Dr. Yath Ramesh

You're trying to remember all those things that they told you last time so that you don't come across as being inconsiderate when you see them.

So many people with old age are masking and they have no idea because they think it's their personality.

but then there's a second bit.

And I think this is almost sort of the ultimate mask is aging.

So you go through many stages in life and you try and find different ways to rationalize your symptoms.

But then all of a sudden, as you get to a certain age,

you can actually justify what your executive dysfunction problems by talking about the fact that you're getting older and society accepts that as well so i meet a lot of old people who what they tell me is that they're going through aging and they tell me that this is all something that's new but when you actually hear the story

The problems have been there all along.

It's just got a new name for it now.

if you're seeing a psychiatrist at that age it's probably because you've got to a stage where you're experiencing some level of distress about something and i'm going to give you an example here just to just to help with painting this picture so i had a gentleman in his

early 80s who was due to see me for an assessment and he actually wrote into the clinic to ask if the appointment could be moved forward and the reason for that is that he said that I'm not sure if I have time you know I'm going to be alive and around for the assessment and he'd just been given a diagnosis of a life-limiting cancer and

He'd always considered the possibility of neurodivergence, but once he had the cancer diagnosis, he was worried that he might not ever find out whether this could explain things for him.

And actually, what's interesting as this goes on is that he'd actually been doing really successfully

but there was one bit of his life that he didn't understand and this is what happens in later life.

You start to reflect and you start to want to understand that every bit of your life.

So, I saw him earlier and we did his assessment and he came with his daughter who gave us lots of useful information.

But what transpired was that this was a man who struggled through much of his childhood with inattentive symptoms and also hyperactivity symptoms, called a naughty boy.

Punishments looked a bit different back then to what they are now, so he was punished a lot at school.

He then went into a corporate role and really struggled with managing the administrative parts of that role.

There was a lot of masking going on in his job that he didn't realize.