A community for women to find support and discuss living with ADHD.
If you're functioning, what are people supposed to do?
If you're suffering from a medical issue that's for a medical professional, not your coworker/neighbor
Like, not minimizing the condition, or the experience of the individual. But a society can only hope to react to issues if they perceive the issue. If you are functioning and achieving in society, there are no signals.
Further, it wouldn't be appropriate for your coworker or similar to get involved in your healthcare.
I think there are signs we’ve been conditioned to overlook as a society though. Parent seems frazzled and exhausted? Well that’s just part of parenting. And yes, it’s hard to know if it’s “regular” tiredness or something more. But if a friend has a cough and it’s not going away, we’d tell them they should see a doctor.
There is some kind of “timeframe” for physical symptoms where most of us would tell the other person to get it checked out. But we as a society haven’t learned that same kind of timeframe for mental health stuff. Hopefully now that we’re becoming more aware of all the ways things like ADHD and autism can show up, we’ll start noticing when those around us are struggling. Even better, maybe we should all get at least annual mental health checks like we do for our bodies, teeth and eyes.
I agree with the sentiment - co-workers should not be knowledgeable of one's health requirements.
The problem is that there is no option to break from the race. Even if we are wheezy, we must run yet.
For real, also an appeal to victim status coming from a successful doctor doesn't hit quite the same.
So you somehow think doctors don't have to deal with mental struggles?
We all got problems. I'm just having a little trouble mustering too much sympathy for this highly successful individual.
Well as an adult that went a long time before my diagnosis, I can tell you that if you understood what it was like to live like that, you'd have no problems mustering sympathy.
Hell, I'm as 'eat the rich' as anyone else here but it doesn't matter how externally successful you appear if you feel miserable inside all the time.
Not a woman, but every word here strikes home. Noone cares that you're breaking until you break.
And often only then because you breaking is inconvenient to them.
My entire life summed up.
How do people know that you're on the verge of burnout? They're not mind readers. They probably see you over achieving and just think wow, that person's really got their shit together without realizing that you're pushing yourself too hard.
Right? People can post any monologue they want on social media. That was her monologue, imagining that anybody around her cared or even thought about what was going on deep inside the recesses of her convoluted psychoneuropathy.
And then there's people like me who can burn out without over achieving. Which makes op a role model.
Well, people need to stop and actually think for 5 minutes. Is it really ok to have a person work 12-16 hours every day and that actually be healthy? How would I or so and so be if we worked the same amount of hours or put in the same amount of work? Does this person ever take vacations? Days off? Do they look like they are getting enough sleep or have made comments that they don't?
These were all common themes in every person I have worked with who got burnt out, but never complained or said much. It took me over a decade to learn how to say no. That I had had enough. That I deserved time off. A lunch break. That sleep was more important than being called multiple times a night, every night.
One of the few good things my last boss did, despite all of faults, was force one of his employees to stop traveling for work for a while. The guy was literally flying his kids (both under 4) to his parents place, flying to job sites, and then having everybody shipped back home at the end of each trip.
Of course, I was one of the ones who had to pick up the slack, be guilt tripped by the other guys' situation as a single dad, and burn out instead. Especially when they knew I was raised by a single dad too. No beef with the other guy though. We both quit and ended up at the same place. My boss did the right thing, but the wrong thing for the rest of us.
The point is, we as people, and especially people in supervisory roles or in heavy partnerships, need to be a little less self absorbed and stop to think about the person's life logically. When dealing with power inequality, you absolutely have to understand that there is a pressure to perform and not say anything. If you happen to be a workaholic, you can't force the same on everyone else either.
I absolutely hate it when people go on about how they worked all night and that they should be rewarded for it or that everything else should too. I threw the HR lady for a loop when she went on how she had to work all weekend, last night, the upcoming weekend, etc. I questioned why. Why didn't you just say no, I need more time? That I need help? That I have my own life and that my weekends are mine? I broke her damn brain. She couldn't really come up with a good reason and was completely confused.
While some people hide it really well, I have still found that in most cases, there are plenty of signs that somebody is headed for burnout. You just have to look for them.
See, even without ADHD, this is still a problem. Burnout does not require undiagnosed neurodivergency - we need to dispel the myth that working this much and carrying this much is normal. ADHD shouldn't have anything to do with it.
