Ask the Middle Aged Woman with Severe ADHD

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I know a good number of Dopers have ADHD besides myself, and I invite them to add to this thread freely.

I was diagnosed with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder in 2005, when I was 46 years old.

The short and snappy version of the symptoms I’d dealt with my whole life and how it led to the diagnosis:

I was a very intelligent child and I made excellent grades in grammar school. Entering middle school pulled the rug out from under me completely and I never recovered. The only class I attended with any regularity was English, and I consistently received A’s. In virtually every other subject I failed or barely scraped by with a D. When I was IQ tested in 8th grade it was something like 140, so they knew the problem wasn’t stupidity.

In eleventh grade California introduced the Proficiency Exam, which is an alternative to the GED and tests your ability to function in the real world: can you write a check, read a recipe, etc. I took that and left school.

When I was 20 I went to junior college and took only classes I was interested in: psychology, philosophy, many broadcasting courses. I attended for 3 years and made the Dean’s list with a 4.0 every year.

Between the ages of 18 and 36 I had approximately 30 jobs. A few were temporary to start with, a few were things I had created on my own, the rest I was fired from after being a star in the beginning. I did many different kinds of work, ranging from answering service and driving a cab to editing a porn mag, working as a bookkeeper and office manager, sales of many kinds… lots of things. I always rocked it out the gate but eventually got to a point where I wanted to kill myself rather than show up one more time.

In partnership with my boyfriend we created a special pornsite at the dawn of the internet. We both struggled enormously with doing much beyond the minimum required to keep things going, but it wasn’t that big an issue because we had a good thing.

Between the ages of 30 and 45 I had about 5 different therapists. My issues were never about interpersonal relationships, love, family… maybe some here and there, but really the biggest issue was ME: I was aware that I could not seem to function like a normal human being. The fact of my intelligence was meaningless because I seemed incapable of making a goal or a plan. following through with anything… as I put it to my first therapist: I can’t even brush my teeth on anything like a schedule.

What therapy made clear to me was the horrible conundrum of my siituation: so many steps and processes therapeutically useful when one is trying to deal with one’s issues about love or relationship or pretty much anything except ADD were useless for ADD because they call upon precisely the skills I so desperately needed and lacked: write in a journal, make a plan to do X differently ona regular basiss, remember to do Y when Z occurs… well, hello, if I was good at that I wouldn’t be here freaking out over my inability to fucking control myself and remember to do things a certain way and follow through with things…

I was a very heavy smoker from age 16. I was also a voracious reader of fiction, reading 2-5-8 novels a month. I quit smoking in 2000. The day after my last cigarette I found I couldn’t focus on reading a book. From that day forward I never read a novel again (except “the Road”). When I told my then-therapist, she suggested that I might have ADD. I laughed it off, because I really had no idea what ADD REALLY was then, and I knew for sure I wasn’t hyper. (The reason quitting smoking showed my ADD in that way was because I had been using nicotine to self-medicate without realizing it. It is a stimulant, and roughly 10% of people with ADD have a good response to nicotine in terms of controlling symptoms. )

It took 5 more years for me to get a diagnosis and medication. That was 2005. I’m 54 now, and while meds help, they don’t help as much as they did, and the circumstances of my life are pretty much the absolute worst possible for someone with ADD: I live alone and I have no immediate consequences to failing to do what I need to. This is a disaster, but I’ll leave that for now.

Also, I am a freak for information, so I have educated myself about ADHD over the years, and I will say this: with a few minor exceptions, I can pretty much guarantee that the average person’s understanding of what ADD looks like is almost completely wrong. Especially when the hyperactivity is not a part of it, as it is not with me. ADD really boils down to impairment of the “executive functions” of the brain. The grown up:

The only areas in which I do not manifest severely impaired functioning is in my language and communication skills, and while I am extremely emotional and ridiculously impulsive, it does not come out as anger, which is the more frequently seen manifestation of that.

So ask away if you care to…right now I’m going to see my shrink for my meds…

2

Do you tell people you have ADHD? If so, do you worry they’ll think you’re just using it as an excuse for bad behavior?

