ADHD affects millions around the world but is still surrounded by misconceptions. Photo / 123rf
ADHD affects millions around the world but is still surrounded by misconceptions. This collection of stories offers information, solidarity, help and support.
This story was previously published in January and has been updated with additional content.
Sharing your ADHD diagnosis can be empowering, but not everyone reacts in a positive way.
To say there has been an explosion in the number of people being diagnosed with ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) in the last few years would not be an understatement.
The ADHD Foundation, a charity which advocates, supports and campaigns for awareness of the condition, reports a 400% increase in the number of adults seeking a diagnosis since 2020.
Yet although cynics might say the rise is partly down to social media, with thousands of TikTokers posting about the condition, or the fact people with ADHD may be entitled to disability benefits, the condition itself is nothing new.
ADHD is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in adults. Yet many healthcare providers have uneven training on how to evaluate it, and there are no United States clinical practice guidelines for diagnosing and treating patients beyond childhood.
Without clear rules, some providers, while well-intentioned, are just “making it up as they go along”, said Dr David W. Goodman, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
This lack of clarity leaves providers and adult patients in a bind.
Recognising masking behaviours is key to self-acceptance and creating supportive environments, writes Leanne Maskell
The neurodevelopmental conditions ADHD and autism have only been able to be diagnosed in the same person since 2013. As a result, millions may have struggled with one or both conditions they didn’t even know they had believing they are simply ‘weak’ for being unable to meet neurotypical standards.
Late diagnosis means we’ve often developed ‘creative adjustments’ throughout our lives to cope with the daily challenges being neurodivergent can come with, such as over-stimulating environments or emotional dysregulation.
These strategies may be a form of masking, a survival strategy to navigate a world that’s not designed for your brain. Often unconscious, masking involves suppressing natural behaviours, mimicking others, or performing socially acceptable versions of oneself to fit in. While it can help people get through daily life, it often comes at the cost of identity, mental health, and energy levels.
An innovative online tool for university students with ADHD, developed by Kiwi ed-tech entrepreneur Alex Kerr, has gone live for the new academic year.
Up to 85% of students with ADHD will drop out or fail a course during their time at university. Alex Kerr was one of them.
After sailing through school academically, her organisational and time-management skills at university were so shambolic she struggled to keep up with the workload.
“I still remember the first time I just forgot to put an assignment in,” says Kerr, who failed two courses at Victoria University before being diagnosed with executive functioning difficulties (one of the key symptoms of ADHD) during her final year of an economics and finance degree.
“I really did think, ‘Am I stupid? Or am I lazy?’ That’s something a lot of people with ADHD battle. You go into this shame spiral where you don’t want to tell anyone or ask for help.”
New research on “slow-wave sleep” may have implications for others battling insomnia, including people with anxiety and depression.
Parents and doctors often think about children’s sleep all wrong, says psychologist Jessica Lunsford-Avery. Instead of focusing on quantity of hours, they should pay more attention to quality of rest.
Well-meaning parents and physicians frequently assume a child who is sleepy during the day, or having difficulty thinking or regulating emotions, needs to spend more hours asleep, says Lunsford-Avery, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. Yet when the child is suffering from insomnia – trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, or not feeling rested after sleeping – the answer is more nuanced.
Alex Partridge created one of the seminal websites of the 2010s, then lost it, then endured a five-year legal battle that nearly killed him, then won it back, then sold it for enough money that he never needed to work again. Those are not the most interesting things about him.
The lead-up to Partridge’s diagnosis began a few years ago when, on impulse, he decided to start a business podcast. He called it Walk Away Wiser. Over the course of three hours, he spent a small fortune on recording equipment, cameras and tripods, then dismantled his bedroom and turned it into a soundproof studio. He hired a producer and booked a series of high-profile guests. Three days later, when the equipment was delivered, he no longer had any interest in doing the podcast.
He told the producer he was pulling the pin. The producer replied: “When did you get your ADHD diagnosis?”
Speaking with his partner afterwards, Partridge realised this was part of a long-running pattern in his life: high excitement and impulsive action followed by complete loss of interest – what he calls the “boom-bust cycle”.