Nor should being a woman, for that matter. Take care of each other out there.
As someone who crashed and burned... hard, multiple times, yes that is what it took to even begin the conversation about what had been eating away at me my entire life. Maybe the quiet overachieving loner wasn't OK.
You can really mess yourself up trying to fit into a neurotypical world. The biggest problem is these people don't understand that just because you can't see something doesn't mean it's not there.
In the UK it is official healthcare policy to deny the existence of this problem for as long as possible. It is estimated that around 30% of the male prison population has ADHD.
One of my favourite pastimes is denying the existence of neurotypical behaviour, those unstated social rules like starting conversations with small talk, fuck that noise.
It's hard to know if something is there when it's invisible. That's why one of the first thing mental health charities tend to work on is awareness.
Kahneman referred to this cognitive bias as WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is).
Step 1. Build a habitat in a vacuum for the UK healthcare minister.
Step 2. When they bang on the glass, appear momentarily interested in their plight.
Step 3. WYSIATI???
Step 4. Profit
Eye contact is a myth propagated by people trying to make our autistic friends and neighbors uncomfortable
People don't even start small talk in my office. We just laugh about memes, funny videos, games or do animal noises
I want that kind of job environment instead of constantly having to work with toxic men who constantly make sexist and homophobic jokes that make me super uncomfortable. 🥺
Eh, that's part of the culture in my country 😺
You could replace the word woman with person and it still applies, seems a bit pointlessly gendered to me
Girls are significantly less likely to be diagnosed than boys and are more likely to get diagnosed later in life.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10173330/
Edit: Underdiagnosis in female-presenting children will continue to be a problem until it is recognized and corrected. When this sort of silent type of ADHD is codified, the minority of boys with this type should also benefit as a result. It's a women's issue because it predominantly affects women. It's really gross to come into a women's space and essentially say "forget the many women; let's talk about the few men."
I think your point needs to be highlighted here. I wasn't diagnosed until I was 17 . I was the quiet kid in class. I hardly participated but i came off as shy. The primary reason was that I never bounced off the walls like my son literally does without his medicine. My ex wife was diagnosed at 5, but it was because she presented with hyperactivity you usually see in boys.
With ADHD in general, if we improve diagnosis in girls, it will drastically improve it across the board.
For real. It sucks so hard that not having the classic disruptive hyperactivity is pretty much an express ticket to going undiagnosed. That's what caused me to go undiagnosed until like 27.
Luckily my daughter isn't going to have to go through the same thing. Between having an established family history, having that more classic hyperactivity you usually see in the boys, and the fact that we've known she's had it since my wife was pregnant with her and she'd take a nap while her twin brother got all hopped up on the caffeine my wife would use to help her migraines. Only reason she doesn't already have a diagnosis is because she's too young to officially diagnose. Everybody from her pediatrician, to the people at the clinic that diagnosed her autism, to her preschool program agrees she has it.
It was hilarious. One time, she stole an entire large iced capp while we were in the checkout line at Sam's Club. They were doing inventory at the nearby tables and one of the workers had sat it on the register. We didn't see it because they were in the cart on the other side of the checkout lane until we're get the cart back to leave and we just see this little thing HUGGING THE DAMN COFFEE to hide it and greedily chugging it. It was apparently full when she got it and she had drank pretty much the entire thing. The look of horror on that poor employee's face as my wife finally wrestles the cup away from her and it's got maybe 2oz left in it. She immediately fell asleep in the car and had what I can only assume was the best nap of her little life because she didn't wake up for like 4 hours. Even when I picked her up out of her seat.
Yup,I hear ya. It took till I was 34 to get a diagnosis of severe ADHD. It’s hard not to be angry when I think of all the ways it could have been so much easier and better for me, but it’s wasted energy to do that, honestly. Just gotta move forward, you know?
It so is. For me it's especially hard when I think of how much I struggled in college and how that spiraled into a full on anxiety disorder that took me like 7 years to get back to a place I feel good about being mentally.
Luckily my daughter has an established family history now and very well documented, very noticeable, and recognizable symptoms and shouldn't have any trouble getting diagnosed once she's actually old enough to officially diagnose. She's already got an IEP in place for her preschool program.