ADHD is co-morbid with a number of neuropsychiatric illnesses. Have you or anyone else in your family been diagnosed with them?

Have you fully accepted the label or do you feel weird about it sometimes?

3

I’m your exact polar opposite, plodding, methodical, and not spontaneous at all (my sig on a different board was “I’m even more boring than you think I am.”) I’m good at my job mostly because I don’t mind mindless tedium and small details.

So I’m wondering, are you working now? What field? What kind of work did you like most in the past? I’m assuming something where there was always something different going on, rather than a daily grind.

Do you have trouble managing money and paying bills on time?

4

Yes, I tell people, I’m an open book about everything. I don’t “worry” per se, but I’m aware that many people don’t believe that ADD is a genuine disorder, and I’m also acutely aware of the fact that even people who really do understand it can still find themselves getting impatient and annoyed with the ways in which it manifests, and find themselves thinking that I could do better if I would just <fill in the blank concerning something I’m inherently poor at doing…>. This is frustrating, but its pretty much the nature of the beast.

I’m the only member of my family to have ever sought therapy of any kind for any issues. I’m not the only family member that needed it, just the only one who did. So no one else has ever been officially diagnosed with anything at all. Now that I understand what it is, I know that one of my sisters has it for sure. (My other sister is the reverse of both of us: super productive, goal oriented, amazing follow-through, etc.) My mother and father both had issues that looked a whole lot like some of the major problems in ADHD, especially my mother. My mother also suffered from depression. In terms of co-morbidity, mine is definitely anxiety with a smidge of OCD/hoarding behavior layered in.

That’s a good question, because as clearly as I see where my struggles and failures are classic ADD, I get sick of slapping the label on it all because I don’t want to “own” it, so to speak, but I also want to recognize and understand what’s happening in order to apply strategies for coping with it. I don’t have any issues with it as far as other people, it’s all internal.

My life has been incredibly painful and frustrating; I learned early on how painful it could be to have people who love you talk to you about all the “potential” you have that you’re wasting. I carried so much shame around for so many years, there was a lot of relief in finally understanding that yes, there actually was something “wrong” with me, I didn’t just suck because I’m an asshole, and I’m not imagining things when I find my big high-IQ brain completely stressed out at the prospect of having to accurately collate, sign, staple, stamp mark mail and deliver this big stack of important papers, that’s a genuine challenge for me because of the way my brain functions. I have to work hard to get that shit right.

When I got the diagnosis, I had to grieve for awhile, too. I was 46… I’d lost so much over my life as a direct consequence of this… if only I’d known sooner things might have been so much different.

I’m doing what I’ve been doing for years, only ten times more so because the money isn’t what it was. Instead of having various people doing various jobs involved in running the website, it’s all on me. Which means that if I was my sister, vs. me, I would actively, daily, for long, long hours each day, be first learning, then applying all of the following skills and abilities:
[ul]
[li]photo retouching[/li][li]html and CSS [/li][li]php, mysql and jQuery[/li][li]linux administration[/li][li]bookkeeping[/li][li]special software to facilitate management of affiliates[/li][li]tax preparation[/li][li]promotions[/li][li]advertising [/li][li]material buying[/li][li]search engine optimization[/li][li]copywriting[/li][li]digitizing 8 and 16 mm film[/li][li]using Premiere or Final Cut and or After affects to clean up and assemble film[/li][li]turn that video into something appropriate for the web[/li][/ul]

However, I am me, not my sister, so while I love to learn new things, the responsibility is bringing out huge anxiety in me… it’s complicated. But let’s just say I’m not exactly kicking ass.

As for what I “want” to do, that’s a tricky question. I want to do a number of things, but when all is said and done, people who know me tell me what I already know: the best possible jobs for me would be voiceover and radio. It’s where my greatest gifts lie, as well as my passion. But I need to earn a living at the moment. That’s my biggest challenge. I’d love to earn a living doing what I know I’m good at and love, but for today that’s not happening so I have to do the best with what’s in front of me.

