Why Are Women Being Diagnosed With ADHD In Adulthood?

i'm sarah fuller i am an assistant professor of english at a community college i was diagnosed with adhd five years ago when i was 33. when we think of adhd i think a lot of people think of teenage boys who can't sit still and are hyper what has been your experience with adhd yeah that's what i always associated it with i think there's that emphasis on hyperactive for me it wasn't until i started like reading more about it and seeing more stuff being published about how it affects girls and women that i started to see it in myself you know for a long time i sort of suffered in silence and this series is trying to shine a light on these topics there is no stigma to me it's mine the prevalence of diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or adhd in boys is roughly twice as high as its prevalence in girls studies comparing adhd in gender found that girls tend to have trouble focusing on tasks involving mental effort like homework while boys display more physical symptoms like running about and fidgeting most girls aren't physically running around the classroom turning flips like things that get you noticed by the teacher you might get on your report card you talk too much but if you're still you know keeping up with your assignments things like that um being messy being disorganized those are things you might get comments on but it's not something that your teacher or your parents might necessarily be so frustrated about that they want to go get help kind of started suspecting or figured out that i had adhd in medical school and at that time i because of stigma i didn't seek out diagnosis because i figured that people would think i was just trying to get on stimulants to get through medical school easier as more women like sarah fuller are diagnosed with adhd in adulthood that gap between its prevalence across gender closes if you didn't get diagnosed let me put this out there until you were 33 is that correct correct adhd at 33. i like how it rhymes your story rings probably really true to a lot of people i believe that i mean that makes sense to me i found out that i have adhd because i had a separate medical condition i had an ovarian torsion um and the change in my hormones when that happened to me was so profound that it really made my previously sort of like livable under the radar adhd much much worse and that is how i got diagnosed i started to lose my words in therapy you know being a therapist i talk all day and i had read one time where adhd could be a part of you know losing your words especially during menopause so i sought out someone to be able to diagnose me when i got older and i saw like lists were like trouble staying organized messy desks messy rooms i'm like yep yep yep outburst of anger was something that was listed for like girls well girls and boys with adhd i'm like okay that was definitely me let's go back for a second when you were a kid did anybody have any reason to diagnose you with any sort of mental health issue disorder so i think i just finally found like what i was technically diagnosed with as a child as being oppositional defiant disorder and especially now i believe that it was a misdiagnosis and that the symptoms that they were seeing were actually a result of my adhd i'll be honest i was a royal terror at home they didn't know what to do you know my parents very much you know were aware that it wasn't okay like what was going on and so i did go and see therapists and and shrinks and i did not like that how did that manifest through you know you know college or your young adulthood i never really embraced any diagnosis all the way through you know college or anything and i struggled in college i struggled in high school academically right now i'm an english professor i got kicked out of ap english in high school how do you explain that i didn't use a planner i didn't understand my test scores in english and reading and writing were always sky high 98 99th percentile but then when it came to actually doing the work i had a hard time keeping up right and keeping myself motivated and organized this would become a pattern for you absolutely i was the student who like the top of their desk didn't close all the way because it was like piled the locker didn't close i had a roommate in college who asked me to move out because my half of the dorm room was it was a pigsty i mean i i can admit that was it a matter of you just couldn't get a kickstart to clean it was the kickstart and that's where i really felt just kind of like i felt like i knew something just like was different about me like this seems easier for other people but i still didn't necessarily associate that with like adhd where's the attention deficit and the hyperactivity disorder a lot of people in the adhd community kind of take issue with that a little bit because oftentimes we have too much attention so it's about getting your attention on the right thing at the right time sometimes i'm super focused other times it's really hard to stay in that zone so one of the ways that my adhd shows up in my house is that i have ideas for house projects that i want to do and i will get the energy and the impulse to start them like picking out paint but then i will get stuck at that step and i won't finish it and so this has been like this for a couple of years now and how do you manage that what helps you get through that meds help but also like i feel like each semester each year you know i tweak things to try to figure it out one of the things for me as a teacher with adhd is making sure that i'm managing my class time and my students time really well and keeping on top of it on different slides i will have different timers so that i can kind of keep pace for sarah knowing she has adhd and setting up systems to help her keep organized has been a life changer so one of the strategies i've been utilizing for organizing is clear storage and combining like like things face things extras hair and of course my nail polish collection which has been a hyper focus of mine during the pandemic and i decided to get like a little extra and number them so they're in order and i can figure out what colors i have which is also going to help me not buy repeat colors which has happened in the past and with her youtube channel the adhd academic sarah has set out to share the systems and teaching aids she uses to not only keep herself on track but to share her journey with others for me the biggest positive of adhd is that it makes me good at my job i am constantly coming up with new and creative ideas for my classes i don't let anything get stagnant sometimes people don't realize that you can have something like adhd and still be successful in that academic realm i think we're seeing so much more of the mental health discussion online it's really becoming prolific which is awesome what have you gotten from online support i found adhd tick tock and i felt so validated it was wild sarah isn't alone in finding community on tick tock videos with the hashtag adhd have been viewed over 9.6 billion times and videos tagged adult adhd have over 172 million views you need to talk about the relationship between sex and adhd so if you don't want to see this kind of content grab a fruit snack on the way out creator kate osborne is one of the platform's biggest adhd creators their account katiosaurus has over 1.5 million followers and their videos have more than 41 million likes i mean i started talking about adhd frankly as a joke there was a trend going around on tick tock that was like things in my fill in your personal blank house that just makes sense but everybody who is making these videos have these like perfect immaculate like you know like magazine houses and so i and i don't i never have that has never been my reality and so i made this video that was like things in my adhd house that just makes sense this pile of boxes that's been sitting on the ground for a week some poster board conveniently stored in the dining room next to a bag of scraps just in case i want to do a project 17 cans of pasta sauce because i always forget if i've bought it or not frankly i got mad that's why i started making content because i just was like where am i i'm not a seven-year-old boy i have two master's degrees like there has to be somebody out there like me 37-year-old renee brooks also started openly discussing her adhd online her blog black girl lost keys was started 12 years ago and today a facebook support group renee created provides a safe space for over 3 000 people of color to talk about their adhd experiences it's really humbling and i feel like i've been able to free up a lot of people who were feeling like they were on the outskirts they can come into a place where they can be their full self all at once without having to feel like they have to check an identity at the door a lot of the things that help me are out of reach for other people some of the medications are extremely expensive being able to afford therapy or find a therapist to also help getting good quality mental health is actually kind of difficult it's a great thing to point out because if anybody knows somebody that is potentially struggling with something and they don't have the means they can step in and offer that help maybe hey take their laundry and do their laundry for them there's still ways to help people and that's helpful just sometimes like to reset life happens right and like things can build up again and you have to maybe like restart getting into the habit you're such an inspiration especially for someone who's diagnosed at 33 as a professional kicks ass and has found ways to make it work and so you're going to help a lot of people so i just want to say thank you i don't know who i would be if i didn't have it i just need to embrace the good and do my best to manage the parts that make my life challenging

Channel: TODAY

Views: 72,790

Keywords: TODAY, Latest on TODAY, News, Entertainment, Top stories

Id: FmHmgsuMQ6Y

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022