So? It's not like there arent also a statistically significant population of guys who are diagnosed later in life, and they often verge on burnout exactly as described in the post...
So? This is a women's community.
Fair, though a) she originally posted this to the world on Twitter, so in the original context it's a little odd to be needlessly gendering it, and b) I still correct my dad when he needlessly genders stories even if there are no other women around, it's still a bad habit that leads him to tell stories that sound exclusionary and mysoginistic.
In childhood, the ratio of boys to girls with ADHD is about 3:1 whereas in adulthood it is closer to 1:1, suggesting that women and girls are underdiagnosed in childhood
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10173330/
It's not needlessly gendered to talk about issues that predominantly affect women.
I mean, 75% of adults suffering from ADHD are diagnosed in adulthood:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/217065
If 2/3 of those are women, that means that 25% of adults with ADHD were diagnosed as children, 50% are women diagnosed as adults, and 25% are men diagnosed as adults, which is still a statistically significant proportion of the population.
That's a 20 year old paper. Diagnosis rates have risen a lot since then, and more recent studies suggest that boys still get diagnosed about 3 times more often than girls. I don't see the point of pretending like this isn't a gendered issue. We're talking about an issue that predominantly affects women. No one is saying that men aren't suffering. From an awareness standpoint, it makes more sense to draw attention to the larger population of sufferers to press the urgency of the issue. Once this silent type of ADHD that is more common in girls is codified, the boys with this type should benefit as well.
I don't see the point of pretending like this isn't a gendered issue.
I wouldn't argue that it's not a gendered issue, or an issue impacted by gender, but I would argue that the test for whether or not you should gender something isn't whether or not it predominantly effects one gender, but whether or not you can replace the gender specific term with a gender neutral one and still get the same point across.
In this specific context, feeling constantly on the verge of being overwhelmed because you have undiagnosed ADHD is something that everyone with undiagnosed ADHD suffers through, whether they're men, women, or identify differently.
Or conversely, the majority of construction workers may identify as male, but it's still problematic to talk about construction jobs or problems with the construction industry as if it's a gendered issue that only men suffer with. If they were to talk about specific examples of say, male : male peer pressure, and male gender norm expectations that they were facing then it would make sense, but if they were just talking about something that every construction worker goes through then it would be a little odd and exclusionary to say something like "as a man, waking up for a 5am shift sucks".
It's her life, it's her gender. She's not implying that her experiences are exclusive to her gender.
She may not mean to be, but from a linguistic standpoint, by using woman instead of person she inherently is implying that the specificity of gender matters.
It's the same as when a guy needlessly genders a woman in a story to make it mysoginistic.
Check the community, champ. You're in a forum made to talk about experiences of women with ADHD, so gender is a bit relevant to the discussion.
I realize where we are, and the struggles of people are real. However, i would like to point out that this is a classic male problem to have. Almost every man I have ever met has gone through this, and the others are just really good at hiding it.
I realize. But this community is a space for women to discuss their dealings with ADHD in a specific place. There are lots of other ADHD subs for memes and discussion outside of that, though, if that would help :)
Also, I assure you, I was the same. But then also reached past burn out multiple times. In general, people still didn’t care. And then burned out, FINALLY with a diagnosis, the expectations were still there. Are still there.
I’m glad we have us though ❤️
I am seeing a few negative comments on here and it's baffling. It's a post about learning that your issues had something to do with a mental health disorder. No where in this post did it say my coworkers should fix it. My partner and friends and family need to be involved deeply in my health care. (Though part of my journey was talking to those people and asking them to point out things about my behavior I didn't think about or realize might be part of ADHD)
When I first learned I had ADHD I was sort of baffled and lost. I couldn't see how it got missed and it felt like someone should have noticed but no one did and I am still in the process of unpacking years of self doubt and terrible thoughts. Part of that process is realizing why people may not have noticed, or why you might not have noticed. Hell had a friend not asked me if I had ever been tested I wouldn't have even considered asking a professional.
This point doesn't read as blaming the people around them so much as grief at learning late. Grief at not reaching out sooner. Maybe some grief at someone not simply saying hey you okay? But it doesn't read to me as blaming anyone just sadness.