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ADHD

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I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2015, when I was 51. My assessment went along the lines of that I-Speak-Your- Weight machine gag, where the voice says ‘One at a time please!’. Ironically, the penny dropped for me when I was attending a workshop for psychotherapists on ways of working with ADHD clients, run by the ever-so-good Dr Phil Mollon. I was writing a blog which was to be published after the workshop, and the main notes I made were ‘Oh fuck’ and ‘Finally!’
I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t experienced an Executive Function meltdown earlier today, which resulted in aborting a train journey to visit my daughter in Bristol. I say Executive Function, because I reckon Executive Function Deficit Disorder is a better description for what does (and doesn’t go on). I wept on the platform at Three Bridges station this morning, because after a week of having to chop and change my route, there were further delays, and my ability to strategise, ie plan ahead was shot to shit. Some might be starting to sigh now, thinking ‘Yeah, no-one likes delays, we all have to adapt and cope. Fail to plan and you plan to fail. Quit your self-pity, big baby. And anyway, ADHD is just an invention of Big Pharma, and everyone claims to have it these days’
I’d agree with some of the above, but it’s days like these when I think it’s important to elucidate and hopefully illuminate. I’ll attempt to continue in the comments section…

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Comments

  1. When I was 11, I was on a TV quiz show, and they stopped the recording after ten minutes because no-one else’s buzzer seemed to be working. They were, but I was always buzzing first, and getting the questions right. It was factual sort of stuff, and I’m sure the other kids knew the answers, too. There’s a great expression: an ADHD brain has to be set on fire, eg via deadlines, stimuli, whatever, and this was a great example. I wasn’t especially competitive, I didn’t see the other kids as rivals, I simply thrived and came alive with the heightened situation. It’s a dopamine and adrenaline thing, this brain’s on fire.
    Ah, but later in the show there was a more elaborate question, similar to a maths ‘problem/, and while I got it right, I was utterly unable to explain my working, my strategy to the host (who was John Craven). Again, they stopped recording, and wondered whether I must be somehow cheating.
    I later worked on loads of quiz and game shows, and I love watching them, though my partner and my kids have to lay down the rules beforehand, which basically amount to not shouting out before the question has finished. Again, it’s not to impress, it’s not to ‘win’, it’s a brain coming to life.
    Another spot-on expression in the ADHD treatment world is ‘There are two sorts of time: now, and not now.’ For me, that means that I don’t understand what next week (or indeed next month, year etc) is. I don’t mean that I can’t predict exactly what’ll be going on. A better way of putting it is I don’t know what it looks like. It’s a void. There’s now, and there’s not now. It can be thrilling, and it can be hellish. Intellectually I know I should have all sorts of pension schemes, but I don’t.
    In the USA, to not take medication when you’re ADHD is almost seen as a crime, but my experience of working with clients for whom the meds so often don’t work, has been off-putting. Days like today can make them tempting, but to be in thrall to Big Pharma outweighs that at the moment. The acronym SPECT, devised by psychologist David Nowell, is always handy when it comes to the non-medical approach: S being Sleep, as in getting enough, P being protein (rather than too much simple sugar), E being exercise, especially the high intensity variety, C being calendar (as in writing out a proper structure for the day etc. This tends to be of a hard copy variety, rather than a scroll-down phone diary – when you can’t literally see the whole of the day/week, it’s as though it doesn’t exist), T being Team, as in having others around who ‘get it’ and can be supportive.
    Oh, so much more to say, but I’ll leave it there. And if anyone wants any tips on living with ADHD (or with someone with ADHD) then do PM me.

    • Absolutely fascinating. I can relate to so much of that.
      I gave up work 3 years ago after 36 years of almost constant day to day work and while perfectly happy with that I do feel others around me wondering what the hell I’m doing living day to day with absolutely no plans. I too have trouble visualizing future events. I prefer an almost empty diary.

  2. I’m not ADHD but I’m interested in this from a “what took you so long?” point of view.

    A family member was recently given an Autism diagnois and has thrived since – talking therapy, support groups, coping strategies, etc. The process of diagnosis was a series of interviews and, essentially, ticking three out of five boxes (or five out of seven, I forget which).

    I read the assessment and thought to myself “I’m fairly sure I’d tick four out of the five boxes”. Happy in my own company? Yep (I was an only child). Obsession with details? Yep – I’m a pedant. Collector? I mean – have you seen my record collection? Awkward in social gatherings? You get the idea…

    • I can see exactly where @barry-blue is coming from, not least as also professional loosely in the biz. But physician,, heal yourself is a nonsense akin the likelihood of the cobbler’s children ever developing an Imelda Marcos fixation.
      I have always diagnosed Asperger’s freely amongst my colleagues, such traits often useful in medicine. Not me, mind, o no, despite being as dyspraxic as a puppy with new legs. Until I did a questionnaire. About a month ago, encouraging my colleagues to do the same. For academic interest. Guess who came too, which at least appeased my pass-agg competitive streak.
      Quite proud of it now, but daren’t seek professional correlation as it’s a bit late now. Of course, when I told the wife, once a pysycholigist(always a psychologist), she replied, dimly and with one word: And?

