Writing a Mentally Ill Character

I absolutely love this. It's so frustrating to see mental illness portrayed wrong in movies or roleplaying or books. Generally, the thought running through my head is, "STAHHHHP!! YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!!"


One thing I'd recommend is maybe adding some information to the bipolar section about the two types, and the different types of cycles it goes through. I'd be willing to help if you'd like a first hand account. (Only offering because you said your lessons didn't talk about mood disorders.)


Anyways. Thank you so so so much for this epic post/tutorial.
 
@ianbabyyy Thank you so much!


If you'd be willing to write something about the differences between the types and the cycles and pm it to me that'd be really helpful. I'll be sure to credit you!
 
My brother has bipolar to, I think it would be rest to write about it here.


He becomes manic, everything excited him, he gets wide eyed and hyper, and he will casually say things that have universal gravity. He feels like the hero of the world and the one in the right, but his mentality is so fragile and I'll balanced that flaw can be found in his speaking by any person able to see trough his ridiculous charisma. Hell burst into a room and suddenly say "you're gonna do everything man, you're gonna change the world! Im so excited for you, I just got this vision and I realized that we're gonna be on the top!"


The opposite side of the spectrum is easy to explain. When depressed, my brother is, quite singly, not moving. Hell enter a room and sit on a couch and won't move until perhaps the same time tomorrow.


mental illness vs not mental illness

I may not have done much role playing yet, but I've been around the block enough to see some characters using mental illness in ways I strongly disagree with.


1. Mental illness is not an excuse to have a flawless character. I have no greater pet peeve than the Mary Sue with a dark side. A character that is all around good natured, happy, and perfect except for the fact that they have a split personality Which is malicious, or can fight, or etc, that's not a fully realized character. If you want split personalities, think of each personality as its own character, and none of them can be Mary Sues. This goes for characters with different modes, states, drugs, anything.


Without bipolar, my bro is still a flawed person. If he was perfect, he bi polar wouldn't be much of a problem because he'd deal with it well and understand himself during manic or depressive attacks.


2. I don't have time to write two out with my dying phone battery, but basically personality disorders are like personality traits. They can have causes and effects, be triggered and be quelled, but stay with people, being learned over time. they are states of mind, and often they don't care about context or logic, they just are. A depressed person feeling a weight on their chest-- personalities can interact with it, I can be a sepressed person and logically say "I should do x" or have the strength to say "I NEED to do y!" But my depression is a state which can at times, be almost separate from and acting on me. And at other times I can move into it and decide it is logical right now for me to be depressed or to not move for a day or two. Is it my depression that's making me sad, or some circumstance? It's a chicken or egg thing, and your character may very well not know.
 
I return from the dead, to ask a question that may not be entirely relevant to this thread's contents.


Is there merit in making a thread about the trend of romanticizing these things (mental and physical illness, abuse, etc.)? Does one already exist?


It's not directly pertinent to writing mental illness, but I feel it might be important to note somewhere anyway, because during my years of online roleplay, I've found that people love to romanticize and trivialize these issues for the sake of romance (no offense, but ex: The Fault in Our Stars, the fandom in particular).


I don't know, I've seen it a lot, and it seems relevant to bring up.
 
castigat said:
I return from the dead, to ask a question that may not be entirely relevant to this thread's contents.
Is there merit in making a thread about the trend of romanticizing these things (mental and physical illness, abuse, etc.)? Does one already exist?


It's not directly pertinent to writing mental illness, but I feel it might be important to note somewhere anyway, because during my years of online roleplay, I've found that people love to romanticize and trivialize these issues for the sake of romance (no offense, but ex: The Fault in Our Stars, the fandom in particular).


I don't know, I've seen it a lot, and it seems relevant to bring up.
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I think there could be some merit. I haven't been rping much lately, but I've still been seeing rps that have ridiculous portrayals of this kinda stuff.


Actually, abuse is an interesting one to bring up, considering how often you get characters with the basic personality that 1. they were abused 2. now theyre either sweet perfect angels or edgy angsty murder machines.


While I think a lot of people who have those kinds of characters are beginning writers and probably don't know any better/mean well, and the userbase here is made up of mostly 13-16 yr olds I don't really blame them, but having a thread explaining it could be interesting/helpful.
 
@castigat First off, that was an IMPRESSIVE wall of text! Like seriously, I doubt I could write that much if I wanted to, and that's why I didn't 'reply' to your comment, and instead tagged you in a whole new one!


I would like, if I'm able, to make a point of contention on 'real people are more than their diagnosis' point, if I may?


Now, I am perfectly open about my Neurodivergancy (My preferred term. Neurotypical and Neurodivergence. Hereon out described as NT and ND), I have BPD and have been showing symptoms for as long as anyone in my life can remember (my mum often recounts to me on how my self-damaging behaviours began at a very young age in the form of hiding that the frame of my bed was broken and scraping my arm along it because apparently 'I enjoyed the way it felt' (obviously not a direct quote, I don't remember this time, but apparently that's the essence of what I said to her))


A big part of BPD (for me, personally) is the unstable sense of self. I will cling to any label I'm able to apply to myself in order to give myself some sort of identity. To have the chance to say "Yes, this is me, this is who I am." And that's exactly what I did when I (FINALLY) got my diagnosis. It was already part of my personality (what little of it was actually MINE and not stolen from fictional characters and those around me) but after being able to give it a name, it became a BIG part of who I am, because it's something I can 100% be certain is mine and is me. I can loud and proud stand up and say, "I am Neurodivergent, I have Borderline Personality Disorder." with the firm knowledge that it's true. That it's not going to change like the rest of me will. (The way I often describe it to people is that I am my very own dress up doll. I get bored or find a better personality or trait? I take it and wear it with pride because hey, it's better than what I had before.)


So while I can't speak for other ND folks, I AM my diagnosis. That is entirely who I am, because I don't know who I am underneath all of these layers of other people that I've taken on.


Therefore (while I don't often because it's bad practice) were I to portray someone with BPD, even if the RP/Fic/Book/Show/Whatever wasn't centered around their mental health, it would be something in the forefront. It would be a major character trait, and it would be ruminated on and mentioned (at least during an internal monologue of some description) on a semi-regular to regular basis. Because it's the one sure thing.


Like being in a room of holograms and finding a real rock. While it might not be relevant to what you're doing, you'll think about that rock. Because hey, that's the one thing I found in this entire place that's real! Awesome, yes, I must remember that the rock is real and go back to it as often as I can in this upside down crazy hologram world.


(And yes, I'm aware I use a lot of weird metaphors (I think they're metaphors, it's late, don't hate me if it's the wrong term!) but that's because, in my experience, NT folks struggle to understand where I'm coming from without them. I don't aim to talk down, sorry if that's how it's come across!)


To summarise:


I agree with your point on most fronts (from what research I've done) however it would not be unrealistic or wrong to portray certain Neurodivergences as a key personality point as for some of us, they are a key personality point.
 
