Justice sensitivity is what’s it’s listed as, along with rejection sensitivity!

It’s that thing we do where we will go above and beyond for anyone else but never do anything for ourselves.

I couldn't become a politician, but all the issues in the world make me care about politics more than most I think.

Like, I spend a lot of time arguing for LGBT rights online.

* shoulder

Pedant AWAY!

Yeah, to me the "jump" is like half a step. I'm tribally minded, and humanity is my tribe. If someone would care about supporting their brother-in-law through a troubled period, but laughs about cops gunning down homeless people, that triggers massive dissonance and warning alarms in my head, because it's entirely arbitrary. They're demonstrating they'll draw lines through who they consider human for purely spurious reasons, and why should I spend any time building community with them when their fundamental values don't support human life?

Why would I waste my energy developing and maintaining some kind of relationship with someone who could change their mind at any time and leave me for dead? So many neurotypicals are sketchy and the rules they defend to their last breath are entirely made up.

I have ADHD as well and have been considering the past two years of going into something local politically...

Maybe it's a coincidence though haha

It *is* hard to live with. One of the things I felt really strongly about as a kid was the climate :) That's a fun justice sensitivity to grow up with considering you just watch how everything climate related has been literally crashing and burning for the past 20 years.

I very often feel distraught and depressed due to the climate crisis. Mostly because it's hard to witness the apathy of the people in charge and how greed, money etc. takes priority.

What's sad is that I've become increasingly numb to it because it hurts so much to witness. I don't want to stop caring about the environment and the planet and all the species living on it. It's just becoming too traumatic to deal with, so my brain is slowly turning a blind eye to protect itself. I hate it here.

I don't understand people who *don't* have a deep sense of justice sensitivity. Feels apathetic to me.

I've always been like that but I would never have connected it to my ADHD. How does that relate?

Probably because 30 percent like the clock broken to gain power and have used buzz words and threats to get another 20% onboard.

I've had ADHD my whole life and never knew about justice sensitivity until just now. Makes a whole lot of sense.

Shouldn't everyone have justice sensitivity? Maybe the ones that don't are the problem huh?

Ugh, I should go and get tested...

Like most symptoms in neurological conditions it specifically relates to how it impacts your functioning. If if doesn't lead to poor outcomes, make life more difficult to cope with, or impede your ability to succeed socially it probably isn't. Qualities like that generally get treated as negative symptoms only in the extent to which they are maladaptive when they are extreme enough make the patients life more difficult.

God, I used to be addicted to online arguments with randos. Stopped when I realized, after three hours, one dude wasn't even close to getting my point.

Right? Great analogy. And we all wave our arms and point out the wrong, while half the people are sucking up to the boss for a promotion so they ignore the issue and compliment him on how hard he worked to get that nice new chair.

Yeah great points.

The peace some people have while the world is burning down around us is remarkable; but I don’t know if I’d honestly want to be able to.

I mean, how could any intelligent person not see the interconnectivity between everything? Sure, some things are wholly outside your control and there would be no point in stressing out over them, such as for instance the treatment of the citizenry of North Korea at the hands of the Kims, but literally everything is connected to each other by varying degrees of closeness by sheer virtue of existing.

In my brain, it's like a space where every Thing is at least tangentially connected to every other Thing by a thread, and it's easy to mesh different concepts together. Great for creativity, not so much when you're stumped as to how to get the other person caught up on your point in two sentences or less.

Same.

I also don’t make pictures in my head. So when I read books, I’m reading through the emotional journey the character goes on. I don’t remember plots easily, but I remember how the character felt and how it felt being with the character. So I have trained my brain in empathy.

LOVED the lockdown. Got to live in my own head without the exhausting amount of usual social interactions? Of course we live in the woods where it's possible to rampage around here and almost literally go down rabbit holes. Ask me about that plant with the weird flower you only see in June behind that dead Hemlock 31 feet, 11 inches behind the shed.....

