Dr. Yath Ramesh

So yes, criminality and ADHD definitely have a commonality.

And it's sometimes just your life experiences early on

that can shape which direction you go.

I have many stories about that.

So,

What I'm actually going to tell you about is, and I guess this comes from my experience of working with people across the lifespan, is I had the pleasure of actually treating three different generations of one family and seeing how ADHD changed things for them.

I'm going to start off with my original patient.

So she was a 19-year-old young woman who was struggling with a transition to university.

Again, she did well academically, but really struggled with how to navigate everything in her first year.

And what became apparent when we actually started to unpick her symptoms, and she had a lot of inattentive symptoms that she was masking, was that

At a certain age, around 15 or 16, she stopped pursuing the things that she was actually good at and pursued the things that she felt she needed to be good at.

So there was a lot of masking that was happening around that time.

She picked subjects not based on her strengths, but again, based on a narrative that she was playing.

Perhaps there's a bit of people pleasing in there and it progressed into university.

So for her,

When we made an ADHD diagnosis, what she actually benefited from was understanding herself, understanding where she was masking.

And through coaching, she realized that perhaps actually the choice that she made in terms of the degree wasn't the right one for her.

And she actually changed her course and

thrived in what she did what was interesting was that during the diagnostic assessment process so her mum completed an informant questionnaire and and we see this a lot where parent completes the questionnaire and the parent identifies with a lot of the symptoms yes and the child

Child herself said, my mum has undiagnosed ADHD when I asked about the family history.