  3. Barry, I just wanted to say thanks for this. It’s a great post and paints a picture of the world viewed through a different type of mind. Genuinely interesting stuff.

    Sorry to hear about today’s meltdown. I hope that writing this helped, and that your trip to see your daughter came together in the end.

  4. Kinell @barry-blue I was going to start a thread about this called something typically he-he-hilarious like Calling All ADHDafterworders .

    Not dissimilar experience – got my diagnosis this April at the grand old age of 49. No meds yet, haven’t even had the blood test – but in effect I’ve got what I wanted which is that I could go to my manager with it and have put on my record to prevent what happened to me in the first half of 2021 (basically being given too many different types of work to do at the same time). Just being diagnosed has calmed me down in itself.

    Right after diagnosis I came across this old article which rings true for a lot of my experience:

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2020/jan/15/a-new-life-being-diagnosed-with-adhd-in-my-40s-has-given-me-something-quite-magical

    I particularly like: Much of what I had fondly considered to be my personality could be understood as a set of elaborate compensations for a condition which I had never quite understood.

    Good luck Barry.

    • So I got home yesterday to find that after nearly eight months of silence, I’ve got a blood test/ECG on Monday as prep for, er, experimenting with drugs (funny, preparation used to consist of rubbing some on my gums… )

      That this should finally happen yesterday when I’d been actually thinking about ADHD for the first time since April as a result of this thread is quite alarming. Is my psych or someone in the health centre an Afterworder?

      “He’s gone back to the Afterword… code red!!”

  5. A fascinating post – I’ve never read anything so descriptive and compelling about the actual experience of ADHD.

    I’m quite pleased to report I now realise I definitely don’t have it (not that I ever seriously thought I did), as my brain is probably the opposite and rather than “catching fire” during immediate, pressurising moments, it more kind of just melts into a blob where I can’t remember my own name or anything. Going on a quiz show, or actually any game involving quick thinking, is my absolute nightmare. I like Scrabble and Risk, games for slow people who want to take time to ponder their next move.

    *EDIT* On a side point though, I think (and please don’t take this the wrong way) there is a secret desire people have in today’s world to be diagnosed for something/anything to “explain” their behaviour and put a pin in it. I admit I would secretly love it for some professional to analyse me and tick a few boxes which would give a reason for all the things that go wrong in life. Sadly, I think for most of us it’s just life and that’s how it is: you can be quiet, weird, worrisome, distracted, bored easily, obsessed with detail, etc etc etc, but that’s just you, it doesn’t mean you have a condition or anything.

  6. Very interesting post. I doubt I have ADHD but the bit about “There are two sorts of time: now, and not now” resonates with me big time. I seem to live totally in the now and have little interest in the past or the future. This can be a good thing (I’m certainly not a worrier) and a bad thing (I’d probably be a lot better off financially if I’d thought ahead).
    The comment “quit your self-pity, big baby” is also something that struck me, in a way I doubt anyone will appreciate much, might even seem offensive, but the honest truth is “diddums” is my immediate thought in response to most problems, other people’s and, especially, my own.

  7. This is a fascinating read, and thanks for sharing.
    Whilst I recognise bits of it in myself – particularly “two sorts of time”, not being able to fully explain logic or train of thought getting to an answer, and “brain coming to life” moments where answers are given quickly (or in my case, daft comments are made because that is what my brain has processed and my mouth is not properly connected).
    But the useful bit for me is perhaps being able to recognise some of these traits in others (I’m not what you call socially aware or empathetic, and I believe I could be better at that).
    My big takeaway: SPECT
    (might need to work on the Exercise though, and actually do some …)

  8. My wife is an occupational therapist and two of the most common issues she has to deal with in clients are autism and ADHD (ADHS in the German system). She says I have ADS – which is attention deficit without the hyperactive part (I like Scrabble too), while she freely admits to her ADHS superpowers that enable her to do the amazing number of things she has to do, the remarkable woman.

    We discuss this often – rather she tells me things and I listen. Brain chemicals and receptors are a fascinating area and have led me on much of my recent reading journey. The article above zones in on dopamine and the book I read (Dopamine Nation) is fascinating on the pain/pleasure principle, and homeostasis – the dopamine reward that pleasure gives diminishing over time leading to the need for increased stimulation.

