After receiving other diagnoses that didn't quite fit, Alex was first diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 48. He is sharing his experiences of ADHD, and discovering this truth about himself at such a late age, to mark ADHD awareness month. Here's his story.
Until two years ago, I had been living and working in Singapore. In 2007, I moved there aged 37 after a decade in a career in which promotion and recognition had mostly eluded me. When I first moved to Singapore, my life and career started on a happy and fortuitous exponential rise. My work quickly progressed, and all was good with the world.
Sadly, at the tail end of the 2008 financial crisis, the impact hit Singapore and the company I worked for went into administration. Career and financial woes collided with a personal relationship crisis, and I ended up in hospital, where I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. At the same I time started treatment for depression and anxiety. I saw a counsellor, and slowly things began to improve. Sadly, life has a way of progressing in cycles, and despite the growth I gained in counselling, after a few years, a cluster crisis occurred again.
I started to see a new counsellor. After just one hour together, she asked me to look into the possibilities that I may have ADHD. At first, I marginalised this possibility, as my prior misconception of ADHD was of the unruly intellectually challenged 'bad' boy. However, I committed to looking into it, and duly started researching when I got home.
Despite actively trying to be contrary, I could immediately see myself in the descriptions. I started taking online evaluations. One quiz identified three areas within ADHD: 'generalised ADHD', 'emotional hyperreactivity' and 'rejection sensitivity dysphoria'. While not a diagnostic tool per se, I scored almost 90% across the three parts and immediately broke down in tears. I could not tell you now if they were happy or sad tears, but they were answers to questions I had never been able to fathom before. To make sure I did not see this purely through my own pathologically negative bias; I asked my partner to take the questionnaires for me, answering as though they were me. I was astonished, his scoring was even higher. Although I recognised myself in many of the answers, a few of them irked me: Surely, I am not always late, nor always forgetting where I had parked the car? Hilariously, I used to think I didn't procrastinate either - how wrong I was! I used to strongly feel that my extreme adverse reactions to people or situations were reasonable 'under the circumstances', but now I recognise it as emotional hypersensitivity.
"From then on, my life changed immensely."
After this revelation, I started seeing a psychiatrist who specialised in the identification and treatment of ADHD and had ample experience of working with people diagnosed in adulthood. From then on, my life changed immensely. I learned so much about myself and how ADHD had crafted me into the person I had become. I understood triggers I never knew existed, and how they had driven emotional responses I wish I did not experience - but felt powerless to control. I learned about Mindsight as a concept and slowly started to practice this as a regulatory framework. It helps me tremendously. Together, these inroads of personal discovery have allowed two critical things for me:
The first is for me to forgive myself. On bad days - which still happen - the way ADHD expresses itself is not an excuse for me to act out or misbehave, but it is at the cause of my behaviour. As with many personal development paths, knowing and acknowledging my 'issues' became the first step towards addressing them.
The second is that on lighter days, and there are plenty; it has allowed me to find humour in some of the ways my ADHD expresses itself. For example, when I am with other ADHD-minded folks, a conversation is like a never-ending game of snakes and ladders. Trajectory and topics change with lightning speed, as one person takes hold of the reins unexpectedly and takes the story on a tangent. It is often only when we have parted that we realise that no topic truly concluded. But it's all good!
"When I am with other ADHD-minded folks, a conversation is like a never-ending game of snakes and ladders"
ADHD is poorly understood by most, even today. Not just by the public but by many people within the medical profession. Greater understanding and research into the neurochemical basis for ADHD and how these translate into our experience of it are vital. Medical training needs to shift focus to better and more broadly understand that ADHD can manifest in numerous ways, at any age, and circumstances. Coping - or not-coping - strategies are often causative or confused with other mental health issues.
I would encourage anyone who has a concern regarding their mental health to seek appropriate help. I have ADHD, but I am not broken.
