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Comment by lghh | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I was diagnosed by two professionals independently of each others because I was so unsure of the first diagnosis.

Comments like these are hurtful. I ask myself the question the commenter asked me every single day. I just try to approach them with care and the assumption they are coming from a good place. I know that isn't always the case, but it's the best I can do.

Also, it's wild that I already have a strategy and thoughts about dealing with comments like these. It's only been a few weeks, but it's already happened a handful of times.

Musk and Andreessen's recent comments on the matter angered me. And though I don't think Andreessenn's were necessarily out of the same place of hate's as Elon's were, they were still framed in a damaging way.

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> Comments like these are hurtful. I ask myself the question the commenter asked me every single day. I just try to approach them with care and the assumption they are coming from a good place. I know that isn't always the case, but it's the best I can do.

I try to as well, I had to rewrite that comment several times to be bit more generous but had to leave it where it was. It's hard - Ironically it comes from a place of wishing the world would be more generous to you. Beyond regular therapy I don't talk openly about this, both for this reason, and as I had been struggling with, and treated, for depression for over 20 years (which it now turns out is exacerbated or even caused by the untreated ADHD).

I've spent an incredible amount of effort and energy actively hiding this fact and any consequences from employers, teachers and loved ones out of fear of what it would mean for my already difficult to maintain status quo. I've seen what the stigma of mental health can do to ones career and future opportunities (unless of course you are an active and visual advocate, campaigner as well as your normal role).

I'm in a similar position as you.

It's deeply unfortunate that it's so asymmetrical. u/symlinkk has asked a question that in isolation is merely a category error, a lazy intellectual argument regarding burden of proof, subjectivity inherent in the DSM, clinical standards regarding impairment, etc., that can be dispatched in short order. However the emotional effect of a question that implicitly denies the existence of the illness remains long after the intellectual error is corrected.

It's structurally similar to LGBT erasure. We have already gone through life for years believing that there was something wrong with us that we could fix, and therefore was a moral failing and source of shame ("just use a planner" [1]). If in fact it is an immutable characteristic akin to sexuality, then it cannot be a source of shame. One would not ask nowadays whether one was really sure about their sexual orientation. Then again, very few people recreationally take testosterone.

I can only wish you the best regards, and be grateful that we live in the modern day where science (but not the general public yet) has developed an understanding of these things.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/pelip6/how_i_cured_my...

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