    I Google ‘dopamine’ and the first words on the top page are:
    Dopamine acts on areas of the brain to give you feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation. Dopamine also has a role to play in controlling memory, mood, sleep, learning, concentration, movement and other body functions.
    It’s the second part that is alarming -memory, mood, movement and bodily functions – my father has advanced Parkinson’s – his brain is increasingly losing the ability to produce dopamine, and you sure can tell from his sad decline.

    I mentioned in the Blogger Takeover thread the new book I am reading about the ever encroaching information economy. It’s built on grabbing our attention with stimuli and reaping the profits from the big data from our likes, comments and posts, among other things. What is the price we are paying?

    I am not surprised there is an increase in these mental health conditions. We are worked harder and harder to generate patterns for algorithms, to engage in ever-increasingly complex virtual platforms – all for the sake of greater efficiency and performance – and at a far faster and constantly changing pace than ever before. The pause between one screen-based activity and the next is rare, and there’s always another hit to achieve. Dopamine Nation posits that dopamine ensured our survival, because its stimulation pulled us endlessly towards creativity and comfort, but that we are now cacti in a rainforest – overstimulated and needing more just to function.

    I’m going to switch off and read a book now, and make notes on paper while I do it – purposely slowing myself down. The attention economy is a dangerous place for human health, I fear.

    I wish you well, Barry – and that you find the peace you need.

    • I don’t have the Hyperactivity part – as I’m fond of saying, I’m barely any kind of active – but ADD isn’t considered to be a seperate condition any more (I think that’s weird).

    • Sorry to hear about your dad, @salwarpe. There was a brief moment when clinicians thought that people with Parkinson’s and those with ADHD would benefit from the same meds, when it’s not a lack of dopamine that’s the issue for us lot, more the functioning of the pathways.

      • Thanks, Barry. I’m reminded of the Oliver Sacks’ film Awakening, portraying his trials with L-Dopa on catatonic patients. In the end, the effect wore off and they went ‘back to sleep’. I understand there is caution in the use of drugs like this on Parkinson’s patients, as there can be unpleasant side effects, and diminishing effectiveness, both of which I think we are seeing with my Dad, who now sleeps most of the day.

  9. Thank you for the OP, Barry.

    My son, aged 35, reached breaking point this year and finally had confirmed the diagnosis we all knew he’d had for many years. He’s doing a lot better on the tablets. I scored worse on the tests than him. My colleagues expressed no surprise. I’m best in crisis. If it’s crazy busy or rapid change is needed, I’m your man, decisive, calm and efficient. If it’s routine or quiet, I create chaos. Over decades, I’ve built fail safe mechanisms to make sure I complete tasks I really must complete myself.
    I miss out on annual leave because I am not organised enough to book it all. I’m a whizz at delegating. It’s part of the reason why I dread retirement. I can think of plenty of things to do but if there is no urgency or absolute necessity, where will my mind go? At home, I have always been a useless fidget, never getting anything done.

    The time thing is interesting. I tend to calculate what I can do in any given situation. If there is nothing, I don’t worry about it. There are enough things in my head to occupy me anyway. People interpret this as not worrying about the future and I guess I don’t much. However, I do think about the future a lot. I formulate loads of coherent plans but don’t actually follow them through.

      • Arf, and in the way only a colleague can arf, so the the 2 medics here are both as neurodiverse as to be delightfully bonkers. And both still working into their dotage (at the moment). Says something about the lightweight typicals who leave early!
        (This is very nearly just a jokey throwaway comment, by the way, should offence be chosen. I wouldn’t know, I don’t recognise boundaries, it seems.)

        • Of course you don’t recognise boundaries! You constantly invade personal space both physical and mental.

          I find I’ve turned into the doctor on The Simpsons, chortling at even the most dreadful news.

  10. There’s a lot of it about. Used right, it’s a spur to invention and fluency, but when you are spinning your wheels and attentively challenged, however smart you are, you under perform. I rarely see people without a clinical diagnosis of it, and yes, I’m there, too. My family is full of high functioning dev dis folk. I like these folk. They are my people. Self medicating with stimulants is common, and gets you in a mess. I wish I was still a university researcher, as I have a lot of ideas about the comorbidity with Asperger’s.

    • Yes, the comorbidity does seem to be significant. Another area ripe for research (not that I’d have the patience) is that of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and ADHD. And I love your ‘”i like these folk. They are my people’!

