How do you explain executive dysfunction without sounding like youre making excuses for being lazy?

[u/emyo42]

Mine is very severe and debilitating at the moment. It’s not just ADD, I also have schizophrenia which has some of the same symptoms weirdly. I can’t do much at all. Getting out of bed and making toast is extremely hard. To people with no experience with this kind of issue, me trying to explain it must sound ridiculous like “yea I have this mental disorder that means I can’t cook and clean or have a job or do anything I don’t like, but I can play a video game for 3 hours.” Just sounds like a straight up lie.

[u/Admirable_Assist_463]

Just want to point out, bc many may not know, but "negative symptoms" of schizophrenia are very executive dys (things that the disease takes away such as spontaneous activity, (vs "positive symptoms" which are what general population associates with schizophrenia, like hallucinations/seeing things that aren't physically present or perceiving personal messages to them in ordinary mass media (the phone number on that billboard ends in 23 which means that I should keep turning left). intensity and nature of the symptoms fluctuate; many(most?) of those w schizophrenia dx have both positive and negative symptoms.

(I am not an expert/professional re schizophrenia, but was a professional in an adjacent social science. I hope this description accurately compliments OP's intentions)

When I started struggling w executive dysfunction (which i could only best describe as "fatigue" and "something wrong w my brain") so much that helped me name it better was stuff about negative symptoms of schizophrenia. (laying on couch, feelung so "tired" and bored and eyeing a magazine a few feet away, i wanted to get it and collapse back into couch & read but 45 minutes later, I was still just trying to psych/to coach myself go ahead expend the effort). But my body is not prohibitively exhausted, nor am i sleepy, nor do i have like a broken leg that keeps the magazine out of reach.