@CheshireKittenWill I wasn't referencing that so much as people that think that mental illness is an accessory (and this, to my experience, comes from people who are not mentally ill most of the time) and treat it accordingly. When I referenced TFiOS and its fandom in my previous post, I distinctly remember when teenage girls would say, "joke" or not, that they wish they could have terminal illness too so they could have a romance like that.


People do it with other topics, too, like the obsessive and controlling relationship between Edward Cullen and Bella (which is treated like it's a healthy and ideal relationship to have, that Edward's manipulation, isolation, and stalking are okay and normal), and things like 50 Shades, where Christian Grey is lauded because of and despite how badly he treats the main character. Irony when it's taken into account that 50 Shades is a glorified Twilight fanfic


As someone with mental illness and very likely neurodivergent (a detail I'm taking up with the appropriate authorities), I realize how important it is to show a realistic take on a character's illnesses, if they have them. It's very important to me that pains are taken in communicating that in a way that is both real and palatable to readers, without losing any of the characters' voice in the process.


Most of the characters I write tend to be a bit mentally unhealthy or ND and that does, inevitably, come into focus. I'm not saying that it shouldn't, nor am I saying that we shouldn't play them as key personality points, because for many of us, neurodivergence and mental illness consume—and often define, in their severity—our being. It would be daft of me to say that one should avoid including a character's or person's unique experience with mental illness or neurodivergence (or anything else that informs their self, for that matter)—that would rob them of their reality and their integrity. It would remove something that forms their perspectives, their thoughts and behaviors (unique depending upon context, of course), and their actions. To avoid that would be fallacy.


I am saying that it should be done with care by the people who do not have direct experiences, and that those who don't are better off looking at the experiences (how the symptoms manifest) before the name, because many people who are not crippled in their mental health tend to have preconceived judgments about the names/diagnoses and what they look like based on stereotypes (I doubt I would need to expound upon this, as BPD is a very good example of the sort of stigma I'm talking about).


People too often want me to write characters with serious issues that they need to work through as if they do not have them, for the sake of romance. I enjoy writing through and exploring these issues and how the characters handle them. I live for the other characters that come into their lives and help them, and slowly aid them in learning how to live again. I explore their recovery, and people ask me to eschew that because it's 'ugly', because it's unpleasant, because it isn't always happy—and because it isn't a good ingredient for romance.


I've gotten a lot of people who ask for nothing short of that, and that is my beef in my most recent post: I cannot, ethically, pretend that part of a person's being doesn't exist in order to cater to romance—or act like everything that they do is a good thing, or that they shouldn't be accountable for (as I've gotten from some people that want "this totally isn't abuse, because (insert justifications here)" abuse relationships with the Joker, as an example).


TL;DR when I play "villains" or "dark" characters especially, the theme between them all is that they probably have mental illness—and the shitty things they do or are portrayed to do is what attracts people to them, and in the process, they want the edgy grimdark villain guy, but they also want a free pass from the darker aspects of their personality, because it's "uncomfortable". This is what I get when (NT and mentally healthy) people ask for romance with mental illness.


That doesn't jive with me. Mental illness is real. It is raw. If the character hasn't started their journey to recovery, it is dark. It is not a happy place. I will not give that up all at once for the sake of romance. I will allow them to make that journey along the way of recovery, but I will not carelessly discard part of a character's core just to appease someone who doesn't understand them and wants them to fit a warped ideal.


I'm sorry, that was kind of ranty and rambling, but I love playing the characters that aren't all joy, sunshine, and roses, and I get that and see it every day.





@Ghost Yeah, abuse on its own is also another one worth mentioning because of the twisted ways in which people try to portray them, or how they are placed in one of two boxes: so traumatized that they passed their despair event horizon and are now TEH EBIL!! or a True Angel that Transcended Their Abuse Before the Roleplay, so now they are Wise and Enlightened (and then writer possibly forgets to write about the abuse they got past as a part of who they are now, in favor of focusing on 'I am a happy shining star of optimism!! Magic!!')—not saying a character that has passed abuse can't be happy and optimistic, but that takes work, and as with anything else in writing about mental illness, it's gotta come up at some point. Otherwise it'll just become an informed attribute.


When I talk about these issues, I'm also talking about older people too, haha. Across the internet, it's still pretty rampant (I'd even say it's gotten worse, c/o Twilight, 50 Shades, and Co.) regardless of age. The only people I've seen that don't pull these shenanigans on the regular are a) experienced writers, b) 25+, c) experienced with abuse, trauma, mental illness, etc. or d) some mixture of those.


For those that don't fit that criteria but still want to learn, education is nonetheless paramount to their growth and success.
 
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@castigat


i'm kinda tired so sorry if it's a short reply but basically: yes to all that


younger people is just our typical userbase, i think if an older person wrote something like that i'd consider it their fault for not doing research/etc because at that point they should know better and be capable of understanding it more/thinking about the implications, you know?


i'm not going to make a thread on it since i don't have the energy or really any motivation right now, but i think it's a wonderful idea!
 
I apologize for another post, and this one may be repeating my own previous points, but it's a little bit of a divergence from my last point:


I may sound a little weird, or maybe just passionate, when I talk about these issues. Not only is it a central part of my life because of my own experiences, but—and this is the important part—in writing, it is a critical piece in creating and maintaining realism.


I treat characters as humans themselves, and 'real' within their own worlds. They have their talents and strengths, and they have their weaknesses and character flaws. They see the world through their own eyes. The world has power over them, but they also have power over the world. They influence others, others influence them. They feel happy, sad, angry, annoyed, excited, anxious.


In terms of mental illness, neurodivergence, and other things, as with their real counterparts, it forms a big part of their being, even if—especially if—they don't show it. These things inform what they do and how they think and behave. It can control them or they can control it. As they evolve, maybe they get better or worse.


Whatever the journey, the important part is staying true to their voice and their experiences, the good, bad, and ugly.


goodness I ramble a lot
 
I quite enjoyed this guide, having scizophrenia and seeing it so romaticized to the point of being annoying. (This is quite literally the first time I mentioned having this mental illness online, I'm always afraid of being judged as having homicidal insanity.) Sometimes, I even worry about having my scizophrenic characters not be "scizophrenic" enough despite drawing on personal experience (which is why such characters seem pretty normal due to not displaying it like being paranoid all the time and having auditory hallucinations is the best thing ever).


I'm gonna do something that's common mentally-wise, but not considered an mentall illness. It's more technically a mental "disability".

While not a mental illness (and actually being something I'm proud of), autism has some stigma and prejudices as well. I haven't seen many people do high-functioning autistic characters, but I think I can offer some advice.


Autism does NOT equal being stupid. High-functioning autistic people can actually be quite intelligent.


Most auties don't normally associate with other people willingly. They're not social butterflies, and usually only have a few friends that they have a lot in common with.


Most auties have interests they're really into. Usually the auties I RP tend to either be into gaming or reading/writing fantasies, but it can be anything, really. They could even collect pictures of llamas if you want, for goodness sake!


As the maker of this guide said, research! There are websites on autism of all parts of the spectrum, so go to Google and learn some stuff!
I just wanted to offer some advice on roleplaying this particular type of character. I hope you don't mind. If not, I can edit it out.
 
