Quote:
Originally Posted by AlbertaCowboy
I find that curious as well, as I was diagnosed with a textbook case of ADD when I was a child, yet always read at adult levels myself.
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I didn't get diagnosed until my early fifties. The moron who was supposed to be an expert on adult learning disabilities apparently never grasped the concept of age skew; as people age, they often learn to compensate for their disabilities. He ran all the standard tests, including the supposedly unbeatable MMPI (I've taken it four times; I beat it the first two times to hide things then the last two times I answered everything honestly), and the quack would have declared me as not having ADD based on those tests since he didn't allow for the fact I had had 50 years to learn how to compensate for it (same happened with the dyslexia so, according to him, I didn't have it). He never even asked about my past history, my performance and behavior in school, etc., which is vital for properly diagnosing ADD (I have a B.S. in Psychology and, under the direction of the shrink I was seeing at the time, had done quite a bit of research on the subject). It was his final, homebrew test, where I had to perform a simple repetitve task on a computer, one most of you would ace, that convinced him I did have ADD. I started out doing a great job performing the task but after a short while, performance started to fall off until I was doing as bad as a small child.
People with ADD (or Adult ADHD since adults don't bounce around as much as kids do) tend to be well above average in intelligence. I tested at only 121, which is well above average, but even the quack acknowledged it was probably higher due to the possibility the test scores may have been skewed by the ADD. Both my children were bright. My son may have had ADD, based on his behavior (not bad enough to have triggered a suspicion of ADD) and poor to fair schoolwork (he "had other priorities" until he got into high school football and had to keep his grades up to be eligible to play; his "priorities" shifted dramatically then), but was sharp enough to fly under the radar if he did. I don't remember what his IQ was but it was high. My daughter was a little brain with an even higher with an IQ of 132. She was a model student and never misbehaved but when it came to life, things that most people take in stride intimidated her so it's possible she has a mild form of ADD.