Anxiety is an emotion or experience that anyone can feel, it is not the same as anxiety disorder.
ADHD and Autism are neural divergences which means that these are people that are literally born with a different brain behavior then most. It means that they are how they are.
As a dude with OCD, yep it's a mental illness by classification. It's something that impedes and impacts the way people function and live their day to day lives along with social difficulties due to those things.
Disorder would be a lateral word to illness, and over-explaining doesn't categorize it but rather deliberates the meaning.
Just doesn't sound nice to folks. Until you figure out how to manage it, it's seen as a disease as it can be debilitating. However, lots of folks can go fine most of their life with the disorders, since it isn't an illness unless it impacts your life.
I watched the SoftWhiteUnderbelly interview of a guy with OCD who works as a clown, and used to serve in the Navy. His form of OCD wasn't self-loathing intrusive thoughts but intrusive thoughts that stemmed from the anxiety or fear of something bad happening. Like, the fear that he was going to be dishonorably discharged or drown if there's a storm, was perceived as a sort of bad mojo that he had to combat with drowning it out with positive thoughts, and by repeatedly carrying out certain mundane actions as ritualis to eliminate the bad mojo that his OCD thoughts manifested. And failure to do so meant that those bad things mentioned by his negative thoughts were actually going to happen. So, he would obsessively repeat certain words or phrases to himself, or repeat in a specific action until the thought went away.
In the interview he repeatedly mentions feeling self-conscious about how he must have looked crazy to other people in the Navy or in public, talking to himself repeatedly or being stuck in one of his rituals battling the intrusive thought that was overwhelming him, but the alternative was letting it actually drive him crazy.
And a part of his psyche believed if he didn't engage in those coping rituals, than the things his intrusive thoughts said we're going to happen, might actually happen. And so those two things were his only coping strategy for dealing with being overwhelmed by all the crippling anxiety and fear, from which his OCD was manifesting.
I have ADHD and I will hyper fixate on something for 12 hours straight, forgetting to eat or take a bathroom break. I will learn all about it and do it perfectly, but then I will be useless for a day or two, as I lose my car keys in the refrigerator and then remember I went to the grocery store and make a sandwich instead of looking for them.
This sounds a lot like me. Whether I have ADHD is something I've been wondering for some time now, but the descriptions of ADHD are always so conflicting to me, because every symptom can be taken as a evidence or counterevidence by changing perspective, partly because of this duality you described.
Edit: lolshit wall of text about ADHD of all things. Sorry!
Attention DEFICIT is a misleading term. It's more an issue of not being able to willingly direct your attention.
That's why ADHD brains hyperfixate on something and we're are unable to switch to something else, even though we KNOW we should/want to/have to do the other thing - we can't direct our attention away from the thing our brains are hyperfixating on.
What sometimes looks like rapid "task switching" is again the inability to direct our attention so it flips around uncontrolled.
This also often leads to a weird state of paralysis where we're doing absolutely fuck all because we can't activate our attention properly but we're yelling at ourselves on the inside to DO THE FUCKING THING YOU FUCKING LAZY SHIT.
For ADHD brains to be able to consciously, actively direct attention, there needs to be some immediate reward. It can't be some vague reward that might come in the future, like "you won't have back pain when you're old (so exercise!)". That doesn't work.
For me (and others, I hear), it's often the thought that others are depending on me doing The Thing. That's why I was absolutely insanely good at organising shit in my last job - my coworkers depended on me having prepared all kinds of data. Without this reward, I am completely useless at organising stuff.
Unless it's interesting, of course, which is again an immediate reward.
Does this sound in any way like you?
Edit: and did you have trouble directing your attention to get through this text? :D
It's because ADHD despite it's name is not a deficit of attention, but the inability to control it. That may be that you change focus all the time but also that you can't take your focus from something even if you should.
I felt this way too before I saw a doctor. I would see posts online about it and relate to them, but I knew social media posts can be inaccurate. I knew that that type of thing targets very generic symptoms to attract more interactions.
I thought everyone was tired and stressed like I can be. I spent a lot of time thinking I was lazy or not good enough because I couldn’t get stuff done that seemed easy for other people.
It wasn’t until my partner suggested I talk to my doctor about it because he saw signs.
Honestly, the best thing you can do is talk to a doctor if you feel like symptoms are disrupting your ability to function. If you’re doing fine, you might not need it! But the best thing I ever did was talk to my doctor about this, anxiety, and a potential sleep related disorder (I’m still working on the latter).
Yeah the OP is the opposite of my experience with ADHD. I'm fucking terrible at moving from one task to another, that's literally the hardest part about it. I just studied Japanese for 12 hours straight yesterday instead of working or writing any code, just because I got the sudden urge. I haven't actively studied Japanese since 2020 so I'm just reviewing shit I already learned years ago. I'll do this for a couple days until I either burn myself out or find a new thing to fixate on.
