Dr. Julia Schechter

Other people are not noticing as much as those kind of more overt hyperactive impulsive symptoms.

Do girls manage those symptoms differently when they pop up?

They certainly can.

They often will mask their symptoms, so kind of hide them from other people.

And that might look like coming up with these elaborate coping mechanisms to manage their symptoms.

So this is a really common thing that we also hear from girls and women that they've come up with many, many to-do lists or these really elaborate spreadsheets or they're really relying on a lot of other people to help them manage their symptoms.

I would say what that person just described is so incredibly common at what we hear about at the Duke Center.

And it is.

It's heartbreaking.

I think that experience also speaks to some additional obstacles to understanding ADHD and what it is and what it isn't.

One of the things that it isn't, it is not a disorder of intelligence.

And it's also not a disorder of what someone is capable of.

of doing.

So for clinicians, one of the challenges that they have to think through is to kind of dig a bit more below the surface.

So on the surface, we often hear about women saying, but I did really well in school as a kid.

And that's great and probably took a lot of extra effort.

But during evaluations, to be able to dig in a little bit more and say, okay, tell me a

What was that like for you?

Were you pulling all-nighters on a regular basis?

Were you asking for extensions from your professors?