Alex Partridge

Thank you for having me.

It's such a pleasure to have you here.

The patients that you've treated for ADHD, they range from 18 years old to 100 years old.

Is there anything that still shocks you about ADHD?

So the symptoms of ADHD can stay consistent throughout someone's life, all the way from 18 to 100, but the way they manifest and show up and cause challenges, does that change as you go through life and get a bit older?

I've never ever heard it explained in such a fluent way before, how it kind of can show up at various stages of one's life.

So I suppose...

At different stages of your life, you have different support systems around you, your environment changes.

And in response to the sort of ever-changing landscape of what you are in as a human being, how much your ADHD shows up changes depending on that too.

Do you think as you grow up and you transition through these different stages, can ADHD get easier to manage as you as an individual become aware of your traits, your challenges, and you're able to self-reflect on them?

So interesting being able to recognize your patterns and therefore it gives you the tools to mitigate and avoid perhaps an RSD trigger.

Are there circumstances in someone's life as they get older, new experiences that their ability to see coming because of that pattern recognition isn't so useful because they have never experienced that life event before?

William Dodson, he theorized, and we speak a lot about it on this podcast, is those horrible comments that many of us experience in our early years because of our differences.

But what other trauma could a child with ADHD be exposed to that perhaps someone who didn't have ADHD might, for various reasons, avoid?

Gosh, it's heartbreaking.

If a child experiences those traumas you were just mentioning, and they're in their really early stages, their developing years, and they are on the receiving end of all of those horrible comments, or they witness this event like a divorce, and they internalize it and think that it's their fault.

What does a child do?

How do they react?

How do they...

respond to those messages?