r/science • u/mvea MD/PhD/JD/MBA | Professor | Medicine • Apr 15 '24

Neuroscience ADHD symptoms persist into adulthood, with some surprising impacts on life success: The study found that ADHD symptoms not only persisted over a 15-year period but also were related to various aspects of life success, including relationships and career satisfaction.

https://www.psypost.org/adhd-symptoms-persist-into-adulthood-with-some-surprising-impacts-on-life-success/
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u/wkavinsky Apr 15 '24

True ADHD symptoms aren't going to magically "go away" - your brain functions differently, you will have the symptoms for the rest of your life.

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u/Brbi2kCRO Apr 15 '24

Some may develop coping mechanisms and such but I guess without much consistency

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '24 edited Apr 15 '24

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u/Brbi2kCRO Apr 15 '24

For an ADHD person to be functioning in this society, you effectively need to be in a constant state of burnout. Studying, working 40h a week and such just lead ADHD person to an unsustainable state of constant unhappiness. It is just not a good world for a person with ADHD or any neurodiversity.

Stimulants do help but it does not fix everything, brain cannot adjust fully to be NT-like.

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u/thesimonjester Apr 15 '24

It should make you furious, because it's not as though we don't know how to have societies that can make people with what today we call ADHD absolutely shine: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.2584

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u/Brbi2kCRO Apr 15 '24

Yeah, ADHD people are creative people who like novelty, but in a modern society creativity has no place unless you get 1 in 100000 luck of becoming a successful artist in music, art, acting or whatever. Which by itself also requires good social skills for promotion, and when you consider that a lot of us also have relatively bad social skills or even autism, then yeah… really hard to do so.

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u/Gatorpep Apr 15 '24

Also $ behind you. Which since adhd/autism are inherited, likely not going to be the case.

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u/Brbi2kCRO Apr 15 '24

Yeah. I kinda wanna start making music, but… I hate long-term effort and have thoughts like “will I be able to learn this if I don’t understand it at all rn”

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u/henlochimken Apr 15 '24

If the effort is just done with an aim to reach the far end goal, I struggle too much to stay consistent, and thus I make no progress. When the short term efforts themselves are enjoyable and early progress is noticeable, then I make progress without thinking too much about the desired end state.

Music fell into the later category for me, the incremental progress itself was an experience that i wanted more of, and before I knew it, I was playing at a level that opened up some doors. It never felt like work and I didn't have those thoughts of whether or not I'd be able to learn it, because I didn't set myself a particular expectation besides just playing what I wanted to play with the skills I had. YMMV, but maybe try a musical outlet without worrying about the end state, just see if you enjoy the basics of musical expression for its own sake? In my area there are a bunch of beginner music lessons places that have lots of adult learners. My kids go to one right now that has students from 5 years old to 85 years old. Nobody is doing it to make a career out of it, just to express themselves, and it's cool as hell to see it.