What ADHD is, How if affects children, and Dealing with ADHD as a child

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD is a fairly common disorder and most people know what it means, right? It’s a learning disability that causes those with it to have difficulty concentrating. I started this off with a question, that question was meant to draw attention to the fact of human behavior that when a whole group of people think they know how something works none of them truly do. The classic depiction of ADHD is like the end result of a game of telephone, it has elements of the original but is incomplete.
ADHD is more of a lack or difficulty in controlling one’s focus; this of course means the classic depictions of difficulty getting focused and maintaining focus, but it also applies to removes one’s focus. It is far easier to notice the first two symptoms, this is because the inability to focus is a social and practical problem while the inability to draw your focus from something is considered a good thing. Humor me for a little as I tell you a story about me.
When I was younger, I would always be bouncing off the walls, always getting distracted in class and not listening to the teacher, normal kiddy stuff. The only time I would sit still at home was when I was playing video games on the computer, I could sit there for hours and hours without getting up.
Who noticed the problem? Sitting in one spot isn’t normal for children in general, let alone those with ADHD; furthermore when I said hours and hours, and I mean straight, without leaving the seat. I didn’t eat, drink, stretch my legs, or even relieve myself; it wasn’t I didn’t get hungry or thirsty, I did, it’s that it didn’t register in my brain. The times that actually haunt me were the times that when someone came downstairs and started talking to me; I turned around to talk to them, but it was odd I still couldn’t see them. I may be misremembering the time it took, but I think it took a minute or two for me to realize that I was turning my in-game character rather than my body.
That isn’t just a child lost in a world of their imagination, it’s a child in a state where they can’t remove their focus, I will be calling this hyper-focus. This can often be seen as an improvement in a child’s progress, especially if the observer is a teacher that doesn’t have the kid long enough to see the detrimental effects of this state. Hyper-focus can be advantageous if it is trained, but that takes time and practice are two things children don’t have.
Most of what I have mentioned thus far is about the classic more overt symptoms of ADHD, but if you are writing a character with ADHD then you might want some subtler ways of hinting that someone might have ADHD. There are subcategories of ADHD so there isn't one thing that easily identifies people with ADHD the symptoms show in a variety of ways for more [url=]. So how do you make it clear that they have ADHD? Just don’t make it overt, this is a problem because the easiest way to show that a kid has ADHD is to blow the attention deficit symptom out of proportion; that is never a good way of including diversity in your story. Try to display it like you would a difficult puzzle, subtle hints and repetition of mannerisms.
First use the related articles to determine which type of ADHD your character has, then decide what symptoms they have. Now you have a basis of the character and can work out from there depending on the symptoms you chose. Don't go overboard with the symptoms, you really only need 5 or 6 to start with then build the character a bit. If you want to build a proper character with ADHD then don't only focus on their symptoms, people with disabilities are people in and of themselves, not plot points, not walking embodiments symptoms.
If you are writing in a medieval period then please be aware that fidgeting is occasionally equated to lying, for good reason. For example, looking in certain directions while trying to describe sensory effects like appearances, smells, and sounds can indicate whether it is from memory or imagination. Please keep in mind how people might interpret actions caused by ADHD, but don't set the whole world against them; compassion is not a new invention, it existed 500,000 years ago and it existed 500 years ago.
In a modern or futuristic setting where diagnosing the character is possible then you will need to go into medications, modern non-medical treatments, and modern views on learning disabilities. (I will have to go in depth into that at another time in another article, or there’ll just have to be links to peer reviewed professional articles. Regardless medical science will never be able to just remove ADHD, that just isn’t possible without basically obliterating the character’s brain.)
Now people will naturally find methods and actions that help them think and that goes for ADHD as well. Actions that form clear lines of progress are helpful for people without ADHD as much as those with it; things like pacing, thinking out loud, and writing are clear and simple actions that can be used regardless of period or place, unless that is a specific thing about your world. A more abstract method is mental exercises, things like chess, reading, abstract non-linear problem solving; these can be difficult to implement.
Now a method that personally helped me a lot when I was younger was hiking; I was lucky enough to have a father who understood that kids with ADHD need freedom and where is there more freedom than nature? It helped that he was a prolific hiker already. He brought my sister and me on many of those hikes since we could walk; we would hike in every season and my dad was always careful in making sure we had more than what was needed.
In the Winter snow my sister and I could run across the snow like fairies not even packing the snow and there were glorious views of this winter wonder land as far as the eye could see. In the Spring the smells and sounds of all the flowers and animals were incredible; the rivers rushed with the melted snow and the sun shone on use with its warm embrace. In Summer, the cloudless skies went for miles and the lakes, rivers, and ocean reflected the light beautifully. In Fall, the sound of crunching leaves the endless colorful tree lines and the brisk breeze calling for winter’s return.
Those memories of accomplishment, of freedom, of life that made me feel like there was no end to the things I could do; those memories unburdened by the bullying, void of the terror of being an outcast, absent of feeling like the "weird kid" at school, free of the complexities of social interaction, lacking the pressure to maintain focus. They were the times when I felt free to do anything, those were the times I felt like I could fly through the endless sky, they were the only moments where I truly felt unrestricted, unburden by something that was a part of me, of what others considered wrong and in need of repair. Those memories have a level of euphoria that I can’t properly put into words.
I'm sorry, that got personal, but I hope it properly displays how much I loved this freedom as a child with ADHD. I wasn't fully aware of how important this was to little me until I started writing this.
ADHD isn’t the most severe disability, but the sheer awareness a child has of human behaviors is obscene, their attention to detail ridiculous, and their ability to learn behaviors is unmatched. This means that they can notice the smallest differences in behavior between interactions, they can tell the differences in treatment and thanks to their ability to learn behaviors if their parents don't talk about it them neither will they.
With the separate classes you get put in and the medication so you act normally in school enough for a child to realize that they are different and if they learned to be quiet about those things then nobody will know. The affect those things can have on children is immeasurable, it is potentially catastrophic when you don’t openly discuss with them the why of those difference and stress the fact that they are alright.
I hope the sheer emotion in those paragraphs speaks to the immense importance of what I have been talking about.
Thus far I have talked about what ADHD is and how it is exhibited in mannerism and behavior; I still have to discuss how it effects adults and I’ve only just touched on how it effects social interactions. I also have to discuss how the character in question is viewed by others and how the character views themselves and their disability.