My ADHD…helping those who dont have it understand it.
Since I was a small kid, I have been a school nerdy, not that I was very much of a straight-A student but I was good at school, I kept good grades and loved learning. There was one thing though, that teachers and my parents did not know what to do about, my hyperactivity and the easiness of losing interest, I was “easily distracted”. I remember going to therapy to figure out what was “wrong” with me. Teachers constantly complained about how talkative and active I was in class. Back in those days and especially in a small town like the one where I grew up, ADHD was still not a thing, at least it was not that easily diagnosed and detected, it has gotten better but it’s still not that easy.
I struggled with ADHD all my life, some experts say that as you get older you outgrow it, sometimes you take it with you through your adulthood. I had to overcome numerous challenges with the disorder and learn to work with it. One of the things it helped me with and that became one of my strengths is being a good multitasker. However, I often faced other struggles like having short attention span for certain things or becoming forgetful, it is not that you are not caring, it is simply your mind runs through so many things at once, like having a film being fast forward in your head that things easily slip out your head.
Now do not get me wrong, ADHD sometimes is misunderstood, it is not a disease or a pathology, nor it means we have a deficit of attention; in fact, what we have is an abundance of attention. The challenge is controlling it. Sounds quite a contradictory right?
ADHD has helped me with tasks that I am highly interested in, I can be immersed in a activity to the point where I become absorbed and lose track of time (hyperfocus) and my surroundings falling behind on other chores I have to do.
Another challenge and this has been the most difficult one for me, is that people with ADHD tend to have extreme emotional sensitivity. Which tends to cause high levels of anxiety. Additude health magazine describes it as follows:
“The ADHD brain is turned up to 11; our neurotransmitters burn bright. On an emotional level, this means we feel the stabbing pain of rejection, frustration, and failure more acutely than do others.”
I am not alone with these challenges. Even though the diagnosis rate of ADHD among men is 5.4%, the diagnosis rate of women is 3.2%, I believe that most of the women go underdiagnosed. I can tell that from my personal experience.
ADHD has been around for centuries, but it was until the 1980’s when it started to be mentioned as such.
The APA named it Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), with or without hyperactivity. In a revised third edition in 1987, the standard name was changed from ADD to ADHD. The DSM-IV in 1994 refined the diagnosis. It listed three different types of ADHD: inattentive type, hyperactive/impulsive type, and combined type.
People in today’s world need more knowledge and to be sensibilize about ADHD in adults. It has been one of the highly debated health conditions for many decades. Even as such, the knowledge that people in today’s world have on ADHD is not good enough to provide support for the people who struggle with it.
There is a lot unknown to ADHD and it affects different parts of your life. Being kind to yourself is a start and must, helping people understand what it is sure is helpful for those who struggle through it.
