Stories of an ADD Adult

Growing up, my father was chronically late when it came to picking me up from school. You wouldn’t believe how late he would arrive. He would show up at least one hour later than he had promised. Often, he was two hours late.

I would always get so mad at him when he was late. He would make every excuse imaginable, but very few of his excuses seemed genuinely excusable. Most of the time he was late due to work or running errands.

The sad thing is that now I am chronically late to every appointment. I promised myself when I was young that I would never be a “late person” like my father, but I’ve broken that promise repeatedly.

Being late is one of those annoying parts of having ADD that you work endlessly to improve. At least there are all sorts of helpful tools and tricks to keep you a little more on schedule. I would never be on time to anything if I didn’t have a million clocks all over my house, nagging me to hurry up and leave the house.

I believe that childhood ADHD may very well be overdiagnosed. However, adult ADD is another matter altogether.

In my mind there are two main groups of people who get diagnosed with adult ADD. The first group consists of adults who had the ADHD diagnosis when they were children and are now grown up. They are the ones who didn’t outgrow their diagnosis. That is, they are the ones who genuinely suffered from ADHD as children and were more likely not to be part of the overdiagnosis trend.

The second group consists of adults who have been hearing about ADHD and adult ADD in the news, in magazines, and in commercials. They see it on TV or read the articles and say to themselves, “Hey, that’s me! That describes exactly how I’ve suffered all these years.” They then go online to find whatever other information they can find about adult ADD, including this website if they are lucky. They really do their research well, and if they are sure that they fit the symptoms, only then do they see a doctor about their problems.

Like the second group of adults, the first group is also extremely knowledgeable about ADHD and ADD, due to all the years of being labeled with the disorder. They know all the details by heart, both because they have gone through therapy and because they have been reading about ADHD and ADD for years and years.

Anyhow, both groups of adults have one thing in common: they themselves identify with the adult ADD diagnosis, including most or all of the symptoms, and they feel comfortable that it’s not a misdiagnosis. They have done their research. They differ from the children who get diagnosed with AD(H)D in that not all of those children can comfortably say that they identify with all of the expected symptoms. Many of those children have the diagnosis imposed upon them by a teacher, school administrator, doctor, or parent. Few children received the AD(H)D diagnosis only after doing their own independent research (though it may be true in some cases).

Self-diagnosis is probably quite accurate in the case of ADD. The symptoms are pretty simple to understand, and you either relate to most or all of them, or you don’t. Since the majority of adults with ADD either self-diagnosed themselves or are sure that their symptoms from childhood are real and have carried over into adulthood, the diagnosis is probably accurate for most ADD adults.

Furthermore, doctors tend to be especially careful in prescribing ADD medications to adults. Adults are also the ones who abuse these controlled medications, so doctors know to take the extra effort and care to be sure that the adult ADD diagnosis is correct.

Based on all these facts, adult ADD must not be overdiagnosed. It is a completely different scenario from childhood ADHD, which has great potential for overdiagnosis.

I don’t have any children right now.

But when the time comes for me to have children, one of my biggest fears is that they will suffer from ADHD.

I am definitely not ready to have children because I don’t know what I would do when they received the diagnosis. Would I take them to a psychiatrist early in life and have them go through therapy? Would I subject their developing little brains to harsh stimulant medication?

I do know that I would try to spend as much time with them as possible. I would want to give them every possible advantage of having a loving parent to help them with their classwork and homework.

I would buy many educational toys to help them with their concentration and memory. I would give them all the art supplies they wanted in order to encourage their creative thinking.

I guess I probably wouldn’t medicate them until they reached late high school or college. It would break my heart to see them struggle through school the way I did, though, so I don’t know if I could sit back and watch them suffer with their illness, knowing that medication existed and was available.

I knew I wasn’t normal when I was young, although I didn’t know what ADHD was until I was in middle or high school. Therapy might help my children understand the differences in their brains, but having the ADHD label might hurt their self-esteem.

Until I have a better idea of what I would do for my kids, I will not have children. I am not ready to bring up children and watch them suffer in the same way that I have always suffered.

I was talking to a friend of my mother’s who happens to be a pediatrician. She regularly prescribes ADHD medications to her young patients. She was saying that it’s sad how so many parents insist that their kids be given a prescription immediately, rather than trying to examine and change other factors first.

I agreed that too many parents try and take the easy way out of solving their children’s problems with medicine. But I also told her that I was a patient myself, and that I was taking Ritalin. I told her that it had helped me tremendously.

