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Three tweets grabbed my attention yesterday. I’ve put them together as one.
“My husband who is the most vibrant, interesting person I have ever met in my life has been diagnosed with ADHD aged 57. His diagnosis to him is like a bereavement but also a blessing. I can’t imagine a whole life feeling as if if you were wrong & no-one understands you. It is so painful for him to acknowledge what he has been through and the unintentional damage he has caused to others. It’s so hard living and loving someone with ADHD and there is no support.
Something has to change for younger people going forward: it’s a legacy of broken relationships, failed careers and debt.“
I asked my darling partner and carer whether this wasn’t a million miles away from what’s happened to me. She shied away from stating the obvious, “Yes, apart the bit from you being the most vibrant and interesting person I have ever met in my life”, but that would have been a very low bar. I certainly wouldn’t include myself in either of those categories but the rest of the narrative certainly resonates, except for the blessing bit. I really don’t understand that at all.
I’m tired of reading some of this ADHD tosh, which often comes from so-called celebrities who have revealed they have the condition. Apparently, it’s not just a ‘blessing’, it’s also a ‘gift’ and it’s a ‘best friend’. In my view, if you claim you have ADHD and then say all these things about it, I’m suggesting you might not have it at all.
The only bit that works with the word ‘blessing’ is that it could be described as a blessing to know you have the damn thing rather than not knowing or not being sure. But there is literally nothing about ADHD that feels like a gift to me, or a best friend.
The gift of being unable to retain information, to learn just about anything, to concentrate, to stop fidgeting all the time, to not being able to follow even the most straightforward TV show without wondering what the hell us going on. I can’t even follow a James Bond storyline. Tell me that’s a gift. When I hear these ways of describing ADHD, it’s a bit like being told by someone that it’s sunny when where you are it’s pissing with rain.
My endless, woe-is-me, whingeing about my own ADHD is probably not the best thing you will ever read, but here I go anyway. My diagnosis appears to be an end, not some kind of new beginning. My GP says I shouldn’t take a drug recommended to me by my ADHD assessor because it could increase the chances of heart attack or stroke and also that the NHS has nothing for me. I can go to a charity to buy therapy at enormous cost or a private health business at even more enormous cost with no guarantee, or anything remotely like a guarantee, that it will make a blind bit of difference. No. It’s not a blessing but it’s a kind of bereavement. And as with all bereavements, there’s no coming back to life.
I’ve definitely lived a whole life feeling that I was wrong and no one understood me and in some ways my diagnosis has only managed to deepen my loathing of certain schoolteachers who made my life very difficult and specifically the abusive bullies of the British Red Cross who destroyed my mental health and still refuse to apologise. I now know the truth but it means that I now hate more people deeply than I did before and my mind is turning over uncovering the names of others who were horrible to me. I know this list includes people who could not have been aware of a condition I didn’t even know I had, but, at this specific moment in time I wish them nothing but ill. Was this worth what was for me a substantial financial outlay?
The answer is an unqualified yes because I needed to know what I always knew. The rest is much more than noise but I suppose it’s my fault for not thinking through the consequences of my actions.
The near certainty is that I had no help for what I hadn’t been diagnosed with and now I have that diagnosis, it looks like there’s nothing else I can do about it.
I’m far nearer the end of my life’s journey than I am to the beginning so I now spare a thought for those many young people who also have the condition and unless something changes in this broken country they will have the same, seemingly endless struggle with all its negative outcomes.
A bereavement but also a blessing? Nonsense. Just a bereavement, a life of what ifs and what might have been.
