Dr. Kieran Kennedy

It's the stigma side of it.

And it's not just with ADHD, but it's medicine in general.

I think there can be still a massive amount of stigma around mental health and psychiatry.

And so...

that is kind of one of the main things that frustrates me in terms of you know even unfortunately hearing from gps sometimes in terms of gps having told their patients oh you don't have adhd that's just something that everyone thinks they've got now and if you see the psychiatrist they'll definitely say you have it because they you know telling everyone they've got it and

That is just absolutely not true.

And also it's just very damaging and discriminatory, not only to my profession, but to people living with mental illness or living with ADHD or autism.

So, yeah, that's definitely my soapboxy kind of gear grind, that's for sure.

Yeah.

And I mean, that's a big part of my work.

And when I meet someone for an ADHD assessment, that's probably the hardest part, actually, is trying to work out, well, are you experiencing struggles with focus and attention and memory because we're looking at ADHD?

Or are you struggling because you are juggling three jobs and you...

don't sleep more than three hours a night, or maybe you have depression, maybe you have an anxiety disorder.

And so all of these other things, including modern day pressures, can sometimes kind of really make it tricky to work out what's causing what.

Often again, I mean, someone who's trained as a psychologist or a psychiatrist to diagnose ADHD, that's a big part of it is teasing out what's going on here.

But definitely a part of the ADHD assessment process is making sure that there isn't another condition or something else going on here that actually might be kind of masking and looking like ADHD.

So a big part of my work is also sometimes telling people, I don't think you have ADHD.

I think you have an anxiety disorder or you might actually have bipolar disorder.

You might have depression.

And so kind of helping support people with treatments and avenues for those things, even as an initial step and then coming back to see if ADHD is there underneath, that's a big part of the process as well.