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Okay, so not sure why I didn't think about this before, but since Ghost's lessons didn't really cover it, I think it would be worthwhile for me to throw in my experience/knowledge of ADHD. It's a fairly common disorder, and one I believe where misinformation within "common knowledge" is rampant, so hopefully this will be helpful to anyone interested in writing anyone aspiring to write a character suffering from this. Not to discredit myself, I'm a psychology major, have done fair amount of research, but I would still advise against taking my account as an end-all be-all authority on the topic. Everyone has a different experience which personality could play into. Also I'm writing this at five in the morning and tend to get a bit rambly so bear with me going over every painstaking detail that I can.

Let me start off primarily with an overview of my experience with public school education, as this is a developmental disorder.


I believe it's been a little over a decade now since the DSM has lumped the term ADD (attention deficit disorder) in with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and simply made the disorder into three types. Type 1 ADHD is the inattentive type, or what was once called ADD. Type 2 ADHD is the hyperactive-impulsive type, and I don't know if they call it Type 3 or not, but there is a combined type. I was born in 1996, which is supposed to be two years after the shift in terminology has taken place, so it was somewhere in the early 2000s that I was diagnosed with Type 1 ADHD, and perhaps some time before that my sister was diagnosed with Type 2. I do not know for a fact which type my mom has, but I suspect she has a combined type, or at the very least has displayed symptoms I recognize in the inattentive type. (Like almost all mental disorders, ADHD has a very strong genetic presence.)


I don't remember the details at this point in time, for obvious reasons, but when I took my basics for psych, my teacher mentioned satirically something about it being commonly misdiagnosed to children via a ten question quiz in a doctor's office. I read that studies were originally done predominately on young boys, and so a bias was developed to overly diagnose them with ADHD and underdiagnose females. The disorder generally develops differently between males and females, where for males it loses severity with age but persists and worsens for women as they approach adulthood (particularly during their college years). These inaccurate diagnoses could be fun to play into a character, as any energetic male could accredit this to a disorder he doesn't have, and thus in a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of way, feed into this obnoxious behavior. Then for a female ignorant of her own disorder, this could damage self-esteem and create a buffer between any coping mechanisms she could have otherwise been using. (I'll touch on the latter somewhere down the line.)


I think it's worth noting that until I took that aforementioned psych class, I had always been told that I had ADD and I was entirely ignorant of it being renamed as Type 1 ADHD. I'm unsure of whether or not it was described to me this way to simplify/help my understanding of the disorder at such a young age, or if the good doctor was just not up to snuff on the DSM because... they probably weren't a psychologist. Either way, my mom seemed surprised when I later went on to tell her about the name change, but I digress.


I don't know how this got planted in my mind as a child, be it my mom again trying to simplify me or having booger-flicking five-year-olds for peers, but I grew up with a sore misunderstanding of my own disorder. My understanding of ADD was how it has come to be stigmatized and portrayed in media. I believed the symptoms were like that dog in Up, where someone would have an uncontrollable urge to stare at a squirrel or a shiny object any time one passed by, even in the midst of a back-and-forth conversation. While I must admit that is literally something I've seen my mom do (including the declaration of whatever fucking animal it was she happened to catch glimpse of), I would strongly suggest to you guys that isn't what the entire disorder is cracked up to be.


As a result, growing up, I didn't see myself ever having such a reaction to things, so I never saw my ADD as a problem. I had been given some sort of medication on weekdays, and since I habitually copied my sister who decided she didn't like taking medication, I decided I didn't like taking medicine and probably skipped on taking it quite often unless my mom specifically forced me to. I don't know the name of the specific medicine that I was taking. If memory serves, it was a tiny white pill, not troublesome to take at all, but I wouldn't quote me on that. According to my mom, the medicine had strong addictive qualities, though obviously I remained unaffected. However, I did experience a decent amount of side affects, including trouble sleeping, loss of appetite, and what ultimately lead me to getting off the medicine before the end of elementary school, mood swings (I think).


I can definitely account for the loss of appetite, as I distinctly remember the staff at my school bribing me with ice cream money to eat my meal. (In all fairness though, school lunches were fucking disgusting and I have no idea what kind of "meat" was in those burgers.) I also do remember having very intense, morbid nightmares which eventually lead to me visiting the school counselor. I think that issue was ultimately resolved as latent feelings over our recently deceased horse and I remember her doing that whole "draw anything you want on this sheet of paper" thing, in which, lo and behold, I drew a horse and told her all about it. I did have a distinct fear of death as a child though (still do), so I'm not sure if that is relevant to the medication or not, but I did eventually stop having nightmares about myself and family members dying in such frequency.


Another thing I think that's worth mentioning is how common ADHD seemed to be among my peers in elementary school. It wasn't an uncommon practice to hear one kid to share "I have ADHD," "I have ADD and ADHD," and so forth. (Again, misconceptions on my part lead to me falsely asserting that you can't have ADD and ADHD, as I thought because of the acronym ADHD only differing by adding the "hyperactivity" bit that ADHD was just a more severe form of ADD which is, once again, very, horribly wrong.) It wasn't something that seemed to be really hidden or to be ashamed of, in my experience, and it just seemed to be the norm for someone to have one of the three. Even if someone didn't and they acted like a total spazz, kids would accredit that to undiagnosed ADHD.


I don't really know enough about my sister's experience in life to talk as much in depth about Type 2 ADHD, but I do know she had to take a special ed class for a little while early on, but she definitely isn't an idiot. In our own ways, we both excelled early on in school, and following after the special ed class I believe she was also placed in the gifted talented (GT) program they had at school. I do also know that she becomes restless without almost constant stimulation and would always be the person dragging me places, including trespassing into our neighbor's very, very extensive back yard, then also running around my grandma's neighborhood, even into the pen where my neighbor's horses were kept (hence, impulsive). Her grades suffered in high school and she had to take at least one summer class. Present day, she was put on academic suspension with one semester left in college (after rescheduling courses for switching her major) and seems to mostly vent her energy with board games and her two dogs. I could try to analyze how ADHD has played into her life and how it's turned out, but I never thought to try to until after she moved out. I will say, though, that she interrupts often when people are talking and I have never once been able to solely blow out my birthday candles in her presence. I digress. Back to me. :'^)


Another thing to note is that my mom did try to help treat/control our disorders, at least for a while. We had a timer for an hour for as to how long we were allowed on the computer each, which at the time, seemed largely unfair where the internet was concerned. We had dial-up, so if we wanted to get on Cartoon Network and play a game there, it would take probably half an hour for the game to load, so we would often mess with the time to better suit our needs. In addition, I was introduced to Gamecube/Super Smash Bros. at my neighbor's house, and as a result of sitting way too close to the TV and obsessively playing it at each visit, to the point where at least I would always come home with bloodshot eyes, my mom forbade us from having a console attached to the TV. Eventually I was gifted a Gameboy Color, then when the Wii came out and was advertised as some miracle for exercise, my mom caved in and bought one thus leading to over 300 logged hours of playing SSBB. Before video games, my sister and I largely just played "pretend," where we would make up rather elaborate stories for our age (imo) and play them out with our stuffed animals (then later at age eleven, I believe, I went on to roleplaying). I suppose I'll explain the video game thing in a second when I actually get past the whole anecdotal story but for now whoo boy I'm rambling.