  11. Gosh, thank you all, some lovely words there. One of the arguable/occasional benefits of ADHD is that now/not now time idea (aka ‘object impermanence’ in the therapy world); it means that my upset this morning has gone, with no conscious/cognitive effort required. So that’s good.
    @fentonsteve wondered ‘what took you so long?’ and I’d say that until the realisation, I’d unconsciously found ways of working and living that made life easier for me. I’ve done loads of sport and exercise since I was 8, and I’ve always been self employed, thus avoiding much of the admin and dealing with authority stuff that can be troublesome.
    @moose-the-mooche : DSM 5, the diagnostic bible, calls ADD ‘Inattentive ADHD’ these days, though that’ll probably change when edition 6 comes out. There’s a physician in the states called Dr Amen, who reckons he’s identified 9 types of ADHD, using fMRI scans, but frankly he has the air of a charlatan (blonde these days, like Tim Burgess). Oh, and welcome to the gang. We’d been expecting you!
    @arthur-cowslip Yes, I’d agree that there’s too much push these days towards diagnoses and subsequently using them as an excuse for arseholery. Let’s also not forget that the DSM mentioned above is pretty much put together by the pharmaceutical industry, which obv much prefers the idea of medication over active behavioural changes or questioning the workings of society. Then again, some meds can create the space, the possibility for reflection and changed behaviour. I’m also mostly with you on the ‘getting on with things’ bit, partly because yes, life’s a tricky business, and late capitalism’s subtext that you shouldn’t feel disquiet for a moment is disastrous.

  12. I don’t know whether it means I have ADHD or not, but as someone who finds it necessary to fill every minute of every day with some kind of activity I recognize a lot of myself in several of the above posts.

  13. My sympathies.

    I don’t have ADHD or any of its associated conditions. But I do have very bad Executive Function issues and inhibition disinhibition.

    I am no longer allowed (by my wife) to travel by myself, as our confidence level that I could fly (eg) from Austin to Heathrow and then train to York is very, very low. I usually have close to one breakdown per trip. Sometimes just because, and sometimes because there is an issue, and my brian can’t find a way for me to handle the issue. The more the number of variables at play, the worse it becomes.

    My Neuropsych has explained the reasoning to me – my brain is diverting resources to where it thinks they are needed, rather than where they would normally go. Getting challenged by logistics, or any other things like you lay out can be perceived by the brain as a threat, so instead of helping you make good decisions, it puts you into fight/flight.

    Tetris helps. And is clinically backed up.

  14. I’m fairly certain that I’m an undiagnosed high functioning autistic, and that several other people in my family are as well. The youngest generation is getting diagnosed now, but I’ve suspected this about my family for decades before these “confirmations by association” showed up.

    I’ve been back and forth about getting an assessment, but apart from being able to use a diagnosis to stop people from demanding things from me that I have a difficult time dealing with (and I’ve always been good at saying “No, I will absolutely not” and stick to it even without any official confirmations), I can’t think of many good reasons to get diagnosed.
    In fact, a paranoid side of me (small but loud…) thinks that I’d rather not have any kind of diagnosis on record in case some new nutter comes into power with ideas about final solutions for getting rid of people that are less than perfect in their eyes…
    (I partly jest, but TBH; I no longer believe that “it could never happen again”. )

    I understand the sense of relief of a diagnosis, but feel that I experienced that when I self-diagnosed after reading several books on the subject and recognising myself.

    I’ve learned over the years how to tackle the situations I have problems with in a way that (mostly) works for me, but I’m still dealing with some badly handled stuff from years back, that I very slowly am trying to fix.
    The stress and pressure to be an adult and deal with every aspect of life without help and without letting anyone notice that there were parts I very much struggled with has been a bit of a pressure cooker. I can sometimes feel that I’m awfully close to exploding from the accumulated anxiety of a lifetime of trying to stay in control, while in reality everything was chaos.
    But then I just keep on going, and when I look at how much I’ve managed to do, on my own, I feel proud of how strong I am – and then I don’t want a diagnosis and other people butting in to “help” (which would annoy me).

    Most of the time I don’t think about it at all, I just deal with it one problem at a time. The only thing I sometimes wonder about is if living with the stress and anxiety of dealing with this in secret all of my life is the reason why I have LADA today? It wouldn’t surprise me.

    Best of luck getting on top of your situation, diagnosed or not, to all of you.

    • I guess that the only reason to seek a “late” diagnosis of any of the “spectra” disorders is if there is an advantage in putting a name to it. I am near deluged by folk seeking adult diagnoses of ADHD, ASD and other acronyms. However, peace of mind may be one such reason, an explanation of why you function with otherwise little peace of mind. Having said, with the paucity of NHS opinion availability or at all, this is often left to disreputable and dishonest private agencies who will “diagnose” you. Or worse, in ADHD commend sometimes somewhat questionable meds. Childhood diagnosis is worthwhile, so get any educational support going, although it is tough then for their adult relatives to see it happening , when they were just naughty, odd, clumsy or thick.