People with normal brains don’t go around talking about their normal brains much.

Reddit is crack for the adhd brain. I hate it but i keep coming back.

Keep in mind the vast majority of Reddit users do not comment. "Normal" for Reddit commenters might diverge from the global population.

Its under diagnosed in Gen X and the boomer generation. Basically the millennials were the first to carry official diagnoses as they were often caught when went through primary education.

That said, I suspect that social networks, and the style of Reddit in particular, is appealing to folks with ADHD. So there is likely some selection bias.


Edit: I wrote Gen Z instead of Gen X originally, sorry if I confused anyone.

I would not be the least bit surprised if 80% if Reddit was neurodivergent. Seriously.

Yeah because Reddit is basically like cocaine for us.

Autistic people love Reddit and half of autistic people are ADHD.

It also felt like Bernie would win by a landslide if you were on reddit.

Well the numbers might be higher than anyone thinks. 90% of adults with adhd are undiagnosed

Yeah, that's essentially my understanding.

Much of what I've read comes from research I read online several years ago and also the book The 10,000 Year Explosion. There's so many articles, studies, and blogs about ADHD related to coping mechanisms and genetic research that I'm having trouble finding any great links right now but these links cover some of the basics:
https://www.verdict.co.uk/drd4-7r-wanderlust-gene/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/the-wanderlust-gene-is-it-real-and-do-you-have-it/

It would help if I could think of the proper term for global spread of specific genetic mutations or whatnot but my brain is fried from working all day answering phones and sending emails. If I remember correctly the theory is that at one time there was one genetic mutation which seems to be the "primary" ADHD gene and as time went on at least one other major mutation appeared. The DRD4–7R mutation appears to be the primary mutation associated with ADHD, it alters the DRD4 gene in a way in which "it has been reported to encode a receptor with lower affinity for dopamine." [1] So people with ADHD would be likely to seek out more novelty in order to boost dopamine production, in modern times this can often be through drug abuse, or various other addictions, but in ancient times the best way to run into novel situations was to travel to unfamiliar places and push yourself forward into challenging environments.

The Wikipedia article on DRD4 [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_receptor_D4 ] explains briefly what I was describing in my first comment but there's a lot more info out there if you or I can find it aha- I'll try to remember to search some more tomorrow.

>The frequency of the alleles varies greatly between populations, e.g., the 7-repeat version has high incidence in America and low in Asia.[27] "Long" versions of polymorphisms are the alleles with 6 to 10 repeats. 7R appears to react less strongly to dopamine molecules.[28]

>The 48-base pair VNTR has been the subject of much speculation about its evolution and role in human behaviors cross-culturally. The 7R allele appears to have been selected for about 40,000 years ago.[27] **In 1999 Chen and colleagues[29] observed that populations who migrated farther in the past 30,000 to 1,000 years ago had a higher frequency of 7R/long alleles. They also showed that nomadic populations had higher frequencies of 7R alleles than sedentary ones.** More recently it was observed that the health status of nomadic Ariaal men was higher if they had 7R alleles. However, in recently sedentary (non-nomadic) Ariaal those with 7R alleles seemed to have slightly deteriorated health.[30]

The authors of The 10,000 Year Explosion theorized that the reason why the 7R mutation was less common in Asia (and especially Japan) was because the people there lived in collectivist cultures (for the most part) for thousands of years. They mentioned that there's an old expression in Japan, if I remember correctly it's "the crooked nail gets hammered down"- the people with the 7R mutation would have been more likely to be restless, hyperactive, and less likely to fit into a tight bureaucracy or whatnot so they were less likely to have kids and perhaps more likely to be criminals or otherwise engage in reckless behavior that led to their death. Thus the low prevalence of the 7R mutation in Japan.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3560519/

I had never considered that my deep seated need to see the “right” thing done was an evolutionary step. It makes me consider a great deal many things.