ADHD in menopausal women | Bev Thorogood | TEDxBrayfordPool

[Music] I have a question for you what does a sweet young man on the left have in common with a mad menopausal woman on the right that's me by the way at first glance you might think not much and actually if you'd asked me 12 months ago I'd have really struggled to find a connection I might have taken a punt on do we share the same surname or do we share a birthday or perhaps we're both prone to pulling our hair back with a set of jump leads okay I've never actually done that last one but actually that could be the nearest guess to the truth because the young boy and the woman both have hormones that sometimes don't behave the way they should and it can lead us to doing things that aren't always judged as normal by Society standards and whilst that young boy turbo charging himself with a set of jump leads was the first image that came up when I did a Google search for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD I couldn't find a single image that represented anything like the stressed out middle-aged woman on the right and that's actually because sadly girls are seven times less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than boys and 50 years ago as a young girl growing up on the outskirts of Newcastle ADHD was barely even recognized and it was never considered a condition that affected girls and you know even if it had been I didn't show any of the stereotypical ADHD traits that are still the main diagnostic criteria used today I wasn't boisterous or disruptive and I wasn't aggressive or climbing up the furniture I was a quiet introspective kid who daydreamed about being an actress and loved music and dancing and reading but nobody picked up on the fact that by the time I reached my mid-teens at the height of puberty I was no longer the studious well-behaved girl that I had been in Primary School by now I was smoking weed behind the bike sheds I was bonking off school regularly I discovered boys and I was hanging around with older kids that my parents would have probably called the wrong sword nobody asked how or why I ended up in debt at the age of just 18 because I'd impulsively gone on a spending spree with my shiny new Topshop credit card or how I equally impulsively found myself married at the age of 20 and divorced by 25. nobody ever questioned even as an adult why I couldn't keep my bedroom tidy oh why I was the mum that regularly sent her kids to school without their PE kit or I'd be frantically fishing out the least dirty School shirt from the laundry basket because I'd forgotten to put the washing on again I simply moved through my early adult years convinced I was lazy and disorganized but doing my very best to convince everybody around me there is actually an organized fully functioning adult who was adulting just fine thank you very much when I remarried at the age of 28 life got a whole lot easier my new husband Mark was everything that I wasn't a military man he was logical and organized and he was great with money and he was tidy and I thought this is brilliant problem solved are simply abdicators many adult responsibilities as I can to him and I'll be fine and that's what I did and I ticked along nicely for the next 20 years I was able to mask all my failings at work and I didn't have to worry about being tied or organized when I got home because now I had Mark in my life and he would tidy up and he'd put things away and he'd make sure the bills were paid and he'd just remember everything and he just remind me whenever I forgot but about seven years ago the wheel started to fall off the bus when I turned 50 I was gifted my very first hot flush along with a great big badge with a number 50 on it just in case I forgot enter perimenopause and the start of a voyage of self-discovery that I had no idea I could go on started to realize that all of my most useful abdication strategies and even wearing my faithful I am a fully functioning adult mask just weren't working anymore the strategies were failing they weren't just starting to show cracks it was like they developed full-blown subsidence my foundations were crumbling and it felt like my brain was crumbling with them when women enter perimenopause they begin to feel disruption in their hormones as the ovaries release eggs more sporadically as they begin their Journey towards no longer producing a period the case sex hormones estrogen progesterone and testosterone become erratic and disrupted estrogen in particular as well as being involved in the female reproductive process is also a neurotransmitter and it's involved in the modulation of dopamine now dopamine is another hormone and it motivates and rewards the brain into action and it's a dysregulation in dopamine that results in the condition that we know as ADHD the key traits of ADHD particularly in women are mental hyperactivity hyper Focus impulsivity emotional dysregulation and inattentiveness we now have a look at the symptoms related to perimenopause please don't try and read them all there are far too many there are actually more than 40 symptoms directly related to lowering estrogen levels and they can be categorized as cognitive physical and emotional stroke psychological and actually the cognitive and psychological symptoms tend to be the ones that cause the most distress with many women myself included wondering at times if we've got early onset dementia now if we take a look at the symptoms commonly associated with ADHD