      • The right answer. With my work head on, the pissiness about diagnosis and dissing the medical model is unhelpful, as resources are not provided without it. But it would be more helpful to see some of this as cognitive and temperament variation, rather than a disorder for those with the right balance and a sympathetic ecological niche. My late son would have benefited from statementing when 6 rather than the shit we and he went through.

      • Personally I’d really like to be not quite as shit at doing stuff. Just a little bit less. I’m fucking sick of feeling rubbish and useless and out of my depth. I don’t honestly expect medication will cause this miracle to happen but it’s worth a shot.

        • First of all, you come across here as very nice and extremely funny. As someone who’s never met you, your self-description seems very much at odds with the image I have of you. Secondly, “feeling rubbish and useless and out of my depth” seems par for the course to me. Surely that’s just what everyday life is for most people in modern, wealthy, liberal countries? (A lot worse in other countries.) Surely most of us just get by with a little humour, some love, happiness here and there, and plenty of feeling rubbish and useless and out of our depth?

          • Thank you, and yes it’s mostly things that everybody has to some extent. It’s pretty obvious that if I have ADHD it’s mild enough not for me to somehow blame it for things that are either my fault or just in the normal realm of human behaviour. Nobody should be doing this anyway. For the record I’m even less patient with the pop-psych idea that being ND somehow makes you a creative genius. Does it bollocks.

            As for being shit, it’s not about the having the talent or intelligence to do stuff, it is literally fucking doing it. It’s the concentration, or sometimes concentrating on the wrong thing (he typed into The Afterword). It takes me ages to get anything done. A lot of people are like this a lot of the time I think – not all of them have ADHD.

            As for being a victim, when Mrs M told her sister about my diagnosis she said “Poor thing!” as if I’d been in some terrible accident. Don’t feel sorry for me, I am who I am and if I have ADHD I’ve always had it. There are undoubtedly people using it – and the idea of it – to claim victim status. I am not somehow labouring under it – it may be disadvantaging me but those disadvantages may also stem from what my psych called “underlying personality”.

            In short: Yes, we are all individuals.

            • You don’t have to have ADHD to feel “rubbish and useless and out of my depth”, Moosey. We all feel like imposters. Well, I do, anyway.

              33 years into my (ahem) professional (ahem) career and I still await someone pointing out that I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I probably know a little bit more than my colleague, which makes me the expert in the room.

              • Nobody knows anything. I am basically a test engineer who needs to guarantee that the design works as planned and then characterize and qualify it.

                You need to know a bit about the design to do this work but really not possible to know everything as one moves quickly from project to project I would sometimes miss things because of this and felt guilty about it.

                At one point we had weekly seminars where the chief designer (inventor of the technology) would explain fairly basic design philosophies. It became clear to me that many of the designers didn’t fully understand the designs either!

                @fentonsteve

  15. Does anybody actually not have ADHD? I’m getting the impression it’s the norm. I certainly get the impression that having concerns about one’s “mental health” is absolutely the norm in the UK. Literally not a day goes by without me reading about someone’s “mental health problems”, either in the press or on social media. It seems to me that mental health gets spoken about far, far more than any physical health issues do.

    • It’s a shame, because clearly autism and ADHD are things; I just reckon about 1% of the people who claim to have them, have them. Whenever I see the neurodiversity-as-personality lot on Twitter, all of whose pictures look precisely as you imagine, I’m always a bit struck by what they think “normal” looks like because they’re always posting examples of their utterly typical human behaviour and going “huh, I took over a minute to put my socks on today cos my phone beeped, what am I like, I’m so neurodivergent!”

      • Obviously I’m not talking about anyone on this thread, but TikTok contagion in ND conditions seems unarguably to be a thing. Everyone’s gotta have something.

        Incidentally, reminded of this, written by a psychiatrist, on the related subject of mental health:

        “There is something to be said here about the word “depression,” which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means.

        Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed).
        This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.“

        • Very awkward topic, because it can so easily be taken personally, but with the stipulation that I’m not referring to anyone here… I do wonder if it’s related to a wider “victim mentality”? Being seen as a “victim” of something over which they have no control allows a person to expect sympathy and compassion, avoid moral judgement and abdicate from personal responsibility.
          (Incidentally, it’s something that can also be seen in the “I’m a member/ally of an oppressed minority, so any criticism is purely _____ism / _____phobia” context.)

          I’ve watched three celebrity documentaries recently. One about Pamela Anderson, who went through an undeniably traumatic experience, one about Michael J. Fox, who has a debilitating illness, and one about Robbie Williams, who self-medicated to cope with mental illness and depression. The first two I found inspirational in their complete refusal to accept victim status. The third I found rather pathetic for his embracing of it.

