Back to News
Advertisement
Advertisement

⚑ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

31% Positive

Analyzed from 719 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#adhd#gaming#kids#lot#parents#those#dont#thats#something#more

Discussion (7 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

GuestFAUniverseβ€’about 1 hour ago
I've yet to meet someone with ADHD or ADHS that doesn't consume too much. Most children I know from kindergarden or school (as a parent) bragged about their gaming consoles, gaming mobiles and consumption of drinks full of sugar and caffeine. And their parents are dumb enough to talk down everybody else who sees excessive gaming critical. No joke: some of them choose "gaming" as a project topic and the teachers failed to dismiss it because they're happy those kids are interested in anything at all.

It's not black and white. Maybe those kids would have issues even without overconsumption. But I don't see anyone trying a proper approach (remove or at least restrict the distraction first). Instead those diagnoses seem to have become a cheap excuse for free wheeling.

tancopβ€’22 minutes ago
whats wrong with gaming? if they dont go out and get zero exercise thats a big problem but a lot of kids are "excessive" gamers and play football after school.

and even with the real problematic cases the solution is working with them to find something thats even more fun to get them off the console. but thats hard when parents are scared to leave their kids alone with their friends even if theres a trusted adult nearby because they feel like cant trust anyone out of the family. i think a lot of "lazy" kids just want an escape from their controlling parents, and if their family dont let them do it outside they just dont go.

honestly sometimes i think adhd is not a bad thing at all. it can protect you from drug addictions (stimulants dont get you high), push you to constantly try new things, let our culture break free from depression novels and classical music. and it might be the death of useless office jobs that contribute nothing to society, because a lot of people with adhd would take manual labor or food service over something that feels boring even if it pays more.

doom scrolling comes from being broke and stuck at home with nothing better to do. the moment something better appears (more social, more exciting) most people get off their phones and only use them to record the moment. and thats not a bad thing either.

wfnβ€’9 minutes ago
(tl;dr you are confusing symptoms of a disorder with its root cause. See evidence below.)

I don't understand, are you suggesting that overconsumption / overstimulation behavior is / could be the cause of ADHD?

Because they certainly are effects and symptoms (not root cause) of ADHD, this is a well established fact, kind of core part of ADHD literature and research, actually... (I mean: dysregulation of dopamine; impulse control (lack thereof); higher substance abuse risk (esp. when unmedicated)).

While excessive screen time or poor diet can exacerbate executive dysfunction or poor sleep in any human (esp. child), they do not create the neurodevelopmental deficits that define ADHD. Taking away a video game does not repair a child's dopamine transporters.

I feel there is enough literature to substantiate this. I'm interested in this because I have a clinical diagnosis of ADHD which I got only in adulthood, but better later than never; getting the diagnosis has absolutely helped me in life, in various respects.

By the way: I recognize that in certain countries, ADHD may be overdiagnosed (idk, though); medications overprescribed (again, idk, but acknowledging the risk here; not here in Baltics (LT) though, I think);

AND - what ruffles my jimmies PARTICULARLY - prevalent overuse of ADHD term and culture of (over)self-diagnosis of ADHD in social media and elsewhere (general culture, too; I hate that so much, I believe it contributes to such one-sided unscientific docs as well as not-scientifically-grounded viewpoints).

Those over-self-diagnosing people really do not help the rest of us, to put it mildly.

As for canonical evidence and studies:

1. The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 Evidence-based conclusions about the disorder (Faraone et al., 2021) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33549739/

2. Dr. Nora Volkow's dopamine research (e.g. JAMA, 2009) - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/184547

3. Dr. Russell Barkley's Theory of Behavioral Inhibition (see e.g. his long talk directed towards parents of ADHD children, if curious; on youtube)

richardatlargeβ€’32 minutes ago
As the author of Ritalin Nation I can only say Bravo

In the 1950's, gallup polling had chewing gum and cutting the queue the biggest problems in school; where was ADHD then?

Putting symptoms in a psychiatry manual is toxic. Put them in the environment and history

tonyedgecombeβ€’about 1 hour ago
A commercial TV channel attempting to attract attention and viewers by courting controversy. What a surprise.
richardatlargeβ€’30 minutes ago
Funny how bias works

Something questioned by millions is treated as gospel, and one program asking questions is controversial

This alone reveals the power of myth

bjoliβ€’about 2 hours ago
I do believe there is some truth to it. The reason we have had an upswing in diagnosed people is that society's demands have gotten higher and what was previously considered normal is no longer within the normality corridor.

the same can be said about things like mild intellectual disability. With increasing demands, not just in the jib market but in society as a whole, is has become much harder to find a place for them. Not only are they poorer than the average person, they are a lot sicker - both physically and mentally - with a lot less resources to manage.

This is going to become a larger societal problem if we wait longer.