I’m fundamentally unemployable in the traditional sense, so the only hope I have of earning a living is making the most of the website and a few other internet -related things. Unfortunately, while I am answerable to the people who now own the website, they are anything but taskmasters, so it really comes down to me being my own boss and that’s pretty much the worst possible situation for a person with ADD because the single most useful thing the world can give them to help them function is direct, immediate accountability, because we are incapable of holding ourselves to account. ADD is, most damagingly, an issue of self-regulation.

Everything happens at the last possible moment. I alleviated the pressure of that when money was flowing by setting everything to be paid automatically. Now I have to do too much juggling just to get things paid so I have to be on top of it directly. It does get done, but usually in the last seconds available.

And since my impulse control is virtually non-existent, I have always had a problem managing money, as did my mother.

5

I have no way to check it, but I’ve long suspected that my Dad may have had a minor case of ADD (hyperfocus, utter inability to concentrate on stuff which did not interest him), corrected partly through education (the Jesuits are very good at teaching structure) and self-medicated with heavy smoking. He once took amphetamines to study for an exam, back before anybody knew they could be addictive or dangerous, and promptly fell asleep - his studymate was unable to wake him for almost 24h. When he stopped smoking he was already being treated for cancer, so the lack of focus and inability to make any plans or make the simplest decisions were attributed to “the Illness and its treatment”.

6

How were you able to type out such a long

7

What is this I don’t even

8

Wow, Stoid, you sound like my twin, except I was diagnosed at the age of 34 (and when I told my friends, every single damn one of them said “you didn’t know?”), and I’m 41 now.

Let’s see: straight A student until middle school, check. Constantly told by parents and teachers that I wasn’t “living up to my potential”, check. Failing or almost failing any class which required rote memorization or repetitive detail work, check. Leaving things to the last minute and then finishing them in a blind panic, check. Becoming an honor student when I got to college, check. Having constant problems with money management as an adult, check. Co-morbid diagnosis of depression, check. Carrying around buckets of shame, self-hate, and resentment, check.

Between the ADD (which I prefer as a name to ADHD, because most people don’t understand that ADHD can present without the hyperactive component. It’s called ADHD - Primarily Inattentive) and the depression, just keeping up with the basic demands of life becomes an Olympic event.

On my really good days, I can get so much accomplished, it leaves regular people with their jaws hanging open. I don’t get really good days very often anymore. In a good month, I can handle job duties, social life, finances, and get a major creative project in. I haven’t had a really good month in several years.

I think what’s probably the most frustrating of all this is that I know it’s due to a difference in how my brain is wired. Yet, because of this, even my friends and family think I’m a flake, a spendthrift, I’m lazy, and I’m “wasting my potential”. What they don’t see is that every day is a struggle - a struggle to remember details, a struggle to prioritize, a struggle to stay focused.

I do so much better in jobs which have immediate tasks, especially when they’re people oriented. But there’s only so much tech support you can do before you burn out. I love teaching, but the amount of sustained, focused effort necessary to get a job is simply beyond me - even though the job isn’t. Some times, I think I should go back to school and get a master’s, but I suspect it would only exchange the troubles of work for the troubles of school, and after I was done, I’d just have to go out, get another job, and relearn how to deal with all the stressors of that position.

9

That’s just what I was going to

10

Hi Stoid,

I remember you bought a semi-recumbent bike a while back and were pretty stoked about using it.
Did you stick with it? If so do you find that the exercise helps with your symptoms?

I do not have symptoms to your degree, but also have problems sticking with things and establishing new routines. Using my bicycle for basic transportation needs is the only exercise program I have ever been able to stick with. I find the exercise helps me mentally and emotionally at least as much as it does for me physically.

11

Coke or Pepsi?

12

Are you me?

My cousin insists that I have AD(H)D; she says that it runs in the family. My friend, who has been diagnosed with it, thinks that I do not.

It’s weird. Half the time I am scattered and can’t focus. It takes great effort to ‘latch on’ to a task, and stop being distracted. Stress, guilt, depression make the scatterbrainedness worse. But once I’m in a task, I can’t stop thinking about it. At times I do very well with detail-oriented tasks like indexing manuals.

I’ve connected with a counselor at the College, and I think I’m going to see whether I can get a real yes/no diagnosis for this, along with prosopagnosia and Asperger’s. I don’t know whether I have any of these–I just have suspicions–but I’d like to know.