Elementary and middle school went without a hitch. It wasn't until high school where classes took a bit of outside work that I began struggling a little. I ended up dropping a substantial amount of advanced courses, which in theory I would have been able to pass with flying colors, but I simply couldn't bring myself to affording the appropriate attention needed to all six courses. Since I was convinced I would just go on to play an instrument professionally after school, after college, I focused more on that and was content to skid by with just passing grades. Spoiler alert, but I never tried majoring in music.


When I took my aforementioned psych class, my teacher's lesson on ADHD was just a two minute aside, as I don't believe it was any material taken on a test. She simply covered that, as I mentioned before, the process for diagnosis was flawed and that ADD isn't a thing anymore. Rather unfortunately, either because I had been ignoring the lesson in favor of something else (not an uncommon practice in that class, unfortunately) or it had just been poor wording on my teacher's part, but I had then been lead to believe that what I knew as ADD was not a disorder at all. I didn't realize that she meant it had been renamed to ADHD. I thought that she had meant that ADD had been falsely named a disorder while it was simply a quality of poor student that psychologists had at one point in time overreacted to. This lead me to believe for almost a solid year that I was neurotypical, which was hugely problematic upon me entering college.


When I came to college, I had resolved to buckle down and actually really study for the first time in years in my life. College is what determines your future career, so I couldn't afford to fuck it up on account of my own laziness. In high school, it hadn't clicked in me that just memorizing a few facts just before a quiz/test didn't help me learn and the future field you intend to apply yourself to necessitates KNOWING your field of study in the long-term.


What I found was that buckling down and studying was not as easy as I wanted it to be. If ever it came to any online homework, I would often click away to RpNation, often prioritize a roleplay post over homework, cram writing an essay into an hour before it was due, not finish reading the text needed for that day's lesson in English class, and show up ten minutes late to my big lecture classes habitually. This mostly came to fruition in my second semester of college. I began to blame my own inadequacies on my innate shortcomings. I felt that I was lazy, incompetent in a working world, and the perceived lack of motivation would fuck me over for life. I believed that even if I did by some miracle graduate on my four year degree plan, that I wouldn't have what it takes to get a teaching job, because I would have learned nothing of the material I would need to teach.


All of this amounted to my own fluctuating self-esteem, and periodic bouts of anxiety and depression, the likes of which I had not experienced before. At one point the stress had come crashing down on me hard enough to leave me largely unresponsive for about an hour. I wouldn't call it dissociating, per se, but that's the closest I've ever felt to it. Needless to say, it would have helped me a lot sooner if I had realized that I was not neurotypical. Once you know a disease, then you can work to find a way to cure it.


Now onto specifics with the disorder itself.


As I mentioned before, Type 1 ADHD is not some spastic split of attention between everything that sparkles or moves around you. In my experience, it's all about concentration and distractions. Anything that doesn't interest me and requires a lot of attention, I have difficulty focusing on. I'm able to handle mundane jobs just fine, and in fact, they're rather therapeutic. When I'm at work, I could do the dishes for hours, because it's all simple, repetitive actions that require little to no thought, and I can wander in my thoughts all the while, developing personal philosophies, analyzing a coworker's behavior (something I actually wrote a whole theory on, but that's a story for another time), plot out characters, story ideas, just... anything. When I started to feel overwhelmed with college, I would clean up the room, and accomplishing all those small feats left me with a sense of satisfaction, that I was productive, and prepped me ready to launch myself back into homework. That is more or less one personal coping mechanism I have come to develop for myself. I also enjoyed taking algebra, because after taking it for what was basically the third time, it became systematic and similarly mindless. It's all about resolving my feelings of laziness, which I equated to worthlessness in myself.


But laziness is a grievously improper term for what was going on. Contrast to math, I struggled in geography and foreign languages, which are classes that are heavily reliant on committing things to long-term memory. I can't stand reading a list of words over and over again in an attempt to associate them with x item. It bores me out of my fucking mind. There is no new knowledge to be found in being able to point out Zimbabwe on a map, nor do I want to learn alternative names for an item that I'm already intimately familiar with its form, its functions and so on. I would much rather be exploring new concepts. This conflict of interests came up primarily when I was taking my basics for anthropology. I loved learning about the concepts of the skeletal structure in men versus women, adaptation to warm climates versus cold climates, functionality of quadrupeds versus bipedals, but fuck if I'm going to be able to recognize a skull as Australopithecus Osteowhatever and the something fancy scientific name for that crack on the frontal lobe appearing in Asian ancestry. The classes were interesting, I knew all the concepts, but I had no way of showing my knowledge on the tests because I didn't have a fucking name for what I knew.


So when it comes to things like word association, I can't concentrate. My mind wanders to one of the 5,000 things I would rather be doing, and before I know it, I've read through an entire paragraph without comprehending a single word of what I read. I'll have a separate tab open to RpNation, which somehow multiplied to five when I wasn't looking, and now I have seven tabs, two of which were related to my long forgotten Spanish homework due in a couple of hours.


I was in the middle of an exam once when, after I had repeatedly been watching the same episodes of the same show however many times in a row, a scene would play out in my head when I'm trying to write an essay. If I let my mind wander for even a moment, desperately trying to find some sense of stimulation when I get stuck on, stress about an answer I can't remember, all I can hear is the sound of turning pages, scratches of pencil on paper, the ticking of a clock, classmates sniffing, a chair squeaking, so on. I've held my head before, pressed my temples, covered my ears, pulled my hair, whatever to try to ground me back into focus on the task at hand, which is sometimes a sufficient distraction to bridge myself away from these outside noises and back to what needs to be done. The pressure of necessity, very rarely screaming at myself internally, is usually enough to push me to do what needs to be done. Procrastination, in a way, helps me get stuff done, but the amount of stress preceding me completing a task is anything but healthy.


Other times, when things are not immediately as urgent, I can force myself to look over a page, read over the words, but words lose all meaning and I have no idea what the sentence I just read even meant. Not dyslexia, but it really feels like it sometimes, and it's frustrating as hell.


Essentially, if ever something starts to bore me, or I experience even a modicum of frustration at a problem that takes special attention to solve, then my mind tries to stray away, focus on what's more interesting. Even when it isn't "interesting" to me, outside stimulation just becomes downright invasive. If I'm sitting in my room at home, the television is almost always on, and suddenly background noise can't just be background noise. I wake up early in the morning to avoid other people that are awake that would be doing something that would draw my attention away, because no one else likes to wake up early. When they're up, I have to listen to music to block them out, but if it's something that requires any special thought or concentration, it either has to be lyricless or atmospheric music (i.e., doom metal). Can't listen to baroque music or marches, though, because I fucking hate them, and my hatred simply provides another distraction. There is no true ideal conditions for me to work in. If it's quiet, my thoughts or small noises distract me. If it's loud, it's a toss up on whether or not all these noises suddenly try to organize themselves out in my mind. I will tell you, though, that TV is the absolute worst. I can have anxiety just watching it, knowing that I'm wasting my time and my life, but that might just be me myself and have nothing to do with my ADHD.