and adult females you can see there's quite a lot of them as well but when we start to see where they overlap you can understand why the wheels were spectacularly flying off my bus my erratic estrogen and my dysregulated dopamine had just had a head-on collision and the hormonal Emergency Services nowhere to be found and that hormonal car crash caused me to resign my 32-year career with the ministry of Defense my strategies had stopped working and I was mentally and emotionally wrecked education around the subjective menopause is virtually non-existent nobody had ever told me that it was about so much more than just hot flushes or that it can start so much earlier that I'd realized I was totally unprepared for the Maelstrom that hit me the brain fog the loss of concentration the memory lapses the emotional roller coaster the anxiety the fatigue the complete loss of self-confidence for the last four years I've been on a bit of a mission to educate employers and employees about the impact of menopause on working women I've spoken to hundreds of employers and probably thousands of employees to help them to better understand the hidden struggles that many people experience as they go through the menopause transition but it's only in the last 12 months or so that I've made the connection and joined the dots between the hormonal disturbances and the disruption that characterize both ADHD and perimenopause and there is a lot of overlap both are sort of um sorry forgive me both are plagued by misconception misunderstanding myth misdiagnosis and misfiring hormones now I'm putting this talk together I was really Keen to come from an Evidence base of peer-reviewed randomized controlled trials that would reinforce my own lived experience but unfortunately that research simply hasn't been done yet I could find very little compelling evidence to support my own Theory the organization attitude is one of the leading authorities on ADHD working alongside top medical professionals to share as best they can evidence-based information but by their own admission they say that despite increased and hugely warranted interest there are no studies that specifically examine menopause in females with ADHD and that they say is a serious medical problem there is an equal an equally inadequate or confusing amount of data around the subject of perimenopause and in the UK our medical practitioners currently receive minimal training about menopause leading to huge variations in the levels of knowledge and the standards of care provided to women it's been suggested that as many as 900 000 women may have left the workplace in the UK in 2021 as a result of menopause-related symptoms and as a woman who gave up my own career because of my perimenopause and who now believes that undiagnosed ADHD also played a part in my cognitive decline I feel absolutely passionate that more needs to be done to really understand the impact of hormonal changes on women not just as they enter menopause but throughout their whole life factors such as full-time careers positions of leadership and seniority domestic pressures caring responsibilities for Offspring and elderly relatives Financial pressures hell a global pandemic mean that menopausal women in 2022 are under significantly more pressure than previous generations and a jaw-dropping book invisible women author Caroline creedo Perez shines a light on the gender bias inherent in medical research highlighting that the vast majority of that research has been carried out on an average man we're increasingly demanding more of women and actually women themselves are increasingly demanding to be allowed to bring their skills and talents to the world and if we are to truly profit from the unquestion of whether fits that a diverse Workforce brings then surely we have to do the work necessary to really appreciate and understand that men and women simply function differently a biological makeup means that our hormones fire differently and in that understanding and that awareness we can start to ensure that the bumps in the road of the female reproductive life Journey can be managed so that that enormous talent pool out there can be exploited fully but without detriment to a woman's physical or mental well-being now I'm not a doctor and I'm not a scientist I'm just a menopausal woman with a dodgy brain but I have developed my very own syndrome because we all need a new syndrome I call it menopausal attention dysregulation or mad for short so I would ask you please to applaud and embrace all of my mad menopausal sisters out there those amazing women who continue to thrive even if they have got neurodivergent brains and wonky hormones those women who continue to do the best job they can even if they are a little bit mad said finish to all the Mad women out there please know you're doing a grand job and you're my heroes thank you [Applause] [Music] foreign

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 31,226

Keywords: Aging, Brain, Cognitive science, English, Health, Mental health, TEDxTalks, Women, Women in business, [TEDxEID:49388]

Id: eRPSvRWRoXg

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/SpeechGrouchy9116]

Thank you for sharing this! It’s exactly what I have been thinking to do as well. You know as soon as I can start functioning with my new MAD normal. Before I started peri I had huge respect for so many women but now after starting peri, more than ever, do I look at women and see the strongest most enduring Sheroes!