Colman Noctor

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.

And that was what I understood ADHD to be and I wasn't like that.

I never had that sort of...

level of overactivity that I can remember.

And I certainly wouldn't have been troublesome in any way.

I was kind of a risk averse kid, you know, from the point of view of if there was lads jumping over a river on stepping stones, I'd be the one that going, I'll just go down and find a narrow point and I'll jump at the end.

I was kind of that kid.

which wouldn't kind of fit the impulsiveness or the, you know, that sort of what we would, the caricature of ADHD certainly wasn't that.