Neurodiversity and iNaturalist!

I’ve stayed up for hours, re-playing the same fight scene or a string of character’s dialouge, over and over in my head, until it seemed perfect, and- at times, I’ve felt horrible if the scene isn’t right, often losing even more hours of sleep just trying to convince myself if was fine, and that it’s just my brain being bored and wanting to create some new reality but GoD- It’s so annoying getting attached to some brain characters and losing time just to “talk” to them.

But hey, I’m young. I’m sure I’ll grow out of it…sometime

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I’d like to remind everyone that we are trying to focus specifically on how your neurodiversity affects one’s iNaturalist experience.

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A lot of autistic people do this sort of thing (I am not saying you are autistic though!) . Perhaps other neurodivergent people as well (and this stuff blends together a lot). I don’t focus on the numbers so much but i am perhaps a minority amongst autistic people :)

I am ok with the roaming discussion about neurodivergence myself, I like it… but can move it elsewhere if it’s causing a problem for others…

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Good to know there’re other people doing it too! hah. Yeah, I guess that most of my “stuff” are acquired traits, but it’s hard to see by myself if my brain triggered things that happened or the other way around.
But if we stay on route of iNatting, I was and am lonely for my hole life, so I just had to spend tons of time outside, probably sounds familiar for many locals! Nowadays with iNat any child can become a prolific member and who knows how may thousands of observations one can get in a lifetime?

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Can I ask how you went about getting diagnosed and treated? I’m 32 and slowly coming to the realization that I probably have pretty severe untreated ADHD. I’m feeling a bit of hope that there might be a better future for me if I can get it treated, but I’ve heard a lot of stories about doctors dismissing late diagnoses and I’m kind of unsure how to go about the whole thing…

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Unfortunately there’s strong bias against adult ADHD diagnoses. You have to ask yourself what the purpose of seeking a diagnosis is. Do you want to try getting medication?
Most psychiatrists with good knowledge of ADHD specialize in working with children and may not be willing / interested in diagnosing adults. Women, and adults of both/any gender are expected to “grow up and get over it”, which is total BS but many doctors will still have that attitude subconsciously if not blatanty.

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Thanks for starting this thread!

I have OCD, which results in compulsions to document and categorize things. Which is of course the reason I’ve done so many identifications on iNaturalist - it’s distressing to see things put into the wrong categories and I have to ‘fix’ it. It also results in me deciding I need to document and ID to species every living thing in a given area…

I’m coming to the realization that I probably also have ADHD, and the stereotypical joke about getting distracted by passing butterflies definitely applies.

Also I have major depression, which doesn’t really have anything to do with iNat except explain why I sometimes don’t do anything on the site for months in a row.

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Know that you’re valid and are accepted here. We appreciate your contributions! And take whatever time you need if you’re not doing well.

If you already have a psychiatrist, ask them about seeking a diagnosis. But if you don’t think meds would be a good idea (e.g., they might interfere with medications you already take), don’t bother. In America it’s not taken seriously at all and once you’re outside of school I can’t imagine you’d get any extra benefits for your trouble.
Also, because American health care sucks, you also have to consider the price of medications. Some common ones will be covered, but if you have other psych diagnoses you may need to take a less common one to avoid bad side effects and those can cost in the range of $100 a month, at least in NJ.

ADHD can actually be beneficial to the naturalist, but it does make other parts of life more difficult. Sometimes just recognizing your own situation can be highly beneficial, and lets you choose coping systems which are better for you.

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Not going to lie, I definitely got into iNat out of being lonely. The strange thing is that I was a happy, well-adjusted child, very satisfied with my number of friends, but since leaving school I’ve become progressively more alone and anxious. I’m now almost 30 and I’ve begun having nightmares about being bullied at school, even though I never actually was bullied at school… isn’t that strange! People joke about missing time with their friends during the pandemic, but I quite literally don’t have any local friends to miss.

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TL/DR
My adult ADHD experience… After a serious illness in my 50s, I was slow to recover. Besides the physical recovery, I also had a fair amount of cognitive impacts, including memory problems, attention loss, severe anxiety, depression. During an intake interview related to treating anxiety/depression, we discussed the ADHD I was experiencing. After reviewing my history, the interviewer suggested I was ADHD as a child and young adult and it had reoccurred after my fevers. I asked why I did not have it as an adult, then? She replied, I likely had developed coping skills to manage it as an adult; and then that illness (“an insult to the brain”) had disrupted those coping skills.

Slowly, as time went by, my memory recovered somewhat and I redeveloped enough coping skills to embark on a new career.

There may be some drugs that help manage adult ADHD, but I think working on some coping skills may be valuable. For me, these skills are associated with awareness, limiting multi-tasking, and keeping focus “just a bit longer” to help interrupt the cycle of tripping from half-done task to half done task .