With this focus on interests comes periods of obsession. I get very deep into things that pique my interest at the moment, and once I get started on something, it's difficult to stop. For a while, I was obsessed with Marilyn Manson and watching interviews with him. At some point in time Super Smash Bros. was definitely something I couldn't my mind off of. Sometimes I can even obsess over a person, like wanting to hang out with them, get to know them, the sort. The absolute worst case I think I've ever had was when I first got into watching Gotham, in which I spent all my time rewatching episodes, thinking about the characters, analyzing them. I literally have pages written down on my thoughts on how each character was feeling and how it tied into x relationship, developing headcanons, so on, as if I ever actually intended to roleplay these characters. Hugest fucking waste of my time because it only took one season for the show to end up in the shit hole of rushed storyline and cheesy acting. A little more moderate example of my interests as distractions comes from writing this post. I was trying to go to sleep, but I was doing that whole tossing-and-turning in bed thing where I couldn't get comfortable, and I kept thinking about what I want to say in this post, so eventually I decided that I wouldn't be able to sleep until I got this all out there.


In any case, once I REALLY get invested in something, it's hard to concentrate on anything else. This also happens in smaller instances. If I'm doing dishes at work and a customer comes in, I don't want to stop doing dishes. I want to keep doing what I'm doing until the task is complete, then I can move onto other things. I CAN remove myself from what I'm doing, but it's annoying, irritating, frustrating, distracting as I move onto the next task while thinking about the last. Again, it's the sense of completion that helps me feel good about myself.


This want for finishing a task arises from the difficulty that may come if I leave it unfinished and try to come back to completing it. That's why I'm still here typing three and a half hours later when I should really be getting ready for work. I talked about these invasive distractions that prevent me from concentrating often, but when I do achieve absolute focus on a task, I can become very efficient and block out the things around me. I can hear a sound, but it doesn't register to me as to what it was because it becomes inconsequential. If I'm making a customer's sandwich and a coworker speaks to me when I don't expect it, it's just muffled sound, and not that they aren't speaking clearly to me, but I do have to ask for what they said again. Sometimes after they repeat themselves I still didn't entirely hear them, and not wanting to bother them (because I know I hate repeating myself), I just move on, return to what I was doing and hope I can figure it out later. This can also happen sometimes when I'm writing something, like finally getting down to a really long roleplay post, then someone comes to tell me dinner is ready. I then get greatly irritated if I don't just tune that person out, because otherwise I'll lose my train of thought and interest, more or less, in what I was already doing.


Hyperfocus is the term coined for what I'm talking about here. It's a state of being so immersed in what you're doing, your thoughts that you become oblivious to everything else around you, which often leads to losing track of time. It can be just as useful as it can be harmful. Hence, I will sit for five hours long past the point of hunger just to finish something that I'm writing, or a level in a game I'm trying to complete, and be surprised when I look up to see the sun has gone down. This has played a large part in why I was showing up to class late so often. I always have to be doing something, so that time spent doing something bleeds into the time that should be spent getting ready to leave. I have come to terms with the fact that I prefer living with someone, because even if the distractions caused by them are annoying, their presence motivates me to do productive things and keeps me from zoning out too much.


Schedules, timers, things of that sort are effective for regulating how my time is spent, though it's definitely not something I like to do, and admittedly have a tendency to skimp out on it. I keep a mental list of priorities in my head all the time, but when it comes down to it, my priority list is probably skewed.


I think the final thing I want to talk about is the root cause of Type 1 ADHD. From what I read, Type 1 ADHD is a deficiency of dopamine, a brain chemical related to reward-motivation behavior. If I'm understanding this correctly, the value of an incentive feels lower, and the pleasure gotten from that incentive is less than it otherwise would be (don't quote me on that). This deficiency is also associated with having a lower libido, a.k.a. sex drive. I identify as asexual, and my ignorance on both the association with that and ADHD as well as the fact that asexuality was a thing caused problems in the five year relationship I was in, but I won't go into detail about that. I'm not saying that all people with inattentive ADHD are asexual, but I do think there is a correlation with that.


In any case, I think that covers everything I know/think might be useful. But again, don't just take my word for it. Do your research.


EDIT: Forgot to mention study methods. Best thing for me to do is study as the information is passed on to me. Basically, if I'm sitting in lecture, I need to be paying attention, writing stuff down (pen to paper because the act of writing something out is another method of reinforcement because keyboard strokes don't force you to write letters/think about words), then maybe read over them again once more before a test. Usually don't have to study after that if it's more of a theoretical class like stats or English. For foreign languages, writing the word down, auditory reinforcement by saying it out loud, having a visual reference, rinse, repeat... a lot. orz
 
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@Pine Thank you thank you thank you for this post. I've been avoiding talking about it because I'm not diagnosed myself. It might be a bit foolish of me considering there's a diagnosis in my family (and possibly one for myself in the future), but I didn't feel comfortable saying anything about it, despite my own 30+ tab research on it when my brother got diagnosed lmao.


I wish I could thank the post more than once, haha.
 
[Cutting/Pain Described Briefly]


I have major depression, paranoia, PTSD, and a manipulation disorder(I forgot the abbreviation xP), diagnosed fall of 2009.


Putting that out there, I'm not offended when people turn disorders into something that can be explained easily. If I had a dollar for every time someone said, "I'm so OCD," I could hire actors for a documentary about how serious the subject is. DID is usually misunderstood, and very recently, someone described it as being mood swings.


I make a lot of mistakes when playing an unhinged character, who usually has hysteria, by making all of their symptoms occur at once, or intensely.


If I write about a depressed character, it's likely that they won't seem very different, simply because that's how I picture myself. When someone else looks at my history, it may appear out of normal. When I was on medication(which I believe worsened my depression) I burned my mother's keychain, ripped apart a charging port in the car, cut up my couch with a knife, destroyed mirrors and pet food dishes, and completely trashed my room, all on several instances with more smaller and more personal situations.


I believe there was reason behind it, but looking from an outside perspective, its hard to fall back on my diagnosis, which I do frequently. No one told me that with my depression would come anger. It shows that not everyone experiences it the same.


The point is, to many people, they only notice symptoms of depression when they're severe. It's not something that can be easily understood, and everyone has a very different point of view on it. Right now, I consider myself very normal, but I still catch myself downplaying things when talking to doctors or therapists.


As far as mental illness goes, if someone hasn't personally known someone who has a diagnosis, or has done extensive research on the topic, its difficult to understand exactly what its like.


I'm not saying everything is okay. In fact, I tend to dislike it when people describe things that I am, or have done. Such as making depression into a huge monster(well, kinda) that cripples someone and turns them into a vampire hermit that does nothing but cry. It happens, but makes up a very small minority. Or, "cutters" that cut so deeply or often, they have to make frequent hospital stays. From my experience, people have a wide variety of pain tolerance, and many of those I know, and myself, cut or have cut, for pain, not always death. That's where the tolerance comes into play. If someone's satisfied with a small amount of pain, they won't make huge gashes, but more likely smaller cuts.


