forgetfulness, time loss, adhd

I don't know if many people here have been diagnosed with ADHD, but I imagine it's not uncommon to have ADHD/ADD if you have DID/DDNOS. ADHD by definition already makes you "absent-minded" and "imaginative" from a very early age, so I guess it would a major catalyst for a child to develop "intense dissociative solutions" to cope with every aspect of existence in or after intolerable situations.

The thing is that some of the defining components of DID like "time loss" and "excessive forgetfulness" are also defining components of ADHD, except for the degree of the effect involved in one and the other. I guess if you have one condition and possibly the other one too, and if want to really make your life more manageable, then you need to learn how subtle or not-so-very-subtle is the difference between one and the other, so you can know how to think of methods to glue the pieces of your days together.

Even if you don't have ADHD, I guess it's easy to simply not notice when you're being forgetful or losing time. How do you tell when there's real forgetfulness and time loss happening and it's not just that "you're tired and that's normal"?


PS: Sorry if I have been posting a lot but not participating much in other people's threads. I'd like to participate more, and I intend to. It's just that right now I have way too much stuff in my ("our"?..) head. Thanks.

I do think it's possible to have ADHD and DID just as someone may have diabetes and DID. I'm certainly not a psychologist but what I do know is ADHD is a medical condition that happens genetically some say a child's diet can cause it. Where DID is a psychiatric disorder, it happens to children who have suffered extreme abuse.
There are medications that can control ADHD. Where there aren't any for DID. even though many take meds for the symptoms like depression, anxiety or rage. Talk therapy is really the only way to heal.
Time loss and forgetfulness may appear in someone with ADHD when they are tired, I don't know but for DID this happens because alters in the system have taken control of the body and occurs at anytime. Usually some sort of internal or external trigger.
Many people with DID have been grossly misdiagnosed because there are so many symptoms that happen in other conditions, so I believe it's possible some Dr's may say ADHD again that I don't know. I guess the only way to know for sure is to have a psych eval.
I hope I was helpful.

I very much agree with bevia.

A friend of mine was diagnosed with ADHD and DID but the diagnosis was removed due to the DID and her therapist telling her that since not all parts of her had it, it was not a "true diagnosis". How that works I am unsure.

I think by experiencing time loss it can be relatively apparent. ADHD runs in my family and I see their forgetfulness. My experiences of time loss is vastly different.

In time loss I will open my eyes and be somewhere I have no idea where I got.
I will be told about conversations I know full well I have not participated in or even have the same opinions I'm told I've expressed at times.
I am told I've done something that I had no idea I did, even if I didn't know I had lost time.

There's a black gaping hole.
I've not heard of this in ADHD.

Hope you figure some of this out.

this is sort of interesting. i actually screened myself for ADD because i have a lot of symptoms, but i found out that i don't classify for all the criteria to fit ADD, but that the symptoms are actually directly related to our DID.

it's so easy to misdiagnose symptoms of DID as other things, it's why i really hate those tests they hand out at the psychiatrist's office.

I guess what makes it difficult for me to tell is that I barely leave my room at all. I work from home now, but even in college it was "normal" for me to not leave my place and to have no "real-life" human contact at all for one or two weeks at a time. I am living in the same house as my parents at the moment (hopefully not fot long) but I don't talk to them. I think the last time I saw either one of them for more than a few seconds was maybe ten days ago. Nowadays they're mostly harmless, so to speak, but they're a large part of the reason why I have the problems I have.

So, there are witnesses to what I say — online — but there are no witnesses to what I do, and I don't really do much to begin with. My daily life is the proverbial "tree that falls in the middle of the wild forest". Miles away from anyone who could hear — so did it really fall, or was it even standing there, to begin with? In practice, it has always been like this to a degree, because I never had a reliable witness around. Either because they should have been there and should have acted as such but didn't, or because I shut them out myself.

PS: I have no doubt that I do have ADHD. The "hyper" part of it makes it clear, and it's exactly when I allow myself to be hyper (or, to put it another way, when one of the several hyper parts is out) that I feel more positive and genuine. It's very clear to me that repressing those parts (which is something I have been forced to do throughout my life) is a major component of why I can be so (disproportionately?) troubled sometimes.

i have both disorders, d.i.d and adhd. Few years ago when i had a brain scan done a qeeg it showed my frontal lobe runs slightly slower than the rest of my brain which is what adhd is. Im not a really hyperactive person quite the opposite actually lol but i do notice i get scattered brain. thoughts can be a little disorganized at times also when i talk sometimes its like im frolicing all over the place. bouncing back and forth because i missed something in my story lol so at times when i feel it acting up on me people need to be a bit patient. I can tell it can be amusing at times by the look on peoples faces as they are trying to follow my story but the differences between d.i.d forgetfulness and adhd is quite different. adhd for me is normally when im trying to tell a story and the peieces of it seem to bounce like i mentioned above or just overall scattered brain. somethings i think can trigger it more like if theres alot going on around me as i tend to be a bit hypersensitive. zoning out, fog, and switching among different parts is what helps me tell the difference between the two. losing chucks of time or forgetting days which normally most wouldnt forget about is the d.i.d aspect. also the triggers and post traumatic responces i have are trauma basis rather than brain chemistry.
also i forgot to mention being implusive is a hallmark of adhd as well. doing things before thinking about it. but thats more of the negative aspects of adhd there is alot of positives as well.

I just thought of an example. At some point between three weeks and three months ago I received the news that I was going to be an uncle, which I thought was really cool, and I told an (online) friend about it. Then at some point between two weeks and two months later, my friend mentioned it in a passing remark and it hit me like this was the very first time I was learning about the news, "whoa, I'm going to be an uncle!", and this time my reaction was not as positive as the first time. I knew I had heard the news before, and I knew I had received it with enthusiasm the first time, but both the fact that I had heard it before and my first reaction to it seemed like something someone else had told me second-hand. Even though I knew that the "someone who told me about it" was just myself.

This is a more blatant example because it's about "big news", but this kind of thing is typical in my daily life (from the smallest to the biggest things). Another example is my birthday. I forget about my birthday and I don't like to remember it, because it doesn't seem like a significant date, and particularly not significant to myself, so it bothers me when others remember and remind me of my birthday. I can think of many small examples, but those would be in the gray area of ADHD.

I know that these two examples in particular can't be attributed to "just ADHD" or "just being tired", but where would they be in the "scale" of this type of thing? If a technical name had to be given to "explain" these examples (I mean, as a "symptom", not as a "condition"), what would it be?