Colman Noctor

It is.

I mean, again, I know there's a lot of anti-disorder movement that we shouldn't be talking about anything that's disordered and especially around neurodiversity, which it kind of falls under that umbrella.

And again, that was probably the part of the column that I was probably trying to make that point, that sometimes it's like these things are not deficits, they're variations of brain function.

And so there's probably a movement around thinking about them as almost a superpower in some respects.

So to have a disorder and a superpower at the same time seems at odds with each other.

My experience of it...

I would be very comfortable calling it a disorder or a condition.

I'd be less comfortable with describing it as a superpower, if that makes any sense.

About 18 years ago, 2007, I think it was.

And look, I was working, I suppose it's hard to separate the fact that I know so much about it and the fact that I had it as well, because when I was in CAMS, I was working, I was studying all this day in, day out, and it never occurred to me that I would have had any features of ADHD.

But in the same way, I think you can kind of fool yourself a little bit.

Like when I was doing this, I had to gather up school reports to bring them to the assessment of what I was like when I was young.

And I was kind of going to there going, sure, I never failed anything in my life.

I've been a kind of a B student all my life.

And it was only when I pulled out the school reports, I realized I'd failed loads of things throughout my schooling life that I actually had either been so scaffolded through that I didn't remember or I just chose not to remember it.

But it was a genuine reading them thinking this might be someone else's.

That's not how I experienced adolescence in that way.

Yeah, so I was working in that area and I had, like everybody else, and when you were working in the 90s and early 2000s, ADHD was seen as a little boy, typically around seven or eight years of age, who would come into your office and just like a Tasmanian devil would tear it apart and they'd be in the presses and out of the presses.

They're like on a motor and you're trying to kind of catch this kid's attention for two minutes to just ask a simple question.

And there's a mother there pulling her hair out and there's this exacerbation.