For example, if I was starting to make an iNat observation on my iPad, I might run off to go out to the yard to take a better picture of, say, the host plant. But, I see something else, and get a picture and edit that, then go look up some factoid and get totally sidetracked following tangential links, then go back out to the yard and water some pots, and then get something to drink… and then… and then.

Finally, perhaps hours later, I see my still unsubmitted observation sitting in a tab. I totally forgot to add whatever it was I needed to check in the yard.

Do I run back out to the yard and start that cycle again? I have done that. But, I try not to do so. I am always re-learning to just interrupt the unfocused cycling and sit down and finish a task at hand.

As a skill builder, I try to catch myself in such cycles. When I find I’m drifting into unfocused leaping from task to task and leaving most unfinished, I try to look up. I remind me to just stick with this one task until it’s done (say, filling in the basic iNat data and hitting submit).

FWIW…

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I feel for you! I hope iNat community help you with it at least a little bit! I’m both very anxious and very outgoing person for my whole life, trying to always tell the truth and it turns out one who hardly understands what people feel or think, so now I have nowhere to talk about anything rather than forum and have to stop myself from writing cause imo everyone hates me, cause I do.

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I’m sure no one hates you for your contributions to the forum. I’m always interested to read your points of view. Keep them coming.

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I genuinely look forward to and enjoy reading your postings.

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a year of lockdown … frequently gives me weird nightmares. Follow the news, followed by scrambled nightmares blending fact and ‘fiction’.

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iNat has been so valuable for me in that regard… I find it really hard to make friends, and I don’t really know how to interact with people besides doing activities with them. So finding a website full of people I know I share at least one interest in common with has been really valuable. At this point most of the people I talk to with any regularity I met on here.

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Oh god I feel this so much!

The other day I was setting out to help with mapping fire-followers in a park about an hour away. Pack my lunch, I start gathering my things together, realize I want to use a different bag - wait, why is this bag so heavy? Oh look, it’s full of dried beans. Why is it full of dried beans? I probably saved them for seed from the garden at some point and never emptied the bag again.

I go to bag them, label them, and put them in my seed collection, and can’t find a pen. Find the pen, wait, where did I set the beans? Oh look, they’re back in the backpack again. OK, put them where they belong - wait, where are my keys that I was just holding? In the seed bin, under the beans, of course. Now, where’s my camera and spare battery, I JUST saw it… wait, why on earth is it on top of the bookshelf? OK, put that into the backpack. Now where did I set my lunch… oh, it’s over by the closet, right where I got the backpack full of beans from.

Alright…where the hell are my car keys now?!

And so on… I finally get out the door, twenty minutes late, and forgot my park pass so I have to pay for parking when I get there. It’s EXHAUSTING.

It’s not always that bad, but when I start feeling tired, or depressed, it gets much worse. When it’s mild I manage it with lots of checklists and notebooks, but when it’s bad I get distracted in the middle of writing the list, lose my pen 3 times, forget where I put the notebook, and give up and cry.

As I’m sure you can imagine, it dramatically effects my ability to find work, earn money, or survive in general…

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Absolutely. The accumulation of small fragments of lost time can reach hours a day. And the energy required to focus on a single task for any length of time is intensive.
Skills can do a great deal to mitigate these losses, or help you work around them. But it doesn’t matter whether you are super interested in something or how smart you are, if you have adhd your brain is just wired differently. Your default state of mind is multitasking; it is nearly impossible to ignore sensory input most automatically filter out. This can be a strength sometimes, so lean into that and don’t feel bad. It’s just how you are.

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Ditto w @jhbratton and @teellbee I always read your posts as well, you obviously take a very active interest in the world around you, and appear to have an impressive amount of knowledge and insights about many different aspects of that world. I respect that you are willing to share your thoughts and point of view.

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Well, there is that whole autistic desire for stability, and how that is affected by the seemingly constant taxonomic changes. I try not to get too discombobulated when I see that something is in a different family than I last remember it being, but sometimes I just want to tell the taxonomists to quit fooling around.

When I found out that pterosaurs had fur, I was like, um, I thought they were reptiles? Are they going to be mammals now?

Just as @teellbee has learned coping skills for ADHD, I have done so for ASD; but my goodness, taxonomic revisions can really tax them sometimes.

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This is why I’m so good at spotting cool stuff in nature - people will ask me “How did you even find that?!” when I point something out to them, and it’s like, well, the bird was shouting at us, how did you NOT notice it? It’s background noise to a lot of people, but to me it’s like someone got in my face and screamed at me, I just can’t overlook it. So that part is cool, because I get to see a lot of stuff other people don’t.

It also means I get sensory overload pretty easily though, and I cannot have a conversation with someone in a restaurant, because my brain is giving them the same portion of listening power as it’s giving the 27 other conversations happening in the room, and I can’t sort them out haha. It’s usually easiest just to tell people I’m hard of hearing.

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