If I'm in burnout, I'll start rapidly changing between tasks, playing 10 minutes of every game I own chasing any shred of dopamine I can find, or scrolling through short form video content for hours until I find something that catches my attention and then I'll be fixated on that for anywhere between 1 full day, to about a week.
Like I have coping techniques and medication, but they only go so far and sometimes I just can't seem to reign it in. Sometimes I can fixate on work or study tasks, (e.g. Japanese) but usually it takes a Herculean amount of effort, determination and discipline to actually control my focus to what I need it on. When I manage to direct my focus to the important stuff it feels like a superpower to fixate on it, but those moments are few and far between.
Can we have one fucking post without american politics getting shoehorned in?
I get it's important to you but perhaps keep it to topics or communities at least somewhat related. You know, for the two people in the world not living in the us.
If the word 'Republican' were omitted, that comment could be applicable in most countries on the planet.
It's kind of nitpicking anyway, don't you think? Almost as nitpicky as pointing out when the country of the United States is referred to by the name of the continent it shares with other nations.
"Won't someone think of the people that are destroying our society?"
Not all mental illnesses are high-functioning autism-style quirkiness, things that need help, many of which makes people more of victims of violence than the perpetrators of them. Sure, you can say that e.g. the Cybertruck bomber was abused by the MAGA cult, but that won't change the facts. All this does is downplay the abuse these people can do if they're at the wrong place.
We can call out the abuses of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, without taking away their mental health card. They were very close to two pedophile rings, and pedophilia is among the few paraphilias that psychology tries its best to correct due to the harm these people can cause to real children. They're also narcissists, and likely also psychopaths.
Tgis is what gets called out, and not equating disabilities with illness?
You treat an illness. It's something you try to eliminate. A disability isn't something that has a cure, and often needs accomodations rather than treatment.
One aspect of autism is lacking "mirror nodes" in our frontal cortex that allow neuro-typicals to possess self-awareness while speaking or carrying out a physical action, and thereby being aware of the emotional impact their behavior has on the people around them.
So, by your definition, I am superior to neuro-typicals by virtue of lacking equipment and firmware that neuro-typicals have, which assists them with interfacing with other members of their own species.
I feel like this really needs to be said. OCD != being meticulous to detail. It isn't "omg this spreadsheet is in the wrong order," it is more like "I can't fail to flick the light swith 3.5 times when I enter a room. I know that the switch gets left midway, but that is how I will obsessively leave it. If you change it, I will put it back to everyone's detremint."
I have ADHD -> I'm excellent at moving from one task to another.
I dunno about those of you who have more substantial ADHD, but I find moving intentionally or external-led from one task to another - i.e. other than my brain's natural flow - is one of the hardest things for me. Switching from, even, washing dishes to mopping up water splashed, can be a great mental strain.
I have anxiety -> I anticipate accidents and hiccups before they happen
Sadly, I have that John Nash thing where my brain notices connections and correlations (spurious relationships? dunno!) but without all the cool game-theory math skills.
WARNING: Fringe Hypotheses Ahead! 🕶🛸👽🧬
A recent one is the interaction between Trump's state of being an insurrectionist (according to a commission and some legal entities and not denied by SCOTUS) and the insurrectionist clause of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
As things are SCOTUS has suggested (in dicta) it's up to congress to legislate action to block Trump's presidency if they want to, that the insurrectionist clause is not self-executing.
What this opinion doesn't do is change Trump's status as an insurrectionist. Nor does it rule the 14th amendment doesn't apply, only that congress is required to pass legislation to make it happen.
This means members of the public and government workers might decide among themselves President Trump is not legitimate. After all, the January 6th Commission presented an ironclad case he committed treason against the US, and the 14th amendment is in effect.
And this could be useful when the Trump Administration gives orders that are contrary to the duties of the department, or are unethical. Say if the DOD is ordered to put down public protests against current policy, or the Department of Education is told to disband.
And Then if SCOTUS can neuter 14-3 (the insurrectionist clause) by insisting congress has to enforce it, they can also neuter 14-1 (the birthright citizenship clause) the same way, maybe even insisting each person born of foreigners on US soil has to be given citizenship by legislation. Trump is particularly interested in killing 14-1.
In fact, this suggests the US Supreme Court can reinterpret any part of the Constitution of the United States by adding further obligations to assure it is enforced. And this puts SCOTUS above the Constitution.
Will anything come of this? Dunno. Could be nothing. Could lead to civil war.
I mean I'm mad so take my ideas with that consideration. 🐰🎩🫖☕️