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Transcription
The speaker, Hilary Gillespie, discusses the reasons why adult women are being diagnosed later in life with ADHD. She shares her own experiences of being diagnosed with ADHD at different stages in her life and how it affected her. She also talks about the societal expectations placed on girls and women, which can lead to their ADHD symptoms being misdiagnosed as depression or anxiety. The speaker highlights the lack of research on ADHD in women and suggests that there may be different symptoms and treatment methods for women compared to men. She emphasizes the importance of taking women's mental health seriously and participating in the research of women with ADHD. The speaker concludes by encouraging other women with ADHD to embrace their differences and consider their own treatment options. Hi, my name is Hilary Gillespie and I'll be discussing why adult women are being diagnosed later in life with ADHD and an interdisciplinary approach to understanding ADHD symptoms and treatment methods. While reading Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, I was pleased to find an author who used so many examples from so many different works of art and media that I'd never heard of to paint a picture in her readers minds of different situations and she connected them using her own experiences. In Right-Sizing Interdisciplinarity, an introduction to interdisciplinarity by Kevin Foskin, Lilia Schrafer, and Sarah Ornsing, I felt as though my approach at learning and research problems throughout my life was validated because of their three workflows approach to solving complex problems. What is, what if, and what now? That's how I've always problem-solved and it may be because of my own ADHD diagnosis that I connect deeply with their interdisciplinary processes. Our minds work like a well-tuned symphony or at least they're supposed to. I've been diagnosed with attention deficit or hyperactivity disorder or ADHD or ADD, however you want to say it, three times in my life. Once when I was young in elementary school and I was always excelling at creative and experiencing what I would call bursts of brilliance where I would occasionally get answers so right that I would be thrown in a gifted and talented class, but I never fit in with the hyperactive boys who were openly being treated for ADHD. I remember my mom telling the doctor, no thank you, we don't want to try treatment for that. The second time I was diagnosed with ADHD was as a young adult who was struggling to find motivation early on in college and I was told that I could request my test be printed on salmon pink paper to help me focus, which I basically blew off because I was too busy or stressed or I just didn't believe it. And the third time I was diagnosed as a 30 year old woman, that diagnosis finally stuck and felt like my aha light bulb moment when I began to research the symptoms in women that were commonly misdiagnosed as depression anxiety. I was 27 years old when I felt as though I was done working for bosses who exhibited a lack of leadership and ethics and I set out to be my own boss finally and started freelancing with the skills I'd successfully used in my career so far as a graphic designer. I thought of myself as a hustler, a fighter, but what I was actually exhibiting were extreme masking techniques to pass as normal. I had adopted a few common masking personalities growing up such as being a perfectionist with control issues, trying to be the life of the party. And I was commonly called a ditz or an airhead. And I also was always super generous to a fault and trying to win clients and friends by being indispensable with my tech skills or just other skills that I was doing for people and money. Even I always felt like the black sheep at work and in social situations because I had problems listening to people and they told stories. My mind felt like it was moving a million miles a minute with basically nothing to show for it. It became more apparent when I began working on my own full time and I experienced burnout and problems communicating my boundaries. I dragged myself to make an appointment with a therapist who immediately noticed my ADHD symptoms and connected me with a psychiatrist to talk about treatment. Since then I've been taking a controversial stimulant for the past year and slowly weaning myself off of it and I feel more artistic and lively than I have in the past few months. I had rejected the idea that I could have ADHD growing up because I'd always been calm and collected. Research shows that societal expectations play a role in young girls being diagnosed with ADHD because they're expected to be well behaved and creative. Women like me become aware of our symptoms when work related stress and parenting demands are increased causing more procrastination, executive dysfunction, and overall just a poor self esteem, self image. Representation of women with confirmed ADHD is rare, but when a woman character has been upfront about their ADHD, they have been portrayed as unapproachable or annoying, often interrupting others and blaming moral wrongdoings on their ADHD. The reason this could be is because ADHD is still young in its research when it comes to women. As far back as the ancient Egyptian text, women's mental health issues overall were mainly all attributed to hysteria and things such as paranormal activity like witchcraft or demonic presence. It wasn't until Sigmund Freud pointed out that males could have hysteria as well in the late 1800s that the brain's development began to be studied in more depth and learning disabilities and other common mental health conditions began to take form. The study of ADHD on young boys was developed first and only in the past 40 years has women's ADHD research even taken shape. What if women exhibited such different ADHD symptoms that we can completely disregard the research of boys and break off into our own neurodivergent class? What if the treatment methods used on boys like stimulant medication is unnecessary and unhealthy in the long term for women? What if ADHD is actually just being overdiagnosed and the treatment is numbing natural creativity and personality quirks? What if the research on women with ADHD continues to develop and we learn that there are perks to just acknowledging the differences in ourselves and trying to carry on and just mask without medication at all? The most fun and frightening what if is what if women's mental health was taken more seriously in the past? How many misdiagnosed women that had hysteria, cases of witchcraft, and more could have been just women experiencing ADHD symptoms or mental burnout? What has been most valuable about researching ADHD in women from an interdisciplinarian approach is that I've learned much more about myself and my own mind and have considered my own treatment and how I want to participate and lend my experiences to the research of women with ADHD. Instead of relying heavily on expensive and scary stimulants that I won't have access to forever, I'm trying to decide on how I want to talk about ADHD with myself and others and become a leader in the women's neurodivergent community. Other interdisciplinarians can use my experiences along with the research psychologists, psychiatrists, historians to continue to learn about women's ADHD symptoms and treatment plans. Thank you for listening to my latest hyper-focused obsession as we call it in ADHD land. I hope that if there are any other women who feel their brain symphony is out of whack, take some comfort in knowing you're not alone and that understanding your own ADHD is a superpower. you
