All About ADHD

This week’s blog post is from our Treasurer, Kayleigh, in light of #ADHDAwarenessMonth.

There is a lot of negative stigma associated with ADHD: people in prison, lazy people, daydreamers, disturbance in class, naughty children, and the list goes on...... October is ADHD month, so what a better time than now to talk about ADHD from the person-with-ADHD’s perspective instead.

According to ICD-11, ADHD is diagnosed if a person has at least 6 months of broadly categorised symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, or both, across multiple settings and which have direct negative impact on the person’s functioning such as socially or academically. However, this is far from enough to explain the struggles faced by people with ADHD. I recently came across an artist, Dani Donovan, who has ADHD. Her comics give us a great insight into what an ADHD life is like.

People with ADHD can be perceived as lazy, because it seems like they are always doing things last minute. Dani shows how people with ADHD perceive time which is by “not now” aka “I have a lot of time”, against “now” aka “I have run out of time”. People with ADHD also have difficulty engaging in conversations due to a difficulty in picking up social cues or turn taking. Thus, many people find that they are either talking too much or zoning out. As above, we find that people with ADHD can be over-talkative. This is not just because they are hyperactive but also due to the difficulty in organising thoughts. As Dani nicely demonstrates how it is hard for her (and many people with ADHD) to even start telling a story, therefore, she ends up starting with a pre-story prologue for context. Throughout the story, she also gets distracted, loses train of thought and side-tracks. By the end of the story, the other person might already be bored so it ends up by apologising for the long story. Commonly, this also applies to situations where people with ADHD are writing emails or essays etc. where they end up with overly long paragraphs as it is just hard to be concise with an ADHD mind.

Another example shows Dani’s thought process of how to answer a text. We sometimes find people with ADHD not replying to texts (or emails, letters etc) or replying a long time after the text was sent. One aspect of it, as Dani has drawn, is the forgetful aspect of ADHD. In addition to the difficulty in organising thoughts as mentioned above, it could easily end up in a situation where the person sees the text, doesn’t know what to say, or how to respond, forgets about it and thus never responds.

Finally, everyone with ADHD is different, and each goes through different struggles in life. Nonetheless, this gives us a small snapshot into the real life, day-to-day struggles of someone with ADHD, which extends beyond the criteria set out in DSM or ICD. From this, I also hope to encourage people with ADHD to talk more about their struggles, and others to listen and understand. #ADHDAwarenessMonth

References: 1) https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en... 2) https://www.facebook.com/danidonovanart/ 3) https://twitter.com/danidonovan