When her son was diagnosed with ADHD aged 10, Margot started to piece together behaviours from her own childhood
For most of my life I felt out of sync with the world around me. As a mother, wife and successful entrepreneur, everyone thought that I was happy and thriving, but when I hit my 30s my social life started to suffer in ways that I couldn’t ignore. After an evening with even my closest friends, I’d feel so drained that I’d need to lie down in a dark room to calm my mind and recover from what felt like hours of hard work.
I’m not an introvert. I had spent my 20s and my university years as a social butterfly: always the loud, funny one in any group, dependably up for a party or a night out. Or that’s how I’m sure it seemed from the outside – in reality I was constantly “masking” the real me and putting on a confident face so that I would be liked. Inside I was exhausted and crumbling, and blamed myself for being unable to cope with ordinary life.
Having ADHD has meant a lifetime of challenges for Sonia Gray and her daughter Inez. Now, she tells Joanna Wane, they’re celebrating the wins
Sonia Gray, who has had her own battles with anxiety and depression, was diagnosed with ADHD after a psychologist working with Inez suggested she and her husband, Simon, get tested. Her mother told her it explained Gray’s entire childhood.
“My big thing was that I couldn’t trust my brain, so I had to be hypervigilant and would get into absolute panics if things weren’t exactly right,” says Gray, who knew from an early age that there was something different about her.
Medication has helped calm the chaos in her mind – “not completely, but just enough so it’s not 15 voices all speaking at the time and at the same volume”.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental condition. It affects the way the brain functions. Symptoms exist on a spectrum of severity ranging from mild to severe and affect millions of adults and children around the world.
Dr Max Davie is the co-founder of ADHD UK, and a consultant paediatrician who specialises in ADHD. He also has the condition.
“People who have it talk a lot about restlessness; about being easily bored and finding boredom physically unpleasant, and sometimes unbearable. They talk about being under-stimulated and about their emotions feeling out of control.”
The condition is often misunderstood.
Finding out I had the neurological condition helped to explain so much of my behaviour and enabled me to live happily, writes The Telegraph’s Annabel Fenwick Elliott
It was a crisp winter day in Zurich six years ago and I was in rehab, following a bender in Budapest. No less than 10 minutes into my first session with the eminent psychiatrist Dr Thilo Beck, he asked me a fleeting question that was about to change my life. “You do know,” he said, head cocked to one side, “that it is highly likely you have ADHD?”.
My formal diagnosis back in the UK shortly thereafter confirmed it - I scored a near-perfect score on the test – “9/9 for attention-deficit and 8/9 for hyperactivity,” Dr Frances Klemperer wrote in my report to the GP, “reflecting a life-long pattern of symptoms and impairment in multiple domains of functioning”. It explained everything from my dismal school reports and dropping out of two university courses to my self-loathing and heavy drinking.
The growing number of high-profile women who have gone public about their ADHD – the former Spice Girl Mel B, TV presenter Sue Perkins and the actress Sheridan Smith to name a few – coupled with a plethora of ADHD content across social media platforms, especially TikTok, have all prompted more women and girls to see it in themselves and seek help.
Women are now being diagnosed at unprecedented rates. So what does ADHD look like in women – and why are we only recognising it now?
D’Arcy Waldegrave shares his experiences of living with ADHD.
I was first diagnosed five years ago. I had sailed downhill mentally again with alarming pace and, at the insistence of a good friend, I booked an appointment to address it. I was diagnosed but resisted medication until late last year after another intense depressive episode. I went back, got assessed again and acquiesced to the wants of the professionals.
The shrinks couldn’t believe that I didn’t know, I’m a cookie cutter case apparently. Go figure. I’m very impatient. I build multiple outcomes in my head for even the simplest issue. I start many projects, get bored quickly, then walk away. I’ve made choices without knowing or caring about what they may result in. Reckless. I have excessive energy and enthusiasm. I’m quite exhausting to be around!
The inability to focus fully on a task required a lot of mental horsepower to overcome. The impatience meant I lost my cool too often and too quickly.
Cognitive overload can cause overwhelm in those with ADHD. Here’s how to recognise the symptoms of ADHD paralysis and ways to manage it
What is ADHD paralysis? While it’s not a medical diagnosis, nor the physical paralysis we associate with the term, people with ADHD increasingly use paralysis to describe the very real experience of cognitive overload.