13

Can you say what led you to include the qualifier “severe” in your thread topic? My understanding is that ADD has no severity scale diagnostically. Is this a self-reported scale based on your current level of functioning? Is it a label a diagnostician gave you? Is it something that is subject to change? ARe there times when you would have rated it less severe?

My son was diagnosed with ADHD at age 7 and I’m still on a learning curve as to how best we can support him and minimize the hit to his self-esteem that so many report.

14

Is this ADD stuff something that is a spectrum kind of thing, or do some of the symptoms maybe come with intelligence instead of ADD?

The reason I’m asking is because I have a lot of them- hyperfocus, inability to concentrate on details, inability to even notice details at times, easily bored, adventurous, etc…

However, I’m good at prioritizing, good at planning, and pretty good at planning ahead, etc… I’m not a last-minute kind of person at all. Never had money management problems or impulse control problems- I have the impulses, and they’re strong, but I can control them 99% of the time.

Where I have the hardest time is getting interested and making myself grind out stuff I really am not interested in (like say, at work).

15

I don’t know about a “Severe” label, but when I was diagnosed as an adult I was told I had “moderate ADD”.

16

Your dad was lucky; because my mother was working and a bit of a mess herself, all I had was LA public schools and her disappointment and anger to help me. The Jesuits were probably your father’s salvation.

The smoking thing is huge, people with ADD smoke at much greater rates than the general population. And now that I know, it explains why the very first day I began smoking I smoked a whole pack and never slowed down. I quickly got up to two packs and stayed there for 26 years.

nyuk nyuk. As I said, the one area where I do not manifest classic ADD symptoms is in communication skills.

Obviously, I hear you loud and clear. Turns out we’re not such special snowflakes after all… :wink:

Since I traded it for my car, I’ve had no choice but to stick with it. I had to impose it upon myself as an unavoidable requirement or I would not have stuck with it, which is kinda true of everything that my adult self wants me to do but my no-executive-functioning ADD suffering child will not let me do because she’s busy doing something more immediately interesting and rewarding…so she will say “later, later, later…” thinking she has about 200% more time to do it than she really does and finding herself sad and frustrated that she didn’t end up doing it later…sound familiar my fellow ADDers? Sigh…

(As an aside: the bike and the Bike Tow Leashhave been the greatest things I’ve ever done for me and any dog I’ve ever loved. Preston accompanies me on most local errands and it has enhanced our relationship enormously.

Here’s the thing: if a topic is interesting to you, the relative complexity is not an issue. It all comes down to whether you find it rewarding, literally. Which is why people can be so unsympathetic and annoyed, the complaint is “What do you mean you can’t sustain attention? You seem to do just fine sitting for 12 hours at a time in front of a video game! (insert your hyperfocus thing here)” Hyperfocus is the flip side of the disorder…if I am interested in something, I will put off going to the bathroom until I’m practically peeing my pants. “later later later in-a-minute”. Which is where the whole time management and time horizons thing comes in. We can intellectually understand what a given time span is and looks like, but we consistently misjudge what WE can do within a given time frame.

If you are not familiar with his work, check out Russell Barkley Of all the experts, I think he is the best and has the best understandingof what’s going on.

My favorite description of what ADD is that we love to slay dragons while other people clean up, do the paperwork, and order more dragons.

17

I’m so glad you asked and I so hope my answers can help!

It is a self-reported thing. I dont’ believe that the ADD that I was born with was or would have been all that life-altering if it had been or could have been recognized and correctly addressed when I was a child. I am very fortunate that most of my closest friends have known me since I was a child so they are able to confirm my own view of my experiences, which were that I had no support or understanding within my family, could not have had because my mother was a working mother with sever depression, some ADD and other issues as well. Instead of giving me what I really needed, I was blamed and shamed for being lazy, self-indulgent, and I’m sure you can fill in the list. This of course was a terrible start that simply spiraled further the older I got and the deeper my struggles buried me. This also allowed my naturally inclined responses and behaviors to become more and more deeply entrenched, sort of running grooves into my brain making it that much harder to break out of them.

