this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
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That's true to an extent, but maybe there's more to it than that. The older people I know seem to have more, well, I'm not sure how to put it... Willpower? My psychologist is an elderly woman and she says that if she decides she ought to do something, she just does it. What she feels doesn't matter. My older relatives act like that too. Their ability to endure emotional (and physical) pain and keep going is remarkable.
Let's not forget the survivorship bias at play here. I don't want to take this somewhere morbid, but the older people you know survived to make it to be old. There were people from their generation with undiagnosed issues that did not.
If that were true a lot of people weren't struggling as much as they do.
I think you are right to an extent, but the philosophy isn't healthy, though I don't think you are wrong in pointing it out, you are just pointing to the cracks in the sidewalk. I think it's more in line with the idea of being born without a finger or a hand. As you progress in life you adjust and learn to live with your disability. It's the same for mental health, except that you can't just point to your missing attention span and say, "it's a disability." People want proof, otherwise they think you are trying to take advantage (a problem that arose in the late 50s as a response to the Beat generation, and propagated by the government through Vietnam and onwards). The older generations have the same problems as us, but if they are old enough to be around to talk about it then they have learned to adapt. This is a dangerous way of thinking in the same way that it's dangerous for a parent to tell a teen that life isn't that difficult in high school. Sure, with more life experience it may be easier to cope, but that experience doesn't mean fuck all to the teen dealing with bullying. Problems are problems, and ignoring your fellow human isn't the cure, it's just another disease. Be kind.
That sounds an awful lot like emotional repression, and it’s not healthy. Those generations are not known for their impeccable mental health.
I also hope you realize your comment implies that people with ADHD and autism just need some willpower to feel better.
With ADHD it's kind of technically true lmao, part of ADHD is a difficulty building the "willpower" to do basic daily tasks, at least in my experience. However what helps to build that is medication and/or therapy
To some extent, the coping mechanisms we (the old people) had to figure out ourselves did work. Stuff got done. The cost? Depression, anxiety, all that good stuff.
Yes, most of us survived - but life would have been so much better (and more productive) if we could have gotten the right help at the right time.
So, yes: We made it, it SUCKED, let's not make people go through this needlessly.
My belief is that willpower isn't something a person "just" needs - it's one of most precious and hard to acquire things a person can have. It also doesn't fix mental health problems, but it helps cope with them. I say that as someone who has just barely enough willpower to keep my own life from falling apart, even with medication and the help of my family. I don't know how to get more of it so I'm not going to be dismissive of other people who also don't have as much as they might want.
People are downvoting you, but I think you are on to something.
My parents and grandparents are/were quite similar to me, but never diagnosed. It wouldn't surprise me if a few of them also have/had ADHD.
That said, without therapy or medication I noticed that they learned to just plough through. That was their coping strategy. It isn't 100% successful, but it was what they had.
I also think the distractions of modern life don't help. With smartphones, the internet, games and streaming services - there are just so many distractions that make life harder.
Perhaps "ploughing through" would work better without all the distractions.
They just drank and smoked instead, those are just different coping mechanisms after all.
My parents and grandparents neither smoked nor drunk. Only one grandparent was a light pipe smoker.