Post what you're thinking right now.

[TheoK]

I don't understand why Yanks or Brit's cannot pronounce the "ü", "ä" or "ö" letters correctly. 

[TheoK]

You can try to translate this into English: "Mor, får får får?" "Nej, får får inte får, får får lamm." 

[DirtDawg]

Why?




Dude, I'm NOT making fun of him, I am saying how odd it can be to communicate with people of a different culture. He was very intelligent, well spoken, for the most part, but his natural accent made him difficult to understand.

OK, we made fun of each other, after we got to know each other a bit, and it was nothing but good and better.

[Christopher McCandless]

You can try to translate this into English: "Mor, får får får?" "Nej, får får inte får, får får lamm." 

Bah Bah Black Sheep?

[TheoK]

You can try to translate this into English: "Mor, får får får?" "Nej, får får inte får, får får lamm." 

Bah Bah Black Sheep?

No, not really. But it's fun, because it's 100% correct Swedish. 

[odeon]

I don't understand why Yanks or Brit's cannot pronounce the "ü", "ä" or "ö" letters correctly. 

Many of them can, once they have a use for the letters.

[RageBeoulve]

I just heard about these "chav" people in europe. This doesn't apply to them does it?

[TheoK]

Chavs are not brave. Raggare are brave. 

[RageBeoulve]

I see. The name almost looks like rage, so I agree.

[TheoK]

It comes from the Swedish word "ragga" that means looking for broads, but it might have to do with rage as well. 

[odeon]

I'll probably rot in hell.

[Peter]

I'll probably rot in hell.

Pack condoms and paracetamol then.  I hear the people down there really know how to party.

[RageBeoulve]

I'll probably rot in hell.

I'll see you there dude.

[Pissgai]

I'll probably rot in hell.

The cars in Sweden look huge. oO

[Peter]

I've got a psych appointment on Thursday with a new psychiatrist.  I wonder if this one will know his arse from his elbow; my experiences of doctors and psychiatrists so far is that they're often shockingly ignorant.  I found this exchange on Slashdot, and I'm wondering if I should print it out and take it along, since it would make a reasonable primer on 'ADHD: myths and misconceptions' if the psychiatrist turns out to be clueless:

Just get them a WoW account (Score:2)
by Animats (122034) on Tuesday January 13, @02:21AM (#26429117) Homepage

It might be simpler to just get them an account on some game that demands long login times, like Evercrack or World of Warcraft. If they stay on for hours at a time, they don't really have a serious ADHD problem. They're probably just bored with school. See The Trouble with Boys" [msn.com], from Newsweek. "Very well-meaning people have created a biologically disrespectful model of education."

In fact, games might be a good tool for sorting out students with serious disorders from the merely bored.

Re:Just get them a WoW account (Score:5, Insightful)
by seebs (15766) on Tuesday January 13, @02:28AM (#26429175) Homepage

If ADHD meant "inability to pay attention to anything whatsoever for a long time", you'd have made a great point.

It doesn't. You didn't.

I have moderately severe ADHD. This is easily confirmed by my reaction to the Schedule II stimulants -- they make me calm, and allow me to do things like sit still without vibrating in place. I can quite easily, unmedicated, play a video game for 16 hours straight -- as long as it happens to be catching my interest. If it gets dull, I start doing other things. Often, other things at the same time. I have been known to play WoW for 8 hours while watching old sitcoms on a nearby DVD player and reading a book. There are also times when the game is sufficiently interesting to actually hold my interest for long periods of time. It's not unique to games, either -- get me started on a really interesting math problem, and I'm not going to distract easily. I can program for 16 hours straight, too.

Sometimes.

The disorder, again, isn't that I can't stay on a task for a long time -- it's that I don't necessarily have the ability to *control* what task I'm on. If you give me a really interesting math problem, and then tell me to do something else, it may be beyond my ability to continue the other task without getting side-tracked onto the math problem again.

I'm aware that a lot of people think this is "just laziness". I always assumed it was, until I started comparing notes with other people who have clinical diagnoses of ADHD, and discovered that there are very clear distinctions in the pattern of attention.

So far, I'm on meds a fair chunk of the time, but I like to spend some time off them. There are things I do better unmedicated. Some of them are even work-related! But I like having a choice in the matter... And that means that I have to take a little time now and then to correct people who are going off a vague sense that ADHD is mostly faked, or whatever, because they've got a very weird stereotyped view of what ADHD ought to mean, and think anything that doesn't look like it isn't "real" ADHD.