I have never had a decent support system preventing me from becoming the worst possible version of a person with ADD. I was never taught strategies and skills to help me cope or overcome. I have rarely had any decent structures of accountability that didn’t simply shape up to be new forms of blame and shame that just led to self-loathing. My best friend says that there can be no question that it’s severe and very real because the consequences I’ve suffered have been so enormous that if it were genuinely within my control I would have controlled it.

At this particular point in my life, the reason I say it is severe is not only because my habits and ways of being had been allowed to become so entrenched for so many years before I knew what was going on, but also because of my current circumstances. Living alone and working at home alone is about the worst possible situation I could have, because, like many people with ADD, I will not do for myself what I WILL do for someone else. For instance, I don’t like a dirty house but I won’t generally be consistent about cleaning it for myself, there are too many other more interesting things to take my time and attention. However, I want to see friends and have them spend time with me, so I have made deals with friends to come visit me on a regular basis to motivate me to clean up. If they don’t come, I don’t do it. If they do, I do.

When the consequences are bearing down on me, I will do what I need to, at least the absolute minimum, but if they are somewhere down the line… nah. Later…

As the parent of a young child who has been diagnosed, let me tell you a few mistakes I know are being made in schools. First and foremost, ADD gets lumped with other “learning disabilities” and is often treated similarly, one major example being giving ADD kids extra time to do their work. NO. NO NO NO NO. WRONG. They do not need more time, because I guarantee you they will not use it to do their work. They will use it to do what interests them and get their work done at the last minute anyway. So the extra time is pointless and wasted.

If your son is dealing with ADD, what he needs to have a successful life starts now, for sure. He needs help learning how to start things and understanding the structure of what he’s supposed to produce. In practical terms he needs and will need to learn specific, concrete, clear methods and means of studying and producing schoolwork. He needs to have a solid, internalized understanding of structure of all kinds, this is crucial. He needs to have immediate accountability and consequences right in front of him to motivate him. Telling him he’s going to fail in 6 months is meaningless, or even worse, telling him his whole life will be a ruin if he doesn’t spend the next 6 years rocking school. That will have exactly zero impact, because that’s somewhere off in a future that simply does not exist for him emotionally. What exists for him emotionally is the next five minutes.

He will spend his energy seeking things that he finds rewarding and he will gravitate towards that. Your challenge is in helping him learn to get the rewards out of life’s inherently unfun realities, learning to trick himself or structure his life in such a way so he will find it easier to do things that he wants to do intellectually ( be a good student, have a successful life, gain parents approval) but which do not naturally give him the immediate hit his brain is telling him to go get. You need to help him found a way to serve his brain’s demands in ways that serve his life’s bigger goals.

If he has ADD his problem is self-regulation. Simply telling him to regulate himself and do what he should and not what he shouldn’t is beyond pointless. However much he wants to be better, he doesn’t possess the tools. It’s kind of like telling someone who has no feet that they should just try harder to walk.

Medication will help him harness his brain while he’s medicated, but he needs to learn the most effective ways to do that. It’s like giving the footless person prosthetic feet; they can walk, but not well, it will take practice, and when the feet come off they still won’t be able to walk, but at least they will remember what it felt like so the next time the feet are put on they will be able to walk a little better.

Self-control is an issue for all of us to one degree or another, critically so for people with ADD. Researchers have done some very interesting experiments and learned a lot about how it operates. I’ll share more about it later, and I strongly urge you to read it…

It’s absolutely a spectrum thing. Hey, pretty much all mental issues are spectrum things…everything that people with ADD experience are things that all human beings experience sometimes, it’s just a matter of degree. When the issues begin to impair your life, it’s become a disorder that needs to be addressed. I peg the needle in the red zone.

And Bob is in the yellow… :slight_smile:

18

Perhaps not, but the length and density of your posts in this thread suggest (at least to me) someone manifesting classic “speed-induced graphomania” symptoms.

19

Thank you for sharing.

20

Thanks for answering and giving your insight. While it’s pretty easy to identify some of the What Not to Dos (blaming, labeling someone as lazy), it’s not always intuitive to identify the To Dos.