ADHD affects more than 3 million people in the United States each year. Treatment can definitely help, but the condition is incurable. It does require a medical diagnosis to confirm you have it. Its symptoms, including difficulty concentrating, hyperactivity, and no impulse control, can be mistaken for garden variety bad behavior or low intelligence. It’s important to get a diagnosis for ADHD, because being told that you’re stupid or a bad child isn’t to anyone’s advantage. ADHD often starts in childhood, and it can last well into adulthood. Because childhood can be so difficult already, and because the teenage years require a lot of hard work and academic discipline, it’s important to get a diagnosis for ADHD early and confront it head on. There is no sense in having a child work much harder because he didn’t get the right treatment for an underlying condition. ADHD has been proven to hurt self-esteem, make relationships harder, make school and work harder, and lead to feelings of inadequacy, shame, and low self-worth. Hopefully this article will help you get a clear overview of the symptoms of ADHD, so that you will be armed with more information when you go to a physician to see whether you have it or not.
1. Short attention span
People with ADHD can hardly sustain their attention on the same thing or task. They seem to lose interest very quickly and can rarely persevere in what they are doing. ADHD makes it difficult for people with this condition to organize tasks or make plans, because they can’t get all the way through without losing track of their thoughts. They easily get lost when they are handling too much information, or quickly forget all things they need to keep in mind when taking complex decisions or planning an activity. As a result, they switch activities often and rarely complete any complex task in which they try to engage.