Re:Just get them a WoW account (Score:2)
by rolfwind (528248) on Tuesday January 13, @04:03AM (#26429819)

A lot of those symptoms sound like the natural tendency of wanting to do whatever interests you at the moment and it just being hard to pull away. I think a lot of smart kids, because of a slow public school system (for instance, I didn't have to study at all until 12th grade), simply never developed the self-control earlier in scholastic life due to this type of thing. It sort of becomes an ingrained, doing well up to a certain grade/level despite bad habits that never recieved significant negative feedback before, so that failure eventually (inevitably) occurs and often triggers an exploration into what the cause is with ADHD or the like being a nice culprit because you can medicate it (pills) versus a tougher solution. Of course, I don't want to downplay the severity of breaking a habit that may have been with a person the majority of their life and the system/parents sometimes actively foster the situation and this type of solution as being most convenient to them. Although that is my take on the skyrocketing rates of ADHD, perhaps it's just an observation of the faked cases masquerading as ADHD.

But what would you say leaps such behavior from perhaps something beyond a learned habit into something needing outside intervention like ADHD?

Re:Just get them a WoW account (Score:2)
by hey! (33014) on Tuesday January 13, @11:17AM (#26434447) Homepage Journal

Everybody has a natural tendency to prefer to do what interests them. There are two things that make it a disorder: (1) you can't control it, and (2) it has a significant, negative impact on your life.

ADHD isn't a new diagnosis, it's just a new name and conceptualization for informal diagnoses people have been making for years. You're doing it here: just not interested. Other diagnoses include "lazy", "unmotivated", and "absent minded". The problem with these informal diagnoses is that they're too simplistic. They're internally consistent if you want to cherry pick certain facts but give you an accurate picture of the individual's life. It's not that students aren't interested in getting along in school, it's that they can't even if they want to. If they don't want to, it's not a disorder.

Likewise, a diagnosis like "lazy" doesn't work either, because people with ADHD have the capacity to work harder than their "normal" counterparts. "Absent minded" or "wooly headed" doesn't cover everything either, because in emergency, high stress situations, people with ADHD may feel, calm, focused, and normal, and show unusual presence of mind. In fact part of the pathology of the disease is that it keeps people's lives on the edge of chaos, and they perform better there.

Brain studies support a biological basis for ADHD. For example when people with ADHD are given a task that normal people perform well on, brain scan suggested that increasing conscious effort actually makes their brains less coordinated. It is literally the case that the harder they try, the worse they do. It's like throwing the throttle all the way forward on an outboard motor: it creates a lot of noise but the props aren't driving the boat forward; their just cavitating.

This may be why games are promising, because the same is true in games. You don't want to try hard, you want to achieve flow state. Think about that for a moment: the problem with labeling ADHD people as lazy and unmotivated is that it leads to exactly the opposite actions than they need. They don't need to try harder, they need to relax. It's like ADHD brains work in a different stimulation band than average brains; the effect of stimulant medications is to shift the band towards the normal spectrum.

Or course ADHD has its problems too. It's a very bad name for a complex of several phenomena: a higher need for stimulation to achieve optimal performance, poor performance at conscious direction of attention, and poor impulse control, each of which is distinct but related to other facets and may manifest itself differently in different people. What is clear though is that there is ample evidence that people who should receive this diagnosis are biologically different. For example a dose of amphetamines that might undermine impulse control in a normal person could improve it in somebody with ADHD.

I believe your point is that ADHD is part of natural human population variation; if so, you'd be right. The exact line between a character quirk and a psychiatric disorder is not clear, nor is is fixed. It may be that in preindustrial societies people who now receive a diagnosis might have provided societies with the benefits of restless, stimulation deprived individuals: as big game hunters, explorers, warriors, craftsmen, or shamans. The problem is that in a society where it is mandatory to regulate your life by the clock and calendar, even moderate ADHD traits are highly mal-adaptive. I've heard it said that the primary symptom of adult ADHD is chronic underachievement.

Of course, one alternative would be to reorganize all of society to make use of each individual's unique characteristics. Unfortunately, that's just not realistic. We can wish society was different than it is, we can work towards that end, but in the meantime you have nothing to offer people who drop through the cracks. It's more practical to address each individual's coping abilities, through a combination of medication, skill development, and planning. That's the point of a psychiatric diagnosis, the thing that makes such a diagnosis more useful than a folk diagnosis. It gives you practical things to do right away.