This is probably just because I relate to those things personally, which, actually, is a little selfish of me.


Something I cannot handle is making fun of an illness or acting like its something not serious, or optional. This happens unintentionally, when some people say, "It's not a big deal," or something of that nature. Other things are intentional, and hit far too close to home. For instance, I called the police, not really thinking, when I felt like hurting myself. The operator was able to calm me down, and by the time the patrol cars got there, about eighteen minutes later, I was feeling better because she sounded genuinely concerned for me(at the time, I felt useless).


This made one of the men angry, when I told him I no longer felt this way, and didn't need a hospital stay. He gave 19-year-old me a lecture. Being a relatively good student, and living in a loose household, I wasn't used to being scolded. He didn't quite "make fun of" my depression, but he certainly called me out on being a hormonal teen, as well as saying something very close to, You called us here to make sure you didn't "scratch yourself." As well as saying that no one else wanted to be in my "pity party." On top of this, he cursed much more than needed, despite calling me a child.


I agree with most of this, and definitely with the lack of realistic portrayal of psychiatric and behavioral hospitals. However, I understand most reasons for exaggeration of many things about mental illness, which is why I don't usually point out faults in players that have characters with severe and unrealistic diagnosis. This doesn't make it okay, and I don't support it, but I think its just a lack of personal experience, which I understand.
 
Also, thank you so much for bringing up autism! During a little camping trip when I was an early teen, the only one there I really bonded with was Autistic. He was incredibly smart, far more than myself, even with my high self esteem when it comes to that area. Absolutely incredible. I think his interest was movies, actually, I know it. He was able to recognize a quote from nearly every one of the movies I gave to him, popular or not so much. While it isn't something I think is easy to have, at all, he was in no way any less important to me than any other person I know.


Anyway, I'm going elsewhere for a bit. That's all I have to say for right now ^^ Thanks for posting, OP.
 
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Pine said:
Okay, so not sure why I didn't think about this before, but since Ghost's lessons didn't really cover it, I think it would be worthwhile for me to throw in my experience/knowledge of ADHD. It's a fairly common disorder, and one I believe where misinformation within "common knowledge" is rampant, so hopefully this will be helpful to anyone interested in writing anyone aspiring to write a character suffering from this. Not to discredit myself, I'm a psychology major, have done fair amount of research, but I would still advise against taking my account as an end-all be-all authority on the topic. Everyone has a different experience which personality could play into. Also I'm writing this at five in the morning and tend to get a bit rambly so bear with me going over every painstaking detail that I can.
Let me start off primarily with an overview of my experience with public school education, as this is a developmental disorder.


I believe it's been a little over a decade now since the DSM has lumped the term ADD (attention deficit disorder) in with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and simply made the disorder into three types. Type 1 ADHD is the inattentive type, or what was once called ADD. Type 2 ADHD is the hyperactive-impulsive type, and I don't know if they call it Type 3 or not, but there is a combined type. I was born in 1996, which is supposed to be two years after the shift in terminology has taken place, so it was somewhere in the early 2000s that I was diagnosed with Type 1 ADHD, and perhaps some time before that my sister was diagnosed with Type 2. I do not know for a fact which type my mom has, but I suspect she has a combined type, or at the very least has displayed symptoms I recognize in the inattentive type. (Like almost all mental disorders, ADHD has a very strong genetic presence.)


I don't remember the details at this point in time, for obvious reasons, but when I took my basics for psych, my teacher mentioned satirically something about it being commonly misdiagnosed to children via a ten question quiz in a doctor's office. I read that studies were originally done predominately on young boys, and so a bias was developed to overly diagnose them with ADHD and underdiagnose females. The disorder generally develops differently between males and females, where for males it loses severity with age but persists and worsens for women as they approach adulthood (particularly during their college years). These inaccurate diagnoses could be fun to play into a character, as any energetic male could accredit this to a disorder he doesn't have, and thus in a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of way, feed into this obnoxious behavior. Then for a female ignorant of her own disorder, this could damage self-esteem and create a buffer between any coping mechanisms she could have otherwise been using. (I'll touch on the latter somewhere down the line.)


I think it's worth noting that until I took that aforementioned psych class, I had always been told that I had ADD and I was entirely ignorant of it being renamed as Type 1 ADHD. I'm unsure of whether or not it was described to me this way to simplify/help my understanding of the disorder at such a young age, or if the good doctor was just not up to snuff on the DSM because... they probably weren't a psychologist. Either way, my mom seemed surprised when I later went on to tell her about the name change, but I digress.


I don't know how this got planted in my mind as a child, be it my mom again trying to simplify me or having booger-flicking five-year-olds for peers, but I grew up with a sore misunderstanding of my own disorder. My understanding of ADD was how it has come to be stigmatized and portrayed in media. I believed the symptoms were like that dog in Up, where someone would have an uncontrollable urge to stare at a squirrel or a shiny object any time one passed by, even in the midst of a back-and-forth conversation. While I must admit that is literally something I've seen my mom do (including the declaration of whatever fucking animal it was she happened to catch glimpse of), I would strongly suggest to you guys that isn't what the entire disorder is cracked up to be.


As a result, growing up, I didn't see myself ever having such a reaction to things, so I never saw my ADD as a problem. I had been given some sort of medication on weekdays, and since I habitually copied my sister who decided she didn't like taking medication, I decided I didn't like taking medicine and probably skipped on taking it quite often unless my mom specifically forced me to. I don't know the name of the specific medicine that I was taking. If memory serves, it was a tiny white pill, not troublesome to take at all, but I wouldn't quote me on that. According to my mom, the medicine had strong addictive qualities, though obviously I remained unaffected. However, I did experience a decent amount of side affects, including trouble sleeping, loss of appetite, and what ultimately lead me to getting off the medicine before the end of elementary school, mood swings (I think).


I can definitely account for the loss of appetite, as I distinctly remember the staff at my school bribing me with ice cream money to eat my meal. (In all fairness though, school lunches were fucking disgusting and I have no idea what kind of "meat" was in those burgers.) I also do remember having very intense, morbid nightmares which eventually lead to me visiting the school counselor. I think that issue was ultimately resolved as latent feelings over our recently deceased horse and I remember her doing that whole "draw anything you want on this sheet of paper" thing, in which, lo and behold, I drew a horse and told her all about it. I did have a distinct fear of death as a child though (still do), so I'm not sure if that is relevant to the medication or not, but I did eventually stop having nightmares about myself and family members dying in such frequency.


Another thing I think that's worth mentioning is how common ADHD seemed to be among my peers in elementary school. It wasn't an uncommon practice to hear one kid to share "I have ADHD," "I have ADD and ADHD," and so forth. (Again, misconceptions on my part lead to me falsely asserting that you can't have ADD and ADHD, as I thought because of the acronym ADHD only differing by adding the "hyperactivity" bit that ADHD was just a more severe form of ADD which is, once again, very, horribly wrong.) It wasn't something that seemed to be really hidden or to be ashamed of, in my experience, and it just seemed to be the norm for someone to have one of the three. Even if someone didn't and they acted like a total spazz, kids would accredit that to undiagnosed ADHD.


