Just saw a spicy hot take in the notes of an ADHD post that was like “adhd isn’t a mood disorder stop making excuses” from a supposed fellow ADHD person and like yes, ADHD is not exclusively a mood disorder. It’s 4 of them hiding under a trench coat with 15 other neurological disorders. And also:
ID, a screen grab from an article that reads: About 70 percent of adults with ADHD report problems with emotional dysregulation, going up to 80 percent in children with ADHD. In clinical terms, these problem areas include:
-Irritability: issues with anger dysregulation – “tantrum” episodes as well as chronic or generally negative feelings in between episodes.
-Lability: frequent, reactive mood changes during the day.
-Recognition: the ability to accurately recognize other people’s feelings. Individuals with ADHD may tend to not notice other people’s emotions until pointed out.
-Affective intensity: felt intensity – how strongly an emotion is experienced. People with ADHD tend to feel emotions very intensely.
-Emotional dysregulation: global difficulty adapting emotional intensity or state to situation.
Like not to be wildly and irrationally peeved about this, but bully for you if you don’t experience this as part of your ADHD, but over 70% of us do and saying we’re making excuses or not trying hard enough is the exact same shit neurotypicals say to invalidate us, and causes us real harm. Please don’t do the same thing. Trauma inflicted by neurotypicals is a huge part of why living with ADHD is so difficult. We don’t need it from within our own community too.
We all experience this shit show disorder differently. It’s a spectrum of one size fits no one, not a cookie cutter mold to fit into.
And yeah, you know what, this shit isn’t an excuse to behave badly, but you know what, knowing emotional dysregulation is a symptom of ADHD helps you to treat it and work on getting a handle on it. Knowing the reason it feels like the world is ending in your chest because something bad happened, and knowing it’s because your gremlin brain is perpetually starved for dopamine so there’s no cushion for the raw emotional feedback currently happening can help you, with practice, to curb the impulsive desire to do something rash or harmful.
I mean, fuck, there’s a reason for why suicide is so prevalent in ADHD, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that impulsivity and severe emotional dysregulation is a part of that.
Knowing that the feeling will end and isn’t an accurate reflection of the situation, overwhelmingly painful as it is in the moment, can help. It does help. So denying this aspect as part of ADHD? Not helpful, and you need to take some time to sit with your thoughts and see why you want to distance yourself so much from this to the point of invalidating others.
