I’ve been thinking through loads of stuff in recent days and weeks. Over-thinking loads of stuff, as I always do. Much of it is down to what feels like an eternal wait for an NHS assessment to confirm the suspicions of numerous therapists and my GP that I have spent my life with undiagnosed ADHD, Bi-Polar or being somewhere on the autistic spectrum. I’ve lived with clinical depression since childhood, along with various types of anxiety but I often wondered if there was something more, a condition of some sort. But then life got in the way. Now I am obsessed with getting to know the truth and, increasingly, desperate.
I went to see my GP – this was in the old days when you could actually see a GP in the surgery and not chat on the phone or by the Ask My GP app – and she said she would contact the ADHD folk within the NHS, although there was a long waiting list. It turned out there was a two year waiting list to get on the waiting list, so now I’m essentially three years on and nothing has happened. So, I do tests on websites that give you an indication of whether you have something wrong with you. And these were some of the conclusions:
- I often have difficulty sustaining my attention while doing anything
- I am easily distracted
- I often avoid, dislike and am reluctant to engage in takes that require sustained mental effort
- I have trouble listening to someone, even when they’re talking directly to me
- I’m piss poor at organising activities and tasks
- I’m crap at giving thing close attention and often make careless mistakes
- I’m awful at remembering to do stuff
- I’m always misplacing things
- I often fail to finish things I have started
- I’m not always quiet during leisure activities
- I hate queueing, waiting my turn
- I feel like I’ve got to be on the go, as if my head is driven by a motor I can’t switch off
- If I’m sitting down, I have to get up and walk about from time to time, for no obvious reason
- I’m always blurting out an answer before someone else has finished their sentence and I often talk across people in conversations
- I’m very restless
- I fidget all the time
- I talk too much
- I butt into conversations
- It’s always been like this
RESULTS: ADHD likely.
But that’s just from websites. It’s not a proper specialist writing so I can’t announce my own diagnosis to a disinterested world. Instead, I have to wait. And wait, And then wait some more.
I am sure there will have been people at school who thought I must be very simple for failing to understand the most basic maths, the sciences, practical subjects and to be honest pretty well anything else. Similarly, at work people must have thought: why doesn’t HE do that particular form of clerical work? Is he lazy or stupid? But not a single teacher and only one manager at work took this stuff seriously. And with my working life now seemingly at an end I am now confronted with the issue that I suspect should have been recognised before I was even a teenager. That there was some reason I was crap at almost everything at school. But when I was a schoolboy, things like ADHD, the Spectrum and all the other conditions didn’t exist, or rather they did exist but no one took them seriously. At my old school, Briz (Brislington), if you struggled, you were dumped in the very bottom set, pretty well abandoned. I never made it that low and I don’t know how I didn’t either, given that I secured an unimpressive one O level. Actually, I know why: I became an expert at bluffing, I was a BAFTA standard at pretending to be what I wasn’t. And so on to today.
I managed my clinical depression for years, to the extent that I lived a normal-ish life. I got through nearly 40 years in the civil service without being sacked and I went on to a number of part time jobs including the British Red Cross where I was bullied and abused by managers, something that brought about a mental breakdown from which I have never fully recovered. I needed a lot of therapy after that and that was when I was made aware of these odd sounding conditions, like ADHD, which only happened to children. And when I did some internet study, I came upon a revelation: there could be something else going on. And that was when my journey to discover what, if anything, else had been going on was because of something undiagnosed. Today it remains undiagnosed and, I have to confess, nearly all of my hope is gone.
Last week, I believed there was the possibility of a diagnosis and really got my hopes up. Sadly for me, it was a false dawn and the road goes on forever.
It’s the not knowing that kills me. A positive diagnosis gives me answers to questions. No diagnosis at all just leaves questions that I wake up in the middle of the night unable to answer. And the night time is just the worst time.
My mood was not helped last night when Boris Johnson casually announced last night that because of the frightening speed of the spread of the Omicron variant NHS waiting lists would grow even longer. When he said that, I felt he was looking straight at me and if he really had been, I’d have punched his lights out. The liar who promised an extra £350 million a week for the NHS is making me wait even longer and it’s making me ill. Three years waiting and still I’m no nearer finding an answer, if there is one.
I’m still of the view that life is a lot better than the alternative but if there’s a lot of it like this to come, then I may think again.
This has been me thinking and over-thinking loads of stuff. But this is what an NHS waiting list look like when it’s presided over, and grossly underfunded, by people who don’t really believe in it.
I’d advise you to not getting mentally ill if you can somehow avoid it. I couldn’t and look what happened to me. And when Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid tell you they’re spending record sums on our NHS, then don’t believe them. Liars gonna lie, sick people gonna die and our so call leaders don’t give a toss. And I’m still waiting.
