What is ADHD?

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or Attention Deficit Disorder. 

My firstborn was diagnosed first with autism and ADHD. My second son was diagnosed with autism later, not diagnosed with ADHD but displays a lot of the symptoms. Then, I was diagnosed last year at age 32. I had thought for many years that I had the same symptoms. It was only because I had social services in my life telling me I needed to do X, Y, and Z that I knew I could never stick to. Kids need routine... never in my life could I stick to a routine. I'm so forgetful that I can have an alarm set, get up to do it, walk into the room to do it, and forget why I went in there. I remember phoning my mum one day because my eldest, when he was a baby, wouldn't stop crying. My mum asked if I had fed him, and amazingly, I had forgotten to. I needed to do parenting courses... It's all fine and well doing these courses, but when my kids are screaming, my brain feels like it's going to explode, and I simply can't access what I've learned. I needed to prove that I simply couldn't help how I was, so I went ahead to seek a diagnosis, in the hopes that they would just give me a break and be a bit more understanding.

This leads me to how I came across Gabor's book. When my friend started her business, and I sat for a few days wondering what I could do, I realized it didn't matter what I decide to do because I'm guaranteed to fail. I can't ever stick to anything. I will get a brilliant idea, go full steam ahead, and after a while, get very bored with whatever I started. Although we struggle with paying attention, we can also go into hyperfocus, which is exactly what happens when I start something new.

Having ADHD means, for most people, they have zero patience, are very impulsive, extremely forgetful, and have a short-lived attention span. I tend to walk through life like a mindless robot on auto-drive, never really paying attention to what's going on in my mind. This makes people with ADHD vulnerable to becoming distracted. I was always called dopey as a kid because I was forever daydreaming, not paying attention when people spoke to me. As I got older, I found myself being very conscious about this. So when people speak to me, in my head, I'm saying, 'Listen, make sure you're listening.' Then, I still fail to listen because that's all I could think about. Then comes the anxiety about what people must think of me. That also has a huge effect on my social skills.

Most people think of the hyperactivity part of ADHD as being physically hyper, but that's not true. Some are physically hyper, but for others, it's all mental, or both. You could say that although we go about mindlessly, in actual fact, our minds are more than likely on overdrive, we just aren't aware of it. It becomes very hard to be organized. Just like the very name Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, 'disorder' is just a lack of order.

Gabor talks about how he felt when he first realized he had ADD. Although I had an idea that I had ADHD, it wasn't until I impulsively decided to steal one of my son's ADHD tablets that I was certain. The only way I can describe it is like my whole life I'd been living in a noisy, lashing storm on a rocky boat, then all of a sudden, the clouds separated, and everything went quiet and still. I felt relieved from my own noisy brain, but I also felt sad. I thought, so this is what normal people feel like? I went shopping to Meadowhall, which I usually avoid because people dawdling drives me nuts, and managed to just dawdle around myself happily. 

In this part of the book, Gabor also makes a point about how diagnoses are made. Someone checks what symptoms you have for a diagnosis but often misses emotional states. Most of these symptoms can be pointed to emotional reactions that aren't helpful. Why do we interrupt? Are you feeling fear? Fear of forgetting what you wanted to say? Why are we impulsive? Are you feeling excited or sad? Excited to get what you want, or do you want to feel better? Why aren't you paying attention? Is it the emotion of boredom? Are you feeling bored of listening? It's clear that emotions play a huge part in ADHD or any other mental health problem for that matter.

Thankyou for reading, I hope you found this useful. The next part is just below....