Questions about ADD/ADHD

I suppose that by answering this you are technically helping me with my homework but I don’t think that it should be a problem considering what I’m actually looking for.

Tomorrow I am going to be interviewing a family of four. One of the daughters has ADD and this will be the subject of my interview, what it’s like to live with this in the family. I’d like to get all of their perspectives. My problem, I guess is how to be sensitive to the daughter’s (and everyone else’s) feelings.

Therefore, I’m wondering what sorts of questions I can ask in a respectful manner. I’ve compiled a general list of questions to ask the daughter just about herself. But I’m kind of struggling with what to ask everyone else so that it doesn’t just turn into a bitchfest about what’s wrong with her. I know her fairly well and she’s a pretty cool person so I want to be balanced and fair in my representation of her and ADD.

Any thought provoking questions you can think of?

Thanks

The mood of the interview may depend on how much her family knows about ADHD (ADD is no longer the label used by the DSM, and the variant of ADHD which doesn’t present with hyperactivity is called ADHD - Primarily Inattentive, which is what I and most females have (which is partly why so few girls were diagnosed with it in the 80s and 90s. Teachers and parents expected anyone with ADHD to be hyperactive, but really only the boys show up that way.)).

The thing is, ADHD is not an exclusively negative condition. People with ADHD tend to be bright, very creative, funny, a whiz at whatever subject has captured their ability to hyperfocus, and to work well in sudden-onset pressure situations. So, as much as the person and her family have to find ways to cope with the downside (impulse control, inability to focus on repetitive tasks, difficulty following a list of instructions. forgetfulness, distractibility, et cetera), there will be things that she excels at and her family will turn to her for without even realizing it’s the ADHD making it possible.

I guess it also depends on what you’re wanting to focus on in your interview. Do you want to explore how she is treating her ADHD? Some people don’t do anything, but most of us do something - dietary changes, lifestyle changes, counseling, medication, career choices, spoken and unspoken support arrangements with loved ones. Do you want to see how her diagnosis has altered the way she sees herself or how her family views her? I have close relatives who get that ADHD makes me bouncy and sociable and distractible on small scale stuff, but they’re still very judgmental on larger scale stuff - looking down on me for having less than stellar credit and such. When was the diagnosis, for that matter, made? If I’d been diagnosed in middle school - which is when it really started to have an impact on me - my parents would have known that I wasn’t being lazy or willful or immature, and that would have meant the world to me.

Once she had the diagnosis, what did the parents do about it?

The kind of questions you ask can redirect them from a bitch-fest and may even serve to educate them or let them know that they’re not alone. If you’re worried that the family members’ answers are going to be stressful to your subject, you might interview them separately. She’ll still read about what they think, but it’ll blunt things at least a little bit.

Starting off here is key. Spend some time exploring these strengths as they apply to her. Spend some time exploring whether of not their perception of her and how they treated her changed once she was labelled. Were they more understanding and more in her corner as a result? How does being in her corner currently play out?

Beginning with her hearing her praises extolled and having the specifics of how her family have worked to be her advocate enumerated will allow her to tolerate the discussion of what’s “wrong” with her much better.

Yes. Starting out with the positives is a good way to set the tone. Once she (and the family) start talking about these positive manifestations, they will segue into the negatives all by themselves (“ADHD enables me to be really X, but by the same token, being so X also make ***Y ***a huge problem”) which will then allow you follow-up questions about both the good and the bad.