          As a poet once wrote “eternal is the warrior who finds beauty in his wounds”.

          • Right. I’ve been depressed in my life, very seriously, but it was essentially just unhappiness at the way I was living, which got out of control and turned into illness. I think turning one’s moods or illnesses – and we all experience both – into identities is one of the more dangerous habits of modern affluent humans.

      • Sage comments, @hedgepig . I think you are a teacher and must be similarly deluged as I by parents wanting a diagnosis for their kids, whether a spectrum or just plain old “mental health”. The spectra, btw, I don’t consider as “mental health’, being more variants of neurological connections, but I take your point. And yes, unhappiness and feeling stressed by applicable stressors are appropriate responses to life stimuli, and hence not always best treated by medicating. Sometimes, yes, when they tip over into frank depression and anxiety enough to make normal impossible. The problem is being canny enough to see where the one might become the other. Then again, we live in a world of instant fixes being expected as routine and alternative models: talking therapies, principally, are so hard to currently access within any sensible time frame, that it is little wonder that folk grasp at the straws of psychopharmacology. I freely confess to prescribing them on a near daily basis, yet do not consider myself a soft touch either. Then again, personal experience, a beneficial one, of taking the fuckers might have some bearing on that.

        • I thought I was depressed. My sawbones and a therapist believe me to be depressed. The therapist told me it was a persistent depressive disorder which certainly chimed with me as it explained a lot about how I have had a tendency to mishandle life and struggle with people over many, many years. How life feels denuded of colour and taste like an over chewed piece of gum. Utterly devoid of any joy. I was prescribed pills by my doctor Lustral or Sertraline to be accurate, they made me feel worse so I stopped taking them. I’m sure they benefit many but medication wasn’t for me.
          Now I just accept that from time to time the ever present cloudy days become a little bit more overcast so I hunker down and wait. It lifts eventually and life returns to whatever passes for normality. Am I unwell? I don’t believe I am. I am lonely which is an awful condition and obviously doesn’t help and my right hip is completely buggered and constantly painful but these conditions are common for us older folk. It’s unhelpful how these two things interact with one another. The lack of contact with people means I have nobody to help me to cope physically and my lack of mobility cuts me off from people who might help. It’s a vicious circle. But I am not depressed. It’s just life and life is often just a bowl of toenails.
          My very best wishes to those amongst us who are struggling with whatever problems they are undergoing and I hope in time things improve for you.

          • I have been what I felt was proper depressed only once in my life. I was laid up in bed after a car crash that was entirely my stupid fault. On a psychological level, knowing I’d be banned from driving for a year (while living out in the sticks and very car reliant), knowing how much financial cost and godawful bureaucracy I’d brought on myself, I felt guilt and self-recrimination. On a physical level, I think the sudden and total withdrawal of endorphins (I’m a swimmer/exercise enthusiast) led me to deep depression. It was truly awful and I never want to go back there. My doctor immediately brushed aside my expressed interest in anti-depressants with a casual “you’ll be fine once you get back on your feet” dismissal. He was right. For all my conviction that depression isn’t as widespread as it can appear to be, I have utmost sympathy for anyone going through it.

            • On a similar note, when I was going through a dreadful time with work I went to see my doctor hoping for something to help me sleep. I hadn’t slept properly in months, I was in counselling through a scheme provided by work and was getting chest pains (her reassuring words included, ‘I can’t guarantee that you’re not going to walk out of this surgery and drop dead of a heart attack’). She suggested depression, but I knew that it was the situation that was making me stressed and very, very unhappy.

              Four decades of suppressed trauma along with several of the personality traits mentioned in this thread had been brought to the surface by a crisis, to the extent that I actually asked for help (and I’m sure a lot of us will realise how difficult that can be to do). In the end I didn’t take meds or leave from work, both of which could have been offered, but quit the job without another one to go to or any idea how I would pay the mortgage. The situation wasn’t going to change so I had to.

              • When I say I’m not depressed I’m not denying that clinically I am as the therapist told me experiencing a persistent depressive disorder. The reason I choose to not describe myself as depressed is because of it’s persistence. I am so used to living constantly with mild depression that it’s my “normal”. I’ve always been this way at least since puberty. I don’t want my “normal” cured, it’s who I am. I think that’s why I didn’t like medication. It blunted me and stopped me painting and painting is my “normal”.

        • My son, who is now 19, lived with his mother, and not me.

          He is incredibly smart – full ride scholarship to a very good School – and an incredibly nice kid who understands people well.

          His mother forced a process of diagnosis with a not-very-good psychologist of autism on him.

          The much better psychologist at School to whom he went told him “autism? don’t be so silly” and so life went on.

