19/08/2026
ADHD and me. (Going public)
My recent ADHD diagnosis has given me a framework of how I can understand myself and look after myself. It’s not an excuse, a cop out, or a made up condition. It’s simply is the way I am made. My mum and her mum (good old nan, “busy” until she finally stopped at age 99) are/were the same. My nan was often very anxious, demanding and nicknamed “all of a minute Jane”. My mum lives in her own world, she has made the rules and equally never stops.
My childhood…. where I didn’t have processed food, screens and spent most days running around outside, still left me feeling like everything about me was wrong, and I still experience the same things in the same way. I was/am too much, too loud, too impulsive, talked/ talk too much, spent/spend too much, ate/eat too much….. couldn’t/ can’t spell, couldn’t/can’t concentrate, couldn’t sit still (this one haunts me to this day and causes panic attacks even now). I am impulsive, incapable of managing even simplest of diary type tasks, I struggle to sleep, struggle to follow a single thought pattern, have at least one song (sometimes more than one) buzzing around my mind…. and I never free from thinking… I have to say that if I was young today in this world of screens etc… I find it hard to imagine how I would have survived at all.
I have chosen to not be medicated, and now am working with my therapist to appreciate myself and learn how to be me… just a little late at 62 perhaps…but if I had to go to school I might think differently about meds.
Using the “medical model”, as shown on the channel 4, The ADHD myth completely ignores my actual experience of life. I have one point of reference and that is my experience, telling me there’s nothing wrong because it doesn’t show up on a brain image is irrelevant (and against what it is to be a human, well, in my human mind it does).
I cannot begin to express how current media trends are hurting me. It’s like I finally have a way forward that makes sense, and then WHAM, Channel 4 produced a prime time one sided documentary, that called into question the very thing that made everything make that sense.
One of the most disabling aspect of my ADHD has a name, and for anyone like me with RSD (rejection sensitivity dysphoria), being told on a public channel that you’re probably making everything up is a severe blow.
As a therapist I know that the current atmosphere of neurodiversity bashing is systematically undermining and undoing years of research and work and education. The effect on so many will lead to distress and increase in mental illness as a direct result of basically being dismissed. I totally agree that screens have been a complete , disaster,but I STILL uphold that my life would have been so much easier if I had been seen as ADHD when I was a child.
To suggest that accommodations set people up for failure is, in my professional opinion absolutely absurd and wrong!!!! It’s totally opposite…. we need to make accommodations and make the environment fit the person, and NOT the person fit the environment ! (This bit of the documentary made me most angry).
We need a sense of proportion, but I am saying I have ADHD, even if the ex Chair of the Royal College of GP’s says it’s a made up diagnosis.
