You make a very good point Balto, and I would agree with you on many levels. However since my D6 arrived in the world I see a wonderfully intelligent creative little girl who CANNOT concentrate for more than 20 seconds at a stretch, who constantly bumps and knocks herself because she isn't paying proper attention to her surroundings, who butts in on conversations far more than a child her age should be doing. Her inability to stay on task means we have stress every single morning just to get her dressed and ready for school. And I have even dealt with this problem by not making it an argument anymore - she knows when the clock says 8.30 we get in car dressed or not. At her age she has no homework, thank god, and she's super bright so hopefully that might not be a major problem. She already sometimes hates herself and says things like "I don't know why I'm crazy" - she's referring to her wild impulsiveness which gets her hurt or in trouble.
She reminds me of me, she reminds me of my mum. I know that my mum suffered horribly with feeling like she was a failure for most of her adult life, and yet she had a very high IQ - in her day only 1% of females in the UK attended tertiary education and she was of that 1%. The house was in chaos, we children mostly went to school with barely brushed hair and completely random items in our lunch bags and even managing that much caused her a HUGE amount of stress.
So far my daughters ADD symptoms are not causing anyone too much stress and I wouldn't want to put her on meds unnecessarily, but I am glad people know about this nowadays and there is help availble should she need it (or should I need it).
Someone with severe attention problems might average up to 3 hours a day. On a good week. Get him running on all cylinders for 6 or 7 hours a day, and his whole life changes. Absolutely!
The hyperfocus helps me enormously when I am on a task I feel really motivated by. Stimulation in the form of a buzzy environment, or days when I am delivering training courses, or chairing conferences are fine and I usually get a lot of positive feedback. Mundane just chug along through several small not wildly urgent projects and I'm just a fifth wheel.
The menopause effect definitely made my mum's life more difficult and if it starts to mean I stop being productive then I'll go on meds. There's no reason I should subject my H and my children to a life of domestic chaos, and put too much of the burden of earning a decent living onto my H if there's something that can be done to help matters.
BTW crazy Eddie, I don't think you would have died in the hunter gatherer days. Typically primitive people spend about 2 or 3 hours a day "working", the rest of the time they're just hanging out. Occasional bursts of hyperfocus when stalking a wild animal would also be necessary. I think we would have fit in just perfectly. It's these non-ADDers that have ruined it all for us by inventing clocks and mortgages and school and sh!t
Fran
if we can be sufficient to ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs Erica Jong