  16. I read an article in The Times about students at Cambridge claiming to have ADHD in order to do exams in a solitary way and being given longer to complete the tasks. Of course many would be genuine but the suspicion was that some maybe trying it on to get an advantage

    • Given how long it takes on the NHS to get a referral and a diagnosis, that seems unlikely. They’d have sat their finals, masters and PhD before a formal diagnosis.

      Might be possible if they have PHI, but still unlikely in the post-Covid backlog. Mrs F has Bupa faily cover through work and I’ve had to wait months for a scan which, pre-Covid, would have been “could you do tomorrow?”

    • @Dai

      Agreed.

      I wonder how many of them mentioned their ADHD on their application forms or in their interviews for a place at a Uni whose stature many would consider to be an advantage in itself

  17. This is great stuff, folks, a far cry from fora where binary positions seem to be mandatory. A current instance in the ‘ADHD world’ is ‘Gabor Mate vs Ross Barkley’, the former’s take being that early years trauma tends to be a big factor in the development of ADHD (the epigenetic bit, if you like), whereas RB is a down-the-line ‘it’s genetic, environment isn’t relevant’ type.
    I’m going to try and address various points made above. The ‘It’s My Mental Health’ line comes up a lot in my work with clients, my work with therapists I supervise, and, of course, all over the media. I’ve some immediate issues with the term. Firstly, ‘mental health’ being a noun can give a sense of solidity, permanence to whatever’s going on. One of the most important words in therapy is ‘Sometimes’. The first series of ‘I’m a Celebrity..’ had a great bit where Rhona Cameron did a powerful monologue about how ‘Sometimes Tony (Blackburn) can be bit of a prick, sometimes Nigel (Benn) can be offensively judgemental, but not always…’ Alan Watts wrote beautifully about the problem with nouns, and suggested trying to change them to verbs when possible, to give that sense of process and change, ie impermanence. When the nervous system is stuck in sympathetic mode (fight/flight/freeze) or a dorsal vagal state (inert, depressed), the narrowness of the experience means that thinking is of an ‘all there is is this, forever’ state. Framing current states as ‘My depression’ (noun-ifying?) rather than ‘Right now I’m feeling low’ (more verby, temporal) can exacerbate things, solidify the state, making it ‘This is what I am’ rather than ‘This is what’s going on at the moment’. Someone I worked with a few years ago came in with ‘I’m asexual’ and eventually moved to ‘Sometimes I fear my desires’. Please note that I’m not denying that some people are asexual.
    We increasingly live in a world of nouns, though. Social media requires self-marketing, with ourselves as the product vying for the attention of others. It’s madness, this Attention Industrial Complex, resulting in what Martin Buber (paging @moose-the-mooche) would call ‘I-it’ relationships rather than ‘I-thou’, ie monologues as opposed to genuine, social mammal to and fro meetings, where the relationship is a kind of third element. NB I appreciate that this post might come across as I-it, but I’m trying as hard as I can to be responsive to stuff talked about above!

    An unfortunate consequence of all the above, that I encounter daily in work, is the increased sense of atomisation, the disconnectedness, the lack of those ‘I-thou’ meetings that we’re hardwired for.
    The cliched therapy question ‘And how does that make you feel?’ is necessary, but equally important is ‘And I wonder how the other person might be feeling?’ Theory Of Mind, or Mentalization’, are the fancy names for the latter, and you’d be surprised at how often the response is ‘ No idea. They’re a sociopath/They have borderline personality disorder/They’re a narcissist etc’ Nouns again.
    Another beef I have with the term ‘Mental Health’ and the way it’s framed, is that it appears to split the mind and body. A big problem with (some) Talk Therapy is that it often simply works out an equation regarding the ‘Why’ someone does something. Whether via EMDR, hypnotherapy, Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing, Polyvagal Theory etc, we have to work with the nervous system to help bring about change. Then again, the world’s mad, so it’s no wonder all this is going on.
    Oh, and finally, @gary – feeling depressed after an injury mightn’t just be the result of the endorphin lack: the inflammation that occurs at such times can result in cytokines passing through the blood brain barrier and directly bringing about a depressed state (the reason, apparently, being that when we’re injured we need to rest, and feeling depressed makes us unlikely to want to move). This is outlined in Edward Bullimore’s book “The Inflamed Mind’, which the medics, far more knowledgeable than me, might question.

  18. Very good post indeed, echoing Moose. The verb-noun issue, referencing Alan Watts, made me think of Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native American who only learned to speak her ancestral language as an adult, discovering that whereas English is something like 70% noun/30% verb, her tribe’s language, was more 70% verb/30% noun – making for a much more dynamic and relational experience with the world and its inhabitants and less a possessive, object-based relationship.

