Please do not call ADHD medication “speed”. It is chemically different from what you would find on the street. (Methylphenadate != Methamphetamine)

Associating doctor-perscribed medication with illegal drugs perpetuates a stigma which creates many problems for people struggling with ADHD.

Without commenting on any specific meme (if for no other reason than that imgur is booked the UK and i can’t see the image) and without meaning to disparage OP in any way, because i believe they are asking an honest question, i think that sometimes it’s a question of framing. I think of it like this:

Say you’ve broken your leg and it’s painful for you to hobble around on crutches. You get to work and find that the lift (elevator for the yanks) is out of order. You work on the 20th floor and have no choice but to take the stairs. You talk about how unpleasant this is going to be for you, and a colleague says “yes, everybody hates taking the stairs”. Maybe they do, but it’s not the same thing.

Which again isn’t to suggest that everybody posting memes about neurodivergence is talking about real traits, just that the idea that “everybody runs out of social battery sometimes and therefore everybody is on the spectrum somewhere” isn’t really accurate. It can be the difference between deciding to skip a party because you’d rather curl up with a book and spending 4 months not exchanging a single word with another human being. Or the difference between having a favourite film which you say you’re “obsessed” with and spending 9 days straight watching it on repeat while only sleeping 4 hours a night because the other 20 are you watching the film.

A decade or two ago people used to say “everybody’s a little bit OCD”. That seems to have fallen out of fashion now. I’m reminded of the meme which goes something like one person saying “I’m a bit OCD, i arrange my books by colour”, and the second person saying “cool. I think that if I don’t flip the light switch 40 times all my family will die”.

Edit: a very good starter would be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1AUdaH-EPM

You have a scale of 0 to 100%. Mine is like 200 to 4000%. There is a lot of literature and research on autism. We work differently and the way your post starts made me feel very attacked. And suddenly completely out of energy, although I love informing about it.

I guess that’s because exactly that is our daily struggle. To all the damaging things we experience add on top that we’re accused of faking and also ‘that’s how it’s for everyone’.

If you want to get into it but not start reading books I can recommend the book ‘invisible differences’ very much. There’s a pdf on the internet floating around.

I know you wanted to ask innocently, however keep in mind asking about something and implicating something is not really a thing to people suffering massively exactly for that reason can be very hurtful.

Typically the difference is that people with autism and or ADHD experience things more frequently or more intensely than others.

Yes, all these things are normal for most folks, but how often and the severity of these symptoms are diffrent.

For example, I have ADHD, and one of the symptoms of that is I’m easily distracted. For most people, this would sound fairly normal, but even when its something important, or something I want to do, my brain is moving on to a billion other things all at once rather than focusing on the task at hand. Medication helps immensely with this, but it still happens even on my meds at times. That is not normal.

Also the autism spectrum is a spectrum for a reason. Some people appear to cope better than others and some can’t cope at all. Masking is normal but for someone with autism it can be exhausting because some people with autism never stop masking. They are constantly aware they aren’t “normal” and it stresses them out.

Its hard to understand these kinds of feelings if you’re Neurotypical. Our brains work differently from others, which might sound like “I’m special” but honestly, I’d rather not have ADHD. Shit sucks dude. I fucking hate not being able to do things like a normal person. Its a curse.

People ive met with ADHD or autism, its just nice to be seen and feel like were understood which is why these memes are often posted or are popular with those crowds.

Didn’t you know?

On Lemmy, everyone is a trans-feminine lesbian autist communist.

/joke

But seriously, doctors appointments are scary and time consuming and like half of Lemmy are Americans without healthcare.

Could be that everyone identifies with the same things that the group you’re referring to experiences. But that group often has it much worse than most people. Or that the vocal minority of that group misrepresents the hole.

What you see as “basically normal” is after they are medicated. Isn’t that the point of the medication? Maybe go look at someone who stops taking it for an experiment.

They’re “normal human foibles” because it’s perfectly fucking normal and human to have ASD qualities.

It’s normal to pee. It’s not normal to pee 200 times a day.

Apply that to any ADHD symptom and you’ll understand.

Girls used to be 16x less likely than boys to be diagnosed, now only 3x less likely, because traditional ADHD criteria excluded girls and women from their studies. Girls are sociallized differently and thus present different symptoms. Girls are also more heavily penalized for typical ADHD symptoms and are forced to learn to mask better.

