Dr. Yath Ramesh

And what his daughter said to us after all of this is, before his passing, this was one of the most impactful things that he did in his life before he died.

So, yes, there are some people who actually are happy to go through life where they can mask and, you know, continue into old age.

But there can be that niggling feeling that I'm not content with life.

And that can cause people to come and pursue an assessment at such a late stage like this.

it's difficult to come to that understanding yourself i think when you have multiple competing factors that are there as well so during the time when he was abusing alcohol he was also experiencing depression and

I think this is the particularly big challenge with ADHD and the comorbidity, is you start to question, was it that I was depressed and is that why everything was happening at the time, or was it the ADHD?

And actually,

On its own, on your own narrative, sometimes it is difficult for you to be able to make that distinction.

So one of the things that actually helped is, yes, he did identify with neurodivergence from things that he'd read, but he couldn't on his own join up all the dots because of all the different things that were going on in his life.

The assessment process itself allowed us to bring together different people that knew him at different stages of his life

and collate and combine all that information in order to build this narrative about him.

Once we'd done that, yes, absolutely, it started to make sense to him even before I'd confirmed the diagnosis.

But sometimes you do need to go through that process of getting all that information, a bit of detective work, to help people with this.

So I'm going to go a bit deep with this, Alex, if that's okay.

I grew up with a parent who had a severe or has a severe mental illness and has had so for all of my life.

And that person, my mother, is also who made me who I am today.

So from seeing her, what I learned was that it's possible to both suffer and thrive at the same time.

But to be able to lean into your thrive state, you need to be able to be seen for you, the whole you, beyond any diagnoses, beyond any labels, beyond all of that.

And this links into, I guess, how I entered the ADHD space, really.

Because when I was working within mental health and seeing people with the full range of mental health conditions, it was only after I started to work in specialist ADHD services that I realized that there was a complete dimension and foundation that we were missing with some of the people that were struggling to respond to treatments.