I don't really know enough about my sister's experience in life to talk as much in depth about Type 2 ADHD, but I do know she had to take a special ed class for a little while early on, but she definitely isn't an idiot. In our own ways, we both excelled early on in school, and following after the special ed class I believe she was also placed in the gifted talented (GT) program they had at school. I do also know that she becomes restless without almost constant stimulation and would always be the person dragging me places, including trespassing into our neighbor's very, very extensive back yard, then also running around my grandma's neighborhood, even into the pen where my neighbor's horses were kept (hence, impulsive). Her grades suffered in high school and she had to take at least one summer class. Present day, she was put on academic suspension with one semester left in college (after rescheduling courses for switching her major) and seems to mostly vent her energy with board games and her two dogs. I could try to analyze how ADHD has played into her life and how it's turned out, but I never thought to try to until after she moved out. I will say, though, that she interrupts often when people are talking and I have never once been able to solely blow out my birthday candles in her presence. I digress. Back to me. :'^)


Another thing to note is that my mom did try to help treat/control our disorders, at least for a while. We had a timer for an hour for as to how long we were allowed on the computer each, which at the time, seemed largely unfair where the internet was concerned. We had dial-up, so if we wanted to get on Cartoon Network and play a game there, it would take probably half an hour for the game to load, so we would often mess with the time to better suit our needs. In addition, I was introduced to Gamecube/Super Smash Bros. at my neighbor's house, and as a result of sitting way too close to the TV and obsessively playing it at each visit, to the point where at least I would always come home with bloodshot eyes, my mom forbade us from having a console attached to the TV. Eventually I was gifted a Gameboy Color, then when the Wii came out and was advertised as some miracle for exercise, my mom caved in and bought one thus leading to over 300 logged hours of playing SSBB. Before video games, my sister and I largely just played "pretend," where we would make up rather elaborate stories for our age (imo) and play them out with our stuffed animals (then later at age eleven, I believe, I went on to roleplaying). I suppose I'll explain the video game thing in a second when I actually get past the whole anecdotal story but for now whoo boy I'm rambling.


Elementary and middle school went without a hitch. It wasn't until high school where classes took a bit of outside work that I began struggling a little. I ended up dropping a substantial amount of advanced courses, which in theory I would have been able to pass with flying colors, but I simply couldn't bring myself to affording the appropriate attention needed to all six courses. Since I was convinced I would just go on to play an instrument professionally after school, after college, I focused more on that and was content to skid by with just passing grades. Spoiler alert, but I never tried majoring in music.


When I took my aforementioned psych class, my teacher's lesson on ADHD was just a two minute aside, as I don't believe it was any material taken on a test. She simply covered that, as I mentioned before, the process for diagnosis was flawed and that ADD isn't a thing anymore. Rather unfortunately, either because I had been ignoring the lesson in favor of something else (not an uncommon practice in that class, unfortunately) or it had just been poor wording on my teacher's part, but I had then been lead to believe that what I knew as ADD was not a disorder at all. I didn't realize that she meant it had been renamed to ADHD. I thought that she had meant that ADD had been falsely named a disorder while it was simply a quality of poor student that psychologists had at one point in time overreacted to. This lead me to believe for almost a solid year that I was neurotypical, which was hugely problematic upon me entering college.


When I came to college, I had resolved to buckle down and actually really study for the first time in years in my life. College is what determines your future career, so I couldn't afford to fuck it up on account of my own laziness. In high school, it hadn't clicked in me that just memorizing a few facts just before a quiz/test didn't help me learn and the future field you intend to apply yourself to necessitates KNOWING your field of study in the long-term.


What I found was that buckling down and studying was not as easy as I wanted it to be. If ever it came to any online homework, I would often click away to RpNation, often prioritize a roleplay post over homework, cram writing an essay into an hour before it was due, not finish reading the text needed for that day's lesson in English class, and show up ten minutes late to my big lecture classes habitually. This mostly came to fruition in my second semester of college. I began to blame my own inadequacies on my innate shortcomings. I felt that I was lazy, incompetent in a working world, and the perceived lack of motivation would fuck me over for life. I believed that even if I did by some miracle graduate on my four year degree plan, that I wouldn't have what it takes to get a teaching job, because I would have learned nothing of the material I would need to teach.


All of this amounted to my own fluctuating self-esteem, and periodic bouts of anxiety and depression, the likes of which I had not experienced before. At one point the stress had come crashing down on me hard enough to leave me largely unresponsive for about an hour. I wouldn't call it dissociating, per se, but that's the closest I've ever felt to it. Needless to say, it would have helped me a lot sooner if I had realized that I was not neurotypical. Once you know a disease, then you can work to find a way to cure it.


Now onto specifics with the disorder itself.


As I mentioned before, Type 1 ADHD is not some spastic split of attention between everything that sparkles or moves around you. In my experience, it's all about concentration and distractions. Anything that doesn't interest me and requires a lot of attention, I have difficulty focusing on. I'm able to handle mundane jobs just fine, and in fact, they're rather therapeutic. When I'm at work, I could do the dishes for hours, because it's all simple, repetitive actions that require little to no thought, and I can wander in my thoughts all the while, developing personal philosophies, analyzing a coworker's behavior (something I actually wrote a whole theory on, but that's a story for another time), plot out characters, story ideas, just... anything. When I started to feel overwhelmed with college, I would clean up the room, and accomplishing all those small feats left me with a sense of satisfaction, that I was productive, and prepped me ready to launch myself back into homework. That is more or less one personal coping mechanism I have come to develop for myself. I also enjoyed taking algebra, because after taking it for what was basically the third time, it became systematic and similarly mindless. It's all about resolving my feelings of laziness, which I equated to worthlessness in myself.


But laziness is a grievously improper term for what was going on. Contrast to math, I struggled in geography and foreign languages, which are classes that are heavily reliant on committing things to long-term memory. I can't stand reading a list of words over and over again in an attempt to associate them with x item. It bores me out of my fucking mind. There is no new knowledge to be found in being able to point out Zimbabwe on a map, nor do I want to learn alternative names for an item that I'm already intimately familiar with its form, its functions and so on. I would much rather be exploring new concepts. This conflict of interests came up primarily when I was taking my basics for anthropology. I loved learning about the concepts of the skeletal structure in men versus women, adaptation to warm climates versus cold climates, functionality of quadrupeds versus bipedals, but fuck if I'm going to be able to recognize a skull as Australopithecus Osteowhatever and the something fancy scientific name for that crack on the frontal lobe appearing in Asian ancestry. The classes were interesting, I knew all the concepts, but I had no way of showing my knowledge on the tests because I didn't have a fucking name for what I knew.


So when it comes to things like word association, I can't concentrate. My mind wanders to one of the 5,000 things I would rather be doing, and before I know it, I've read through an entire paragraph without comprehending a single word of what I read. I'll have a separate tab open to RpNation, which somehow multiplied to five when I wasn't looking, and now I have seven tabs, two of which were related to my long forgotten Spanish homework due in a couple of hours.


