Question about ADD/ADHD! I need your help!

altindiegirl
Sun, 27 Mar 2011 04:30:40 +0000

Hello! I’m an old member who has recently started posting on CC again. This is my second year in college and I have a fairly good GPA (3.83, to be specific). I was accepted into the nursing honors program at my school. I also hold several leadership positions around campus, including being an RA in my residence hall. Outwardly, I’m successful. The problem? I have horrible concentration problems and I’m beginning to suspect that I have ADD. I’ve always had these problems ever since I was little. In elementary/middle school, teachers would complain to my parents about my inattentiveness, the amount of time that it took me to complete my work, my disorganization, and my excessive talkativeness. I was in no way, shape, or form a good student. While other children easily made A’s, I was plagued with B’s and C’s, with an occasional A thrown in the mix. However, in 8th grade something snapped in me and I became an extreme perfectionist. I worked hard, but I still had residual problems with concentration and procrastination. Even though I graduated 14th out of 534 students, I never felt that I had a grasp on conducive studying habits. I always thought this was because I wasn’t trying hard enough.

I got through my first year of college with a 4.0, which was miraculous considering my issues with procrastination that year. I continued to blame the procrastination on myself, though. Last semester, I had a very, very rough time with disorganization and procrastination. I tried very hard to concentrate on my work, but I felt like I was constantly running in multiple directions and my mind couldn’t focus on one task at a time. I was able to scrape by with two B’s and three A’s.

I entered this semester telling myself that I would not repeat the mistakes that I made last semester. However, try as I might, I CANNOT concentrate on my work and things have gotten worse than ever before. My room is in a constant state of disorganization and I have been forgetting academic/work requirements. I’ve barely picked up a book this semester because every time I try to read, it takes me an hour to get through a short amount of reading. I can’t even get all the way through a conversation, movie, or TV show because I get distracted and impatient with it. I have a reputation for being a “quirky” and “scatterbrained” person. (In fact, my coworkers voted me “most scatterbrained” last summer.) I do not like this reputation, however, and I would like to rid myself of these concentration issues by the time I start ACTUAL nursing school next fall.

Anyways, to make a long story short, I’ve scheduled an appointment with my psychiatrist to discuss these issues. I would like feedback from others, though. If you have personal experience with ADD or ADHD, would you mind telling me your opinion on my situation? On a side note, I also suffer from bipolar type II disorder. It has been in remission for quite some time, though, and I feel very happy and satisfied with my life overall (except for the concentration problems, of course). PLEASE GIVE ME FEEDBACK.