Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Labelling children = good, except gifted label

Found this article on PubMed. It's a very interesting article and discusses differences between ADD and ADHD. The author suggests that people with ADD have a deficit in working memory and may also be understimulated.

I've started putting people who meet/work w/ DD into three categories. 1-people who get her (very low percent of people but they are the darling life-savers) 2-people who don't get her but delight in her and are relaxed 3-people who don't get her and think there is something wrong with parenting/child/both and who can drag us down if we let them - sense of humor and long-term thinking needs to especially be implemented with them if I can muster it.

This post reminded me of the principal at the school where she attended K telling me in frustration "giftedness is not a diagnosis we are accepting right now" I'm not making that up.

@ Val: regarding high processing speed and ADHD/ADD. So I'm confused because I thought low processing speed was an indication of ADD. Ah! My DD w/ low processing speed (16th percentile ish) and not so high working memory 27th percentile ish) and very high (high 90s) of the verbal and perceptual reasoning. Testers always note the outstanding block design and matrix reasoning scores, which is nice, but doesn't really help right now with school success/survival.

I think what looks like ADHD in DD is sensory issues as well as nervousness in certain situations...we were at a very cool science center yesterday and the moving around started happening. I think it's just how she acts when she is learning or taking in a tremendous amount of info.

@val again - I was writing my post when you posted that article so I'll read it soon! Thanks

Bzylzy,

Yes, you're right. I did some Google searching after I started speculating. I usually search before...so, my bad.

Val - no worries! Anyway misdiagnosis and fine lines are common with gifties especially 2Es... not an exact science!

I've always thought that was the case with me (just... fast, multi-track thinking/processing). It wasn't until my son was formally diagnosed that all started making sense. If it's just G/T it shouldn't be that debilitating, should it? I actually failed a college level course because the instructional pace was too slow and I couldn't stay focused. Who does that!! ADHD, that's who. sigh.

My DS tested low-ish in processing speed, though, so... there you go: "The discrepancy between is perceptual reasoning and processing speed is statistically significant and occurs in approximately 12 percent of the time in the general population." (The same was true with PR and verbal comprehension, occurring in only 7 percent). Suffice to say he's very, very visual spatial, and really sucky at anything audio/linguistic.

The doc had said there was a lot of the testing that was inaccurate, and I wonder sometimes if the processing speed issues were because of his language and audio processing issues. She thought it was because of ADHD as well.

The "not attending class" option always worked well for me.

Why attend class when you can not attend class and not fail?

Yeah... sigh... that would have been awesome. I wish I'd had the initiative (skip the classes, learn the stuff on my own). Instead I just... stopped caring. (LOL yay!! Such happy stories ;p Ah well. Phase two, now: I'm in a TA program that's relevant enough to my 2e kiddos for me to stay engaged )

Thanks for that article link, Val. Nice to see someone digging at some distinctions and neuroscience between them.

I've been imagining another angle from the G/T side which is heavily mediated/selective attention. Thinking of it as an odd payoff. So, for myself, I don't have a strong base level attention for everything. Many things don't rise to the level of interesting. Interesting, solvable, all these things seem to fire up my norepinephrine to extreme levels. If I can get a frame of reference to find something interesting, then no holds barred on level of attention.

Positing something like a neurotypical mind floats between a 30 to 70% engaged attention level. A fully mediated attention goes from 0 to 100%. At a 100% working memory becomes vast and fluid, things get remembered "forever" and interesting things happen.

Following through this pseudo-thought exercise, other hitches in the distractable (or as mentioned processing to fast range) is that new tangents of thoughts can fire with a higher level of curiosity which pulls the attention train down that novel rabbit tunnel.

this post reminded me of the principal at the school where she attended K telling me in frustration "giftedness is not a diagnosis we are accepting right now" I'm not making that up. End quote

That is quite scary and the sort of thing I am afraid of.