I was in the middle of an exam once when, after I had repeatedly been watching the same episodes of the same show however many times in a row, a scene would play out in my head when I'm trying to write an essay. If I let my mind wander for even a moment, desperately trying to find some sense of stimulation when I get stuck on, stress about an answer I can't remember, all I can hear is the sound of turning pages, scratches of pencil on paper, the ticking of a clock, classmates sniffing, a chair squeaking, so on. I've held my head before, pressed my temples, covered my ears, pulled my hair, whatever to try to ground me back into focus on the task at hand, which is sometimes a sufficient distraction to bridge myself away from these outside noises and back to what needs to be done. The pressure of necessity, very rarely screaming at myself internally, is usually enough to push me to do what needs to be done. Procrastination, in a way, helps me get stuff done, but the amount of stress preceding me completing a task is anything but healthy.


Other times, when things are not immediately as urgent, I can force myself to look over a page, read over the words, but words lose all meaning and I have no idea what the sentence I just read even meant. Not dyslexia, but it really feels like it sometimes, and it's frustrating as hell.


Essentially, if ever something starts to bore me, or I experience even a modicum of frustration at a problem that takes special attention to solve, then my mind tries to stray away, focus on what's more interesting. Even when it isn't "interesting" to me, outside stimulation just becomes downright invasive. If I'm sitting in my room at home, the television is almost always on, and suddenly background noise can't just be background noise. I wake up early in the morning to avoid other people that are awake that would be doing something that would draw my attention away, because no one else likes to wake up early. When they're up, I have to listen to music to block them out, but if it's something that requires any special thought or concentration, it either has to be lyricless or atmospheric music (i.e., doom metal). Can't listen to baroque music or marches, though, because I fucking hate them, and my hatred simply provides another distraction. There is no true ideal conditions for me to work in. If it's quiet, my thoughts or small noises distract me. If it's loud, it's a toss up on whether or not all these noises suddenly try to organize themselves out in my mind. I will tell you, though, that TV is the absolute worst. I can have anxiety just watching it, knowing that I'm wasting my time and my life, but that might just be me myself and have nothing to do with my ADHD.


With this focus on interests comes periods of obsession. I get very deep into things that pique my interest at the moment, and once I get started on something, it's difficult to stop. For a while, I was obsessed with Marilyn Manson and watching interviews with him. At some point in time Super Smash Bros. was definitely something I couldn't my mind off of. Sometimes I can even obsess over a person, like wanting to hang out with them, get to know them, the sort. The absolute worst case I think I've ever had was when I first got into watching Gotham, in which I spent all my time rewatching episodes, thinking about the characters, analyzing them. I literally have pages written down on my thoughts on how each character was feeling and how it tied into x relationship, developing headcanons, so on, as if I ever actually intended to roleplay these characters. Hugest fucking waste of my time because it only took one season for the show to end up in the shit hole of rushed storyline and cheesy acting. A little more moderate example of my interests as distractions comes from writing this post. I was trying to go to sleep, but I was doing that whole tossing-and-turning in bed thing where I couldn't get comfortable, and I kept thinking about what I want to say in this post, so eventually I decided that I wouldn't be able to sleep until I got this all out there.


In any case, once I REALLY get invested in something, it's hard to concentrate on anything else. This also happens in smaller instances. If I'm doing dishes at work and a customer comes in, I don't want to stop doing dishes. I want to keep doing what I'm doing until the task is complete, then I can move onto other things. I CAN remove myself from what I'm doing, but it's annoying, irritating, frustrating, distracting as I move onto the next task while thinking about the last. Again, it's the sense of completion that helps me feel good about myself.


This want for finishing a task arises from the difficulty that may come if I leave it unfinished and try to come back to completing it. That's why I'm still here typing three and a half hours later when I should really be getting ready for work. I talked about these invasive distractions that prevent me from concentrating often, but when I do achieve absolute focus on a task, I can become very efficient and block out the things around me. I can hear a sound, but it doesn't register to me as to what it was because it becomes inconsequential. If I'm making a customer's sandwich and a coworker speaks to me when I don't expect it, it's just muffled sound, and not that they aren't speaking clearly to me, but I do have to ask for what they said again. Sometimes after they repeat themselves I still didn't entirely hear them, and not wanting to bother them (because I know I hate repeating myself), I just move on, return to what I was doing and hope I can figure it out later. This can also happen sometimes when I'm writing something, like finally getting down to a really long roleplay post, then someone comes to tell me dinner is ready. I then get greatly irritated if I don't just tune that person out, because otherwise I'll lose my train of thought and interest, more or less, in what I was already doing.


Hyperfocus is the term coined for what I'm talking about here. It's a state of being so immersed in what you're doing, your thoughts that you become oblivious to everything else around you, which often leads to losing track of time. It can be just as useful as it can be harmful. Hence, I will sit for five hours long past the point of hunger just to finish something that I'm writing, or a level in a game I'm trying to complete, and be surprised when I look up to see the sun has gone down. This has played a large part in why I was showing up to class late so often. I always have to be doing something, so that time spent doing something bleeds into the time that should be spent getting ready to leave. I have come to terms with the fact that I prefer living with someone, because even if the distractions caused by them are annoying, their presence motivates me to do productive things and keeps me from zoning out too much.


Schedules, timers, things of that sort are effective for regulating how my time is spent, though it's definitely something I like to do, and admittedly have a tendency to skimp out on it. I keep a mental list of priorities in my head all the time, but when it comes down to it, my priority list is probably skewed.


I think the final thing I want to talk about is the root cause of Type 1 ADHD. From what I read, Type 1 ADHD is a deficiency of dopamine, a brain chemical related to reward-motivation behavior. If I'm understanding this correctly, the value of an incentive feels lower, and the pleasure gotten from that incentive is less than it otherwise would be (don't quote me on that). This deficiency is also associated with having a lower libido, a.k.a. sex drive. I identify as asexual, and my ignorance on both the association with that and ADHD as well as the fact that asexuality was a thing caused problems in the five year relationship I was in, but I won't go into detail about that. I'm not saying that all people with inattentive ADHD are asexual, but I do think there is a correlation with that.


In any case, I think that covers everything I know/think might be useful. But again, don't just take my word for it. Do your research.


EDIT: Forgot to mention study methods. Best thing for me to do is study as the information is passed on to me. Basically, if I'm sitting in lecture, I need to be paying attention, writing stuff down (pen to paper because the act of writing something out is another method of reinforcement because keyboard strokes don't force you to write letters/think about words), then maybe read over them again once more before a test. Usually don't have to study after that if it's more of a theoretical class like stats or English. For foreign languages, writing the word down, auditory reinforcement by saying it out loud, having a visual reference, rinse, repeat... a lot. orz


holy shit pine thank u so much for writing this, i didnt realize that all those parts of my personality were actually connected to my adhd too
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Most mentally Ill characters I've seen are just crazy killers... :P
 
MrEvilMexican said:
Most mentally Ill characters I've seen are just crazy killers... :P
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yeah, which is why this exists :b
 
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