driving vision test? They’ve never needed glasses before, why get them now? They could just ride the bus everywhere instead.

That is a really dumb analogy. ADHD is not like cancer or low vision. If it exists, you cannot get through a demanding high school with all As, top scores, and admission to an elite university.

This is not true. Plenty of now adults, including my husband (TJ and HYP grad) did this without realizing they had ADHD because it was not well understood when they were kids.

+1 A highly intelligent person not diagnosed until adulthood can tell PP that you will never fully appreciate the relief the diagnosis brings, especially if medication helps. The level of extra mental work, work arounds, self reminders, lack of sleep to keep up with your own brain, stuggle to turn off your brain, extra energy used to keep focused or break hyperfocus, fighting the anxiety of not remembering people's names and being late, etc. that ADHD causes even in (maybe expecially in) extremly intelligent people is exhausting and can cause huge levels of anxiety. They are always working twice as hard as everyone else because of the effort to keep ADHD in check.

PP, the error you are making here is in thinking accommodations are causing the achievement -- no, the kid's intelligence is what it is.

A person with ADHD is trying to do what everyone else is doing with the intelligence they have, but also has a disability unrleated to their intelligence. While they are sitting in class or the board room or a court room with everyone else, they are simultaneously using a part of the brain and mental energy to:
- lift a heavy curtain that keeps unexpectedly dropping in front of their eyes,
- to try to adjust the volume in invisible earphones operated by invisible gremlins who really don't care,
- to constantly look at and focus on external clocks because the internal one sometimes runs fast and sometimes runs slow but never is the same as the external one,
- shoo away crowds of gnats flying around their brains shouting interesting but irrelevant factiods at them,
- tell the professor at the core of their brain that, while fascinating, now really isn't the time to solve the major world problem they work at endlesslly, while hoping and praying it isn't true that if they don't do it right now, it will be lost forever;
- and resist the impossible urge to daydrem about whatever floats into their conscience at any given moment unbeckoned.

It is a constant noise, like tinitius of the brain. People are able to stem this tide at varying degrees at at varying costs to their energy and metal well being. Some of us manage to achieve in spite of this, but at a price - an unnecessary price, we now know.

Accommodations and medication is about that huge added burden on the brain and avoiding that extra price on the head; it's about making up for or stopping all the stuff happening in the brain that other people either don't have at all or can turn off and on at will.

Medication can calm a lot of it and give you extra control. It can ease the anxiety it all causes too. This is what people diagnosed as adults discover.

Extra time for kids who are still trying to develop the copes and work arounds allows them to finish a test even though they involuntarily spent 20 or 30 minutes of the allotted time lifting the curtian, swatting the gnats or puzzling about Schroedinger's cat when they were supposed to be reading a poassage of poetry on the SAT test. It alleviates the anxiety of knowing they are about to be put on an external clock, when they have yet to devolp the skills to work around their broken internal clock. The net result is simply the ability to show what they know without the added suffering and unneeded extra mental strain caused by a disability.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, and . . .

Stop the testing accommodations for kids newly diagnosed with ADHD in high school (if they really have ADHD, how did they previously qualify for those advanced classes and get top grades?) and encourage kids to acknowledge anxiety in novel situations and help them learn appropriate life skills to meet those new challenges.

I’m sure there are families who abuse the system, but here’s a different perspective. DS was diagnosed early in high school. In retrospect, I should have realized it much, much sooner. But I thought his experience was normal because it was the same as my experience. I honestly thought ADHD behaviors were how everyone lives. Turns out, his behaviors weren’t normal and neither were mine but as a GenX kid with no mental health supports, it took until my 50s (and him being diagnosed) for me to understand that. There are going to be some bad apples in any system, but I’d rather some bad apples squeeze through than kids who actually need support not be able to get it.

+1 Same experience. I really wish I had been able to see it sooner, but not only did I think it was normal, but because of my personal experience, I was already doing a ton of scaffolding by instinct at home (stuff I thought was normal, but would have been prescribed therapy for kids whose parents didn't have ADHD), but by high school I wasn't enough -- then it all came crashing down. I could have cried when I saw the transformation that the very first dose of medication allowed. It was like unlocking a door in his brain.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC was diagnosed with ADHD in college and received accommodation. Not surprising, since it runs in the family. Prior to diagnosis, National Merit Finalist and 1,580 SAT, obviously without accommodation. Full merit tuition ride at a T-20. All A in HS and still all A in college. I understand OP's skepticism, but perhaps should keep an open mind since every kid is different.

DC got that far without it: why is the accommodation necessary now?

Some of my favorite alternate version of this include:
Your child had cancer but hadn’t died before the cancer was diagnosed, why treat it now?

Or

Your kid failed the driving vision test? They’ve never needed glasses before, why get them now? They could just ride the bus everywhere instead.

That is a really dumb analogy. ADHD is not like cancer or low vision. If it exists, you cannot get through a demanding high school with all As, top scores, and admission to an elite university.

This is not true. Plenty of now adults, including my husband (TJ and HYP grad) did this without realizing they had ADHD because it was not well understood when they were kids.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, and . . .

Stop the testing accommodations for kids newly diagnosed with ADHD in high school (if they really have ADHD, how did they previously qualify for those advanced classes and get top grades?) and encourage kids to acknowledge anxiety in novel situations and help them learn appropriate life skills to meet those new challenges.

+1000

Anonymous wrote:ADHD diagnosis gives you nice advantages in college admissions. There is no downside to getting diagnosed.

So there is a huge incentive and we are just seeing the results of that.

It is pretty much a safe assumption nowadays that when someone says ADHD, they are cheating.