ADHD Symptoms You Won’t Find in the DSM
ADHD is in the DSM-5, an essential resource used by clinicians to diagnose and treat ADHD, but experts and ADDitude readers say symptoms are missing, making it increasingly incomplete and even inaccurate.
2 Comments: ADHD Symptoms You Won’t Find in the DSM
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I agree with a lot of the comments listed in this article. I think I would like to echo the emotional disregulation piece, the intense emotions can present as a mood disorder if a provider does not have adequate experience with identifying ADHD. I was misdiagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder as a teenager as a result of this, and was delayed in getting the right help until I was diagnosed with ADHD when I had reached 21 years of age. I also agree with the spherical thinking comment (i.e. multiple trains of thought at once – including songs and movie/tv quotes looping on repeat for hours). This leads to issues with communication because someone will ask me a question, and I will answer it in my head but not speak it outloud. The working memory is another good one to point out. I struggle to remember information I have just been given as well as keeping track of tasks in-progress. Time blindness, lack of spatial awareness, and a lack of object permanence are also important. I also would like more research to be conducted on how pregnancy affects ADHD. We need more understanding on how horomones in women as they go through their natural ovulation cycle can affect ADHD symptoms as well; and also what post partum can do to an ADHD brain.
I’d actually like to see it re-evaluated under different conditions to confirm if humans have one brain for “slow, predictable times” and another one wired for “chaotic, high data processing times”. Something like developing a set of tests that can be run in two different situations by two different groups – neural normal (for lack of a better term) and those with adhd; in a slow, predictable env. (Eg. Current school system) and a fast-paced chaotic env where there’s a huge amount of changing data to be filtered through quickly.
It wouldn’t be the first time that someone who was seeking to make their name in an established field felt the need to have their approach be “the right one” and have everything else compared to it and to fail. We saw this extensively in medicine with women, for example.