Here’s a thing I’ve noticed. On the whole, whenever I’ve seen someone say they’re autistic, no-one tries to claim it. In fact, I suspect many of them still fear it, or imagine some kind of Rain Man situation*. Yet as I’ve been telling people I have ADHD, almost everyone’s said they’ve wondered if they have it too.
There are a few provisos here. Firstly: there aren’t that many of either group, contrary to popular belief. By current estimates, around 1% of people are autistic, whereas about 6% have ADHD (and some 50-70% of group one are also in group two). Then there’s the anecdotal but widely held belief that neurodivergent types are drawn to each other like magnets. Put those together and I’m infinitely more likely to be talking to someone who might have ADHD than to an undiagnosed autistic person.
Now, there are four people I’ve spoken to in the last few weeks where I’m pretty sure they have reason to investigate further. The rest, though, tend to fall into groups known as But Everyone Does That and Let’s Not Pathologise Personality.
I’m not knocking them. I used to be one of them. In fact, I’m still wary of trying to file absolutely everything under a neat description just because it tells a cool story.
Still. There are a couple of tricky things about diagnosing ADHD which can mean that quite a lot of people who don’t have it either a) think they do or b) secretly dismiss it as just a made-up catch-all term for slightly scatty people.
Should you fit into either category—or you’re just interested—there are some things you should know.
Lots of things look like ADHD that aren’t ADHD
Anxiety. High intelligence + boredom. Some symptoms of other conditions like bipolar disorder or OCD. Trauma (both physical - ie brain injury - and emotional).
When your most clear identifying trait is an inability to keep focus, the symptoms overlap with a host of other things. Indeed, the diagnostic process is designed to tease out those nuances.
But let’s be clear: ADHD is, first and foremost, a neurodevelopmental condition. It starts at birth. If most of the symptoms and behaviours didn’t appear before the age of 12, you most likely have something else. That’s also why the medical profession used to believe most people grew out of it by adulthood.
Ha.
ADHD can fly under the radar
These days, people with ADHD are largely sorted into three houses: inattentive (Ravenclaw), hyperactive (Gryffindor) or combined (Slytherin).
But someone who is broadly classified as inattentive (ie me) can have hyperactivity that’s hard to see. I find it pretty easy to stay in my seat as long as I need to, and the only indication of my brain whirring at 500 mph is a jiggle in my right leg or the skin I’m tearing off from around my fingernails with my teeth.
Also, a lot of the things you can see do, in fact, look like personality quirks. Lots of people are chatty. Lots of people need deadlines to motivate them. Lots of people are messy.
The thing is, unless they have ADHD, those people won’t also have all the other shit that goes with it. They might feel a bit bad about being a slob, but they won’t have experienced the mortifying paralysis induced by having more than one thing to do, even when there’s ample time to do both.
Time is everything and nothing
If I have several things on my to do list with the same deadline, one of three things will happen:
I’ll feel a desperate, pressing need to go to sleep.
All I can think about is doing something else that’s irrelevant or with a much longer deadline because it’s more exciting.
I’ll panic and get stuck in doomscrolling or snacking or flipping endlessly between distractions while maybe doing tiny little bits of the task in between.
This happens whether or not I generally enjoy the task in question, and am doing it for fun, profit, or to save my life. It really doesn’t matter; overload is overload whether the weight comes from shit or sugar.
Over the years, I’ve accidentally honed enough coping strategies that no-one else ever realises this is happening, and I can smash deadlines. In fact, they’re still my best motivator, as is a desperate need to people please; ritual and routine and support like body doubling can help too. But along with the strong tea I drink to fool myself that caffeine will do much, I’ll be swallowing a boatload of guilt, terror, and destructive beliefs that I’m a burden, lazy, stupid, a procrastinator, and broken.
And then if I really can get in the zone, I’ll generally do the task in a fraction of the time it would take a neurotypical person. Because while I can only really see things as being ‘now’ or ‘not now’, once I’m focused I can think fast enough to basically compress time. Like that one time I wrote 11,000 words of a novel (admittedly a shit one) in an afternoon.
This is not in any way the same thing as occasionally putting off jobs because you slept badly or you’re dealing with some other stuff or you’re bored. Those things all matter, but they are not ADHD.
It’s probably most helpful to think of ADHD as a dopamine processing disorder
That’s a simplistic way of putting it, because there’s much more to the neuroscience of ADHD than just neurotransmitters, and dopamine isn’t the only one involved. But it’s one you’re probably familiar with, and it’s a handy way to explain the kinds of urges and instincts your friends and family with ADHD have.
While I can only speak for my own brain and my ADHD kin will display a range of behaviours, what we’ll all have in common is a need to make our brains ping. We’re reward driven—and delayed gratification doesn’t cut it. We might impulsively seek that out in all sorts of ways, from food, exercise, sex, gaming, engrossing conversation, learning… (or, um, tattoos). And when we’ve found something that really gives us that feedback loop, we might be able to focus for hours. Occasionally to the detriment of eating, sleeping, or getting fresh air.
Basically, I’m not saying no person with ADHD can use the pomodoro method; in fact, some people recommend it to try and break time blindness habits. But the idea of deliberately cutting off focus and then having to suddenly regain it after five minutes fills me with dread. Which is why I tend to agree with this piece that it’s for small tasks only.
In short: that’s why the drugs many people take for ADHD are controlled substances—essentially stimulants. They give the brain a regular dose of wakey wakey chemicals that stop people either descending into the sunken place or getting aggressively disruptive from trying to mash their mental gears together. As I like to joke: if the doctor gives you speed and you slow down, that’s a fairly decent sign you have the thing.
I don’t claim to be an expert in anything—including my own mind
After all, I didn’t even know for sure what flavour of neurowonk I had until last week. But I am beginning to spot the difference between the merely ditsy and the more likely to be diagnosed. It can get frustrating to have to explain that it’s not just a collection of common quirks—and more than that, it does a disservice to the still undiagnosed to characterise it as such.
After all, one of the most debilitating things about ADHD is what it does to the stories we tell about ourselves; there are people out there right now who have it but don’t believe it because they’ve bought the story that these are just personality traits, and they have a shit one. And I mean I haven’t even gone into the whole heaping clusterfuck that is rejection sensitivity. Yeesh.
I don’t really have a neat ending here (I don’t have a neat bone in my body). I just wanted to get some stuff out at a time when I really should be doing something else entirely—but this was all I could think about. So I’ll catch up on that stuff at a time when I should be relaxing or having fun. Because that’s the price. There’s always a price.
*I’m not equipped to tell you what an autistic experience feels like because I’ve been screened for it and I’m way out west at the other end of the spectrum. But I can tell you it’s far more nuanced than mumbling facts about Qantas and freaking out. In fact, you probably know autistic people without knowing they’re autistic. In short: please go and learn from some autistic people, not someone else’s imaginings of them.