> I would say I have "hyper focus", to the point where if I'm working on something interesting, I will lose track of time and am unable to redirect my attention to anything else.

I feel like knowing this tendency has made me extremely protective and avoidant of taking on tasks. I appear “lazy” to the outside observer. It’s something I’m still trying to solve.

Well, it's well known that ADD/ADHD aren't about lack of focus, but about an inability to direct one's focus to where it's needed.

Normal people can think "I need X, let's work on X" but ADHD people are at the mercy of what's "chosen for them" by their brain.

This was probably fine 4000 years ago, when the world was looser, and people could find their place in life regardless of their particular quirks, but not so much nowadays.

This difficulty or inability to direct focus can be "trained away" with enough effort, but it isn't easy at all.

I feel like that’s a different type of ADD or something. My wife has that type, so if she’s on her phone or focused on something I almost have to shake her to get her attention, whereas I’m very much the opposite (hard to focus on anything). Makes it hard to watch a series together bc she always wants to binge the whole thing in one sitting and I can never watch more than two episodes at a time.

This used to upset me, but as time goes on I'm more excited about it. Sometimes I run into someone else that only does that one or two things. They are happy they finished them, etc., but they seem envious of being able to do lots of things even if they don't end up mattering.

I read this comment and it matched my experience so closely I had to double check it wasn't a copy of one of my own posts.

We really do need an update to the diagnostic criteria and descriptions for ADHD, Autism and their combinations (DSM6?). I think monotropism is a good overarching description that aligns better with what we with these diagnosis experience.

I was diagnosed ADD as well. This is my exact experience. Usually my focus being too strong on things I like, and an inability to direct it elsewhere towards uninteresting tasks. (picking up, making bed, dishes)

Yes. Rather a lack of control of the subject and intensity of focus. Which piss everyone off because they can't steer it from the outside, hence the "lack of focus" perspective.

Obsessive compulsive disorder. Only directed towards work and projects. I have it too.

Same for me. I think this experience is pretty common amongst people diagnosed with AD[H]D.

Did ADD turn into ADHD? I thought there was ADHD and ADD

I think this is partly right, partly misguided.

Misguided: there's now a focus on causality and precise identification based on symptoms and negative impact caused that wasn't present in the days of exorcisms and shamanism. Those eras were primarily characterized by people in positions of (often corrupt or unqualified) authority declaring diagnoses for others, largely without the consent of the diagnosed. Now, the default mode of mental health treatment is now focused on identifying symptoms according to specific rubrics, and diagnosing (or not) based on the presence of those rather than the agenda, religious feelings, or whims of people in positions of authority.

Partly right: what I described above is the default or desired diagnostic approach. We have a long way to go before it's actually performed for everyone. Coercive diagnoses are not uncommon even under modern medical/diagnostic practices: parents seek out spectrum or ADHD diagnoses for kids who aren't suffering, just not meeting parental expectations; psychotic people are handled by modern mental health systems with extremely low autonomy, etc.

Conversations here are also often confused: diagnoses for many mental health conditions are qualitative and measured not only by symptoms but by harms. The DSM and friends aren't like the diagnostic instruments for cancer or heart disease: physiological indicators are much rarer in mental health, so mental health diagnoses combine enumerations of behavioral symptoms and negative impacts caused to one's life. That implies a subtlety that's hard to come by among non-medical-professionals: you don't "have" ADHD (or OCD, Autism, etc.) in the same way you "have" an ulcer; you have those conditions if you present with a certain subset of the symptoms for the diagnosis, many of which are behavioral. Whether a particular treatment is merited has to do with both symptoms and the harms posed by those symptoms to your quality of life. So saying "I have ADHD" is a less meaningful statement than "I have some symptoms of ADHD and they seriously damage my quality of life, therefore I seek treatment".

Add to that our limited (but growing, and better than it was in past decades) understanding of pharmaceutical treatments for mental health disorders--many of the drugs we use to treat, say, depression or ADHD behave with all the subtlety of driving a bulldozer through a convenience store because you wanted to get a gallon of milk--and you have a complex area discussed using outdated binary pathological terminology. That's a recipe for suspicion and confusion.

In short, it is, as you say, hyperbolic to characterize modern mental health treatment as shamanism. But lingering corrupt medical practice and the complexity of the field for laypeople make it hard to see how, specifically, things are improving in this area.

I read the whole article and I agree that the first sentence was a very poor choice as an introduction to the rest of the content.

However, it is an interesting article if you ignore that bit of bluster. The amount of overlap and traits commonly associated with ADHD and autism.

Eh, newtons theory of universal gravitation is still a theory, even if he had no access to particle physics, and even if later the Theory of General Relativity (among others) largely supplanted it. It’s also still useful (and used!) in most real life engineering situations. It’s rare where time dilation applies in say civil engineering.

That folks with Autism and ADHD may have large portions of their symptoms occur because they focus too much on some specific things, to the detriment of others - like emotional well being/regulation - can still be falsifiable (better than most psychiatric theories for sure!) and useful clinically.

Personally, it lines up with what I’ve seen and experienced.

That there is another (perhaps chemical, or brain structure) theory too doesn’t necessarily change that!

Not quite, but I think there's a lot of overlap between ADHD and autism, and that the labels are becoming increasingly blurry.

The final paragraph touched on it:

> It is, I think, too early to say with any confidence that autism and ADHD (or KCS) share a common root in monotropism, but the overlapping traits of the people receiving each label clearly demand some kind of explanation, and preliminary results do suggest that each is strongly correlated with monotropism – especially in combination.

Also, a definition of monotropism from their homepage (not my writing):

> I believe that the best way to understand autistic minds is in terms of a thinking style which tends to concentrate resources in a few interests and concerns at any time, rather than distributing them widely. This style of processing, monotropism, explains many features of autistic experience that may initially seem puzzling, and shows how they are connected.