Growing Out of ADHD
May 4th, 2005Children with ADD/ADHD and adults with ADD are pretty similar. This is probably surprising to most people, including doctors, but it isn’t surprising to those of us who are adults and who have suffered from ADD/ADHD throughout our own lives.
It seems hard to believe that the adult ADD diagnosis is so new. I can’t imagine how doctors and researchers could have believed for years and years that all children with ADHD would grow out of the illness by the time they reached adulthood. To me, that’s completely absurd.
You can’t just suddenly wake up one day and discover that your concentration and attention span are suddenly normal. It takes practice, coaching, and/or medication to get to the point of being normal.
I always hoped that one day I would grow out of my restlessness and lack of focus. Once I knew about childhood ADD, I was sure that my symptoms would be gone by the time I was an adult. I was sad to discover that the myth wasn’t true.