She said that if it’s what helps, that it’s good to take the medication. She clarified her words right away, saying that there were children who justifiably needed meds to treat their ADHD, but that there were too many other kids who needed more personal attention from teachers and parents first before resorting to prescriptions.

Children 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.

I loved reading when I was young. I would go to the library and check out tall stacks of children’s books. I won prizes in all the children’s reading challenges, because I loved reading so much.

Then what happened?

As the books became longer, I lost interest. My favorite books were the ones that could be finished in a single sitting or two. Anything beyond that and I wouldn’t be able to finish the book.

Around sixth grade, I completely lost interest in reading for pleasure. That was the time when people started reading thick young adult books. I could not finish books more than a centimeter thick. I sometimes had to read long books for school, but it was grueling and I always grew tired of the plots before finishing those books.

One of the most well-known examples of hyperfocusing in an ADD/ADHD child is with video games. Mothers and fathers often tell the doctors of their children, “He can’t concentrate on his homework for more than a couple of minutes, but put him in front of a television with a video game pad in his hands, and watch him concentrate for hours.”

It wasn’t true for me. I couldn’t concentrate on video games. I didn’t have a video game console of my own, but I often had a chance to play Nintendo at my next-door neighbor’s house.

I would play for a few minutes, but then I would lose interest. At that point, it wouldn’t make a difference whether I was winning or losing in the game. I would stop caring about the game entirely. I would be thinking about other things, and everything would seem more interesting than the dull video game.

I suspect that clumsiness is an ADD/ADHD trait, even though it is not officially recognized as one. I have seen so much overlap between the people I know who have ADD or ADHD and the people I know who are clumsy.

I was one of the clumsiest children when I was young. I would spill every glass of juice, milk, water, or other drink, guaranteed. I was bad at sports because my coordination was poor. It would take much more practice for me to become good at something, than for anyone else to attain the same level of skill.

My parents were extremely clumsy too. They still are, but that’s another story.

I think my clumsiness was a mixture of forgetting what I was supposed to be doing and thinking about other things. I had too much going on inside of my head at once.

My elementary school had Study Hall right after school. In Study Hall, everyone was supposed to work on their homework for an hour.

I usually squandered away the time, instead of taking advantage of it. I would really try to do my homework, taking it out every time and getting ready to do it, but keeping my mind focused enough to actually complete any of it was a problem. My mind wanted to think about everything else, from thoughts about earlier in the day to observations about the children in the room.

By the end of the Study Hall period, pretty much everyone else was done or almost done with their homework. I, on the other hand, was still at the beginning, even though I had struggled and it had not been fun.

I was a child before the ADHD diagnosis had exploded in popularity.

I wonder if I would have been diagnosed as an ADHD child if I had been born during a later decade. Would my parents have suspected my problem? Would my teachers have suggested to my parents that I see a child psychologist?

I might be lucky that I missed the childhood ADHD popularity boom. I grew up without Ritalin, without Adderall, without stimulants, period. My brain was able to develop naturally. The connections within my brain might have formed differently, had I been stimulated by medications from an early age.

In elementary school, we were often assigned to write short stories. I would start by thinking about the assigned topic, just like all of the other students.

However, my thoughts about the topic would lead me to other thoughts, and those other thoughts would lead me to thoughts that were even more unrelated.

The time would pass, and other children would begin to hand in their assignments. I would notice and become worried, but soon afterward I would drift off into new daydreams.

I knew my mind behaved differently from everyone else’s minds, because no one else had this problem. But that was all I knew. I had never heard of ADD, ADHD, or probably even the words “attention”, “deficit”, or “disorder”.

From the time I was born, I was a daydreamer. In preschool and kindergarten, I remember spending much of the time daydreaming. The teacher would be talking, and I would have no recollection of what she (I had no male teachers yet) was saying.

My social skills were rather poor. I was naturally a shy little girl. Compounded with my shyness was the fact that I preferred playing with toys over playing with other children.

I remember getting in trouble often for breaking the rules. It wasn’t that I was purposely disobedient; it was more that I didn’t understand the rules or even know that they existed.

One day my kindergarten teacher had a talk with my parents. I didn’t realize what was going on until she told them that I was a good student but refused to follow directions. I was confused and wondered how they could possibly be talking about me, since I had no memory of the accusation. I think that I just daydreamed so much that I didn’t notice when I was being given directions.