A lot of the backlash against women speaking about their ADHD symptoms on social media is due to misogyny and gatekeeping. When women present their experiences, it’s often seen as attention seeking behavior and not treated as an account of how the medical system has once again failed women.

autistic people find talking online better than talking in person, it’s also not very safe to talk about autism IRL where people will judge you, so it’s not talked about as much IRL

Also as a sidenote, ASD has different symptoms for different people. I don’t relate to some of the things personally, but my sister (also with ASD) does.

The only thing in this list that I relate to is the masking, so I’ll address that

Yes, we all conform and hide parts of ourselves in public, doesn’t mean you can’t “be yourself”.

As I understand it, when a neurotypical person is hiding parts of themselves, it’s something like “I don’t want anyone to know I’m into Taylor Swift”. So just don’t talk about it. It’s that simple. For me, I have to think about every word I say because no one interprets things literally. If someone asks me whether or not I like Taylor Swift and I want to answer in the affirmative, can I just say yes? Or do I need to take note of the day of the week and say no while gesturing wildly with my left hand when it’s a Monday or look 15º to the left from Wednesday to Friday? When we talk about masking, it’s that, applied to every single sentence coming out of your mouth. Comparatively, never talking about Taylor Swift is a trivial task.

Some of us are just sitting here nodding along to 90% of the memes and struggling continuously with basic daily function but also past puberty and thus completely unable to even get checked for any kind of diagnosis due to a crumbling and outdated healthcare system.

Yeah most of it is just human symptoms. I definitely have it more compared to my friends though who cant keep up in conversations with me because I go so fast and switch topics in a millisecond. Its fun when I meet someone who can also do this.

Also. A large amount of people online do have adhd because of the dopamine hits triggered by arguing and getting comment responses. Go in the real world. Bob at the tire store is probably normal.

Completely relate. Pretty normal… Except for… list pending.

I was in denial about being autistic for around a decade after I first had suspicion because of exactly the reasoning you provide.

To provide some insight to my experience is that I had to manually decode all the non-verbal communication with logic while keeping track of the verbal stuff and monitoring my own expression back when I was masking. That shit is exhausting. Masking isn’t just picking a personality to wear based on the occasion, it’s doing that while it doesn’t come naturally and consciously tweaking behavior. Jokes on us, we give of the uncanny valley vibes when do that because it “feels off”.

If there’s something loud around me I will intensely try to hear what people say to me but I just can’t because the surrounding is louder.

I was so bad at throwing and kicking balls that I was made fun of despite actually practicing both football and handball.

I went to sleep scared for a long time because I imagined people breaking in because of slightest squeek in the house.

It’s also hard to explain how easy it is to have conversations with other autistic people vs normies.

People have stopped socializing, at least not in a real, meaningful way. Discord groups of other shut-ins feeding off each other’s insecurity doesn’t count.

The lack of socialization means a lack of social validation so to feel any value at all, we all have to figure out how to carve out new identities in a much more lonely and dark world. Self-diagnosis of conditions and syndromes can give you insulation from criticism and give you a sense of community and belonging, so less effort is placed on managing or treating the condition and more effort is placed on affirming and defending your condition.

I’m not saying the conditions aren’t real, they exist on a large spectrum that almost everyone falls on to some degree, but what’s changed is the view of the conditions or syndromes as an obstacle to life that needs to be managed or beat. Instead it’s a badge of identity that people work to justify and preserve, often without realizing it.

I’ve been in and out of the mental health system for years, I’ve done it to beat depression, PTSD and anxiety and have made great strides by accepting the hard truths of the things I need to do to make it easier to live with problems outside my control. But these are tools I embraced because I wanted to go outside, meet people, be more social and have more opportunities.

Not a lot of young people want any of that, they’ve been disillusioned by the promise of the future because the internet just feeds them the bleakest picture of the world that it can, and people don’t generally seek out balancing perspectives on their own, and even resist any attempt to tell them that there’s a lot of important reasons you might want to stretch your mental and social muscles.

Nearly everyone I talk to under the age of 25 or so says they can’t imagine living past 40, with many saying that they actively have plans to not live past 40, which blows my goddamn mind.

Every single one of you whiny, nihilistic shits out there is going to hit age 40 and say “Oh fuck, what have I done with my life?”