ADHD and learning JP?

3 comments

1. This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.

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   **ADHD and learning JP?**

   So I’m supposed to be headed to Nagoya on a student visa for JP studies. As I wait for CoE approval (OML why do they delay it until so close to classes starting???), I’m feeling like I’m getting cold feet.

   One of my biggest worries recently has been with ADHD. I don’t have an official diagnosis, but I spent my whole life having teachers tell my parents to get me tested for ADD (90s, so it was still a thing then). Never got a modern ADHD test, but I’ve got high scores on inattentive type through the WHO’s self-test.

   Even though I always did good in school, I struggled so hard to focus and pay attention. My grades came almost exclusively from cramming. So my immediate worry is not being able to absorb the information in the JP classes.

   THEN ALSO there’s the issue where, even in English, my brain will drift away mid-convo. I’ve already been experiencing this while doing things like Pimsleur.

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   I was hoping to see a doc before leaving, get a diagnosis, and get some JP-accepted meds, but psychiatrists are consistently booked for months, nevermind the time it takes to sort out your individual med needs.

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   So I guess I’m hoping for answers on two things:

   1) Has anyone else gone through this journey w/ ADHD? How did you deal with it?

   2) How hard is it to get an ADHD diagnosis from a JP psych?

   I’ve considered this possibility, but it seems like an uphill battle and there’s not much information on the actual difficulty of doing so. Most, if not all of the threads I’ve read on ADHD in JP have just been about getting a JP doc to honor your out-of-country prescription.

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   tl;dr – Anyone else move to JP and learn the language while dealing with unmedicated ADHD?

   And how hard is it to actually get a diagnosis (not just transfer foreign prescriptions) for ADHD in JP?

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2. Learning Japanese with ADHD – lots of difficulty with college Japanese for me.

   Came to Japan, met a girl, *had* to stay, and so I learned about 99% of Japanese here and it just seemed much easier in Japan with immersion. In general I’m a hands-on learner and this is exactly how Japanese (and Korean) worked for me.

3. >Has anyone else gone through this journey w/ ADHD? How did you deal with it?

   Plenty of us have. We’ve discussed it a number of times here in the subreddit.

   >How hard is it to get an ADHD diagnosis from a JP psych?

   Anywhere from *extraordinarily* difficult to borderline impossible.

   ADHD is not something that can be diagnosed with a blood test. It requires extensive discussion with a mental health practitioner involving a lot of deep emotional language.

   Finding a Japanese mental health professional who speaks fluent enough English to make that diagnosis is a daunting task. Plus you then have to convince them that you actually have a problem instead of “have you tried… focusing? Meditation?” or “Just drink coffee”.

   Frankly if you think this is going to be a problem you should have addressed it *before* you decided to come to Japan for intensive language training.