It’s the brain freeze that happens when they become completely stuck, unable to make a choice, complete a task, or do anything at all.
It comes from being overwhelmed, whether that’s by a to-do list, a complicated project, mood disorders or exhaustion, and the resulting ‘paralysis’ can make their symptoms even worse.
Depression, heavy drinking, binge eating, insomnia, compulsive shopping — by her thirties, Kat Brown had accumulated a list of mental health problems. It was only when she began treatment for ADHD that life began to make sense.
Shortly before I turned 30, and while in a period of depression I seemed to cycle through every few years, I started seeing a new therapist who appeared only to wear cargo shorts. After one session, I wrote in my Notes app on my phone, “Today I suspect we got to the crux of the matter with Doctor Steve: “It sounds as though you think you are defective”. It was a testament to this man’s gentle competence that I minded neither the shorts nor his conclusions. I had spent my life trying to control how people perceived me and it was a relief to drop the act. But as much as I had started opening up about my constant sense of dread, and generally feeling more like an avatar in a meat suit than a person, I didn’t know how much time was still to go before I would get the answer to why I felt defective.
Many people with ADHD have ‘delayed sleep phase disorder’, meaning falling – and staying – asleep can be difficult. Here’s how to treat it.
With minds that whir away at night as soon as their heads hit the pillow, people with ADHD often struggle to get to sleep, and when they do their sleep is restless and disturbed.
Clinicians estimate that between 50-75 per cent of people with ADHD will suffer from debilitating sleep disorders.
“Sufferers often call it “perverse sleep” — when they want to be asleep, they are awake; when they want to be awake, they are asleep,” says Dr William Dodson, a US-based psychiatrist and leading specialist in ADHD in adults.
New research suggests symptoms of the disorder may be less severe in those with a demanding schedule.
Research has shown that ADHD symptoms can change over time, improving and then worsening again or vice versa.
And according to a recently published study, having additional responsibilities and obligations is associated with periods of milder ADHD. This might mean that staying busy had been beneficial, researchers said. It could also just mean that people with milder symptoms had been able to handle more demands, they added.
Often, people with ADHD “seem to do best when there’s an urgent deadline or when the stakes are high”, said Margaret Sibley, who is a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle and who led the study.
The study, published online in October in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, tracked 483 patients in the United States and Canada who each had a combination of inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive ADHD symptoms.
Researchers followed the participants for 16 years, starting at an average age of 8. They found that about three-quarters of the patients experienced fluctuations in their symptoms, generally beginning around age 12, which included either a full or partial remission of symptoms.
Annabel Fenwick Elliott is a UK-based freelance journalist who was diagnosed with ADHD in 2018.
This neurological condition can be both a handicap and a blessing, but many corporate environments stifle the benefits
My relationship with “the office” has always been a troubled one. “You were brilliant and a shambles; it was never clear which version would show up on any given day,” one of my first bosses in advertising told me, years before I was diagnosed with ADHD. Regardless, no matter how much I often loathed the office, I also owe my career to it. Were it not for the structure, discipline and fiery overlords involved in a typical corporate environment I would never have made it in journalism. In all honesty, I might have ended up on a park bench.
Such is the paradox with having ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; itself, both a handicap and a superpower) and working shoulder-to-shoulder, in a highly distracting goldfish bowl, with “normal” humans all day every day for most of your adult life. “People with ADHD may have problems with organisation and time management, following instructions and focusing on tasks,” says the UK’s NHS (National Health Service) website, as well as being “restless, impatient, impulsive and risk-taking”. All qualities I possess and that would look very bad on a CV, I think we can agree.
To understand why it can be so hard at the office with a brain like mine (I tested very high in all facets on the ADHD diagnostic scale), you first need a glimpse into how my mind operates before I even step inside those four walls. Imagine being in a room. The TV is on and it’s something flashy but inane, like Strictly Come Dancing. So is the radio, broadcasting the news, which is important. They’re both set to the same volume, though, so it’s hard to separate them. There’s also a DJ, playing the same song over and over again. And two monkeys squabbling in the corner. You’re trying to do a crossword. And there’s someone in the doorway asking you for directions; rolling their eyes, because “why can’t you just focus?”.
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