Thursday, September 11, 2008

Self-Diagnosis

I self-diagnosed my condition, based upon a lot of things I had read. It actually started by accident, as my wife and I had concerns about our youngest son. At four years old, he was showing all the hallmarks of what I had as a Hyperactive child: not being able to sit still, short attention span, easily distracted, irritability, etc.

So I used those observations as a checklist and started working my way through things until I came upon ADHD. I really didn't want to look there, mostly because I didn't want (and still don't want) my son to go through what I went through. But I finally looked it up and ran a printout that showed all the symptoms of ADHD to show my wife.

She read it one night after dinner, then sat down next to me and gave me the sheet. I asked her: 'So, what do you think? You think it's a close fit to X?' *

'No,' she said, 'but it does perfectly describe you.'

That rocked me. It never occurred to me that something like this existed for adults (remember, my doctor told me when I was 12 that it stopped at that age - why should I not believe him?).

The next day, I started looking things up for myself. God, was I in trouble. I used the WHO screener, I used the Strattera screener; both pegged me as having it.

I found a copy of the original 17 question Utah scale (now called the Wender Utah Rating for ADHD) and, out of the 17 sociological and psychological traits common in people with ADD, I had 16 (12 or more meant you had it).

So I dug my heels in and started doing even more research.

You'll start to see the results of that on the sidebar over the next week.

*: If you think that I'm going to post my wife's name or my child's name, boy are you wrong.

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