    Nothing is permanent, but we often cling onto it as if it is.

  19. To add to the chat above about diagnoses of Depression (although I’m so wary of tiptoeing round this for fear of offending someone), I’m always moved by one of my favourite essays written by one of my favourite music writers, Ian Macdonald, about Nick Drake.

    Macdonald was talking essentially about how lazy and misjudged it is to just label Nick Drake as having Depression, and seeing this as a problem to be diagnosed and cured, rather than a consequence of the same heightened sensitivity and introspection that informed his musical abilities, and a legitimate emotional response to a challenging world. It puts a particularly poignant spin on things when you take into account that Macdonald himself later committed suicide in his 50s, but I think that actually gives a bit of authority to what he was saying.

    I’ll try and locate some quotes from the essay that put it better than I can:

    “What an observer sees as blank passivity may, to the person experiencing it, be a logical sequence of sane, if sombre, thoughts obscure to those not much given to reflection…. Psychology textbooks admit that ‘depressed’ people are often more realistic than the well adjusted… Certainly, he’d become monosyllabically withdrawn long before serious unhappiness set in after Pink Moon in 1972, but we must recall that he was shy and introspective by nature… We should also bear in mind that he who curbs his tongue may see much that others miss.”

    and

    (of the cycling change of seasons) “While ‘well adjusted’ people accept all this as the given elements of life, Drake was plainly uneasy about the way the seasons symbolise the recurrent suffering intrinsic to being alive… such issues have dogged history’s greatest minds; indeed, ‘depression’ and the ultimate questions of existence are often interwoven.”

    and

    “Without ill will, Nick Drake has been described as a depressed young man whose art never matured. Yet depression can be rational, while sorrow and unease are legitimate responses to life.”

    • I love that essay, too. MacDonald had met Drake and witnessed him play. His description of Drake’s art is beautiful.

      Both were, let’s say, melancholy. At one time, during a hospital admission, Drake was thought to have schizophrenia. He died having taken too much Amitriptyline, an old anti-depressant that is very dangerous in relatively low overdose. MacDonald seems to be saying that “depression” is a rational conclusion of a sensitive mind. In turn, of course, he took his own life.

      • Yes indeed – although I’m not sure that any of the alternatives are any less shocking. ‘Ended his life” I suppose…

        Not to derail this excellent thread, but have you noticed that nobody’s ‘shot dead’ any more? It’s always ‘fatally shot’, as if that makes the victim slightly less dead.

          • i read a biography of Lewis CArroll recently. When Alice Hargreaves (nee Alice Liddell) got the telegram to say that her son had died in the WW1 trenches, the second child she lost to the war, her diary entry was “Alan was killed hit”, as if hat made her loss less painful.

  20. I’m a little nervous about this but quite happy that this thread popped up.

    I’ve known for a while that there’s something a little off about how I function. It’s not anything serious (I think) but I find myself struggling with remembering things and focusing on any one task for any period of time. I am a pretty high performer at work and actually work better if I have too much to do to fit the time I have. I have a few odd things that I’ll do – sometimes I need to touch a surface the same number of times with each hand. If I touch the doorway as I’m going through I have to ‘even things up’ and touch with the other hand. I can be very particular about only using my left foot when stepping from one surface to another. There are other examples.

    It all seems fairly normal to me because I’ve been like this for ages, but I do occasionally think about it and wonder if there’s something actually going on.

    • Yes, thank you for posting, @dkhbrit
      Worth checking out, and also perhaps worth looking at with a therapist; as many have said above, we can have a tendency to pathologize what actually are often simply the ‘normal foibles’ of being human, and the normalising that can ensue from therapy can be a relief.

    • Oh, I used to have those symmetrical OCD tics as a child, and I still have the urge but I don’t usually act on them. As a kid I finally found it so exhausting that I actually decided to quit “cold turkey” one day, and the relief of not having to do it anymore was so great that I’ve worked very hard to not begin again.

      Or, rather; I allow myself to act upon these urges for a few things, but never the same thing twice and no more than once a week, just so I don’t fall into my bad habits again.
      Note: I’m not saying that you should stop or that it’s always to be seen as a “bad habit” – if you don’t see it as a problem for you, just keep on doing it.
      But for me it was beginning to get debilitating and gave me anxiety, so I just couldn’t go on. The straw that broke this camel’s back was the built-in breadboard in the kitchen cabinet – that thing could not make an even number of sounds when hitting the cabinet front underneath and above it when being used…

      It was also very tiresome when some accidental movement had to be copied and I failed to copy it exactly – then I had to try again, but also copy the failed attempt etc…I could get stuck a wee while! Makes me anxious just to remember these things…
      I hope you have an easier time with your particular fixations, or deal with it better than I used to do.

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