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The textbook symptoms of ADD — inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity — fail to reflect several of its most powerful characteristics; the ones that shape your perceptions, emotions, and motivation. Here, Dr. William Dodson explains how to recognize and manage ADHD's true defining features.
The DSM-V – the bible of psychiatric diagnosis – lists 18 diagnostic criteria for attention deficit disorder (ADHD or ADD). Clinicians use this to identify symptoms, insurance companies use it to determine coverage, and researchers use it to determine areas of worthwhile study.
The problem: These criteria only describe how ADHD affects children ages 6-12, and that has led to misdiagnosis, misunderstanding, and failed treatment for teens, adults, and the elderly.
Most people, clinicians included, have only a vague understanding of what ADHD means. They assume it equates to hyperactivity and poor focus, mostly in children. They are wrong.
When we step back and ask, "What does everyone with ADHD have in common, that people without ADHD don't experience?" a different set of symptoms take shape.
From this perspective, three defining features of ADHD emerge that explain every aspect of the condition:
1. an interest-based nervous system
2. emotional hyperarousal
3. rejection sensitivity
Not precisely news but damned if it's not an interesting read if it has any relevance in your life.
Source: https://www.additudemag.com/symptoms-of-add-hyperarousal-rejection-sensitivity/
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday March 16 2018, @01:49PM (1 child)
In the old days it was the midwesterner's SAT. In somewhat more detail:
SAT came from ivy schools needing an IQ test to limit admissions that wasn't banned by civil right legislation banning IQ tests, and spread to most coastie schools.
ACT came from early midwestern attempts at K12 public school testing, which is super popular today but was a new idea in the 50s, and somehow morphed into the standard admissions IQ test, that is not legally technically one of those forbidden IQ tests, for midwestern and generally non-coastie higher ed.
Originally the ACT tested the quality of education, but when the money started rolling in from uni admissions, it changed to an IQ test.
There was a weird interlude generally in the gen-x era where ACT tests were not required of all high school students, but in practice at least where I lived about 99% of kids took them anyway at school on a saturday morning. From what I understand they're back to mandatory during school time, just like back in the 60s. I understand the price has gone way up much as tuition has. I donno who pays, probably the usual screw the parents over.
The military has an IQ test called the ASVAB. Some states give all the high school kids the ASVAB test to determine the quality of schools and teachers under the usual fascination today with extensive testing.
In theory the SAT and ASVAB and ACT are all testing the same thing, IQ, so there's concordance tables to map from one result to another highly predictive result.
All the tests are fairly boomer and/or extreme social striver. During the boom, there was a bulge of kids trying to get into school, so the state school I attended had a simple ACT cutoff, above it you're in, below it you're out, and I heard that cutoff was pretty high during the boom. Nothing changed in the curriculum but as a gen-x there were vastly fewer students so the cutoff for admission was ridiculous low, like you'd have zero change of successfully graduating if you just barely made it past the admissions cutoff. In summary, the test scores mattered a lot in 1970, not at all in 1990, I donno now, aside from hypercompetitive ivy league schools where its always been hard to get in.
Ironically the whole IQ test thing, and why its officially banned although in practice was and is still required, is IQ works pretty well as a racial/demographic filter that in the old jim crow days in the south was very popular to keep blacks out of white schools and so forth. In the really old days blacks would not have been permitted on campus, and now discrimination is anti-white. So IQ or standardized testing was a very short term fad, and there's really no point to it anymore other than revenue generation, which it does a great job of and therefore will never go away.
Another oddity is as a gen-X I knew I only needed a 18 or so on the ACT to get into my state school because of the baby-bust so I did zero prep as did many of my peers leading to massive hand wringing in the gen-x era about kids getting stupider according to test results. I'm not entirely sure I was awake at the start of the test. Well, if I'm not aiming for an ivy, I can fill in the test with random numbers and still get into any non-ivy school in the country, so you can guess what lazy teens do. So yeah, the test scores from my school declined from 1970 to 1990 but the quality of the school and students demographics were unchanged, its merely that the test only matters based on the ratio of admission slots vs qty of prospective freshmen. I went to the same school as a boomer coworker could not get into; the admission cutoff for boomers in 1970 was approx 30 and he didn't make it, when I was a freshman it was 18 and I easily got in.
There are some novelties, like the tests have undergone continuous revision in scoring to make results more politically correct or whatever, or simply to discourage comparison of scores. Any given SAT score or average might be on a 1600 or 2400 scale fairly randomly and usually unstated. The ACT is also messed with although to a lesser extent, the ACT got a 2 point boost in the mid 90s, so I got a 33 about thirty years ago and that supposedly would be comparable to a 35 today. The SAT changes are WAY more ridiculous with new baselines and new formulas. The ASVAB supposedly has never changed anything but the formulas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @06:11AM
SAT scores are highly predictive of the amount of money that the family spent on SAT prep, far more than anything else. Schools like the scores because it allows them to weed out poor and middle class students, the ones that won't have the money to pay for private tutors and similar to pass the courses. Plus, they're more likely to have money to fund endowments and grants later on.